e188. The Eternals and the MCU This Year (so far…)

Somehow, we went the entire year of 2020 just… without a Marvel movie. Phase three ended and there was a real life global pandemic and then… there just weren’t any MCU films. For the first time in over a decade, they were just gone! This year, they came back… BIG! in fact, there’s been three…

e187. 4x4ward: Overlanding and the Great Outdoors

When you study “pop culture” people automatically think of the MOST popular media that is available of the day. For us living in 2021, that’s largely superhero movies. Of course, if you listen to this show, you know we also frequently talk about music, TV shows, books and video games. But popular culture is much…

e186. Wayne, Hannah, Mav & Jehnie’s Infinite Mixtape

Have you ever made a mixtape? We’re sort of willing to guess that if you’re listening to our show, at some point or another you have. But… did you actually do it on “a tape” or was it a mix CD? Was it a playlist in the cloud? Does this matter? Are all of these…

e185. The Wicked, the Witches and the Witch-ish

Halloween season continues and so it’s time for another special episode. One of the most enduring pop culture figure is probably the witch. Witches appear through the ages in media. From the Weird Sisters of MacBeth to the good and bad witches of Oz to to Arthur Miller’s the Crucible, to Samantha of Bewitched to…

e183. How to Read All of the Marvels

If you’re a comic book fan, one of the things people often ask you is “I want to get into comics. Where do I start? What should I read?” This is especially true if you’re someone who reads comics for a living. It’s even more true this last decade or so of box office dominance…

e180. So, You Say You Wanna Host a Pseudoacademic Pop Culture Analysis Podcast (with Drinking and Swearing)

Oddly enough, for a show that is devoted to talking about pop culture, one of the things we don’t talk about so much is podcasts. In a way, podcasting might very well be the epitome of pop culture in the current cultural moment… and also… we are one! So, on today’s very special meta episode,…

e179. ImproveReality?

Several weeks ago, we did a show on how stand-up comedy works in the middle of a pandemic. We talked about the transition that comedians went through to move a traditionally “in-person” art form to an entirely virtual environment. But what about other art forms? Lots of performances that at least seem to “require” a…

e178. Pop History vs. Public History

How do we learn history? The easy answer is to say we learn it from history books, but is that true? How many of us ever read a history book after 10th grade? It’s more likely that we get the majority of our history either from museums or from historic entertainment… things like Hamilton… or,…

e176. What Was Social Networking?

Instagram recently made an announcement that they were going to be shifting their social networking focus away from “photos”. This decision prompted a collective “WTF?” from the users who saw it. You see, Instagram claims that their primary business isn’t photos (despite having a whole motif from their logo to their name based around polaroid…

e175. Game Studies: Ludology vs. Narratology

We don’t talk about games as much as we should on this show, but arguably they’re one of the most enduring mediums of popular culture. They’re certainly one of the most popular. There’s much comparison of modern video games to movies. This makes sense… if we want people to consider games to be a legitimate…