Dispatch Ajax! Podcast

Rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated! We're still going, just having some hiccups, kinda like the rest of the world.  

We open the door to the underexplained corners of Nerd and Geek culture—where a driveway TARDIS keeps you warm at the bus stop, Flash Gordon becomes a friendship hinge, and debates about whether Star Wars is science fiction or fantasy spark better ways to watch everything else.

This is a brief note from Podfest in Orlando earlier this year. 

We celebrate our 159th with - among many Geeky things - a fast, funny tour of Star Trek’s dangling threads, from Tasha Yar’s exit to the lost “Conspiracy” arc, plus DS9’s long-game brilliance and Voyager’s resets. We field listener questions on Avengers, The Question, X-Men deep cuts, and stage a Borg Cube vs Death Star face-off. Plus, Data and the Force?

...It's Erich Von Däniken. In the 1960's a Swiss hotelier wrote a book that changed how millions see the past—and how pop culture tells stories about it. We revisit the wild trajectory of Chariots of the Gods, the “ancient aliens” hypothesis it popularized, and the uncomfortable roots that made its rise possible. Then we pull the camera back: how the Space Age, New Age mysticism, and a collapsing trust in old narratives set the stage for infotainment, speculative nonfiction, and a meme that just won’t die.

RIP Gil Gerard. A New York cab, a day job in drama class, and a shot at the 25th century: that’s the unlikely runway that launched Gil Gerard into Buck Rogers, and it still glows with neon charm. We open the vault on Gerard’s early grind through commercials, soaps, and 70s disaster flicks, then follow the thread back to Buck’s pulp origins in newspapers, radio waves, and the 1939 serials that taught America to love ray guns, zeppelins, and cliffhangers. It’s a fast, affectionate tour of the DNA that links John Carter’s planetary romance, Flash Gordon’s s...

536 CE: What happens when the sun dims for eighteen months and summer never really arrives? The volcanic winter that blanketed much of the world in a cold, bluish haze, and the chain reaction it set off—failed harvests, famine, migrations, plagues, and the quiet rewiring of global power. Drawing on eyewitness chronicles and modern climate forensics like ice-core sulfate spikes and tree-ring anomalies, we piece together how a cluster of eruptions chilled the planet and turned a bad year into one of the harshest periods to be alive.

Cult Classic status doesn’t happen by accident—it’s engineered by obsession, scarcity, and a helluva lot of Weird. We set out to map that journey and name the films from the last decade that might evolve from overlooked curiosities into midnight fixtures, using clear criteria: underseen on release, minimal awards heat, fervent fan energy, and a distinct voice that invites rewatching and debate.
If you’re searching for the next cult classic to champion, this guide gives you a map, a shortlist, and the logic behind the love. Listen, share your picks with us, and help build th...

We trace how films become cult classics, from midnight screenings and VHS trades to streaming silos and algorithm feeds. We pull apart cult vs underground vs underseen, weigh the death of monoculture, and map how community keeps the weird and beloved alive.

Along the way, we separate “cult” from its lookalikes: underground (how a movie is made), underseen (how many people found it), and the elusive chemistry that turns a movie into a banner for a community.

We trade examples across eras—Rocky Horror, The Big Lebowski, The Room, Freaks, Plan 9, Who Killed Captain Alex, even e...

Parties fall apart when they rely on luck. We turn the chaos of a live office bash into a step‑by‑step blueprint for a New Year celebration that feels immersive, welcoming, and unmistakably geeky. From the moment guests walk in, we want the room to communicate: you belong here, you’re taken care of, and you’re about to have fun.

We start with atmosphere, the most underrated tool a host has. Think layered lighting, a soundtrack that grooves without demanding attention, and bold visuals running silently in the background. Zardoz, Barbarella, and Flash Gordon become moving a...

A glowing red nose didn’t start as folklore—it started as copy. We follow Rudolph’s unlikely path from a 1939 Montgomery Ward booklet written by Robert L. May, forged in grief and grit, to Johnny Marks’ earworm melody and Gene Autry’s reluctant hit that stormed both pop and country charts. Then we pull the curtain on the Rankin/Bass special: GE’s sponsorship, Arthur Rankin’s partnership with stop‑motion pioneer Tadahito Mochinaga, and the Animagic craft that studied real deer in Nara to give Rudolph those lifelike blinks and gentle turns. Commerce met creativity, and somehow a marketing proj...

The holiday you know wasn’t born under twinkle lights. It was assembled—piece by piece—out of Star Wars, Sol Invictus and Saturnalia, immigrant folklore and Protestant pushback, department store spectacle and the irresistible pull of a good story. We follow that winding path from Rome’s calendar to America’s shopping aisles, showing how gift giving shifted from communal ritual to commercial engine and why the myth of a “pure” Christmas never really existed here.

We dig into the colonial bans and 19th-century legalization that set the stage for a retail renaissance, when newspapers sold Santa, window...

We open with the shock of Carrie-Hiroyuki Tagawa’s passing and step through the moments that defined him: a scene-stealing Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat, a gallery of elegant villains across 80s and 90s action, and a deep, steady practice in martial arts that prized control over violence. That contrast powers the story—how a performer built on breath, precision, and presence could turn wafer-thin dialogue into lines you still quote, then reappear years later with the same gravity reshaped into empathy.

We dig into Tagawa’s training in kendo and Shotokan under Masatoshi Nakayama and how that d...

A cold lab, stale air, and a wall of children’s drawings signal a mystery no tricorder can soothe: an entire colony erased without a trace. We follow the trail to a being that looks like a celestial snowflake and feeds like a storm—an immense crystalline lifeform that turns living worlds into power. Along the way, a door creaks open on Dr. Noonien Soong’s workshop, revealing not only the origins of Data, but the shadow of his brother, Lore, whose choices bend science into tragedy.

We dig into the science behind silicon-based organisms and crystalline biolog...

A cabin shakes in the night, boulders slam the walls, and a furry arm reaches for an axe—a century-old story that still echoes through American folklore. Today we go Squatchin' with Sunbow.

 From that 1924 Ape Canyon account to the grainy stride of the Patterson–Gimlin film, we chase the moments that turned Bigfoot from campfire whisper to cultural touchstone, and ask why those 39 seconds won’t let go of us. Along the way, headlines get loud, memories get mythic, and the wilderness does what it does best: hide things in plain sight.

We follow the thr...

What keeps pulling us back to the grid when the box office never quite follows? We dive into the whole Tron continuum—from the 1982 cult seed and the overlooked Tron 2.0, through Joseph Kosinski’s neon‑sleek Tron Legacy and the bridge‑building of Tron: Uprising, to the new red‑glow reality of Tron Ares. Along the way, we tackle the question fans argue and studios dodge: is Tron actually sci‑fi, or is it fantasy that borrows the language of computers to tell a myth about creators and creation?

We revisit the ‘82 release headwinds against E.T., the home video...

In a new miniseries all about the weird and/or esoteric we pull the thread back to The Law of One, a 1980s series of channeling sessions where researcher Don Elkins and collaborator Jim McCarty recorded Carla Ruckert in trance, speaking as an entity called Ra. From “intelligent infinity” to densities of consciousness and a sweeping claim that all is one, the material wrapped metaphysics in sci‑fi gloss and birthed phrases that still ripple through New Age culture, wellness spaces, and social media.

We unpack how that language works: grand, elastic, and impossible to falsify. Ambiguity become...

Ever fall in love with a movie’s world while side-eyeing its logic? That’s the neon paradox of Tron. We dive straight into how Steven Lisberger’s Pong epiphany became a Disney gamble that pushed live action, backlit animation, and early CGI into a single, striking language—and why that language still speaks to us. From Moebius-inspired suits to hand-processed frames and vendor tag-teams like MAGI and Triple-I, we unpack the painstaking craft that birthed a timeless visual grammar of grids, glow, and velocity.

We also confront the chewy stuff: a digitization beam that turns users into ava...

We pull the curtain on what happens when iconic slashers, demons, and haunted houses try to survive network constraints, syndication deals, and the long tail of serialized storytelling. From cursed antiques pitched as Friday the 13th to Freddy Krueger moonlighting as a wisecracking host, we map the distance between brand recognition and actual fear.

We start with the bait-and-switches: Friday The 13th: The Series builds a curiosities procedural with zero Jason; Freddy’s Nightmares promises lore, then delivers scattered anthology entries dulled by shoestring budgets; Poltergeist: The Legacy trades domestic dread for secret-society casework. Then we pivot to...

Fog curls over jagged granite and the tide keeps its own secrets—Maine feels like a place where myth, memory, and menace overlap. We head straight for that seam, weaving the state’s stark coastline and Wabanaki dawns into a guided tour of folklore, and true crime. Along the way we reckon with names that linger in the record—Mary Cohen, Constance Margaret Fisher, Malcolm Robbins Jr.—and the ways geography, isolation, and community pressure turn ordinary towns into pressure cookers. Then we pivot to the most improbable nexus of all...

Fog rolls in, the horizon narrows, and a silent ship drifts across the bow. We dive into the world of ghost ships, separating verifiable derelicts from enduring legends to understand why the ocean is such fertile ground for fear, folklore, and forensic dead ends. Together we revisit the Mary Celeste with its missing lifeboat and intact cargo, the SS Baychimo wandering the Arctic for decades, and the MV Joyita broadcasting distress into a void. We weigh competing theories—mutiny, piracy, mechanical failure, fraud—and ask what the gaps in each case reveal about judgment, luck, and the split-second choices sail...

A quiet New Year’s stroll at Miami’s Bayside turns into a story you feel in your bones—a swell of bodies running, a ripple in the air that won’t resolve, and a shape you can describe only in metaphors. We step into that moment on the linoleum, right where curiosity edges past fear, and bring you the first-person rush of a night that refuses to fit the official script. From the intimate details—the mojito glass, the banyan’s hush, the tug of a partner’s hand—to the jolt of gunshots and the flood of squad cars, we t...

Horror doesn’t hand down commandments from a mountaintop; it scavenges from headlines, folklore, and fear, then welds those scraps into images we can’t shake. We open the vault on a Halloween favorite to map where the genre’s “rules” actually come from—Lover’s Lane, masks without faces, babysitters on the edge, clowns that cross lines, and formless things that fall from the sky. The trail starts with the Texarkana Moonlight Murders and the media-born “Phantom Killer,” threads through the brutal, under-told case of Janet Christman and the babysitter myth it spawned, and crystallizes in Halloween’s The Shape: a mask th...

What if vampire movies weren’t just capes and candlelight, but living ecosystems of ideas—about infection, class, desire, grief, and the high that won’t let go? We pulled on that thread and followed it everywhere, from neon-soaked action to art-house melancholy, from airplane sieges to centuries-long love stories. Along the way we map how Blade built a sleek underworld of boardrooms and blood banks, why Underworld kept the biotech arms race humming, and how Daybreakers and Stakeland treat vampirism like a supply-chain crisis with fangs.

We also sit with the softer, stranger places these stories go. On...

Here's s sneak peak of the first of Spooktember's horror specials! In this one Jake breaks down some underseen - sometimes cult - Vampyre (Vampire) Films and media. 

Dive into the remarkable transformation of America's longest-running comic book franchise as we explore how Archie Comics evolved from wholesome teenage stories to groundbreaking horror, genre-bending crossovers, and multimedia dominance.

The year 2009 marked a pivotal turning point when John Goldwater Jr. took the reins following the passing of the previous leadership. What followed was nothing short of revolutionary—Archie Comics became the first major publisher to embrace same-day digital releases, introduced Riverdale's first openly gay character Kevin Keller, and ventured into mature storytelling with "Life with Archie," which culminated in Archie's heroic death protecting Senator Keller from as...

Ever wonder how a blue video game hedgehog became the star of the longest-running licensed comic book in history? The saga of Archie Comics' Sonic the Hedgehog series offers a fascinating glimpse into the intersection of gaming culture, corporate licensing, and passionate fandom.

Born during the heated console wars of the early 90s, Sonic was Sega's answer to Nintendo's Mario. As we journey through the comic's unexpected evolution, we uncover how what began as a simple promotional tie-in for a Saturday morning cartoon grew into a sprawling universe with its own distinct mythology. The Archie Sonic comics...

In accordance with Star Trek Day we bring you a special episode of Memory Gamma!

Once considered an enemy of the Federation, a member of the Augmented Klingon generation, Kor, has a complicated and eventually venerated legacy - at least within the Klingon Empire.  

In this episode we explore the long and storied legend of the mighty Kor, the Dahar Master, and his place in Star Trek lore. 

Archie Comics represents one of the most fascinating paradoxes in American pop culture – a property deeply associated with mid-century nostalgia that has somehow remained culturally relevant for over eight decades. This exploration takes you from Archie's origins in 1939 to its surprising evolution as one of the most experimental publishers in modern comics.

Before Batman dominated box office returns or Marvel built its cinematic universe, Archie Andrews pioneered cross-media expansion. Within two years of his 1941 debut, Archie jumped to radio with a show that ran for a decade. 

The genius of Archie Comics lies in its exp...

What makes a machine human? When does an algorithm become more than just ones and zeros? In this fourth installment of our artificial intelligence in pop culture series, we tackle the profound philosophical questions raised by science fiction's most compelling AI narratives.

We begin with Star Trek's Data—the "fully functional" android whose quest to understand humanity mirrors our own questions about consciousness. But our main focus turns to Ridley Scott's masterpiece Blade Runner and its central question: what distinguishes humans from the replicants they've created? We examine how the film's ambiguity about whether Deckard himself is a...

We begin by exploring the curious case of droids in the Star Wars universe – conscious beings treated as property and slaves despite their clear personhood. The moral contradiction is striking: characters form deep emotional bonds with these synthetic beings while simultaneously accepting their status as possessions. This paradox raises profound questions about how we define personhood and the ethical implications of creating sentient life only to subjugate it.

Nostalgia colors our perception of beloved franchises, sometimes more powerfully than any objective quality measurement could. We dive deep into how childhood memories shape our connection to stories like Star Wars and Star Trek, and why it's perfectly valid for people to hold differing opinions about which iterations of these franchises succeed or fail.

In this episode, we explore how artificial intelligence has been portrayed in popular culture, from the replicants of Blade Runner to the feminized AI of Ex Machina. We examine the fundamental philosophical questions these stories raise: What constitutes life? What separates consciousness from programming? At what point would we need to recognize an artificial entity as deserving rights and autonomy?

The conversation takes us through foundational texts like Isaac Asimov's "The Feeling of Power" and Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," films like Zardoz and Logan's Run, and modern explorations of AI ethics...

In this previously unreleased episode we muse over James Gunn's 'Superman'.

This Superman exists in a world that immediately feels more "comic booky" than previous iterations – complete with Superman robots, a super-powered dog, and pocket dimensions that defy explanation. It's a deliberate step away from the gritty realism of previous DC films, embracing the fantastic elements that make comic books unique.

The passing of Jim Shooter marks the end of a contentious yet undeniably influential chapter in comic book history. From teenage prodigy to Marvel's commanding editor-in-chief, Shooter's nine-year reign from 1978 to 1987 fundamentally transformed how superhero stories are told and sold.

Though the geopolitics were a complicated web of interconnected parts, certain events before, during and after Earth’s 3rd World War are undisputed. At least, today. 

One of the most infamous figures in Human history is Colonel Phillip Green - a key player in the build-up to war and the literal fallout to follow. He’s viewed - rightfully - as one of the biggest villains ever to walk the Earth.

As World War 3 raged on Allied New United Nations and Eastern Coalition troops alike became disillusioned and deserted their posts to follow a new way t...

Our exploration of artificial intelligence continues as we bridge the boundary between current AI technology and fictional representations of artificial minds. While last episode focused on the technological trajectory toward superintelligence, this time we tackle the philosophical dimensions of machine consciousness.

Who carries Charles Bronson's torch in today's action landscape? 

Bronson carved out a unique space in cinema history with his stoic presence, minimalist acting style, and everyman quality that somehow made his extraordinary feats believable. We dive deep into what made him special – that gritted-teeth delivery, the intimidating presence despite his average stature, and his ability to play essentially the same character across different films while still creating something compelling each time.

The extraordinary powers of the Q Continuum defy comprehension: instant teleportation across infinite distances, manipulation of time and space, creation and destruction at will. Yet beneath Q's flamboyant persona and apparent disdain for "lesser beings" lies a complex relationship with humanity. While introducing himself as judge, jury, and potential executioner of our species, his actions reveal a different story.

What does it mean to truly think? This question has haunted humanity since we first gained the ability to contemplate our own existence. Our fascination with creating thinking machines didn't begin with computers—it stretches back millennia, to ancient tales of bronze giants and mechanical beings that could sing, dance, and even flirt.

But the crucial question remains: are today's AI systems truly intelligent? By examining what consciousness actually is—an emergent property arising from billions of neural connections functioning as a high-level operating system—we confront the limitations of current AI technologies. 

When the Borg assimilated El-Auria, Dr. Tolian Soran lost everything—his wife Leandra, their children, and his entire civilization. The once-gentle man who "wouldn't hurt a fly" became a hollow shell, adrift among the few survivors of his species. His life changed forever during a rescue mission in 2293 when the Enterprise-B, assisted by the legendary James T. Kirk, saved him from a mysterious spatial phenomenon called the Nexus. For a fleeting moment within this energy ribbon, Sorin experienced pure joy as he reunited with his loved ones in a realm where desires shaped reality.