I grew up reading Tamora Pierce novels obsessively as a kid, but this show is about my friends and what they liked, so I found someone else who read her books and became friends with them. Elle listened to the audiobooks for The Immortals series a lot with her cousins in the car, but now she has to read them as an adult, and think about them will all the terrifying social critiquing skills she's accumulated over the years. 

I'm linking up with Andrea Caprotti (No Script At All) to talk about her young love for A Goofy Movie. 

Mike Schubert (Potterless Podcast) joins me to talk about the 2003 video game that changed it all- Tony Hawk's Underground. 

Magic is for nerds! 

Be cool! Play skater games!

My friend Harry watched the Animaniacs when he was fourteen, and I watched the Animaniacs when I was four, so there's a lot to be communicated across generational lines. We're uncovering who the Warner Bros are, and why they were locked in that water tower for so long. 

Fear...

Mariah and I grew up together. We also grew up with The Lord of the Rings. We were so hugely into fantasy as kids we practically invented LARPing. But is LOTR still as tight as we remember? Read more to find out. 

We've all had that one movie that we woke up early to watch every day before going to school, and for Patrick that was Space Jam. Second only to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Space Jam takes the stardom of Michael Jordan and pairs it with the Looney Tunes to make a cinematic experience best enjoyed below the age of 12. 

Hey look I had a lot of fun watching it, I just think the plain old life and times of Michael Jordan may be a more compelling drama without the Monstars getting involved. 

Nothing smells like Americana like cracking open an issue of the children's novel series The Baby-Sitters Club. And nothing else smells like Americana than a long history of genocide, colonization, and slavery. But how do you teach children about that? Deena and I read The Baby-Sitter's Club's approach in "Keep Out, Claudia!" to try to figure it all out. 

I ask my friend Madeleine about the time she wouldn't stop watching the 1992 documentary Titanica. Titanica is about discovering the wreckage of the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean where it rests, plus it inspired James Cameron to turn Leonardo DiCaprio into a teenage hearthrob. 

She tells me what she remembers from the movie (which isn't a lot), and then we both go and watch it in order to discover the reason she was obsessed with long underwater shots of rusting metal. 

My friend Shreshth was a big reader as a kid, he loved some old British stuff and some old Belgian stuff. He particularly gravitated towards kids detective and mystery stories, and no one is as plucky or nosy as young journalist extraordinaire Tintin. Coming from the great Belgian tradition of racism and colonization the Adventures of Tintin have been hugely popular worldwide. And through great luck Shreshth and I both read the comics growing up. 

We talk about our memories reading Tintin as kids, and then revisit one of Shreshth's favorites, Tintin in Tibet, to see how Hergé's classics have aged.