Purely Academic with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman

What do we talk about this week? What don’t we talk about? We catch up on a trio of movies from the month of May, from the fantastic John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum, to the depressing live-action Aladdin remake, to the totally okay Detective Pikachu. We also go over the Game of Thrones series finale, and what a muted, unengaged ending it provided. But that’s not all, because we’ve also been playin...

It’s a fun catch-up kind of episode this week, as we cover some big news from the past two weeks, including the reported casting of Robert Pattinson as Batman, HBO’s Watchmen teaser, Disney’s terrifying decade-long release schedule, Nintendo’s Super Mario Maker 2 Direct, and more! Jonathan talks about his delightful descent into masochism playing Cuphead on Nintendo Switch, and works through his f...

Next week, Detective Pikachu arrives in theatres, sure to become the biggest video game movie of all time. Twenty years ago, Pokemon: The First Movie took the United States by storm in a very different way, arriving at the height of the original Pokemon boom and bringing anime mainstream in the West in a way it had never been before. On this week’s show, we revisit that film – in both its English...

Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame is the biggest movie in the world right now, and we dive deep with this culmination of a series we’ve been discussing on this podcast since the earliest days of our show! It’s an amazing film in so many ways – on its own terms, but also as a cultural experience – and more than worthy of a long, in-depth talk about all the characters, set pieces, and the surprisingly cath...

We catch up on two weeks’ worth of news, from the first trailers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and the video game Jedi Fallen Order, to the unveiling of the Disney Plus streaming service, to the confusing reveal of the Xbox One SAD edition. We also talk about the addition of Persona 5’s Joker to Super Smash Bros, and Jonathan gives first impressions of the oddity that is Nintendo’s Labo VR....

It’s a packed show this week, as we give impressions of Super Dragon Ball Heroes: World Mission, the first English localization of the Japanese card battle sensation, discuss Kotaku’s bombshell report on the troubled development of Bioware’s Anthem, break down all the problems with Funimation’s dubious new Dragon Ball Z 30th Anniversary Blu-ray set, and weigh in on the very stupid controversies cu...

This week, we review Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Yoshi’s Crafted World, two games that couldn’t seem more different, but weirdly wind up teaching a lot of the same lessons in how to create a quality video game. Before that, we also kick back and talk about some Stuff – like Jonathan’s first time playing the cult classic Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, or trying to explain the plot of Season 3 of Th...

It’s a jam-packed episode, as we dive deep with Jordan Peele’s incredible new horror film, Us, Jonathan gives some early thoughts from a pre-screening of DC’s Shazam!, Sean shares initial impressions of FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and so much more! Sean also talks about playing the first three Devil May Cry days on some Colorado snow days, Jonathan reviews the documentary Apollo 11,...

This week saw the much anticipated release of Captain Marvel, the latest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the first to feature a female lead. It’s a very fun film that opens lots of exciting new doors for Marvel, and we spend a good chunk of time reviewing and breaking it down in full spoiler detail. Before that, Jonathan talks about catching up on Supergirl and the latest DC crossover sp...

This week, by popular demand (and because we really wanted to do it), we finally begin our trip down Middle Earth Memory Lane, with our in-depth retrospective discussion of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. So much has changed since this film’s release in 2001, its unlikely success helping to transform Tolkien’s work from a literary classic to one of the most dominant transnationa...

Sean couldn’t record this week, so instead, Jonathan watched and live-tweeted the 91st Academy Awards, following it up with a solo podcast discussing overall reactions to the show, the winners, and what we should take away from a night that had a horrible ending – Green Book, aka 2 Driving 2 Daisy, winning Best Picture – but a lot of things worth celebrating along the way. Jonathan delivers a mono...

This week saw Nintendo’s first Direct in months, featuring announcements ranging from Super Mario Maker 2 to a Link’s Awakening remake, plus more details on Fire Emblem: Three Houses and a cavalcade of surprise eShop releases. We talk about all of that and more, go over the latest in a seemingly endless stream of Academy Award dumpster fires, share our horror over Will Smith’s uncanny valley Genie...

This week, we got our first hands-on look at Bioware’s Anthem, and the results were…not pretty. We break down all the ways this uninspired Destiny clone has us worried after a few hours with the public demo, while also talking about Destiny itself and the Forsaken expansion we’ve both recently caught up with. We gush over the new combatants introduced to Dragon Ball FighterZ, Jiren and Videl, whil...

This week, we look ahead to the year that is now upon us, 2019, and preview all the upcoming films and video games we know about that are either exciting, baffling, dread-inducing, or a mixture of all three. We also make a competitive draft of which seemingly far-off video games are most likely to actually see the light of day in 2019, while Jonathan predicts just what obscene amounts of money Dis...

Dragon Ball Super is in theatres and dominating the box-office, and we are absolutely in love with Broly, an amazing film that represents an amazing milestone in the history of this beloved series. We break down the movie in full detail, discussing its bold new animation style and action sequences, surprisingly rich narrative and themes, and how it rehabilitates one of the series’ most one-dimensi...

With Dragon Ball Super: Broly arriving in American theatres this week, we look back on the original three Broly films from the initial run of Dragon Ball Z films (DBZ Movies 8, 10, and 11). The original Dragon Ball movies are a strange beast to begin with – they can be a lot of fun for fans, but they’re also heavily formulaic and mostly plotless – but the Broly films are the strangest of all, crea...

We kick off a new year of podcasting by finally dedicating an episode to one of our favorite franchises of all time: Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball! With the new film Dragon Ball Super: Broly hitting theatres later this month, we take a look back at the most recent TV series, discussing why it worked so well where other attempts to extend the story beyond the manga have not, and discussing each of t...

In our final episode of 2018, we reflect on another amazing year in gaming with countdowns of our Top 10 Video Games of the Year. This was a rich, varied, and incredibly surprising year for video games, with some expected hits and out-of-left-field delights making both of our lists. There’s more crossover this time between our two countdowns than in recent years, but also some big points of depart...

Since Monday fell on Christmas Eve this year, we thought we’d put together a special Holiday-themed episode this week, complete with gift-giving, Jonathan’s impromptu list of the best (and worst) Christmas movies, a shared rant about people who care too much about Die Hard being a Christmas movie, and more! We also chat a bit more about Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Hitman 2, before arriving at o...

Spider-Man’s incredible year continued this week with the release of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the web-head’s first animated movie and the first to star Miles Morales. It’s also one of the best superhero movies ever made, not to mention maybe the single most innovative and imaginative use of CGI animation since Toy Story pioneered the format in 1995. This is a truly special movie, one wit...

It’s another packed episode this week, as we give impressions on one of the year’s biggest game releases and dive into the depths of depression with the worst Doctor Who season ever. But before that, Sean and Jonathan go over all the news out of this week’s Game Awards event – including the most surprising DLC announcement in years – and give continuing thoughts on a variety of recent games, inclu...

This is a clip from this week's full podcast, in which we covered a lot of topics, including this season of Doctor Who and its many creative failings. I wanted to clip out one part of that discussion and share it separately, however, because I think it's the most important part of our comments, and I think it speaks to something few critics are genuinely trying to grapple with this season: Have Ch...

On this week’s wide-ranging episode, we come back from Thanksgiving break to discuss two weeks’ worth of news, including the announcement that Neon Genesis Evangelion is headed to Netflix, while more Marvel shows like Daredevil most certainly are not, before giving continued impressions on a bunch of recent video games like Hitman 2. Jonathan talks about finally nearing the finish line in Dragon B...

In this pre-recorded post-Thanksgiving episode, we finally sit down to talk about one of our favorite games of the year, Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age. After 100 hours apiece and many happy memories, we have both completed this epic JRPG experience, and have a lot to say about what is easily one of the genre’s greatest accomplishments. We’ve talked about the game without spoilers a few...

In one of the single busiest episodes we’ve ever recorded, we pay tribute to the amazing life of Stan Lee, the face and voice of Marvel comics and one of the most dominant figures in modern pop culture, review Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, give first impressions of Hitman 2 and Pokemon Let’s Go, go over several pieces of news including Sony’s decision to skip E3 2019, and review the...