Gobbledygeek

135 years ago, Robert Ford put a bullet in the back of Jesse James' head. 34 years ago, Ron Hansen put pen to paper for a literary retelling of this slaying, calling it The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford . 10 years ago, Australian writer-director Andrew Dominik put to film his version of this novel. What gets lost over time and multiple translations? What aspects of the leg...

This week, the lasso of truth compels Paul and Arlo to tell you all about their thoughts on Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman , the fourth film in the DC Extended Universe and the first major female-led superhero movie since freaking Elektra . Joining them on this Themysciran horseback ride is friend of the show Hallie Prime. The gang discusses Gal Gadot's note-perfect performance, Chris Pine's frighten...

Once again, Paul and Arlo's most British friend Wesley "Wezzo" Mead is abducted from the U.K. to discuss Chris Carter's seminal sci-fi series The X-Files . The gang has reached the show's fifth season; for a while now, Paul and Wezzo have been warning neophyte X-Phile Arlo that things would go downhill, and we may have reached that point. They discuss why season 5 doesn't work quite as well as pre...

Y: The Last Man gets it very own Ring Cycle with Vol. 5: Ring of Truth , wherein Yorick is separated from his engagement ring while the Culper Ring goes head-to-head with the Setauket Ring. Meanwhile, Paul and Arlo's year-long Four-Color Flashback " study" of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's acclaimed series runs rings around the competition (not that there is any). The boys discuss everyone's re...

Family is family, no matter how much they might piss you off. It's fitting that while the ragtag band of losers at the heart of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 learn this lesson, Paul and Arlo are relearning it. That's right, kids, the boys' miraculous and unprecedented string of agreements is over: Paul is tail over paws in love with Vol. 2 , while Arlo rides the good ship Kelly McGillis into a se...

Anti-immigrant sentiment. Militarized police. Fascist leadership. A Britain with closed borders. No, this isn't our world circa 2017; it's the 2027 of Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 sci-fi masterpiece Children of Men . A world rocked by mass infertility and faced with humanity's impending extinction has led down a path of violent extremism, one you and I may be traveling as we speak. Paul and Arlo discuss...

Slip on your shiniest boots of leather and grab those whips, it's Four-Color Flashback time! Professional Grendel podcaster Chance Mazzia joins Paul and Arlo for their year-long exploration of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's Y: The Last Man for Vol. 4: Safeword , wherein things get a little kinky. When the gang stops at a remote cabin in the woods (never a good sign), Yorick is in for a femdom f...

This week, a podcast about a podcast. Of course, S-Town is no ordinary podcast; from the producers of This American Life and Serial , it's a coherent piece of documentary art unto itself. Reporter Brian Reed had little idea what he was getting himself into when John B. McLemore of Shittown (née Woodstock), Alabama, emailed him about a possible murder cover-up. Likewise, the listener who presses pl...

Aliens dripping their acidic psychosexual horrors all over you. Artificial intelligence becoming real, seeing and hearing and controlling all you do. Your friends' flesh peeling back to reveal their true inhuman visage. These are the nightmares conjured by such sci-fi horror classics as Alien , The Terminator , and The Thing , but you may not have seen their likes in recent years. Blumhouse and Bi...

This week, Paul and Arlo turn on and tune into the wonders and terrors of the superhuman mind by taking a gander at the first season of Legion . The FX series, developed by Fargo 's Noah Hawley and theoretically set in the X-Men universe, is unlike most other superheroic media. David Haller is either schizophrenic, an extremely powerful telepathic/telekinetic mutant, or both. Witnessed through his...

Hallelujah, it's raining men! As Yorick Brown discovers he may not be the last man in the universe thanks to a space shuttle carrying two others, Paul and Arlo invite Kenn Edwards to join them on their year-long Four-Color Flashback discussion of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's Y: The Last Man . With Vol. 3: One Small Step , the gang discusses the book's self-referential devices, the prominence...

If only these walls could talk, the secrets they could tell. Among them: murder, betrayal, lies, infidelity, and how in the hell Tommy Wiseau made a movie. It's time for another Geek Challenge , and Arlo has seized the opportunity to finally force Paul into watching Wiseau's 2003 cult classic The Room . In turn, Paul has challenged Arlo to Sidney Lumet's much more dignified 1982 crime comedy Death...

People get old. Claws get rusty. Movie franchises get tired. After 17 years of real-world time and 150+ fictional years, the time has come for James "Logan" Howlett AKA Wolverine to take a bow. In Logan , the final film featuring Hugh Jackman in his iconic star-making role, we're introduced to a near-future bereft of mutants and full of sorrow. Logan's mind is a potent cocktail of regret, pain, an...

Bringing a much-needed feminist perspective to a story about a man surrounded on all sides by women, Jeff Bridges poet Donora Rihn joins Paul and Arlo for their year-long Four-Color Flashback exploration of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's acclaimed Vertigo comic book series Y: The Last Man . This time, the gang discusses Vol. 2: Cycles , which collects issues #6-10 of the original series. Donora...

Just in time for everyone's distrust in government to be at an all-time high, Wesley "Wezzo" Mead joins Paul and Arlo once again to discuss Chris Carter's seminal sci-fi series The X-Files . This time, the gang sets their sights on season 4, and opinion seems to be divided on just how well the season holds together. Is this where the mythology stuff starts to really go off the rails? Does Scully's...

After nearly seven years of fruitless podcasting, Gobbledygeek has reached its 300th episode. For some time now, Paul and Arlo have semi-jokingly referred to episode 300 as the "therapy episode"...so, what the hell, here's three hours of the boys discussing the skeletons in their closest. Acting as guest host and amateur therapist, friend of the show and So Let's Get to the Point host Kenn Edwards...

FIVE SECONDS AGO: Arlo cracks open the first volume of Y: The Last Man. FOUR SECONDS AGO: Paul berates Arlo for not turning on his mic. THREE SECONDS AGO: Arlo rolls his eyes, turns on mic. TWO SECONDS AGO: Arlo loudly eats into the microphone. ONE SECOND AGO: Paul presses record. NOW: Gobbledygeek's 2017 Four-Color Flashback series is here. This year, the boys will be discussing all ten volumes o...

Wait, what's that? Not only did someone listen to our Grendel episodes...but they decided to join us on air?! Wonders never cease. Joining Paul and Arlo to finish last year's Four-Color Flashback series on Matt Wagner's Grendel is Chance Mazzia, who actually discovered the show thanks to Wagner's whacked-out opus. The gang discusses "Devil's Reign," collected in Grendel Omnibus: Vol. 3 , which is...

A band of dirty rebels go to extreme lengths to send a transmission that will change the fate of the galaxy...yes, that's right, Paul and Arlo are risking everything to get the Gobbledygeek season 8 premiere out there. After a months-long hiatus, the boys make their triumphant return to discuss Rogue One: A Star Wars Story , joined by So Let's Get to the Point and Welcome to Paradise 's Kenn Edwar...

We're back! Sort of. Before Gobbledygeek's official return next month, Paul and Arlo explain the terrible real-life circumstances that led to the hiatus. The boys discuss grief, loss, tragedy, depression, and a whole bunch of other super fun and upbeat things! To end things on a positive note, they also discuss some happy news and the pop culture they've enjoyed during the hiatus ( Westworld ! Arr...

We are devastated to report that on Sunday, October 9, 2016, Arlo's mother Kim passed away. This has been a difficult year for many of us, but a death in the Gobbledygeek Family hits especially hard. So we hope you'll understand that Arlo, and the show, will be taking a much-needed hiatus to process and grieve. We will return in January 2017 with a brand new season, Season 8, but in the meantime w...

Armed only with a glass of water and his trusty baseball bat, Kenn Edwards of So Let's Get to the Point invades the podcast this week to help Paul and Arlo kick off Gobbledyween 2016 . This year's month-long horror-fest gets off to a miraculous start with a discussion of M. Night Shyamalan's sci-fi thriller Signs . After the runaway success of The Sixth Sense and the lukewarm contemporary response...

Vampires, bananas, and Weird Al-esque song parodies, oh my! Paul and Arlo may be winding down their coverage of Matt Wagner's Grendel , the subject of this year's exceedingly popular (ahem) Four-Color Flashback series, but the story shows no signs of letting up in "God and the Devil" chapters 7-10. A cosmetically altered face from the distant past returns, incest is rationalized, and produce is us...

Live from Denny's, it's Donora Hillard! The Jeff Bridges poet returns to talk about...pretty much everything with Paul and Arlo. While enjoying late-night diner ambiance, the gang discusses driving and the anxiety it causes; dance, of the So You Think You Can variety (featuring, upon special request, a rendition of Paul's classic Black Swan diatribe); tiny houses, one of which Donora owns; and wha...

Are you in the mood to Bone ? I hope so, because Paul and Arlo are returning to the world of Jeff Smith's cartoonish epic, which they explored in last year's Four-Color Flashback series, to discuss the newly released 25th anniversary book Bone: Coda . The new adventure included in the volume is described as a "completely superfluous" addition to the saga of the Bone cousins--Fone, Phoney, and Smil...