Purely Academic with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman

This week is another crossover with our sister series, Weekly Suit Gundam,  as we dive deep into the wacky and wonderful world of Alternate Universe Gundam for the first time with 1994’s bizarre Shonen soap-opera classic Mobile Fighter G Gundam,  one of the strangest, coolest, and most endearingly heartfelt entries in the entire Gundam franchise. That discussion takes up the bulk of today’s extra-...

It’s a big week for video games, as we dive deep with the excellent, gargantuan, delightfully brutal DOOM Eternal  for a full spoiler review, talk more about Animal Crossing: New Horizons,  and Jonathan finally catches up with last year’s outstanding Resident Evil 2  remake! We also give another Coronavirus Lockdown Check-in, full of stories from this very bizarre time we’re all living through, an...

It’s a very busy show this week, as we got our first in-depth look at Sony’s PlayStation 5, finally got to play Doom Eternal  and Animal Crossing: New Horizons,  and return to Neon Genesis Evangelion  to talk about The End of Evangelion.  For the games, we just give some quick spoiler-free first impressions – the full review of Doom Eternal  will be on next week’s show – while Jonathan also talks...

The world is on fire, but the podcast must go on! With Jonathan back in Colorado for the long haul of social distancing, he and Sean get together to talk about what life has been like as Coronavirus hit the United States in full, affecting both of our professions and keeping us at home for the foreseeable future. It’s a crazy time, with all sorts of cancellations and social disruptions, but we als...

A year after the show’s arrival on Netflix, and a year after promising to do an episode all about it, we’ve finally done a Neon Genesis Evangelion  episode! A crossover with our sister show Weekly Suit Gundam,  we dive deep with the original 26 episodes of Hideaki Anno’s influential classic, and find that, while it has frequently magnificent direction, animation, and voice acting, the story, struc...

Last week’s countdown of The Top 10 Games of 2019 was one of our longest episodes ever, but we didn’t quite finish the countdown. That’s because our #1 game of the year, FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice,  was so beautifully, blisteringly good it deserved an episode all of its own, and that’s exactly what we’ve recorded for today: An in-depth, episode-length conversation about one of the ve...

After being delayed by Jonathan’s trip to Japan and our Best of the Decade episodes, it’s finally time for our annual countdown of the very best Video Games of the year. And it’s better late than never, because 2019 was a really interesting year for games, and both of us wound up with eclectic, surprising Top 10 lists that don’t look quite like any countdown we’ve done in years past, allowing us t...

In a very rare move for this podcast, this week’s show is all about American television, as we dive deep with three very different, very good genre shows from the end of 2019: Disney+’s outstanding Star Wars  series The Mandalorian,  HBO’s wildly ambitious Watchmen,  and Netflix’s unexpectedly strong The Witcher.  Every one of these shows was a pleasant surprise – some more so than others – and ea...

Jonathan just spent three weeks in Japan over the winter break, and now it’s time to tell all the stories from his adventures in the land of the rising sun! From seeing the life-size Unicorn Gundam in Odaiba to visiting the Studio Ghibli Museum in Mitaka to visiting all sorts of famous temples like Zenkoji, Kinkakuji, and Matsumoto Castle, to meeting the infamous Snow Monkeys of Nagano – there wer...

Jonathan’s just returned from his three-week vacation in Japan, and while we’ll have lots about that trip on next week’s episode, today’s podcast is a quick catch-up, as Sean shares what he’s been up to the last few weeks, including a review of Netflix’s surprisingly good Witcher  series. Then we cover some recent gaming news, including delays for major games like Cyberpunk 2077, Avengers,  and Fi...

Today is the third and final part of our three-part podcast series celebrating the best of the decade, as we look at the best and most significant Video Games of the 2010s. One of the primary subjects of our podcast throughout this decade, we’ve got a lot of thoughts on which games most shaped the past ten years, and we’ve divided our discussion into two segments: First, our respective lists of th...

For our first show of 2020, we’re continuing our three-part podcast series celebrating the best of the decade that was the 2010s. This week, it’s all anime (and all Sean) all the time, as Sean, our podcast’s resident prolific anime viewer, tells us about the 50 best animated shows from Japan he watched these past ten years. There’s a detailed Top 10 and then a slightly-less-detailed list of 40 hon...

For our final show of 2019, we’re kicking off a three-part podcast series celebrating the best of the decade, starting today with the Best Films of the 2010s. Jonathan’s been a working film critic and film academic for most of the past ten years, and while Sean’s been to the movies less frequently this decade, 10 years is still plenty of time to see some truly great films. So today, we’re counting...

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and welcome to our 2nd annual Weekly Stuff Christmas Special! After we gave a live-reaction to Pokémon Christmas Bash,  the worst Christmas album of all time, on last year’s special, we’re upping the ante this year with a live performance of the worst adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol  money can buy: A ‘Christian’ Carol,  an Evangelist stage play tha...

Disney’s Star Wars  Sequel Trilogy came to a close this week with  The Rise of Skywalker, Episode IX in the long-running saga and the final adventure for characters like Rey, Finn, Poe, and Kylo Ren. And it’s a pretty baffling finale too, built on a terrible script with nonsensical plotting, confusing character motivations, and a collection of the worst and stupidest twists  Star Wars  has ever se...

Our first year of Weekly Suit Gundam  comes to a close as we reach the end of the Universal Century with 1993’s Mobile Suit Victory Gundam,  the final full series set in the Universal Century and the last before creator Yoshiyuki Tomino took a break from the franchise and Sunrise branched out into Alternate Universe stories. Victory Gundam  is famously one of the darkest installments in the series...

The Game Awards weren’t as eventful in 2019 as they have been in previous years, with the big exception of Microsoft surprising everyone with the formal unveiling of the next generation’s Xbox…and its terrible, horrible, no good very bad name: the Xbox Series X. There’s a lot of promising stuff to be excited for in Microsoft’s new system, but that name is a breathtaking stinker somehow even more c...

We’ve got two big video reviews for you this week, as Sean tells us all about the wacky world of Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding,  and Jonathan gives final thoughts on Pokemon Sword & Shield.  One of these games is very straightforward to discuss, and one is more…um, confusing,  but both are well worth your attention, and they were a lot of fun to talk about. We also talk about our respective Thank...

It’s a Star Wars  heavy show this week, as we discuss the first three episodes of The Mandalorian  on Disney+ and give final thoughts on the video game Jedi Fallen Order,  following up on our initial discussion last week. These are both excellent pieces of Star Wars  media, effectively doing things we haven’t seen from the franchise before, and combined, they have us more enthusiastic about the st...

In one of the busiest, most jam-packed podcasts we’ve ever recorded, we give first impressions of the week’s two major video game releases, Pokemon Sword & Shield  for Nintendo Switch and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order  for the PS4. Star Wars  in particular is an incredibly surprising, exciting game, and gives us a lot to talk about without ever touching on any spoilers. But that’s just the tip of t...

Blizzard’s annual BlizzConevent took place this week amidst a storm of political controversy, but the two major announcements the company showed off were incredible, with both Diablo IV  and Overwatch 2  delivering jaw-dropping cinematic short films and impressive gameplay reels. That’s just the tip of the iceberg for this week’s podcast, though, as we also hear first impressions from Sean on Obsi...

Our journey through Universal Century Gundam  continues with one of the strangest and most rewarding corners of the franchise, the 1991 theatrical feature  Mobile Suit Gundam F91.  Written and Directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino and reuniting him with Gundam’s original character designer, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, and original mecha designer, Kunio Okawara,  Gundam F91  was the first attempt to move beyond the...

WARNING: This episode contains potential SPOILERS for STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, based on internet leaks about the film. This discussion takes place between 1:05:03 and 1:09:36. Please skip if you do not want to hear any possible leaked information about the film.  It’s a packed grab-bag episode this week, as Sean talks about playing the campaign for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare  and finish...

Breaking Bad  returned this week with the all-new sequel movie, El Camino,  written and directed by Vince Gilligan and starring Aaron Paul, proving itself a pretty fantastic opportunity to dive back into seemingly well-explored territory. We talk about the movie at length (with spoilers reserved for our big segment at the end), but before that, there’s also a bevy of news to go over, including the...

Our 300th episode milestone celebration continues this week with Part 2 of our countdown of our Top 10 Favorite TV Shows of All Time! Last week’s discussion proved surprising, as our lists had no overlap and a lot of surprises. Part 2 finds us covering a similarly broad range of shows, and while our Top 2 choices may not exactly be revelations to longtime listeners, they give us a chance to talk o...