Make Me A Nerd with Mandy Kaplan

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 machine, a competitive Super Smash Bros. Melee career, and a hand-built light-up wig. Together they get into the werecats, the lovingly painted Southern Gothic backgrounds, whether Fred and Daphne were ever actually a couple, and the question Mandy asks with the directness of a woman who has waited fifty years for an answer: what exactly is going on with Shaggy? Press play.
Guest Spotlight

Journie Ma-Johnson — actress, singer, and vocal coach. Musical theater background, training from New York Vocal Coaching, and a teaching practice built around bringing acting technique into vocal work. Off the clock: weekly Dungeons & Dragons, cosplay (including a light-up Ember wig from Danny Phantom and the Soup Faerie from Neopets), retired competitive Melee, and a deep, defensible love of Scooby-Doo.

• Journie Johnson Voice — vocal coaching
• About / booking

Reference Links
Films

• Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998)
• Scooby-Doo! Return to Zombie Island (2019)
• The Babadook (2014)
• Interview with the Vampire (1994)
• Role Models (2008)
• The Princess and the Frog (2009)

Scooby-Doo Canon

• Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island — production history
• Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost (1999)
• The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo (1985)
• A Pup Named Scooby-Doo (1988–1991)
• What's New, Scooby-Doo? (2002–2006)
• Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo! (2022)
• Scooby-Doo! and Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery (2015)
• Scoobynatural — Supernatural S13E16 (2018)
• The Hex Girls
• Mook Animation — the Japanese studio Journie clocked

People

• Frank Welker
• Mark Hamill
• Casey Kasem
• Tara Strong
• Ken Jeong
• Anansi

Music

• "It's Terror Time Again" — Skycycle
• Skycycle
• Third Eye Blind

Also Mentioned

• Super Smash Bros. Melee
• Danny Phantom
• Jem (TV series)
• Ghost Hunters
• The Blair Witch Project

TruStory FM Cross-Promos

• The Babadook-dook-dook with Tommy Metz III
• Sensual Creatures: Vampires, Frilly Shirts, and Interview with a Vampire with Jonny Lee Jr.

Fact-Check Corner

"The first feature-length Scooby-Doo movie." Journie hedges this correctly. Several feature-length Scooby-Doo TV movies preceded it in the late eighties, including Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School. Zombie Island was the first direct-to-video feature.The Supernatural crossover. "Scoobynatural" is an episode of Supernatural — season 13, episode 16, aired March 29, 2018 — not a standalone animated movie. Frank Welker, Matthew Lillard, Grey Griffin, and Kate Micucci voice the Scooby cast in it.Velma's girlfriend. Velma's crush on Coco Diablo happens in the 2022 direct-to-video film Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo!, not a series.Casey Kasem and the vegetarian clause. Journie has the mechanism right, but it started with this film. Kasem was originally set to reprise Shaggy for Zombie Island and demanded the character go vegetarian; the crew declined and cast Billy West. Kasem did return as Shaggy — vegetarian — for What's New, Scooby-Doo? in 2002."Fred was flirting with Tara Strong." Tara Strong (credited as Tara Charendoff) is the voice actor; the character Fred flirts with is Lena Dupree. Third Eye Blind. They performed the title track, a cover of "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" Skycycle did "It's Terror Time Again" and "The Ghost Is Here."The Hex Girls' lead singer. Thorn describes herself as "one-sixteenth Wiccan on my mother's side" rather than simply pagan. The eco-goth framing is accurate and, yes, extremely 1999.Make Me a Nerd is a production of TruStory FM. Engineering by Pete Wright. Theme song: "Wonderstruck" by Jane and the Boy.Find Mandy on Instagram at @Mandy_Kaplan_Klavens and on TikTok at @MandyMiscast.Leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and write something — Mandy will give you a shout-out, and it helps more people find the show.Want episodes early and ad-free? Join at makemeanerd.com/join.
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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 a fraction of anything Marvel had proposed. Stan Lee, by the way, had proposed it first. He had a robot.So, that's the business story. The stranger story is everything Omari has absorbed in the years since he stumbled into this world. Yellow was a boy's color in Japan for decades. A season can run eighty episodes and then spin off a movie because that is simply how Toei keeps you. One show tanked in the ratings and broke toy sales records anyway. A villain grabs two arguing men because he assumes they're a couple, and the joke just… never… lands on them. Mandy learns that the Blue Ranger telling dad jokes on a ladder has a real acting career, that the dinosaur robots are a guy in a suit stomping through miniatures, and that somewhere in this franchise there is a rock-singing villain named Candelilla. Then she and Omari decide to write the musical. Press play.
Guest SpotlightOmari Miller is a Los Angeles–based actor, singer, and performer, and a regular in Mandy's long-running cabaret Miscast: Right Singer, Wrong Song, most recently on the bill for Miscast 46 at The Pico.
Reference Links
The Franchises

• Super Sentai
• Tokusatsu
• Power Rangers
• Kamen Rider
• Toei Company

The Episode Mandy Watched

• Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger (2013)
• Power Rangers Dino Charge (the American adaptation)
• Yamato Kinjo (Kyoryu Blue, later in Kamen Rider Geats)
• Kamen Rider Geats

Series Mentioned

• Himitsu Sentai Gorenger (1975)
• J.A.K.Q. Dengekitai (1977)
• Battle Fever J
• Denshi Sentai Denziman
• Taiyo Sentai Sun Vulcan
• Choudenshi Bioman
• Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger (source of Mighty Morphin)
• Ninja Sentai Kakuranger
• Chouriki Sentai Ohranger
• Power Rangers Zeo
• Kyukyu Sentai GoGoV
• Mirai Sentai Timeranger
• Power Rangers Time Force
• Mashin Sentai Kiramager (the 2020 gemstone season)
• Hikonin Sentai Akibaranger
• Mighty Morphin Alien Rangers
• Power Rangers Turbo
• Power Rangers Ninja Storm
• Power Rangers Mystic Force
• Kamen Rider Ryuki
• Kamen Rider Dragon Knight
• Masked Rider (1995 US series)
• Kamen Rider My-Th (2026)

The People

• Haim Saban
• Stan Lee
• Margaret Loesch
• Jinkx Monsoon
• Jerome Robbins

Films & TV

• Spider-Man (1978 Toei series)
• Inside Out (2015)
• Batman Beyond
• Sailor Moon
• Doctor Who, "The Devil's Chord"
• Friends

Concepts

• Reiwa era
• Kabuki
• Vocaloid
• Hatsune Miku

From the Make Me a Nerd Archive

• Batman Pulled a Gun: Batman Beyond with Jason Yeung
• Moon Prism Power, Make Me a Gorgeous Podcaster: Sailor Moon with Jonny Lee Jr.
• Visiting Doctor Who, Rolling with Krissy Lenz, Finding Danny Bonaduce

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 mother? Is Barney at the YMCA a little too often? And why does a show this warm leave her with a lingering sadness hangover, the same one she got from Bluey?Then Mandy watched The Mayberry Effect, a documentary about the fans who make pilgrimages to Mount Airy, North Carolina, dress as Floyd the Barber, and follow a red-headed six-year-old around his yard because he looks a bit like Opie, and she wrote down a single word: whoa. Marty and Dan apologize (they told her to watch the Ted Koppel segment instead), then get into a fandom that stopped being about the show a long time ago and became about a place that never existed, and what that looks like when you swap Barney Fife for Chewbacca. Also, a verdict on whether Andy Griffith is hot. Press play.
Guest SpotlightMarty Schneider & Dan Ludwig are a comedy team, writers, and podcasters from Philadelphia. They host Breaking Mayberry, a classic TV podcast without the nostalgia bait, taking a hard look at vintage favorites and cultural oddities from the 1950s to the early 2000s (mostly The Andy Griffith Show, occasionally Glee, currently the failed sitcoms of ABC's TGIF lineup in a miniseries called TGI Failures).

• Breaking Mayberry on Apple Podcasts
• Breaking Mayberry on Spotify
• Breaking Mayberry on YouTube (clips)
• Breaking Mayberry on Bluesky
• Breaking Mayberry on Instagram
• Support Breaking Mayberry on Patreon ($8/month, bonus episodes)

The Show

• The Andy Griffith Show
• Andy Griffith
• Don Knotts
• Ron Howard
• Frances Bavier (Aunt Bee)

The Fandom

• The Mayberry Effect (2021 documentary)
• Mayberry Days, Mount Airy, NC (September 21–27, 2026)
• Mount Airy, North Carolina
• The Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club (iMayberry)
• Two Chairs No Waiting podcast (Allan Newsome, since 2008)
• Allan Newsome, Floyd the Barber tribute artist
• David Browning, "The Mayberry Deputy"
• Mayberry Man (2021 fan-funded film)
• Andy Griffith Museum

Books

• Looking for Andy Griffith: A Father's Journey by Evan Dalton Smith (UNC Press, 2024)

Music

• "The Mayberry Rap" by Rick Rumble
• "Mayberry" by Rascal Flatts
• "No Rain" by Blind Melon (the Bee Girl video)
• Theme: "Wonderstruck" by Jane and the Boy

Also Mentioned

• I Spy (1965–1968, Bill Cosby)
• Gorillas in the Mist
• Waiting for Guffman
• Cocoon
• Lady and the Tramp
• The Music Man (1962)
• Silver Spoons (Ricky Stratton)
• Happy Days (Chuck Cunningham, still upstairs)
• Firefly and the Browncoats

In the TruStory FM Universe

• Watch Me Fly… Serenity with Krissy Lenz — the episode that made Mandy a Browncoat
• Bluey with Kelly Vrooman — the other sadness-hangover episode

Fact-Check Corner

1. The book title. Marty calls Evan Dalton Smith's book Searching for Andy Griffith on "North Carolina University Press," recently released. The book is Looking for Andy Griffith: A Father's Journey, University of North Carolina Press, May 2024.
2. TV penetration in 1960. Marty says 15–25 percent of US households had a TV when the show premiered in 1960, rising to 93 percent by 1968. Commonly cited figures put US TV household penetration near 87–90 percent by 1960 already; the 15–25 percent range is closer to the early 1950s. The 1968 figure is roughly right. The underlying point (TV became ubiquitous across the show's run) is defensible, the specific premiere-year stat is not.
3. "Aired alongside I Dream of Jeannie." "Dogs, Dogs, Dogs" aired in 1963 and I Dream of Jeannie premiered in 1965.

Connect with the Show

• Follow Mandy on Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavens (both with K's) TikTok: @mandymiscast
• Make Me a Nerd runs on curious people. If that's you, the inner circle is at makemeanerd.com/join, where episodes arrive ad-free and early, and the show goes deepe...

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 the background while doing something else and absorbed roughly a fifth of it, so she came back for a proper viewing with a notebook, which turns out to be the only responsible way to approach a film that fires a joke every fifteen seconds. Together they excavate the good stuff: the family motto carved above the gate (incestus ad infinitum), the poster in the servants’ quarters gently informing staff that unionizing causes cancer, and Jimmy Carr as a vicar who cannot place a comma to save his life or anyone else’s. Roughly halfway through, the film quietly abandons Downton Abbey and becomes an Agatha Christie murder mystery instead, and that is just fine.The conversation wanders where the good ones do. Into Justine’s parallel career playing Dungeons and Dragons on stage for animal charities, which is a real job she has. Into the international editions of Last One Laughing, of which she has personally watched about nine. Into a sincere disagreement over whether After Life is a comedy or a grief spiral with jokes in it. Anyhow… you get the idea. Press play.Guest SpotlightJustine Huxley is an actress, singer, and voiceover artist from Los Angeles, best known as the voice of Wattson in Apex Legends, with credits including Sword Art Online, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, and Spyro Reignited Trilogy. Voice acting is what pulled her into tabletop gaming, and in two years she has played more than fifty live Dungeons and Dragons shows, most of them for charity. She performs regularly alongside Mandy in Miscast LA.

• Instagram: @justinehuxley
• TikTok: @justinehuxley
• IMDb: Justine Huxley

Referenced in This EpisodeThe Main Event

• Fackham Hall — 2025, directed by Jim O’Hanlon, written by Steve Dawson, Andrew Dawson, Tim Inman, Jimmy Carr, and Patrick Carr
• The Vicar — the official clip, if you want the punctuation bit before you commit
• Damian Lewis — Humphrey, Lord Davenport, who survives more than any man should
• Thomasin McKenzie — Rose Davenport
• Ben Radcliffe — Eric Noone
• Katherine Waterston — Prudence, Lady Davenport
• Tom Felton — Archibald Davenport
• Emma Laird — Poppy Davenport, who chooses the manure
• Anna Maxwell Martin — Mrs Edna McAllister
• Sue Johnston — Great Aunt Bonaparte
• Tom Goodman-Hill — Inspector Watt
• Tim McMullan — Cyril, who is always right there
• Jason Done — J. R. R. Tolkien
• Hayley Mills — the narrator

The Comedy Lineage

• Airplane!
• The Naked Gun
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• A Fish Called Wanda — the source of Mandy’s single grievance
• Dumb and Dumber
• Family Guy — cited for the same permission structure
• The Bechdel test, without which the sisters are just two women at a party

Other Films That Came Up

• Jojo Rabbit
• The Graduate
• The Notebook, which neither of them has seen
• The Wizard of Oz
• Fifty Shades of Grey, here reduced to one

Television, Places, and Assorted Nerdery

• Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs
• Dame Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess, the Bonaparte template
• Call the Midwife
• The Forsyte Saga and Homeland, the Damian Lewis Mandy knew
• Motherland
• LOL: Last One Laughing UK and 8 Out of 10 Cats, both hosted by Jimmy Carr
• Alan Carr and The Traitors
• Rebel Wilson, host of the Australian Last One Laughing
• The Paper and

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 good, and by the end that includes the people watching it. Press play.Guest SpotlightSherry Mandujano is an actress, singer, and director based in Los Angeles. Originally from the Bay Area, she trained at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York, studying theatre performance and classical voice, before moving to LA. Her screen credits include The Young and the Restless, This Is Us, I'm Dying Up Here, Baskets, and Downsizing. On stage she's appeared in Real Women Have Curves, Man of La Mancha, and Songs for a New World, and she made her directorial debut in 2021. She performs regularly alongside Mandy in Miscast LA.

• Instagram: @sherry_mandujano
• IMDb: Sherry Mandujano

Referenced in This EpisodeThe Main Event

• Parasite — 2019, directed by Bong Joon Ho
• Lee Jung-eun — Moon-gwang, the housekeeper
• Park So-dam — Ki-jung, the "art therapist"
• Song Kang-ho — Ki-taek, the Kim family father
• Suseok — the Korean scholar's stone tradition
• Jjapaguri (ram-don) — the noodle dish in the stairway scene
• 92nd Academy Awards — where Parasite won four, including Best Picture
• Palme d'Or — Cannes 2019

Other Films Mandy Brought Up

• Being John Malkovich
• The Talented Mr. Ripley
• Miss Congeniality
• Starship Troopers

Television, Games, and Assorted Nerdery

• Squid Game
• The Potato Lab — Sherry's happy-ending K-drama counterexample
• Game of Thrones and the Red Wedding
• The Golden Girls
• Magic: The Gathering
• Icarus, who flew too close to the sun

Past Episodes You Might Like

• Squid Game Season 2 with Jimmy Aquino
• Married North of the Wall: Game of Thrones with Jeremy Klavens

Fact-Check Corner

• The peach fuzz isn't poison. Sherry says the Kims "poisoned the housekeeper with the peach fuzz," and Mandy repeats it. What the film actually shows is the Kims exploiting Moon-gwang's peach allergy to produce symptoms that Mrs. Park reads as tuberculosis. She gets framed for being sick, not poisoned.
• The Oscar categories. Sherry's count is correct. Four wins at the 92nd Academy Awards in February 2020, under the official names Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film. It was the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture, and it took the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2019, also a first for a Korean film.
• The production design claims hold up and it’s just crazy. Sherry's account of the crew salvaging real doors, windows, and gates from neighborhoods slated for redevelopment is confirmed by both Bong and production designer Lee Ha-jun, who also made silicone molds of real bricks from those sites. The entire semi-basement neighborhood was a built set, constructed in a water tank in Ilsan so it could be flooded and drained on schedule. The Park mansion was a set too: a real plot of land with a ground floor built on it and the upper floor added in post. 
• Da-hye's age. Mandy says "they're only like nineteen or whatever." The film never states an age. Da-hye is confirmed as a high school student being tutored for her English exams.
• The ramyeon. Sherry calls it "the pot of ramyeon," which is accurate as far as it goes. The dish is jjapaguri specifically, sold to English-language audiences as "ram-don," built from two instant noodle brands with sirloin dropped in. It’s another one of those class comments of the film, taking fifty-cent packages of instant noodles and topping them with sixty bucks of Wagyu and serving it to a kid as a snack. 

Connect with the Show

• Follow Mandy on Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavens (both with K's) TikTok: @mandymiscast
• Make Me a Nerd runs on curious people. If that's you, the inner circle is at makemeanerd.com/join, where episodes arrive ad-free and early, and the show goes deeper between installments.
• Listening on Apple Podcasts? Leave a review. Mandy reads them on air and will absolutely say your username out loud.
• Make Me a Nerd is a production of TruStory FM. Engineering by Pete Wright. Theme song: "Wonderstruck" by Jane and the Boy.<...

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 whole thing falls sideways into a team principal who called himself Darth Vader and then got fired for reasons nobody will say out loud, a crash in Singapore in 2008 that wasn't a crash, and what happens to a car when it gets within one second of the car ahead of it. Mandy wants to know who these boys are and where they came from. Pete would rather discuss regenerative braking. The part where a nineteen-year-old is currently beating the greatest driver of his generation doesn't come up until almost the end. Press play.Guest Spotlight: Pete WrightPete Wright is co-founder of TruStory FM, where he produces and engineers a bunch of what you listen to, this show included. He co-hosts The Next Reel family of film shows, Craft & Chaos, and Marvel Movie Minute, and Mandy has designated him her overlord. His debut novel Onset, Book One of the Manifest trilogy, is out now. It's a dark YA crossover thriller about foster kids, hidden abilities, and what it costs to be noticed. His novella Lattice came out earlier this year.

• Website: It's Me... Pete.
• On writing Onset: itsmepete.com/blog/2026/on-writing-onset
• Instagram: @_petewright
• Bluesky: @itsmepete.com

Reference LinksThe Show That Started It

• Formula 1: Drive to Survive
• Drive to Survive, Season 8, covering the 2025 season, released on Netflix and, in the US, Apple TV

At the Movies

• F1 (2025), directed by Joseph Kosinski and shot with real paddock access on real race weekends
• Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)
• Quarterback, the Netflix series Mandy wishes Drive to Survive were more like

The Drivers

• Kimi Antonelli
• Lewis Hamilton
• George Russell
• Charles Leclerc
• Max Verstappen
• Lando Norris
• Oscar Piastri
• Isack Hadjar
• Liam Lawson
• Jack Doohan
• Gabriel Bortoleto
• Oliver Bearman
• Michael Schumacher

The Men in Charge

• Christian Horner
• Flavio Briatore

How Any of This Works

• Crashgate, the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix
• The halo
• Drag Reduction System
• How 2026 qualifying works
• 2026 F1 season calendar
• Current 2026 standings

The Circuits

• Circuit de Monaco
• Silverstone Circuit
• Marina Bay Street Circuit, Singapore
• Red Bull Ring, Spielberg

Tangents

• The Ship of Theseus
• Ernst Stavro Blofeld
• Pole Position, the arcade game
• "Wonderstruck" by Jane and the Boy

Elsewhere on TruStory FM

• Hangman Adam Page with Kevin Ryan, the wrestling episode Mandy brings up
• Prince with Kyle Olson and Pete Wright
• The Film Board, where Pete writes the openings Mandy likes

Fact-Check CornerSix corrections. Most of what Pete rattles off holds up under checking, including the qualifying format, the championship math, and the entire Horner chronology. These are the exceptions.Hangman Adam Page wrestles for AEW, not WWE. Mandy calls her earlier wrestling episode a WWE episode. Page has been with AEW since the promotion started and held its world championship.Nelson Piquet Jr., not Nelson Piquet. The Singapore driver was the son. His father is a three-time world champion who had nothing to do with it. Pete was clearly spea...

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 and girded for the fight with Jessica about Olive Snook's wardrobe. Jessica may be wrong about the wardrobe. Press play.Guest Spotlight
Jessica Jimenez — TV producer, musical-theater mischief-maker, and scholar of the pop-culture deep cut. This is her third trip through the Make Me A Nerd gauntlet, following Return to Oz and Showgirls. Her stated goal this time was redemption. Her actual achievement was getting Mandy to voluntarily watch a show about corpses.Jessica's social links to be supplied — see Pete-Notes.
Reference Links

The Show

• Pushing Daisies (ABC, 2007–2009)
• Pie-lette — the Barry Sonnenfeld–directed pilot
• Pigeon — episode four, the one Mandy got lost in
• List of Pushing Daisies episodes
• Pushing Daisies at the Television Academy — the official Emmy tally
• Where to watch

The Cast & Creators

• Lee Pace — Ned, the pie maker
• Anna Friel — Charlotte "Chuck" Charles
• Kristin Chenoweth — Olive Snook
• Chi McBride — Emerson Cod, knitter
• Swoosie Kurtz — Lily Charles
• Ellen Greene — Vivian Charles
• Jim Dale — the Narrator
• Sy Richardson — the Coroner
• Raúl Esparza — Alfredo Aldarisio
• Patrick Fabian — Dandelion car salesman, and Mandy's actual friend
• Paul Reubens — Oscar Vibenius, who can smell death
• Jayma Mays — Elista, in "Pigeon"
• Joel McHale — Harold Hundin, in "Bitches"
• Bryan Fuller — creator
• Cami Patton — casting director, with Meg Liberman and Jennifer Lare

Films & Shows Mentioned

• Edward Scissorhands
• Alice in Wonderland (1951)
• The Fall (2006) — the Lee Pace movie Jessica couldn't name: Tarsem Singh, a hospital, a stuntman, and a little girl
• Bodies Bodies Bodies
• Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain Marvel — where Lee Pace actually plays the bad guy
• Dust Bunny (2025) — Bryan Fuller's directorial debut
• Scream 7 — peak-hotness Joel McHale
• The Gilded Age
• Better Call Saul and Saved by the Bell: The College Years
• Will & Grace — for the Jack-and-Karen of it all

Elsewhere on Make Me A Nerd

• Return to Oz with Jessica Jimenez
• Showgirls with Jessica Jimenez
• Labyrinth with Krissy Lenz
• Veronica Mars with Sloan Just — where Mandy learned what noir was
• Movie Friends Michelle Rubinstein and Seth Vargas on the Strange Legacy of Ed Wood

Podcasts Mentioned

• We Are Liars — A Pretty Little Liars Podcast, hosted by Michelle Rubinstein and Liss Daley
• Total Betty Podcast Network
• Movie Friends

Fact-Check CornerThe Emmy count. Mandy reads out 57 nominations, 18 wins, "including seven Primetime Emmy Awards." The overall figure tracks with IMDb's all-award-bodies tally, but the Emmy number is one high: the Television Academy lists 16 Primetime Emmy nominations and 6 wins across the two seasons. The wins were Directing for a Comedy Series and Picture Editing (2008), and Kristin Chenoweth for Supporting Actress, plus Art Direction, Costumes, and Makeup (2009). Jessica's "I think it was like seven" and Mandy's confirmation were both, endearingly, wrong together.Lee Pace is not in Star Wars. Jessica says he's "a bad guy in the newer Star Wars movies." He plays Ronan the Accuser in Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain Marvel — Marvel, not Lucasfilm. He's also Thranduil in The Hobbittrilogy and Brother Day in Foundation. No Star Wars.Season 3 is not announced. Jessica says it was announced earlier this year for 2027. As of now, Bryan Fuller has confirmed he has a season 3 pitch and that the cast is willing — but there's no platform attached, no formal order, and no 2027 date. Mandy's cited Dust Bunny press cycle quote is currently the accurate story.Kristin Chenoweth is 4'11", not 4'10". Lee Pace at 6'5" checks out, so the height gag survives intact.Joel McHale is 54. Mandy guessed "probably fifty-two or something." Born November 1971. Dear God… he and producer Pete are the same age. What’s the word for “delightful and depressing at the same time?”Four wives, not three....

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 her gallstones and the part where Jason explains what "no late fees" actually did to a company already drowning in debt, this turns into an argument about what we lost — whether the video store was genuinely culturally rich for how a generation learned to talk to strangers, or whether that's just nostalgia doing what nostalgia does. (Mandy has a theory about boredom. Jason has one about dopamine. They are describing the same problem.) There's also a first date ruined by a shark movie, and a phone call that does not go according to plan. Press play.Guest Spotlight
Jason Yeung is a voiceover artist and returning Make Me a Nerd guest who spent ten-plus years in video and game retail, working his way from a first job at sixteen to general manager — which makes him, essentially, Sandi Harding with an Arizona accent and a grudge against Blockbuster. He is a fantasy football lifer currently dreading the first overall pick, a man who once drafted a kicker in round one and nearly won the league anyway, and the only guest to date who has answered a retail phone in a full Moviefone voice for years without anyone catching on.
Links & NotesThe Movie

• The Last Blockbuster (2020) — Letterboxd
• The Last Blockbuster — Wikipedia. Directed by Taylor Morden, written and produced by Zeke Kamm.
• The film on Rotten Tomatoes — worth a look, for reasons covered in the Fact-Check Corner

The Store Itself

• bendblockbuster.com — the official site, including the merch Mandy could not stop talking about
• Last Blockbuster — Wikipedia. 211 NE Revere Avenue, Bend, Oregon. Opened 1992 as a Pacific Video; became a Blockbuster franchise in 2000; last one standing since 2019.
• The Callgorithm: (541) 385-9111. Call it. A real human gives you a real movie recommendation. Mandy tried it live on the air and got the phone tree, so maybe call during business hours.
• Airbnb's announcement of the 1990s sleepover — the $4-a-night promotion Mandy digs up as a fun fact

The People in It

• Sandi Harding — general manager since 2004, and the heart of the film
• Lauren Lapkus — narrator
• Kevin Smith, Adam Brody, Ione Skye, Doug Benson, Paul Scheer, Brian Posehn, Ron Funches, Samm Levine, Jamie Kennedy, Lloyd Kaufman, and James Arnold Taylor
• Jared Rasic — the superfan Mandy singles out, a Bend-based film writer, and the source of the line about video stores being his church

The Rise and Fall

• Blockbuster — Wikipedia. Roughly 9,000 stores at its 2004 peak.
• Hollywood Video — Jason's alma mater
• Movie Gallery — the chain that acquired Hollywood Entertainment in 2005, creating the roughly 4,700-store competitor Jason describes, and the merger he calls a nightmare
• Redbox and Netflix — the usual suspects, though the documentary argues the real killer was the debt

Also Mentioned

• The Big Bang Theory — Wikipedia. Mandy's casting observation, which is sharper than she knew at the time.
• Stuart Fails to Save the Universe — the Big Bang spinoff, premiered July 23, 2026 on HBO Max, with both Lauren Lapkus and Brian Posehn
• Cheers — the reference that stumped twelve teenagers on a training call
• Spaceballs (1987) — Letterboxd. The instant-cassette gag Mandy compares the ending to.
• Sharknado (2013) — Letterboxd. Allegedly a date movie.
• Waterworld (1995) — Letterboxd. Mandy's hypothetical bomb, chosen at random and immediately affirmed.
• Singin' in the Rain (1952) — Letterboxd. What Mandy would have put on the store screens, given another chance.
• Pilotwings — Wikipedia. Jason and Mandy would like you to know it is a garbage game. This is their opinion and not the position of TruStory FM.
• Moviefone — Wikipedia. Hello, and thank you for calling.

Fact-Check CornerWhere we love our guests and also look things up.

• Lauren Lapkus's new show is Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, the Big Bang Theory spinoff that premiered on HBO Max on July 23, 2026 — not Stuart Saves the World. And here's the part that makes Mandy's original point better: Brian Posehn is in it too, reprising Bert. Two of the three interviewees she flagged as Big Bang people are currently starring in the same Big Bang spinoff.
• Sandi Harding manages the store; she doesn't own it. The Bend location belongs to Ken and Debbie Tisher, who opened it in...

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 follows is the rare episode where the defense turns out to be more interesting than the verdict. There's a real conversation buried in here about what alien life would actually be like if it declined to be cinematic about it, about why a book that lives entirely inside one man's skull resists ever becoming a movie, and about the very specific, very gendered shape of what each of these characters is afraid of. (Mandy has a theory. Kynan has receipts from the novel that make it worse.) Also: a helicopter, a jellyfish, and a question about what's inside the sphere that nobody answers satisfactorily — including the movie. Press play.Guest SpotlightKynan Dias is an actor, screenwriter, and film professor whose work lives in the narrow space between the funny and the devastating. Las Vegas–raised, he earned his B.A. in film at UNLV and his MFA in screenwriting at UCLA, studied improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade, and has taught at UNLV FILM since 2008, where he built courses in Women in Comedy and Queer Cinema. As an actor, by his own account, he is most often hired to cry in comedies. He is also, as established over multiple appearances on this show, an enormous nerd who did not realize it until Mandy pointed it out.

• TruStory FM host page: Kynan Dias
• UNLV faculty page: Kynan Dias, MFA
• Instagram & Letterboxd: @howdykynan

His shows on TruStory FM:

• The Devil's Details — with Lester Ryan Clark, tracing the devil through art, literature, and pop culture. Currently deep in Mark Twain.
• Every Minute of Everything Everywhere All at Once — also with Lester, going minute by minute through a film that occasionally hands them shots one frame long.
• Sitting in the Dark — monthly horror, with Tommy Metz III, Chelsea Stardust, and Pete Wright, where Kynan was recruited specifically because he's a scaredy cat.

Reference LinksThe Movie

• Sphere (1998) — Letterboxd
• Sphere (1998 film) — Wikipedia
• Sphere (1987 novel) — Wikipedia. The book Kynan has been carrying since childhood.
• Roger Ebert's review — the one Kynan cites, and the last shot that apparently sank it

The Cast

• Barry Levinson — director
• Dustin Hoffman — Dr. Norman Goodman
• Sharon Stone — Dr. Elizabeth "Beth" Halperin
• Samuel L. Jackson — Dr. Harry Adams
• Liev Schreiber — Dr. Ted Fielding, the man who is old at thirty
• Peter Coyote — Capt. Harold C. Barnes
• Queen Latifah — Alice "Teeny" Fletcher
• Huey Lewis — Helicopter Pilot, and yes, he really does deliver the news
• James Pickens Jr. — the man Mandy spotted as Chuck from Roseanne

Michael Crichton

• Michael Crichton — Wikipedia
• The Andromeda Strain — the other one Kynan calls about as nerdy as he gets
• Jurassic Park — the novel, which Kynan would like to come back for
• Disclosure — the one that comes up when the feminism question does
• A Murder in Hollywood — the posthumous novel Mandy stumbled onto
• The Crichton estate's lawsuit over The Pitt — Variety, on the ruling that let the case proceed

Also Mentioned

• Arrival (2016) — Letterboxd. Mandy's recent Denis Villeneuve benchmark, and part of why a glowing ball was a tough sell.
• Contact (1997) — Letterboxd. The other movie where the aliens decline to look like aliens.
• Outbreak (1995) — Letterboxd. Not this movie. Also Dustin Hoffman.
• The Goonies (1985) — Letterboxd. Chester Copperpot.
• Grease (1978) — Letterboxd. For the ending, apparently.
• A Clockwork Orange (1971) — Letterboxd. A blind spot Mandy intends to keep.
• Rod Serling, Isaac Asimov, and Gene Roddenberry — the three-name crash course

Elsewhere on Make Me a NerdThe Kynan Dias Collection — four visits and counting:

• Spirited Away with Kynan Dias
• The Exorcist with Lester Ryan Clark and Kynan Dias
• Everything Everywhere All at Once with Lester Ryan Clark & Kynan Dias — the one that sent Mandy onto their show in return

Also referenced this ep...

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 complicit about what kids understand about death and when they understand it, and about which of the show's creatures is the one that will actually keep you up at night. (Rick has a pick. It is not the one you're thinking of.) There is also a werewolf novel, an eyeball, and a slug that Mandy would like formally stricken from the record. Press play.Guest SpotlightRick London is a Bay Area–raised author of supernatural fiction, and a lifelong devotee of the seventies sci-fi and horror that shaped his taste — a fact he cheerfully cops to somewhere around the point where he realizes he's the nerd in the room. His debut novel, The Dancing Wolfeman, Volume I, follows Titus Wolfe, a high school music teacher and weekend DJ whose life takes a decidedly lupine turn on the road home from a gig in Sonoma County. It's a werewolf story with romantasy in its bones, and music as the thing standing between a man and the beast inside him.

• Website & book: dancingwolfeman.com
• The Dancing Wolfeman on Amazon: Buy the book
• About the book: dancingwolfeman.com/about-the-book
• Instagram: @ricklondon26
• Facebook: Rick London
• X: @RickLondon1964

If you read it, leave a review. Wherever you bought it. He and Mandy are in violent agreement on this point.Links & NotesThe Show

• Alien: Earth — Wikipedia
• "The Real Monsters" — Season 1, Episode 8, the finale Mandy declares her favorite
• Meet the characters — FX's official character guide, useful for untangling cyborg vs. synthetic vs. hybrid
• Alien: Earth — The Official Podcast — the companion show Mandy tells Rick about, hosted by Adam Rogers with Noah Hawley and cast

The Franchise

• Alien (1979) — Letterboxd. The one Rick insists Mandy watch next.
• Aliens (1986) — Letterboxd

The Cast

• Sydney Chandler — Wendy
• Alex Lawther — Hermit
• Timothy Olyphant — Kirsh
• Essie Davis — Dame Sylvia
• Samuel Blenkin — Boy Kavalier
• Babou Ceesay — Morrow
• Noah Hawley — creator, showrunner, and the throughline of Mandy's entire nerd journey

The 1979 Ensemble

• Sigourney Weaver
• Yaphet Kotto
• Veronica Cartwright
• Harry Dean Stanton
• Ian Holm

Also Mentioned

• Legion — the Noah Hawley series that launched this entire podcast
• Fargo — Wikipedia
• Peter Pan (1953) — Letterboxd. Playing on the screen in the operating room, and not by accident.
• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) — Letterboxd. Mandy's Boy Kavalier theory. Solid.
• The Babadook (2014) — Letterboxd. Where Mandy knew Essie Davis from.
• Jaws (1975) — Letterboxd
• The Last of Us — Wikipedia. The one Mandy tapped out on.

Elsewhere on TruStory FM

• Game Over, Man(dy)! It's Aliens with Darnell Smith — Mandy's own trip into the franchise, back in the early days
• Aliens (1986) on the Most Excellent 80s Movies Podcast — Krissy Lenz and Nathan Blackwell take the same film from a very different angle

Fact-Check Corner
Because we love our guests and we also love being right.

• Wendy is played by Sydney Chandler, not Cindy Chandler. Daughter of Kyle Chandler, and formerly of Pistoland Don't Worry Darling.
• The $250 million figure is widely repeated in trade coverage but hard to pin to a primary source. What isdocumented: the Thailand shoot alone ran roughly 2.8–3 billion baht (about $85 million), making it the most expensive foreign production in Thai history. Either way, Mandy's point about the drool budget stands.
• The eyeball creature has a name: the Ocellus. Most of the internet just calls it the Eye. Both are worse than the xenomorph, on this Rick and the fandom agree.
• Sigourney Weaver is not, in fact, in all of them. She's in the first four. Prometheus, Covenant, and Romuluswent on without her.

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