Make Me A Nerd with Mandy Kaplan

Andy Nelson has been sitting on this one. He's been talking about movies on The Next Reel since 2011, and when Mandy asked him to come back and pick anything, he chose the film he has loved most for his entire adult life, because he suspected (correctly, it turns out) that it would require a Xanax. Terry Gilliam's Brazil is a comedy about paperwork. It is also a horror movie about paperwork. A man is arrested in his living room because of a typo, his wife signs for him in triplicate, and the government is very sorry for the inconvenience. Mandy...

Until this week, Mandy Kaplan did not know the word "Stargate" existed. Not the 1994 movie, not the ten seasons of television that followed, not the conventions full of people who can spell Goa'uld on the first try. (She has also never seen an Avengers movie, and she would like that noted as a point of pride.) Fortunately, Jonny Lee Jr. was nine when the film came out, bought it on VHS and then again on DVD, and owns the complete box set of the series, which makes him about the most qualified tour guide you could ask for on a...

The whole premise of Make Me a Nerd is that Mandy has never seen the thing. Matthew Fox arrives to honor the late Tim Curry with a movie he has attended dozens of times and, by their own count, watched all the way to the ending exactly twice (the back row of a midnight screening has other priorities), only to learn that Mandy was once in it, onstage in New Hampshire, as an emergency replacement Columbia with about four hours of rehearsal and a group of audience members who had prepared a special welcome for the new girl. She also...

In 1998, Hanna-Barbera handed a direct-to-video Scooby-Doo movie to a crew of veterans and then, by all accounts, forgot to supervise them. The crew used that freedom to do the one thing thirty years of Scooby-Doo had solemnly promised would never happen: they made the monsters real. Mandy came for the nostalgia — Saturday morning, cereal, the little kitchen TV dragged into the living room — and left having audibly gasped at a cartoon aimed at six-year-olds.Her guide is Journie Ma-Johnson, an actress and vocal coach whose nerd credentials include a weekly D&D campaign run in a room with a fog mach...

Mandy spent her son's Mighty Morphin years with one nagging question: why are the Power Rangers wearing their helmets in every single fight? She never asked anyone. This week Omari Miller, actor, singer, and possibly the most caffeinated man in Los Angeles, answers it before she finishes asking. The Power Rangers are a Japanese show with American teenagers taped over the top. Super Sentai has been dressing five people in matching spandex since 1975. Haim Saban saw it on TV during a business trip to Japan, licensed the fight footage, filmed the unmasked scenes back home, and cut his budget to...

Marty Schneider and Dan Ludwig, hosts of the podcast Breaking Mayberry, explain that they once built two rating scales for The Andy Griffith Show: an Andy-meter for how good the episode is, and a Barney-meter for how much psychic damage it did to America. They needed both. Mandy watched three episodes on assignment (a boy kills a bird and learns a lesson, a city slicker learns to slow down whether he likes it or not, and one that is just dogs), and she arrived with a few questions. Is Ron Howard a brilliant child actor? Where exactly is Opie’s mo...

The British period drama is a genre built on restraint. Longing glances across drawing rooms. Inheritance law. A great many people declining, for six or seven seasons, to say the one thing they most want to say. Fackham Hall surveys this rich and noble tradition, agrees that it is both rich and sufficiently noble, and then installs a bell in the servants’ hall labeled masturbatorium. The bell rings. It keeps ringing. It rings long enough that it eventually falls off the wall from structural fatigue. This is the establishing sequence.Justine Huxley picked this one. Mandy had previously watched it in...

Three times in the theater. Twenty-odd more at home. Six years of having thoughts about Parasite, and roughly four minutes total in which anyone has let her share them. This week Sherry Mandujano gets an hour.Mandy had never seen it. She takes notes throughout, and most of them are some version of "what genre is this," because the film keeps answering differently. The conversation follows it wherever it goes: production design, then class, then smell, then a woman scaling a wall sideways, then a formal grievance against the screenplay concerning facial hair. Nobody in this movie comes out looking...

Mandy Kaplan came to this with three episodes of Drive to Survive and one other piece of racing knowledge, which is that she can recite Talladega Nights from memory. Ninety seconds into the first episode a teenager gets dropped off at school by his mother, says bye Mom, grabs his backpack, and turns out to be a professional Formula 1 driver. Something maternal took hold around then and never really let go.Pete Wright is here to explain the sport, which he maintains is an engineering competition that happens to involve drivers. He gets a few minutes into that before the...

Mandy has a real, non-joking anxiety about death. You'd think that's the sort of thing a person would mention to a friend before that friend assigns her a series about a man who reanimates corpses for sixty seconds at a stretch to ask them who did it. Jessica Jimenez knew. Jessica Jimenez picked it anyway. Third appearance, still working off the Showgirls debt.So Mandy watched all nine episodes with a Xanax in one hand and a notebook in the other. Six Emmys. One writers' strike. Cancelled anyway. By about episode four she has stopped bracing for the death stuff...

Jason Yeung spent more than a decade working in video stores — not Blockbuster, mind you, but Hollywood Video, a distinction he holds with the unwavering intensity of a man asked to sing a rival team's fight song. (Mandy asks. It does not go well for the show.) He knows the smell. He knows what the drop box looked like on a Tuesday morning. He knows exactly which customers will get physical over a two-dollar late fee, and he can tell you the demographics.So this one is an exhumation. Somewhere between the story about the woman who wanted to discuss he...

Every so often a guest arrives having chosen not the safe pick, not the crowd-pleaser, but the one movie they have been quietly waiting years for somebody to ask them about. Kynan Dias picked Sphere. It's a 1998 Barry Levinson picture starring Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Samuel L. Jackson, adapted from a Michael Crichton novel, and it currently sits at twelve percent on Rotten Tomatoes. (Twelve. Out of a hundred. Mandy looks this up, then spends a while working out how to raise it politely, which in the end she does not.) Kynan knows the number. Kynan is undeterred.What...

Rick London came for Alien: Earth — Noah Hawley's reportedly quarter-billion-dollar fever dream about corporations, immortality, and dying children installed in adult bodies — and he came prepared to defend every last drop of the show's frankly staggering liquid output. (There is a lot of liquid. Mandy counted. It was her first note, and the most consistent theme of her entire viewing experience.) What Rick did not anticipate was that Mandy would arrive with a theory about Willy Wonka.Somewhere between the dot-matrix screens and the dead bodies nobody reacts to, there is a scientist who genuinely cared but can still be comp...

The instant a movie is pitched to Mandy as "aliens come to Earth," she has already changed the channel, mentally relocated to a spa, and started a calmer life. So naturally, this week she sat down with Arrival, a film she spent years confusing with The Martian (fair), which she also assumed was basically the plot of Project Hail Mary (it is not), a book that gave her an actual, physiological anxiety response somewhere around page 100. This is a person who cannot watch a character face death without briefly leaving her own body. We handed her two hours of grief...

The Grateful Dead's own biographer opens their official four-hour documentary by admitting it's really hard to love this band if you're not already a fan — which is a bold marketing strategy, like a restaurant with a sign reading "you probably won't like the food." Naturally, Mandy took the dare. Her spirit guide through the patchouli: Jeffrey Nicholas Brown — actor, Blue Man, drummer in numerous Dead cover bands, and a man who followed this band across the country in a van that smelled exactly how you think it smelled.What follows is a genuine attempt to explain the unexplainable: why a drum...

Mandy has never seen Psycho. She has, however, seen Hot in Cleveland, which — it turns out — quotes Psycho constantly, meaning Mandy has been unknowingly absorbing the cultural shrapnel of a movie she'd never actually watched. It's the kind of realization that says more about the half-life of a seventy-two-minute-in shower scene than anything else could. Enter Jesse Pfister: voice actor, day trader, and a man who showed up to this recording with a wig, a suspiciously well-lit prop murder weapon, and enough notes to make Mel Gibson's conspiracy board in Conspiracy Theory look understaffed.What follows is somehow both a tend...

There exists a specific cohort of women who, if you say the words "do you remember My So-Called Life," will respond — instantly, involuntarily, with the faraway look of someone recalling a first love — "Jordan Catalano." They cannot help it. This is a documented phenomenon. And so Mandy, a mainstream mom who spent the 90s sensibly watching shows that got renewed, sits down to discover what exactly happened to these people, only to run face-first into the deeply inconvenient realization that a one-season teen drama from 1994 (cancelled, unceremoniously, opposite Friends, by a network that did not know what it had) may have...

This week we have a three-act superhero musical, shot on a borrowed studio lot during a labor strike, financed by one guy's personal credit card, in which approximately none of the songs are allowed to finish. Weird as it may be, it all clicks into place, and you understand why a generation of nerds has had this thing memorized for going on two decades.This week, returning guides Kyle Olson and Krissy Lenz walk our favorite mainstream mom through Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. We’ve got all the hits: Neil Patrick Harris fan mail that borders on a restraining order, th...

Batman: he does not use guns. This is practically the whole point of him — a man so committed to a single rule that he built an entire personality, a cave, and a frankly concerning number of themed vehicles around it. So when Batman Beyond opens its very first episode with an aging Bruce Wayne pulling a gun, under a content warning slapped over the face of Bugs Bunny, you understand exactly why mainstream mom Mandy Kaplan pressed play and immediately thought: what, precisely, am I getting into?What she got into — with the help of voiceover actor and lifelong nerd Jaso...

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who have seen The Godfather, and those who have built an entire personality around not having seen it (a group that, until this week, proudly included our own Mandy Kaplan — a grown woman fully comfortable assigning Rotten Tomatoes scores to a film she had never once watched). Enter Seth Vargas of the Movie Friends podcast, back in the nerd chair to commit the bold act of sitting a self-described mainstream mom down in front of the most quoted movie in American history and asking her to actually have feelings about it...

Here’s a fun fact about Prince Rogers Nelson: that wasn’t a stage name. Prince was his actual, legal, on-the-birth-certificate first name. Once you accept that a man named Prince grew up to become the artist known as Prince, you’re already most of the way to accepting everything else. The 8,000 unreleased tracks in a literal underground vault. The candles balanced precariously on the mixing boards. The 2 a.m. phone calls to musicians who had to be at Paisley Park by sunrise because the basketball game just ended and inspiration had struck.Pete Wright and Kyle Olson have feelings about...

Vampires, as a concept, should not work. They are dead. They are allergic to weather. Their entire dating strategy is "what if I bit you." And yet — somehow, Anne Rice took this nonsense, draped it in frilly eighteenth-century shirts (a look Jonny Lee Jr. has, to his eternal credit, brought to this very podcast), and produced one of the most genuinely seductive pieces of pulp fiction of the twentieth century. This week, Jonny returns to walk Mandy through the entire blood-soaked architecture of Interview with the Vampire — the 1994 film, the AMC series, and the lore that Anne Rice constructed to powe...

Pinball looks like two buttons and a ball. It is not two buttons and a ball. It is a 300-pound machine with layered rules, competitive leagues, wrist injuries, a flow state, and — this will surprise you — an expectation that you will physically grab the machine and move it while playing. That last part is legal. Encouraged, even. This week, Mandy's new neighbor Clark Hill, who carries quarters at all times in case he passes a machine in the wild, joins her to watch Shoot Again, a documentary that is essentially pinball propaganda, and to explain why none of this is as s...

The X-Files is, technically, a show about two FBI agents investigating extraterrestrial activity, government conspiracy, and the unexplained — which is why it's mildly hilarious that filmmaker Chelsea Stardust's curated onramp for Mandy contains, by Mandy's own count, exactly zero alien episodes. What it does contain: a man who hibernates in a nest every thirty years and squeezes through air ducts; a parasitic humanoid Flukeman swimming around the sewer system (related, somehow, to Chernobyl); a gentle psychic played by Peter Boyle who can see exactly how everyone is going to die; an inbred Pennsylvania family hiding their quadruple-amputee mother under the be...

Here is a fact about Firefly, which is to say the beloved Joss Whedon space western that aired on Fox in 2002: the network, in its infinite wisdom, decided to air the two-hour pilot — the one designed to introduce you to the entire world, its characters, and the general vibe of a Western in space — not first, but somewhere in the middle. This is approximately like hosting a dinner party and opening with dessert, except the dessert is also on fire, and also you've invited the guests' most confused relatives. The show was cancelled. The fans — who call themselves Browncoats, because of cou...

Mandy Kaplan has been handed a Hugo-winning, Nebula-winning, Mormon-authored military sci-fi classic about a six-year-old being psychologically tortured into committing accidental alien genocide, and reader, she has THOUGHTS. This week, her son Casey's high school chemistry teacher — the proud Trojan, theater company founder, and science-and-theater double-nerd Erica Cochran — walks Mandy through Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel Ender's Game, a book that predicted the internet, iPads, online political discourse, and rogue AI with such unsettling accuracy that you kind of want to check if Card also has next week's lottery numbers.Before they even open the book, there's The Orson Scott Card Prob...

Mandy Kaplan has thoughts about 42 Japanese ninth-graders being forced to murder each other on a deserted island, and honestly, who among us doesn't? This week, Jimmy Aquino returns to Make Me a Nerd for his fourth-or-fifth appearance (he's lost count, we've lost count, the green jacket situation remains unresolved) to drag Mandy through 2000's Battle Royale — a film he insists inspired The Hunger Games, and which Suzanne Collins insists she has absolutely never heard of, nope, never, why do you ask.What follows is a spirited investigation into whether a Japanese dystopian thriller about government-sanctioned child-on-child violence can be considered a...

Sailor Moon was a cartoon made for five-year-old Japanese girls. It aired in America at 6 AM, required an eight-year-old Jonny Lee Jr. to set his alarm for 5:30 every morning — before DVR, before streaming, before any child should be conscious — and quietly became one of the most important pieces of queer representation an entire generation had access to. So, naturally, Mandy had never seen it.Jonny's back to fix that. Mandy was assigned 14 essential episodes and negotiated down to eight, but arrives with strong opinions anyway — about Tuxedo Mask ("He's so hot"), her talking-cat wish fulfillment, and the transformation sequences that feel l...

What do you get when you take eight adult friends — all professional voice actors — who've been playing a home D&D game for years and decide, on a lark, to put it on Twitch? You get Critical Role, a phenomenon now in its fourth campaign, spanning roughly a decade of streaming and somewhere between "a lot" and "an almost unhinged number" of hours of content. Hem Brewster, lead producer at Blighthouse Studio and a Critical Role early adopter, joins Mandy all the way from Iceland to break down The Legend of Vox Machina — the Amazon Prime animated series that took that b...

Here is a fun fact about the worst movie ever made: it was declared the worst movie ever made by people who hadn’t seen it. In 1980, the Medved brothers published The Golden Turkey Awards, a book crowning Plan 9 from Outer Space as cinema’s all-time nadir — a designation selected, in part, by a 16-year-old. The book was a hit. The label stuck. And for decades, that’s how Ed Wood got remembered: not as someone who made movies, but as a cautionary tale about making them badly.The thing is, when you actually sit down and watch Plan 9 — with its styrof...

Somewhere between O Brother Where Art Thou and the Lumineers' stomp-and-clap era, a folk comedy duo from the East Village made a movie about two aliens who abandon a mission to destroy Earth because one of them heard music in a Costco and simply could not get over it. The film cost approximately nothing, shot on the streets of Brooklyn with real bystanders as involuntary extras, features Dee Snider of Twisted Sister as a bar owner for reasons no one can fully explain, and won Fantastic Fest in Austin. It is called The History of Future Folk, and it is...

Manga has a first-impression problem. It's enormous, genre-defying, visually foreign, and comes wrapped in the kind of devoted fan energy that makes newcomers feel like they've wandered into the graduate seminar by mistake. Mandy Kaplan — who did her manga homework at the Department of Motor Vehicles while her son got his learner's permit — is here to represent everyone who's been lurking at the door. Her guide is Helen McCarthy: author of the very first English-language book on Japanese animation, the first English book on Hayao Miyazaki, and thirteen published works on the subject in total. Her fourteenth, The Manga Bible, drop...

Wonder Man is, technically speaking, a Marvel show. It exists in the MCU. Captain America is out there somewhere. The Hulk is presumably smashing things. And none of that matters even a little bit, because this is a show about a guy who bombs auditions, self-sabotages every relationship he has, and quotes Pretty Woman during an improv because he's too afraid to access a genuine emotion. Simon Williams has a superpower, sure, but his actual problem is that he's every actor you've ever met who's three bad decisions away from selling real estate — which, by the way, Joey Pantoliano's character wo...

The Traitors is, at its core, a game you play at birthday parties when someone's kid really wants to be a detective. You sit in a circle. Some people are secret murderers. Everyone points fingers based on vibes alone. This should not be compelling television. And yet — here we are, with millions of people staying up past their bedtimes on a Tuesday because they cannot possibly let it get spoiled.Patrick Gomez, editor-in-chief of Entertainment Weekly and a man who has watched competitive reality television with the devotion most people reserve for religion, joins Mandy to explain exactly how a gl...

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who cross their arms and dare a comedian to make them laugh, and people who show up already giggling before the lights go down. Mandy is firmly in the first camp, which makes it all the more remarkable that Bo Burnham's Make Happy got her — really got her — starting with the moment the man wakes up in full clown makeup and ending with a gut-punch silence that reframes the entire hour you just watched. Tommy Metz III, Mandy's most recurring guest, self-identified comedy nerd, and a man who has memorized enti...

Here's the thing about watching a movie one week after reading the book it's based on: you become the world's most insufferable viewing companion. And Mandy—who consumed Suzanne Collins's novel and then immediately sat down for the 2012 film like some kind of dystopian speed-run—has NOTES. Guest Mona Chatterjee is back for what is officially Make Me A Nerd's first-ever adaptation episode, and together they discover that reading the book first is both a gift and a curse, because now you know exactly what's missing and you will not shut up about it.What's missing, weirdly, is food. In a st...

Yes, I know—it's 2026, Hunger Games came out almost two decades ago, and we've all moved on now to whatever fresh dystopian nightmare is currently trending. But here's the thing: Suzanne Collins' story about state-sponsored child murder dressed up as entertainment has only gotten MORE relevant, and that should terrify us all.Mandy welcomes back Mona Chatterjee (Miscast alum, Billboard chart artist, international beauty brand impresario) to explore why a book that opens with "the day of the reaping" manages to hook readers from age 12 to 52, and why its themes of inequality, complicity, and manufactured spectacle feel less like fiction an...

This week on Make Me a Nerd, Mandy Kaplan does the bravest thing a grown adult can do: she prescribes herself a medically unnecessary, emotionally essential dose of The Goonies—because sometimes “self-care” is a bubble bath, and sometimes it’s screaming “HEY YOU GUYS” into the void until the void screams back. Joined by recurring fan-favorite guest Krissy Lenz (of The Most Excellent 80s Movies), Mandy revisits Richard Donner’s chaotic, sweet, frequently-overlapping-yelling masterpiece and marvels at how it manages to be simultaneously a kids’ adventure film and a movie that opens with a fake suicide and drops the S-word roughly n...

Mandy continues her noble quest to become the kind of nerd who can say “Smallville” without immediately being asked which season she started with, and she brings in returning guest John Mundy to guide her through this corn-fed, meteor-soaked origin story of Clark Kent. What starts as “Is this just Superman: The Homeschool Years?” turns into a surprisingly thoughtful tour of what the show is really selling: not invulnerability, but adolescence—awkwardness, secrecy, and the exhausting burden of being good while everyone around you is making being normal look like a competitive sport. Along the way, Mandy clocks the show’s high-schoo...

Mandy’s latest “please turn me into a nerd” assignment comes disguised as the most harmless thing imaginable: a British competition show about pottery. And yes, at first it feels like the TV equivalent of a warm cup of tea you forgot you made. But then Jeremy Klavens (return guest, television editor, and the father of Mandy’s child—pending) walks her into The Great Pottery Throw Down and suddenly everyone is emotionally invested in cheese sets, kiln drama, and whether it’s legally possible for one judge to cry at this many objects in one lifetime.What follows is a cozy, gent...