Pop Culture Roulette

It's alive! It's alive! And this time, the whole crew is in the same room! 🧟 For this special Halloween-season episode of Pop Culture Roulette , Justin takes the reins as host, mastermind, and keeper of the questions in an original Jeopardy-style game show built specifically for PCR. Nicholas and Jeremy take their places as contestants, ready to put their pop culture knowledge to the test...

Thirty-two sci-fi and horror franchises enter. Dinosaurs, aliens, giant monsters, undead nightmares, questionable experiments, and things that probably should have stayed buried all have a shot at the crown. But which franchise can survive when the competition gets fierce? For this round of Pop Culture Roulette , the franchises were seeded using their estimated cumulative revenue before going head...

Fangs, capes, castles, creepy accents, and an absolutely unreasonable number of ways to say “I vant to suck your blood.” This time on Pop Culture Roulette , the crew puts the most famous vampire in history head-to-head in a bracket featuring Draculas from movies, television, and video games . From the legendary classics to modern interpretations, the question is simple: who actually played Dracula...

Please Don't Look This Up The Streisand Effect Want to make something more popular? Tell everyone they’re not allowed to see it. In this episode of Pop Culture Roulette , the crew dives into the Streisand Effect — that wonderfully backwards phenomenon where trying to hide, ban, delete, or suppress something somehow makes everybody way more interested in it. Movies get shelved. Songs get banned...

The Movie That Wouldn’t Come Out It started with Coyote vs. Acme . A finished movie gets shelved. Everyone assumes it may never see the light of day. And then, somehow, it escapes the vault and finally makes it to audiences. That got the crew wondering: how many other movies have gone through this? Some movies have a release date. Some have a trailer. Some have a cast, a budget, and a finished pro...

Every now and then, pop culture loses someone who feels like they’ve always been part of the landscape. This week, Pop Culture Roulette takes a look at three of those people: Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, and Peter Cullen . We talk about the careers, characters, performances, and moments that made them unforgettable, from Dolly’s larger-than-life legacy to Tim Curry proving there may be no role he coul...

License to Bracket: The Spy Who Lied to Us Justin pulled a fast one on the other two! After insisting he was never going to watch the James Bond movies, he secretly went on a mission to watch all of them —and then showed up with a bracket ranking the entire franchise. Before getting into the bracket, Justin has a confession to make: he watched the James Bond movies. All of them. After repeatedly i...

Somehow, we’ve accidentally created a trilogy. First, we asked “What’s My Name?” Then we moved on to movies and their former titles. And now, because apparently we have learned absolutely nothing, we’re doing it again with bands in “What Was Our Name?” Just like the previous two episodes, we’ve turned the whole thing into a game. This time, we’re digging into bands that didn’t always go by the nam...

Jeremy may be away this week, but the hype train doesn't stop. Justin and Nicholas take over the microphones to break down some of the biggest reveals to come out of San Diego Comic-Con and the latest wave of movie and TV trailers that have the pop culture world buzzing. From our thoughts on the latest look at Avengers: Doomsday to the long-awaited arrival of Coyote vs. Acme , plus new footage...

Some names become legendary. The ones they were born with? Not always. This week on Pop Culture Roulette , we're back with another round of our trivia game—this time putting celebrity identities to the test. We reveal the real birth names behind some of the biggest stars in movies, music, and television, and the guys have to figure out which famous face they're really talking about. Some a...

Behind every iconic movie title is a trail of ideas that never made it to the marquee. This week on Pop Culture Roulette , we're dusting off Hollywood's discarded names in What's My Title? Nicholas puts Justin and Jeremy to the test with a game built around the original titles that famous films almost carried. For each round, only one option is the real title—the other two are convinci...

The Giannis trade hurts. There's no way around it. Rather than spending an hour dwelling on what happened, we decided to do what Wisconsin sports fans have always done: look back at history and remind ourselves that we've survived heartbreaking trades before. From the Packers to the Brewers to the Bucks, we revisit some of the biggest blockbuster deals in Wisconsin professional sports hist...

This week, Justin and Jeremy take the lead as Pop Culture Roulette opens up the quest log and looks ahead to the video games that have captured our attention. From major franchise releases and long-awaited sequels to promising new titles and intriguing indie projects, we're discussing the games we're most excited to see hit our screens in the months ahead. Every gamer has a wishlist, and ours is n...

Before we can argue about the best franchises in pop culture, we first have to answer a much more difficult question: what actually qualifies as a franchise in the first place? But before we get there, the conversation takes a detour into the changing landscape of traditions. From local customs and community events to some of the recent changes around the NFL, we discuss how things evolve over tim...

Quest for Second Place: The Jessica Bracket Some competitions start with a wide-open field. This one started with a champion already crowned. With Jessica firmly holding the undisputed number-one spot in our personal rankings, this week on Pop Culture Roulette we turned our attention to a much tougher question: who deserves second place? To find out, we assembled a bracket featuring famous Jessica...

The NFL schedule release videos have officially become their own form of entertainment… so naturally we had to break them down like they were blockbuster movie trailers. With Jeremy out this week, Justin and Nicholas took a deep dive into the weirdest, funniest, most over-the-top schedule reveals from around the league and debated which teams absolutely nailed it and which ones maybe should’ve lef...

This episode of Pop Culture Roulette goes a little old school in the best way possible, with Jeremy out this time, the discussion shifts into a looser, more nostalgic hangout vibe—less structure, more hot takes, and a lot of love for the world of food TV. The conversation digs into favorite cooking shows across eras, the TV personalities and chefs who’ve defined the genre, and what actually makes...

Are sequels actually better… or are we all just lying to ourselves? This week on Pop Culture Roulette , we spin straight into one of the most heated debates in entertainment: when does a sequel outshine the original? Armed with cold, hard numbers from Rotten Tomatoes, we put some of the biggest franchises under the microscope and let the scores guide the chaos. From beloved classics to surprising...

Spring has officially arrived, and Pop Culture Roulette is celebrating the only way we know how—with a chaotic mix of debates, nostalgia, and an absolutely stacked candy bracket. This week, Jeremy takes control of the wheel and throws Justin and Nicholas into a series of Easter-themed debates that quickly spiral from lighthearted fun into surprisingly passionate arguments. What starts as simple ho...

This week on Pop Culture Roulette , we take on a local bracket from 102.9 The Hog… and almost immediately abandon the idea of blindly accepting it. Instead, we spend most of our time asking a much more important question: why are some of these songs even on this list in the first place? As we work through the matchups, the episode turns into a full-on takedown of the bracket itself. We’re not just...

The crew dives headfirst into the wild, weird, and sometimes downright unbelievable world of comic book crossovers—and this time, there’s a twist. With Jeremy missing from the episode, Justin is thrown into the hot seat for a chaotic game where he’s given multiple crossover scenarios and has to decide which one is actually real… and which ones are completely made up. And when we say weird, we mean...

This week on Pop Culture Roulette , the wheel sends the crew into one of the strangest brackets we’ve ever built: a full tournament dedicated entirely to Patricks . From famous first names and legendary last names to real people, fictional characters, and a few unexpected curveballs, the bracket fills up quickly with Patricks from every corner of pop culture. What starts as a simple idea quickly t...

This week Pop Culture Roulette heads to the ballpark for a special crossover episode. The show welcomes Tim Sternberg and Charlie Semar from the Around the Bases podcast to help settle a very important pop culture debate: what is the greatest baseball comedy movie of all time? With a full bracket in place, the conversation dives into some of the funniest and most memorable baseball films ever made...

In this episode of Pop Culture Roulette , we crank the volume all the way up and launch the Ultimate Sitcom Theme Song War — a full-blown bracket battle to decide which TV intro reigns supreme. This isn’t just about nostalgia (although there’s plenty of that). It’s about catchiness. Cultural impact. Sing-along power. The songs you never skipped — and the ones that still live rent-free in your head...

In this episode of Pop Culture Roulette , we take a deep dive into the movies, TV shows, albums, and video games that have officially landed on our 2026 hype list. From guaranteed blockbusters and long-awaited sequels to risky reboots and potential surprise hits, we break down what we’re counting down the days for—and what we’re approaching with healthy skepticism. We debate which upcoming films c...