Villains are having a moment. They’re getting their own movies, they’re inspiring hashtags that say they’re right. And they don’t want to take over the world. They want to save it -- at a very high cost. I talk with writers and podcasters Charles Pulliam-Moore, JR Forasteros and Bruce Leslie about woke villains, and what their popularity says about our frustrations in the real world. Part 1 of 2.

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Ronald D. Moore is probably best known for rebooting Battlestar Galactica as a gritty political commentary in the early 2000s. His latest show For All Mankind on AppleTV Plus imagines what if the Soviet Union had beaten the U.S. in the space race and planted the hammer and sickle flag on the moon. But Moore spins that nightmare scenario into a positive alternative history where a newly invigorated space race not only gives NASA the budget it wanted in the 1970s, but it forces the agency to be far more inclusive than it actually was in real history.

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Think of an alien abduction: humanoid creatures, medical experiments, lost memories brought back by hypnosis. But that narrative was largely unknown until Betty and Barney Hill went public about their alien abduction in the 1960s. Betty Hill’s niece, Kathleen Marden, tells the story of how her aunt and uncle became unwitting celebrities, and professors Susan Lepselter, Chris Bader, Joseph O. Baker and Stephanie Kelley-Romano explain how the story of the Hills changed UFO subculture and science fiction forever.

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Jason Suran wants you to know he can’t talk to the dead. Then he will convince you that he can. In Suran’s show, The Other Side, he recreates a theatrical type of séance that departed American culture almost a century ago. And he believes that experiencing the way people tried to contact the departed can reveal a lot about our deepest desires and fears. Plus David Jaher, author of The Witch of Lime Street, discusses how séances became all the rage in America until Harry Houdini made it his life’s mission to debunk them.

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We all know Godzilla’s iconic roar, but the musician who scored Godzilla's rampages is not as well known. The composer Akira Ifukube’s collaboration with the director Ishiro Honda is fascinating because the two men had different ideas of what Godzilla represented. Honda filmed Godzilla as a monster, but Ifukube saw Godzilla as an anti-hero. Erik Homenick, John DeSentis, and Reiko Yamada explain how this artistic conversation between the music and the visuals added layers of depth that helped turn a monster into an icon.

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One of the most popular anime series just became widely available when Netflix started streaming Neon Genesis Evangelion. Evangelion is also infamous for having several different endings -- and a fandom that has a contentious relationship with the series creator Hideaki Anno. Nate Ming, Vrai Kaiser, Aaron Clark, Gene Park, and Heather Anne Campbell discuss how Evangelion tackled important issues like anxiety, depression, masculinity and sexuality while finding time for kids to get inside giant robots and fight giant aliens.

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Walt Disney pioneered the art of hand drawn animation, but it was really his top animators, “The Nine Old Men,” who were responsible for developing the art form. Andreas Deja, who animated Scar and Jafar, talks about being trained by The Nine Old Men and the pressure of living up to their legacy. John Canemaker explains why hand drawn feature animation is a lost art in Hollywood, and Jerry Beck sees a renaissance of 2D animation lurking beyond the “live action” Disney remakes.

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Movie trailers have come a long way from the voice-of-God narrators in the ‘80s and ‘90s. So why do the big budget sci-fi fantasy trailers still all feel the same? This week, we're featuring a fun episode from the podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz, where their host Dallas Taylor talks with James Deaville about the history of trailers. Plus, YouTuber Craven Moorhaus breaks down the elements of blockbuster trailers to the point where you’ll never watch trailers the same way again.

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Mexican wrestling (aka Lucha Libre) has a lot in common with the superhero genre, but trying to be a superhero in real life has its own set of challenges. I talk with wrestlers (aka luchadors) about the joy of being both famous and anonymous. Photographer Lourdes Grobet reveals how she went behind-the-scenes with luchadors without exposing their identities, and author Heather Levi reveals the unusual origin of the iconic Lucha Libre mask. Special thanks to Neuva Era Lucha Productions and The Bronx Wrestling Federation.

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I talked with legendary audio drama producer Dirk Maggs for an episode about the history of radio dramas last year-- but a lot of great material ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor. So I’m presenting a full version of our conversation, where we discuss how he brought major franchises like Batman, Alien and The X-Files to audio drama, and how he brought The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy back to radio. And he reveals a few secrets of audio production on how to trick the brain into seeing what’s not there.

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