From Hannah: Perhaps it’s because of Twisters (it’s really good, actually), but I want to talk about disaster narratives. We’ve kind of done this before, when we talked about end of the world stories. But I don’t think they’re necessarily the same — we know in disaster films like Twister and Twisters and Geostorm and…
Tag: literature
Call For Comments: Publishing the Public Domain
From Mav: So if you don’t live in the tiny corner of the internet that follows creators rights within the comic book publishing world, you probably missed a story a couple weeks ago that few of us who do live in that corner were obsessed with. Bill Willingham, creator of the comic Fables, decided to…
e261. PCA2023 After Dark!
After two years being held virtually, and a cancelled conference in 2020, the Popular Culture Association returned to in person conferences for PCA2023. There were some good notes (Mav won a major award for his doctoral dissertation) and some bad notes (Mav ended up catching COVID during the trip) but along the way there was…
e238. Dragons and Rings and Other Fantasy TV
There’s been a lot of Fantasy TV on the air lately. House of the Dragon and Rings of Power have both been airing as prequels to their respective fantasy genres (Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings) and have given fans of Fantasy TV no shortage of things to watch for the last couple…
e201. The Romance Show: (Hannah wouldn’t let us call) Love In The Time Of COVID
Despite the fact that it is perennially one of the best selling genres in literature, Romance is often looked down upon. Part of this is simple misogyny; as a culture we look down upon things that are seen as “for women.” However, not only are romance novels dominant best sellers, romance as a concept essentially…
e184. Bram Stoker’s Dracula & the Draculi that Followed
It’s Halloween season and time to do some spooky theme shows! Of course, we’ve tackled monsters several times on the show before, but we’ve never devoted the whole show to just one monster. Until now! Dracula, is one of the most adapted novels of all time and with movies, TV shows, comics, video games and……
Call for Comments: All the Draculas, er, All the Draculi
From Hannah: Dracula (1897, Bram Stoker) is a novel about reproduction. (And not just the reproduction of the heteronormative family/biological reproduction or the reproduction of the nation-state or even those disruptions through the infiltration of and reproduction of the vampire. Although, yes that, and so much more. But I’ll save that for the actual episode.)…
Call For Comments: On Multiple Readings and Variant Interpretations
From Mav: I was having an interesting conversation with friend-of-the-show Andrew Darowski the other day about the idea of multiple readings. For those who don’t know, in addition to the Protagonist Podcast, Andrew is host of a podcast called Disney Animation Minute Essentials where he and his wife Kestra step through classic Disney films one…
Call for Comments: Wicked and the Wonderful (?) World of OZ
November 19, 2024
From Hannah: In our next show, we’re tackling populism, propaganda, and resistance — through Wicked (the film, the musical, the book series) and its source material the Oz series by L. Frank Baum. The world of Oz has always been political (especially in terms of American politics) since The Wonderful Wizard of Oz first appeared…