Special Topics in Media

Send us Fan Mail As the Communicating Fears in Film, The Return! season continues, host Garret Castleberry sits down with Professor of Rhetoric and Communication Dr. Kendall Phillips to discuss the fantasy of horror entertainments and their relationship to the reality of American anxieties. In part 1 of their conversation, Kendall helps paint a picture for "Why Rhetoric Matters" as a way...

Send us Fan Mail October is upon us! With scary movie season under way we're returning to our " Communicating Fears in Film " theme all month long. To kick off our specialty programming this spooky season, host Garret Castleberry is joined by Scott McMurry to dissect a pair of science fiction horror films that strike at fears relating to identity and duplicity. In the spirit of last...

Send us Fan Mail In this "Epilogue" to the 2023 Summer Movie Season , host Garret Castleberry recaps the roadmap for this mini-series and its analytic structure. After providing a context for the summer movie season analytic structure, Garret then posits five criteria for "Why Summer Movie Season Works" as the perfect antidote to late summer podcasting malaise (13:35). Then, Ga...

Send us Fan Mail Our Special Topics in Media Pod-a-Thon! reaches its summer 2023 conclusion with an examination of the twinning effect that impacted the month of July. Garret Castleberry is joined by Kyle Hammonds in a conversation that highlights the cultural peaks and valleys  encountered through July's movie releases. Among the films released, a clear trend of oppositional twinning emerges...

Send us Fan Mail Rounding out the "Honorable Mentions" list of acclaimed films, hosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry examine the most current film to rank on the McMurry Super Index, 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road . Directed by Australian auteur George Miller, Fury Road expands the post-apocalyptic mythology established by Miller nearly forty years prior with 1979's gear head...

Send us Fan Mail Previously on the Special Topics in Media Pod-a-Thon! : franchise fatigue, IP gone awry, brand dominance in colossal collapse. Garret Castleberry cracks the rhetorical whip with Summer Movie scholar Kyle Hammonds as they tackle the close-out films that helped make June 2023 one of the most commercially promising, yet financially flailing months in recent history. The dark room duo...

Send us Fan Mail As the Film Listology season closes in on #100,  Garret and Scott complete their "transgressive trilogy" of vintage New Hollywood films with Cabaret   from 1972. Directed by Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minelli and Michael York, Cabaret   snuck in a win with the Academy Award for Best Director (among others) in the same year as Francis Ford Coppola's original The God...

Send us Fan Mail The summer heat reaches its epoch, and so does the  2023 Summer Movie Season with this  Special Topics first, a " Lightning Review " of the Warner Bros./DC Entertainment franchise killer, The Flash  (2023). Culminating the volatile and polarizing "Zack Snyder Universe" in the DC Extended Universe, The Flash was strategically delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic...

Send us Fan Mail After a brief pause to commemorate  Special Topics  50th episode , Garret and Scott resume their Film Listology countdown with the second in their "transgressive trilogy" of New Hollywood films,  Midnight Cowboy (1969). Directed by John Schlesinger and starring John Voight and Dustin Hoffman,  Midnight Cowboy is the first and only film to receive an initial "X"...

Send us Fan Mail The month of August has ended, but the heat index continues to soar. Fortunately, Special Topics in Media continues to capitalize on recent nostalgia with the 2023 Summer Movie Season mini-series. Host Garret Castleberry reconnects with Kyle Hammonds in their curated tour of popcorn commercial cinema. The shadow-and-light rhetors drift further into their POD-A-THON! emphasis on th...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Special Topics in Media   celebrates its 50th Episode! To highlight the show's progress, the Dialogic Duo take a break from their Film Listology   and 2023 Summer Movie Season pod threads to reflect on the show's wider progress thus far.   The Dialogic Duo share their Top 3 moments in the show (17:45) first fifty, the time management allocated to develop...

Send us Fan Mail The August heat has not let up. Fortunately, neither has Special Topics in Media with its icebreaker mini-series, the  2023 Summer Movie Season . Host Garret Castleberry mics up with Kyle Hammonds to examine the cultural landscape of moviegoing. The shadow-and-light rhetors rev up a POD-A-THON! emphasis on big releases in June 2023. With so many features releasing from major studi...

Send us Fan Mail With another heatwave heading in this August, Special Topics attempts to stay cool with our 2023 Summer Movie Season mini-series. Host Garret Castleberry sits down with Kyle Hammonds to review major motion picture released in May. Our resident screening room critics weigh the value of May's releases, with emphasis on a pair of Disney productions that emphasize intellectual pr...

Send us Fan Mail The  Film Listology season resumes this week with a foray into a trio of New Hollywood films. Host Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry dub this phenomenon a transgressive trilogy in how each captured critical and commercial attention by embracing cultural taboos and moving them from the margins to the center. The films definitely rode a counterculture wave that impacted not only...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, host Garret Castleberry offers insight into the organic growth of  Special Topics in Media . He outlines how summer 2023 presented a space to diversify lecturecast programming from a single topic to an overlapping trio of distinguishable threads. This includes a quick contextualization for how these topics resonate in distinct ways. Garret then lays out a five-poi...

Send us Fan Mail As the 2023 summer movie season winds down, regional climates continue to rise. In an attempt to mitigate the heat and make sense of the cultural temperature, host Garret Castleberry sits down with Kyle Hammonds to examine the recent film economics rollercoaster with a mini-series focus, the 2023 Summer Movie Season . Each week, Garret and Kyle will examine one month of the summer...

Send us Fan Mail In this extension to our Media Methods and Content Creation mini-series, host Garret Castleberry interviews audio engineer, voice actor, and ambient specter  of Special Topics , William McMurry. Will discusses his growing portfolio in audio production, ranging from audio book performance to video game background vocalist. Will also extends his range of specialty practice into podc...

Send us Fan Mail As the Film Listology season of Special Topics continues, hosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry evaluate their first entry from the twenty-first century, Ridley Scott's sword-and-sandal tentpole epic, Gladiator . Ranking #105 on the McMurry Super Index (MSI) , Gladiator signposts Hollywood's affection for nostalgia as a cyclical storytelling engine. The dialogic duo...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, hosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry wrestle with the first in the line of ranked "honorable mentions" in the countdown to #100. Coming in at #106, from famed Hollywood Golden Age director Howard Hawks in 1940, His Girl Friday . The dialogic duo reveal key ways in which this adaptation departs from playwright Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's...

Send us Fan Mail In this continuation of our Media Methods and Content Creation mini-series, host Garret Castleberry interviews academician, Batman scholar, and occasional cohost of Special Topics , Kyle Hammonds. Kyle discusses his love of popular culture, how he roots it in teaching practices, and explains how technologies like podcasting enable learning opportunities both inside of and external...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, hosts Garret and Scott humbly walk back their previous pronouncement of #100, James Cameron's sci-fi blockbuster Terminator 2: Judgment Day , in light of final modifications to the experimental  McMurry Super Index data analysis formula. Scott "assures" Garret there are no further numerical tweaks, but as a result of the newly aligned "1s and 0...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, hosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry continue their theorization of the art of cultural lists and the commercial practice of listing with an abridged explanation of the McMurry Super Index (MSI) formula as a mechanism for cataloging how culture creates value (1:00). Their assessment includes contextualizing domestic declines in film attendance (4:55), before...

Send us Fan Mail In this mini-series, host Garret Castleberry interviews academic dean, author, and Okie Bookcast creator-host, J Hall. J shares his experiences working in higher education while balancing family and leisure. He then shares how his passion for reading developed into the communication network that grows out of his book-centric podcast, the Okie Bookcast . The interview coincides wit...

Send us Fan Mail It's summertime, and with the seasonal changes comes adventurous shifts in programming. This week host Garret Castleberry is rejoined by his partner in filmic crime, Scott McMurry, for a preview of themes to come on  Special Topics in Media . The dialogic duo introduce the show's first meta-season, focusing on an examination of "movie listing" as a codexing sch...

Send us Fan Mail This week host Garret Castleberry provides a Special Topics in Media progress report, including developments on campus that continue to aid and improve the program's ability to spread in new directions and connect with new audiences. Garret uses this the transitional space to contextualize how even the "complicated" seasons in Higher Ed can produce fruitful outcomes...