Pop Culture Junkie®

Hayley, Nicole and Shauna are back and trading holiday tales of getting barfed on, playing matchmaker, and having a great time at the North Pole of Arizona. Who did what? You’ll have to listen to find out. Then The Junkies ring in 2023 with the obligatory look at the best of 2022, and by obligatory, we mean “really, really fun.” 2022 may have been sparkling and bitter, like a negroni sbagliato wit...

Hayley, Nicole and Shauna reunite to celebrate the holidays Pop Culture Junkie-style: by talking about their favorite holiday movies. Shauna’s is Jingle All the Way, and she challenges everyone to do their best Schwarzenegger accent. Hayley stans Muppet Christmas Carol which begins a debate about which Muppet is the sexiest (the answer may surprise you!) And finally, Nicole’s favorite is Home Alon...

The 2010s were so fire, so lit, and so cringe, we just had to revisit our five-part series looking at the decade. In the 2010s, we had good times, probably, and bad times too, and pop culture was there to get us through it all. The Pop Culture Junkie Podcast is again bringing you the most memorable moments of the years 2010 through 2019 with our series We Love the 2010s. This week, Alex, Hayley, N...

The 2010s were so fire, so lit, and so cringe, we just had to revisit our five-part series looking at the decade. In the 2010s, we had good times, probably, and bad times too, and pop culture was there to get us through it all. The Pop Culture Junkie Podcast is again bringing you the most memorable moments of the years 2010 through 2019 with our series We Love the 2010s. This week, Alex, Hayley, N...

The 2010s were so fire, so lit, and so cringe, we just had to revisit our five-part series looking at the decade. In the 2010s, we had good times, probably, and bad times too, and pop culture was there to get us through it all. The Pop Culture Junkie Podcast is again bringing you the most memorable moments of the years 2010 through 2019 with our series We Love the 2010s. This week, Alex, Hayley, N...

The 2010s were so fire, so lit, and so cringe, we just had to revisit our five-part series looking at the decade. In the 2010s, we had good times, probably, and bad times too, and pop culture was there to get us through it all. The Pop Culture Junkie Podcast is again bringing you the most memorable moments of the years 2010 through 2019 with our series We Love the 2010s. This week, Alex, Hayley, N...

The 2010s were so fire, so lit, and so cringe, we just had to revisit our five-part series looking at the decade. In the 2010s, we had good times, probably, and bad times too, and pop culture was there to get us through it all. The Pop Culture Junkie Podcast is again bringing you the most memorable moments of the years 2010 through 2019 with our series We Love the 2010s. This week, Alex, Hayley, N...

The Junkies wrap up the Winona Ryder 101 lessons with 2018’s Destination Wedding, which may or may not be an actual movie. Winona teams up with Keanu Reeves (who may or may not be her actual husband) for the fourth time in this awkward and talky film oddity. While not the worst Winona movie they’ve had to watch (that would be Autumn in New York), Destination Wedding was still challenging for Nicol...

Well, shave my poodle! Pop Culture Junkie Hayley hosts Thirty, Nerdy, & Thriving, now part of the Pop Culture Entertainment Network. This episode is a love letter to the wonderfully weird world of Stuckeyville, and her favorite comedy drama of all time, NBC’s Ed. Ed ran from 2000-2004 and chronicled the life of Edward J. Stevens, a New York City lawyer who moves back to his hometown, buys the...

Autumn in New York may be the movie that broke The Junkies. Hayley, Shauna and Nicole are not here for any of this movie’s nonsense: not the cringe factor of the age difference between Winona and her love interest Richard Gere, not the utterly unrealistic sex scenes, not for yet another Manic Pixie Dream Winona, and they are definitely not loving that the movie’s main theme is that a woman dying t...

This week we revisit a special episode with Lauren Knight, co-host of the new podcast That Movie Is Fine, part of the Pop Culture Entertainment Network. The Junkies and Lauren use their powers to erase their least favorite films from existence. Sorry, fan(s) of The Love Guru. Then Alex clues everyone in to See, the Jason Momoa show no one knows about. Shauna and Lauren bond over Sly’s ridiculous 1...

Shauna and Hayley celebrate the 100th episode of Pop Culture Junkie by keeping it old school. The Junkies talk about their favorite PCJ moments, like interviewing Brad Perry, hosting panels at Phoenix Fan Fusion, getting recognized at strip clubs, and engaging with dedicated fans. The Junkies talk about the best and worst of what’s happening now in pop culture now, like The Resort, Sandman, House...

This week, The Junkies continue their in-depth look into one of beloved actor Winona Ryder’s most iconic roles by watching Girl, Interrupted, a passion project for Ryder, who bought the rights to the book and worked for seven years to get the film made. Winona plays Susanna, a troubled young woman who may or may not be mentally ill and who gets sent to a facility. This is the movie that officially...

This week, the Junkies are excited to welcome Rachel Herrick, aka Adorkable Rachel, a Sesame Workshop-trained puppeteer who has lent her puppeteering skills to shows like The Afterparty and Crank Yankers. Rachel is also a voice actor, singer, writer, YouTuber, and a Marie Kondo-wannabe. Hayley is excited to talk all things Muppets with Rachel, while Nicole asks Rachel about her YouTube channel. Sh...

This week, The Junkies continue their in-depth look into one of beloved actor Winona Ryder’s most iconic roles by watching Reality Bites, the generation-defining (?) look at the whiny slackers of Gen X. Featuring Winona at her most appealing (and Ethan Hawke at his most annoying), the movie sets up a love triangle between the aimless Lainey (Ryder), the jobless Troy (Hawke) and director Ben Stille...

The Junkies welcome special guest Jim Louvau to this week’s episode. Jim is an award-winning photographer, a director and a musician, and a Phoenix native. Jim has directed two music videos for Jerry Cantrell, formerly of Alice in Chains, and has photographed rock music legends like the late Chester Bennington, Maynard James Keenan of Tool and A Perfect Circle, and Kat Von D (and so many more.) Ji...

This week the Junkies take an in-depth look into one of beloved actor Winona Ryder’s most iconic roles by watching Heathers, a dark satire on high school cliques, bullying, teenage suicide, and scrunchies. It’s Mean Girls, with murder! In this movie, Winona is the ultimate in chic adolescent cool by daring to be a Veronica in a sea of Heathers, and this movie has a ton of quotable lines, which The...

What if you could get a degree in pop culture? You can! This week The Junkies consider going back in time to change their majors after talking to special guest Dr. Jeffrey A. Brown, Chair of the Department of Pop Culture at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. For the past 50 years, BGSU is the only university in the nation to have a Deparment of Popular Culture, and Dr. Brown ea...

This week, The Junkies take another in-depth look into one of beloved actor Winona Ryder’s most iconic roles by watching Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, which is one of Ryder’s first big roles, and started her on the path to be cinema’s iconic goth chick. While Hayley and Shauna were already big fans of the movie, this was Nicole’s first watch, and spoiler: she loved the combination of horror and comedy...

This week The Junkies welcome an incredibly special guest; Grant Goodman, aka ‘Freak’ from Stranger Things. Grant welcomes Shauna, Hayley and Alex into the Hellfire Club, and talks about his time on the hit show’s fourth season, covering topics like telling the Duffer Brothers apart with their masks on, working around Covid lockdowns, how he was the master of the reaction shot, and the rise of Edd...

This week, The Junkies take the last of their in-depth looks into beloved actor Samuel L. Jackson’s most iconic roles by watching Glass, the final in M. Night Shyamalan’s superhero trilogy that began with Unbreakable and continued with Split. This movie reunites Jackson with Bruce Willis, the hero of Unbreakable, and serves as Mr. Glass’s origin story (James McAvoy rounds out the cast.) The Junkie...

This week The Junkies welcome cosplayer Stephanie Van Taylor, an aspiring actress who has been attending and working cons since 2012. She has collaborated with Big Dog Ink, Aspen, and now Mount Olympus Comics, to name a few. Stephanie has studied costume design and film production, and she practices and shares her passions at shows, on Instagram and Twitch. Alex wants to know more about what it me...

This week, The Junkies continue their in-depth look into beloved actor Samuel L. Jackson’s most iconic roles by watching Captain Marvel, arguably the Marvel movie that has the highest concentration of Nick Fury by volume. Though this movie is ostensibly about Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel/Vers, played to smirking perfection by Brie Larson, it is also the origin story for Nick Fury, the future direc...

This week the Junkies welcome special guest Jason Swarr, owner of Terror Trader, Arizona’s only year-round horror marketplace, home to everything from a robust VHS movie selection to a German torture boot to a three hundred-year-old human torso. In other words, it’s the coolest place around. Jason is a horror-movie fanatic and, unsurprisingly, the Junkies are too! Jason talks about how his obsessi...

This week, The Junkies continue their in-depth look into beloved actor Samuel L. Jackson’s most iconic roles by watching Coach Carter, the feel-good, based-on-a-true-story of a basketball coach who demanded more of his players than they were willing to give…at first. This movie is big on heart but has shockingly few F-bombs, and marks the first on-screen appearances of Channing Tatum and Ashanti,...