e138. Holiday Tradition and Ritual in the Time of COVID

It’s the holiday season. In the United States we just celebrated Thanksgiving, and in the coming weeks that will be followed by Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Years, Pancha Ganapati, Yule, Festivus, Saturnalia, Slackernalia and probably 1000 other winter holidays that get celebrated somewhere around the world. These holidays are often commemorated by coming together with…

e135. Election 2020: So Now What?

As most of our regular listeners are probably aware, the United States had a little election last week. Barely worth mentioning! And in that election Joe Biden and Kamala Harris defeated Donald Trump and Mike Pence for the presidency of the United States. And again, if you’ve listened to more than 10 seconds of our…

e130. Freshman Year in Quarantine

Way back at beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown — what seems like a million years ago — we did a special episode where we talked to Tristyn and Sophie, two graduating seniors who had their final year of high school interrupted by the sudden worldwide pandemic that we now all find ourselves still dealing with.…

e126. Reconstructing Deconstructed Superheroes

Ever since the mid 1980s and the publication of Watchmen comics, their creators, and their fans, have been obsessed with the idea of “deconstruction.” Director Zack Snyder is extremely fond of the term. He argues that he is “deconstructing superheroes” every time he gets the chance. But what does that really mean? To most fans,…

e124. Marveling Over Marble League!

If you’ve been following the show for the last several months, you know that in our COVID pandemic quarantine imposed death of media, we have turned our constant starvation for content to the internet and become big fans of Jelle’s Marble Runs, a YouTube channel featuring athletic competitions between… well, marbles. What started as a…

e123. Culture, Context, Protest, and Memefication

Have you ever gotten into an argument with someone on the Internet and they tried to prove their point by forwarding some meme that was a quote of a famous person for historical figure that seemed to vaguely relate to their point in the most perfunctory possible way? When this happened, did you think to…

e122. twentysomethingteen

There are a lot of television shows and movies about teenagers, both comedies and dramas.There always have been. And yet, actual teenagers on television are extremely rare. Teens are typically played by twenty-something actors (or older). This is especially the case when it comes to teenagers in shows with a heavy sexual or romantic components…

e118. #activism

We live in very interesting times. The world around us is changing every day… and with the internet if feels like it’s changing ever rapidly. With everything from #COVID-19 to #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo to #DefundThePolice to #Resist to #LoveIsLove, the social media sites have given every one of us the ability to advocate for what…

e117. Post-Release Censorship and the Disney Vault

There was a weird story that broke a few weeks ago when people discovered that episodes of the 2012 teen sitcom Wizards of Waverly Place had “censored” the cleavage of the mother on one episode by placing a blur over the actress’s chest on the Disney+ streaming service. After some investigation, it turned out that…

e115. Why Do We Love Minor Characters?

Every story (well most stories) have a protagonist that we follow throughout the narrative. Usually we are meant to identify with them; they are our link to the plot and the world of the story. Typically, their worlds are fleshed out by any number of supporting characters that they interact with: friends, lovers, enemies. These…