e194. Dr. Golden Spies From V.O.X.P.O.P with Love

Spies may be one of the longest standing genres in pop culture. From James Bond to Maxwell Smart to Jason Bourne, spies have been ever present on the screen for as long as there has been motion picture cinema. They also have a steady presence in books and comics and other literature. And yet, the…

e191. Pop Culture Casserole

As we transition from the fall holidays through the winter ones we’ve noticed that there was a bunch of pop culture things have just fallen through the cracks. Like, really a WHOLE lot of them. And what do you do when you have a bunch of odds and ends left over from Thanksgiving that don’t…

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……

e182. I Fixed That for You, Now GTFO!

If the internet is good at anything, it’s dumping on asked for criticism at other people. Everyone does it. In fact, in a very real way, that’s pretty much what this whole show is. We’re cultural critics. This is cultural criticism. But is there a point when that criticism can go too far? Are there…

e181. Entertainment and Other Unions — IATSE Solidarity

Over the past year, our viewing consumption habits have changed a lot. We spent months indoors streaming everything — including new release films — largely through new media platforms like Netflix and Disney Plus. These new production models have drastically changed box office results, profit models, and production budgets that reverberate across the industry —…

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…

e177. Deconstructing the Chair

It’s been a while since we devoted a whole episode to one TV show. We’ve done it with a couple of the Marvel shows as well as stuff like Game of Thrones and Watchmen. We did a show on the Queen’s Gambit, and we loved Bridgerton enough to do TWO episodes on it. We talked…

e174. The Arthurian Roundtable Roundtable

We live in an era of constant reboots and updates to well known IP franchises. People (including us) like to complain about it, but honestly, well known franchises do very well at the box office… otherwise people wouldn’t keep doing it. But of all the superheroes, transformers, terminators and star wars that keep coming back…

e173. War of the Readings

The Internet has one main purpose: arguing about things that don’t really matter. I’m sure you’ve seen this, people will fight over whether a movie was good or bad, what the significance of a particular scene of a TV show was, what was the hidden theme of a book, or perhaps most notably today… should…