Did You Do Your Homework? | A Pop Culture Podcast

Zombies are EVERYWHERE and now they're on our podcast, too. Join us and guest Austin to talk Warm Bodies, The Girl With All the Gifts, and the Newsflesh trilogy as we dive into what zombies stand for and why they're so pervasive in our pop cultural landscape.

We get down with Shakespeare in our newest episode! Reoccurring friend of the show Maren Hagman joins us to discuss interpretations of Shakespeare's work, including the seminal Ran by Akira Kurosawa; 10 Things I Hate About You starring Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger; and As I Descended by Robin Talley. Martha stans for Taming of the Shrew and everyone else is all in on Macbeth - check out this grou...

We get personal with a discussion on PTSD in pop culture: different portrayals, how it effects character motivation, and how we can use pop culture to help work through our own trauma. Joel Kenyon from 40 Going on 14, The Coffin Joe Cast, and The Joel Happy Kpants Hour joins us to discuss Macbeth, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Jessica Jones.

Part two of Vice and Virtue! We're joined by guest Sara Shaw to talk about the ways in which virtue is portrayed, exploited, utilized and embodied by a variety of different characters. Homework for the episode: The Crucible by Arthur Miller; Dogma, 1999 film directed by Kevin Smith; Peace Like a River, 2001 novel by Leif Enger.

We continue our cross-pollination with the 40 Going on 14 crowd today with special guest Pat Whaley! Pat brings some real life experience to our discussion on Vice (don't miss our next episode all about the flipside, Virtue). Our homework for the episode: Repo! The Genetic Opera; the 1998 gambling parable Rounders; and the cyberpunk classic Neuromancer.

We have a very special guest this episode - the oft referred to husband of host Martha, Bill! We discuss anti heroes, including some rousing disagreement on whether our characters of choice actually count. Our homework for the episode: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, the 2012 action movie opus DREDD, and the genesis of the film noir genre, The Maltese Falcon.

We're extra topical (and extra long) today as we're joined by friend of the show Caitlin Hofert to discuss toxic masculinity. Our homework includes two TED talks, the pilot of The Sopranos, and a YA novel titles Devils Within by S.F. Henson.

Join us and guest Austin Delmond as we discuss niche communities in all their grit and glory. Homework for the episode: Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle, Awesome Games Done Quick speedruns, and Fursonas, a 2016 documentary.

We're joined by returning guest Lizzie Buehler to dissect the 2018 Academy Awards, just like every other pop culture podcast in existence! But seriously, we all have feelings and you're entitled to 'em as we talk about the relevancy of the Oscars and award shows in general.

Enjoy this bonus episode! Pete and Martha have a quick, unstructured chat about some of the contenders for the Academy Awards. Martha had just seen "Phantom Thread" and "Three Billboards," so the discussion focuses on those two movies.

Today Martha's friend and coworker Lauren Maxwell joins us to talk about the wide and wonderful world of fairy tales! We look at the old, the new, and the remixed - Neil Gaiman's modern take on Sleeping Beauty, The Sleeper and the Spindle; Mike Mignola's supernatural investigator Hellboy in his third collection, The Corpse and the Iron Shoes; and Guillermo del Toro's masterpiece Pan's Labyrinth. W...

This episode gets a little sensitive (hence the content warnings) as we delve into different portrayals of body image, eating disorders, and other self-image topics. We are joined by returning guest Maren Hagman to discuss Hairspray, Zoolander, and The Art of Starving by Sam J. Miller.

We use the words "formative media" so often on the podcast that we decided we'd better to an episode about it so we could explain what exactly we mean by that. Today we're talking about the stories and media that helped shape who we are as media consumers, and we do so with an expert on pop culture nostalgia: welcome guest Josh Brown from the podcast 40 Going on 14!

Calee's back for our one year anniversary episode, which is all about Teamups ! With the insane popularity of comic-based film right now, pop culture is pretty saturated with teamups. For our homework today we looked at the Big Two from the Big Two, and Pete threw us all a welcome curve ball by introducing a real-life teamup in the form of the pop supergroup The New Pornographers.

Episode 23: Top 10 of 2017 by Did You Do Your Homework? | A Pop Culture Podcast

What exactly do we mean when we say "moments of character transcendence"? It's a lofty phrase, but what are we talking about? The characters we're examining - a witch-in-training, a lost and damaged super genius (and her various protectors), and a pair of feisty demon hunters - all have a moment that crystallizes who they are, what they stand for, and what their stories are trying to say.

Friend of the show Sarah Caputo joins us today to talk TRANSFORMATION and all the ways it changes us. We have some feelings about character agency, the virtues of self-driven transformation vs. the non-consensual kind, and the use of metaphor, among others. Our homework for the episode: Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, The Wicked + the Divine: The Faust Act by Jamie McKelvie and Kieron Gillen, and the...

Hello and welcome to our holiday break episode! Thanksgiving is tomorrow and we're all super busy making pies or eating turkey or watching football, so we have a nice light episode full of our favorite holiday media for you. No homework required!

We're talking about MASKS, both literally and figuratively, with guest star Mark Rhomberg! We examine plot and character elements, and there may or may not be a round of patting each other on the back for not assigning any straight forward superhero stories (although we still manage to talk about Batman, because, well, duh). Remember, we are who we pretend to be, so fake it till you make it and li...

We get technical this week as we examine the ways that sound, music, and silence are used in various forms of visual media. Our guest for the episode is Dan Karlin, of SOOL Radio fame, who joins our discussion as we get into, amongst the other things, diegetic music, creating tone with sound, and how Martha gets anxious when a movie doesn't have any score at all. It's no accident that we're talkin...

We are leaving our three-media homework model to the side for a moment to try something different! This ep, we share our experiences with tabletop roleplaying games, and discuss the values we think they have, particularly in an academic and educational environment. We share games that are particular favorites, what we grew up playing, why we enjoy them - and how we've passed that on to the student...

Special guest host Lizzie Buehler joins us to discuss not throwing away our shots, toxic masculinity, and the musical stylings of Glee. Ambition is our topic of the hour: is it a good thing or a bad thing (in general and for our main characters), is it different from having drive or passion, and how do our featured stories treat it differently when the ambitious character in question is a gal or a...

"Home" is a nebulous concept that is, by its nature, constantly redefined. We attempt to make sense of what it means to our main characters, and in the process get to talk about format and world building a whole lot. Home is pretty deeply tied to identity for all of our main characters, so we end up looping a little bit back to our very first topic for the show as we explore the struggle to define...

We dig deep into semantics here, and it may be the first episode where that's a good thing! Across all three media, we encounter characters who are seeking forgiveness in some capacity or another: from their loved ones, from themselves, on behalf of themselves. Are they successful? What defines success? Is, perhaps, the act of seeking forgiveness enough to warrant it? We also get meta and look at...

The podcast is undergoing some changes, so we're taking a quick restructuring break to talk about what pop culture we've been consuming this summer: what's been awesome, and what has been...less so. We're joined by the first of what will hopefully be a long line of awesome guests, Maren!