Geekstorians - With Dave From Geektown

Halloween night, 1992. Eleven million people tune in to BBC One to watch Michael Parkinson investigate a haunted house, with Sarah Greene reporting live from inside, Mike Smith taking calls, and Craig Charles talking to the neighbours. Except it isn't live. And the house isn't haunted. This is Ghostwatch , one of the most extraordinary and controversial programmes in British television his...

Geek culture got what it wanted. The stories once dismissed as disposable became global entertainment. The budgets arrived. The conventions became marketing stages. The films, shows and worlds fans fought to protect became permanent. But permanence is a strange kind of victory. Beginning in the cinema after ‘Avengers: Endgame’, Dave looks back across Geekstorians Season 3 and asks what it means to...

n 1993, Hollywood took the bright colours, bouncing rhythms and cheerful nonsense of Super Mario Bros. and transformed them into a wet cyberpunk dystopia filled with fungus, humanoid dinosaurs and Dennis Hopper. It was only the beginning. For the next three decades, video game adaptations repeatedly reproduced the names, costumes, monsters and locations that players recognised, while struggling to...

Why can an adaptation reproduce the characters, costumes, lore and famous moments, yet still feel completely wrong? The problem may not be fidelity, but whether the people rebuilding the story understand what is holding it together. Hollywood loves an established world. The maps already exist. The characters have names. The famous scenes are waiting. The fans are already emotionally invested. On p...

Streaming was supposed to free television. No schedules. No missed episodes. No VHS tapes with the ending accidentally recorded over by Coronation Street . Just an endless library of stories waiting whenever you wanted them. For a while, it felt like liberation. But once television became something delivered through a pipe, the pipe became more valuable than the programmes moving through it. Netfl...

Cosplay began as something gloriously handmade: fans turning up in costumes because they loved a story enough to carry it into the room. But somewhere between the early science fiction masquerades, Star Wars armour builds, convention photo galleries, viral cosplay, professional creators and the rise of organisations like the 501st Legion, something shifted. The costume was no longer just a costume...

This week on Geekstorians , we travel to Middle-earth, not as tourists, but as slightly suspicious historians with a map, a torch, and some concerns about licensing agreements. In 1998, Peter Jackson walked into New Line Cinema with a fantasy epic most of Hollywood considered impossible. What followed became one of cinema’s great gambles: three films, shot back-to-back, built in New Zealand by art...

Anime did not cross into Western culture in one clean movement. It arrived in fragments, through edited TV dubs, bootleg tapes, playground obsessions, fansubs, late-night downloads, and eventually legal streaming platforms. In this episode of Geekstorians, Dave picks up where Season One’s ‘The Anime Underground’ left off, following anime’s journey from cult import to global mainstream force. We be...

Video games didn’t just become bigger than film, music and TV. They became places people went, watched, gathered, spent money, and built memories inside. In this episode of Geekstorians, Dave from Geektown looks at how gaming quietly became the largest entertainment industry on Earth, and why nobody really announced it. The story begins in April 2020, when millions of people attended Travis Scott’...

In this episode of Geekstorians, Dave looks at the strange five-year window when geek culture stopped being something fans used to find each other, and became something companies used to find them. Beginning in 2007, the episode follows the moment geek identity moved from comic shops, conventions, video rental shelves and school computer labs into the mainstream marketplace. The iPhone made techno...

Season Three of Geekstorians begins with the moment geek culture stopped knocking on the door and started owning the building. In this episode, Dave looks at the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, from Marvel’s desperate rights situation and the gamble of Iron Man, to Kevin Feige’s phase-planned architecture, the genre trick that kept the films from feeling like a production line, and the extr...

This week on Geekstorians, we bring Season 2 to a close with ‘Nothing Went To Plan’. Across the season, we’ve looked at films that nearly vanished, companies that collapsed under their own weight, shows that survived cancellation, fandoms that refused to let go, and the strange ways failure can become an origin story. In this shorter reflective finale, Dave steps back from the individual stories t...

This week on Geekstorians, Dave from Geektown looks at three films that did not behave the way Hollywood expected. ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ arrived as a box office failure before midnight audiences turned it into a ritual. ‘Blade Runner’ opened to confusion, studio interference and mixed reactions before becoming one of science fiction’s most debated landmarks. And ‘The Big Lebowski’ drifte...

This week on Geekstorians , we’re boldly going into one of the strangest survival stories in geek culture: Star Trek , the franchise that has been cancelled, revived, mismanaged, overextended, rebooted, and pushed through nearly every major shift in modern entertainment. Born in 1966, cancelled in 1969, and kept alive by fans who refused to accept that decision, Star Trek became something far bigg...

This week on Geekstorians , we’re looking at the leak that punched a hole through Hollywood’s gates. For years, Fox had Deadpool sitting in development limbo. Ryan Reynolds wanted to make the film properly. Director Tim Miller had test footage. The fans knew exactly what they wanted. The studio, however, remained unconvinced. Then, in July 2014, fifty-two seconds of Deadpool test footage appeared...

In Season 2 Episode 6 of Geekstorians, Dave digs into one of the strangest turnarounds in blockbuster history. After Tim Burton redefined Batman for the big screen, Warner Bros. slowly pushed the franchise away from gothic weirdness and towards something brighter, louder, more commercial, and far more toy-friendly. The result was 1997’s Batman & Robin — a film so spectacularly misjudged it did...

Season 2 of Geekstorians continues with the moment virtual worlds stopped being just games and started becoming laboratories. In ‘Virtual Worlds, Real Consequences’ , Dave looks at three very different digital worlds — World of Warcraft , EVE Online and Second Life — and the very real human behaviour they exposed once thousands of people were let loose inside them. It starts with World of Warcraft...

Season 2 of Geekstorians continues with the corporate disaster that accidentally redrew modern pop culture. In ‘The Fire Sale Blueprint’ , Dave looks at how Marvel’s bankruptcy in the 1990s led to one of the strangest and most important chain reactions in film history. As the company collapsed under debt, many of its biggest characters were licensed or sold off in deals that looked sensible at the...

Season 2 of Geekstorians continues with one of the strangest survival stories in geek culture. In ‘The Wilderness Years’ , Dave looks at what happened after Doctor Who disappeared from television in 1989. No big finale. No proper ending. Just a show the BBC quietly stopped making, and an audience that refused to accept that as the end of the story. This episode follows the long years when Doctor W...

Season 2 of Geekstorians continues with a story about collapse. In ‘When Giants Fall’ , Dave looks at three companies that once seemed unstoppable — Atari , Sega , and Blockbuster — and how each of them, in very different ways, lost their grip on the future. From Atari’s collapse after the video game crash of the early 1980s, to Sega’s spectacular inability to get out of its own way during the con...

Season 2 of Geekstorians begins with one of the great near-disasters in modern geek history. This episode tells the story of how Toy Story 2 nearly disappeared during production, not because of a studio fight or some dramatic Hollywood scandal, but because of a routine command, a failing backup system, and the sort of technical catastrophe that still makes creative people wince. But this is not ju...

What do ‘Adventure’ , the Konami Code, Pixar’s A113, hidden DVD extras, ‘The Beast’ , ‘I Love Bees’ and Marvel post-credit scenes all have in common? They are all part of the long, strange history of the Easter egg. In this special Easter episode of ‘Geekstorians’ , Dave digs into how hidden messages, secret rooms, buried jokes and coded nods evolved from acts of quiet rebellion into a full-blown...

Language doesn’t just describe culture. Sometimes, it creates it. In the Season One finale of Geekstorians , Dave explores the hidden history of geek language — how fans invented their own slang, references, in-jokes, and shorthand, and how that language quietly shaped modern geek culture and the internet itself. From handwritten letters in the back pages of early science-fiction magazines, to fan...

Toys were never just toys. In this episode of Geekstorians , Dave traces the rise of the Plastic Empire — the moment when action figures, model kits, bricks, and collectibles stopped being side products and started becoming entire universes. From the Star Wars Early Bird box that accidentally rewrote the rules of merchandising, to the 1980s cartoon-toy industrial complex, moral panics, and the bir...

Anime is everywhere now. Streaming platforms, cinema screens, fashion, music, TikTok, gaming. But it didn’t arrive in the West through studios, marketing campaigns, or corporate strategy. It arrived through fans. In this bumper-length episode of Geekstorians , Dave uncovers the real, messy, rebellious story of how anime travelled from post-war Japan to British living rooms and American college bas...