The Top Five Podcast

High School...you might have loved it or hated it, but there's hardly a high school experience that hasn't been reflected on the silver screen at some point.  From crushes to proms, dating, and sex, teachers we loved and teachers we hated, and the other struggles of being an adolescent full of uncontrollable hormones...there are some pretty awesome movies out there that capture all of the crazy an...

WOW - are we already at Episode 25?????  That seems both hard to believe and too good to be true, but we'll take it!  Before you know it, we'll be at 50 or 100, or 500.  But we're in no hurry and we aren't going anywhere - this is just too much fun. This week's top five list might seem like an odd duck.  But hey, if it's good enough for MTV to have a Movie Award for this, then I reckon Annie and I...

By now you should know a few things about me and my co-hosts: 1.  A couple of us really LOVE the Go-Go's (and female rockers in general) 2.  This show totally digs on cover songs And in that vein, it should come as no surprise that my sister and I are HUGE fans of Joan Jett AND that we had come to the realization that many of her biggest hits and best songs were not originals written for or by her...

Welcome back!  This week my sister Annie and I take on our very favorite movie soundtracks, which is something we both feel had way more appeal in the 80s and 90s than it does today, and that's mostly because of streaming music and all that jazz.  But nonetheless, we both acknowledge that creating a movie soundtrack takes some serious talent and creativity and that's why we absolutely LOVE talking...

GenX ladies, get ahold of yourselves - this week, Heather Zeitzewolfe and I are completing reminiscing from our early adolescent years of the 1970's as we fawn over our favorite teen idols who you might have seen on the cover of a Tiger Beat magazine.  Or Teen Beat, or "16," or maybe even the TV guide itself!  And with no internet in the 1970's (or podcasts, or E!TV for that matter), these mags we...

So have you ever thought about your favorite song and your favorite artist who DOESN'T sing that song but you really wish he had?   Welcome to the episode where Annie and I make some brave wish lists of Cover Songs we really, really, REALLY would like to see recorded.   Some of our inspo comes from concerts we've seen, where we've been surprised by a tune someone "got away with," like Pink coverin...

Okay, seriously, this IS the end of the Musicals Series.  To remind you what else is there... Worst Movie Musicals Musicals Released After 1980 Musicals NOT Based on Broadway Plays Movies with Musical Performances Musicals Released Before 1980 Wow, as I type that out it seems like a lot less of a list than it seemed to be at the beginning, Ha Ha. But, can I just say how much fun it was to record L...

Hey everyone!  We are totally not kidding - we ARE going to be spoiling some movies for you today.  If you're someone who gets easily pissed off at stuff like this, you can scroll down to the bottom and see the list of films we cover so you can watch them before listening to the show.  Or not.  But don't say we didn't warn you.   My buddy Doug Ferguson is back again for this episode and I'll tell...

OOPS!  Chris and I recorded this episode FOREVER ago but I don't know what happened...it got lost in the ether of Zoom recordings and Garage Band sessions, etc., etc.  You'll start to hear a handful of episodes about Cover Songs because between Chris and Annie and me, we have a lot of opinions about this. Chris and I get into just a general list of our favorite cover tunes, but I think both of us...

There are only two more episodes of the Musicals Series put together by me and Annie - today's is a re-record of our favorite musicals that were released before 1980:  what Annie and I consider to be The Classic musicals.  These were the shows that our parents had us watching in elementary school thanks to a couple of things... First of all, for some movies, watching them on network television was...

AND - I have another amazing new co-host!  Y'all say hello to Heather Zeitzewolfe of the "Get the Balance Right" podcast! Even though she's a vegan and a sexy CPA and I'm still a meat and milk person who knows diddly poo about accounting, we are totally simpatico when it comes to our pop culture stuff.  Not only are we both GenXers, but we were born in the same year and had a lot of the same exper...

Let's all welcome Doug Ferguson to the Top Five Podcast!  I've been waiting for-freaking-ever to have Doug on the show so we could talk about all of the ways we share the same brain! Doug is my CASE buddy from my previous years of being on the Council for Advancement of Secondary Education planning conference and we've been friends ever since we figured out that we both believe DIE HARD to be a Ch...

This Episode was all Annie's idea and we had a blast doing it!  Even though Annie and I were not in high school together, because I attended the same school for undergraduate and graduate studies, we were together at school for about two years.  In those two years, we saw a lot of movies and rocked out to a shit-ton of music.  I loved that Annie honed in on thinking about cover songs that were rec...

Okay - I lied.  We WERE close to rounding out this musical series but there were other Top Five Lists to explore, so there you go...it was quite something to record in person with my sister, Annie Pruitt, during some vacation time in Kansas.  Totally a great time! Today's theme is Favorite Movies featuring Live Musical Performances.  These are movies that may not originally have been considered mu...

Well, it was bound to happen - if you do TWO episodes about "shitty" movies you've got to do an episode about movies you like, right?   This episode is not our take on what we think are the best movies ever - we're not critics, remember?  LOL.  We just love talking about movies, and these are some of our favorite films.  Films we love to watch over and over and over.  Films that we can likely quot...

To help celebrate Pride Month in June, Annie and I brought Emily in at her request to talk about our favorite shows and films in this genre.  We particularly looked for shows and films that taught us important lessons about gay culture and identity, as well as gender representation.  It's fascinating to experience the generational similarities and differences between what Annie and I have on our l...

This was a super fun episode to record and Chris and I hold nothing back, as usual.  Hope you're okay with some bad language tonight.  Because we are getting all up and over those films from Hollywood that are SO BAD, we consider them Classics. How bad?  Well, it's entirely possible that one or more had been nominated for or won a Gold Raspberry Award (or two or three).  Or just so bad that they w...

In the spirit of complete transparency, this was the very first episode I wanted to record once coming up with the idea of The Top Five Podcast (and since launching the show live, I've realized that there are another couple of Top Five Podcasts out there, oh well).  And was so stoked to do this one with my sister, especially since we were able to enjoy the Go-Go's in concert together back in March...

This episode was super duper FUN!  It's a full-on Family Show featuring me, my sister Annie, and her two amazing kids, Emily and David.  So keep in mind once again that we are sharing our top five favorite scary movies of all time - not those which we think the rest of the world sees as scary, but what has freaked us out the most, by far.   So this is a longer episode and you get not one, not two,...

We are THIS CLOSE to winding down our HUGE series of movie musicals with me and my co-host Annie Pruitt.  This week we are tackling movie musicals that were NOT originally based on any Broadway show. This is an episode I sort of wish that we'd recorded PRIOR to the episode on Movie Musicals released after 1980, because my lists might have been different, so this was a smidge difficult for me.  Sti...

In today's episode, Annie and I take on our favorite movie musicals that were released after the year 1980.  We get into a few little extra things, too - like how our parents and siblings shaped our view of movie musicals when we were younger as well as what we really think defines the concept of "Movie Musical."  While this was one of our first episodes recorded, it is coming out mid-season, if y...

OH good lord!  You know you've been there - you have been waiting for this show for freaking EVER and it's finally here - and then it just blows. Or someone talked you into going to a show with them and you hated every minute of it.   OR - fill in the blank. This week, my co-host Chris Corral and I dig into our Top Five WORST Concert Experiences ever.  This is just based on our own personal experi...

Well, it's a great companion piece to the Top Five Worst Movie Musicals.  And wow, did we have a hoot and a holler recording this show! This episode features Chris Corral and me going to town on the five movies we've seen that we consider being THE WORST movies ever made - EVER.  AT least, from our point of view. Remember that neither Chris nor I am official pop-culture scholars and we don't have...

Ewww....gross! or - "Please, God, let me have those two hours back!" There's one thing to watch a bad movie...it's another thing to watch a really awful movie...and THEN there are the Really Bad Movies that are also MUSICALS. In this episode, my sister Annie and I each take on five films of the musical genre that just really grossed us out, pissed us off, or otherwise disappointed us.  And had a r...

First of all?  What the fuck is classic rock? According to Wikipedia, Classic Rock "is a US radio format  which developed from the  album-oriented rock (AOR) format in the early 1980s."  It is considered the main "genre" of music that was listened to by the Baby Boomers.   But you certainly don't have to be a baby boomer to appreciate the concept of Classic Rock, as my co-host Chris Corral and I t...