e144. So, It’s Been a Week! (1/3/21 – 1/9/21)

We totally didn’t want to talk politics this week. And we certainly didn’t want to talk about the world being on fire. 2020 had enough of that. All we wanted to do this week was play our fun little box office game. Unfortunately, that went out the window the moment there was an attempted coup…

e142. Deconstructing the Queen’s Gambit

If anything has characterized pop culture in the year 2020, it’s streaming media. From Hamilton to Tiger King, during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the essential elimination of out-of-the-home entertainment, we as a people have been absorbing a great deal of content from our couches through the magic of streaming. This is a world made for…

e141. Ghosts, Spirits, Scrooge and a Merry Marxist Christmas

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is likely the most famous Christmas story ever written. First published 177 years ago, it has been produced as stage plays, adapted into dozens of films and spoofed and parodied countless times on television shows, in comics, and other media. Whether from Disney, The Muppets, Scrooged, the original or somewhere…

e139. The 22 Reviews of Christmas (Cheesey Christmas 2)

Christmas movies have been a seasonal spectacle almost as long as there have been movies. A couple years ago, we did an episode speaking to the recent trend of Lifetime, Hallmark and now even Netflix creating a a veritable factory of streaming Christmas content. Those films were aimed at viewers who simply love delightful feel…

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…