The VoxPopcast

Four hundred and fifteen episodes over eight years and we never talked about Star Trek. How could that possibly be? Well, it can’t be. Of course we’ve talked about Star…

The post e415. Beyond the Final Frontier: Star Trek’s Influence on Culture & Fandom appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Puppetry is one of the oldest and most respected performance art styles in the world. Except, in America we have reduced it almost entirely to the domain of children’s entertainment.…

The post e414. Strings Attached: Puppetry, from Marionettes to AI appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

A few weeks ago Mav and Monica did a very special show where three of Mav’s current students from his “Introduction to Popular Culture” class where the students joined us…

The post e413. Teen Beach Movie Revisited: a Conversation with the Screenwriter appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

The time comes but once a year… Hollywood’s biggest night! Or so they say. Actually, for as long as we have been doing this show, almost every year Hannah and…

The post e412. The 2026 Oscars Prediction Special appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

So every once in a while we like to do an episode of the show called “is this a bad movie?” The funny part is that usually when we pick…

The post e411. Is The Cannonball Run a Bad Movie? (Ok, we know it is… but does it have to be?) appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Sometimes an episode idea comes out of nowhere. Recently, Mav overheard several of his students discussing a movie from their childhood before his morning class. After he laughed at their…

The post e410. Teen Beach Movie: Metaphor, Methodology, Memories, and Millennials vs. GenZ appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Most TV, movies, books… fiction in general don’t exist. This is obvious. That’s sort of the point of fiction. but what if it didn’t exist beyond the obvious fact that…

The post e409. Tommy Westphall’s Snowglobe: Exploring Fiction’s Largest Shared Universe appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Wonder Woman is almost certainly one of the most enduring characters in all of pop culture. She’s certainly the most famous female superhero of all time. But we would argue…

The post e408. Wonder Woman: Boundaries, Bondage, and Breakthroughs appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties ’cause it’s cooooold out there today! It’s Groundhog Day, and you know what that means! It’s the return of your…

The post GroundPod Day 2026! Happy Groundhog Day! appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

For a show about pop culture, it’s actually somewhat rare for us to address topics of pop culture while they are actually happening. But sometimes we do. So this week,…

The post e407. Oscar Sneak Preview: Breaking Down the Nominations From Snubs to Surprises appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Well, unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard of HBOMax’s new hit series the Pitt. After all, it recentlywon like a billion Golden Globes and Emmys. Well… ok,…

The post e406. So, We Live in the Pitt and Here is What We Think of It… appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

It’s that time again! Every year we have one very special show where all of the hosts get together to reveal the results of last years Fantasy Box Office Game…

The post e405. Fantasy Box Office Draft 2026 appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

For some reason Netflix, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the proper way for everyone in the world to spend their winter Holidays of American Thanksgiving through Christmas and New…

The post e404. Stranger Endings: Breaking Down the End of Stranger Things appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Well here we are at the end of the year 2025; a year that somehow seemingly lasted 147 months. And yet somehow it was really only 12 months and that…

The post e403. Things You Missed 2025 appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

It’s everyone’s favorite time of year… the time where we celebrate that birth of… Cheesy Christmas movies! I mean, I’m sure there’s probably some other significance to this time of…

The post e402. Cheesy Christmas Movies 2025 appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

It’s finals week. Well, ok, finals are over, so that means it’s finals GRADING week, the worst week of the academic semester for anyone who teaches for a living. It…

The post e401. F-M-K! appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Wow… somehow we’ve managed to do 400 of these! On today’s very special anniversary episode of VoxPopcast we have the entire regular team of hosts to reminisce about the history…

The post e400. 400 Episodes?!?! Holy $#!†! appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

There’s this funny thing that happens with TV shows. Because of the nature of human actors, TV shows are the one type of serialized media where a natural change to…

The post e399. The Show Must Go On! Navigating Main Character Exits and Recasts appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

There’s no sense burying the lead here. If you listen to our show at all, you know that Hannah is a Wicked fanatic. We talked about it last year (exactly…

The post e398. Of Course We’re Talking About Wicked For Good appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

One of pop cultures most enduring properties is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Not only is it often hailed as the first ever science fiction property, it is one of the all-time…

The post e397. All the Frankensteins! (like all the Draculas… but with Frankenstein) appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

We’ve mentioned on the show in the past that a large portion of Mav’s job is teaching in the Digital Narrative and Interactive Design(DNID) program at the University of Pittsburgh.…

The post e396. Games, Education, & Collaboration: The Role of Play in Learning and Connection appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

(Note: an earlier version of this episode failed to post correctly to our feed. Our apologies.) Every once in a while we like to step away from our usual serious……

The post e395. Stealing the Fives – Repost to fix error appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Every once in a while we like to step away from our usual serious… well… serious-ish, pseudo-academic intellectual pursuits and just do something a little fun. This is one of…

The post e395. Stealing the Fives (with permission of course) appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Happy Halloween! As we move towards the end of Spooky Season this year, we realized that there is an interesting cultural phenomenon that we’ve never even considered on the show…

The post e394. Spirits and Spectacles: The World of Haunted Houses appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

It’s SPOOOOKY SEASON!!! Actually, it has been for a couple weeks and yet we really haven’t gotten into it. But now it’s time to fix that. A year ago we…

The post e393. Eerie Elders: The Horror of Growing Old appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Has it been a year already since Mav last did a special GameJam episode? I guess so. For those who are new to VoxPopcast, every year Mav serves as a…

The post e392. Games4SocialImpact 2025 appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

It’s always weird and oddly exciting when we discover that we have a hole in the things we’ve covered one the show. And in fact, It’s actually quite surprising that…

The post e391. Manga-101: Why is Manga? appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

We’ve talked a lot on the show in the past about Roland Barthes’ influential literary essay “La mort de l’auteur” or “the Death of the Author” and what it means…

The post e390. La Mort de le Mèmer? How memes make meaning appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

So… America is in a weird place right now. Frankly, we could say that just about every week these days. But this last couple of weeks it’s been even more…

The post e389. Boycotts and their Cultural Impact appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Well, it’s been a summer… that’s certainly true. And if you live in America, you know there’s been a bunch of… let’s say “news” that happened this week. Obviously we…

The post e388. 2025 Summer Catch Up! Was that it? appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

There’s a lot of TV content out there. In fact, sometimes it feels like there’s maybe too much TV to watch. However, there’s a certain set of shows that it…

The post e387. TV is Our Religion: The Theological Lens of Peak Television appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

They don’t make TV like they used to. They quite literally just don’t!. There’s lots of business reasons for this and culture changes and just an over abundance of content…

The post e386. Unpacking Long-Running TV: From Sitcoms to Soap Operas appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

It’s been a while since we did a “is this a bad movie” episode. But the best way of investigating a “is this a bad movie” is to pick one…

The post e385. Is Flash Gordon a Bad Movie? appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

In 2022, a show premiered on HBO that was perhaps tailor made for us. The Gilded Age was a 1880s period drama from the creators of Downton Abbey with sexual…

The post e384. From Vanderbilt Glam to Oscar’s Shades: The Gilded Age Deep Dive appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Way back on episode 47, we talked about Milkshake Ducks. That is to say, the concept of what to do when you suddenly discover that the creator of a beloved…

The post e383. Revisiting Milkshake Ducks appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

One of the most tried and true genres of fiction is the Whodunnit mystery. The premise is simple, a crime is committed and the reader or audience watches the a…

The post e382. How Catch ’em? Exploring the Inverted Mystery appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

For the past couple of years, the general sentiment seems to have been that superhero movies are becoming… well… kinda bad. But, as we spoke a couple weeks ago with…

The post e381. It’s Clobberin’ Time! Fantastic Four’s Impact on the Summer of Superheroes appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Eagle eyed (eared?) listeners might have noticed that it’s actually been a little tricky to get Monica booked on the show for the last couple of weeks because of a…

The post e380. Monica in Paris: The Tropes of Study Abroad appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Let’s face it, if you listen to our show there’ basically no way that you didn’t know that there was a Superman movie that came out this weekend. In fact,…

The post e379. and now… Superman appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

In a media landscape driven by monetizing nostalgia, reboots and remakes are inevitable. Often this involves taking a new cast to offer a modern take on the property. However, there’s…

The post e378. For Mature Audiences Only: When Nostalgia Grows Up appeared first on The VoxPopcast.