Now Playing Podcast Presents: The Fast and Furious Retrospective Series

How prophetic is John Carpenter's 1981 vision of future Manhattan - so crime-ridden it's become a maximum security prison?  And how easily can Kurt Russell shake off his Disney kid image to star as Snake Plissken, the one-eyed convict coerced by Lee Van Cleef to rescue the Commander-In-Chief from crime lord Isaac Hayes? Start spreadin' the news, the podcast is ready to play.  Be a part of it and Listen Now!  

Novelist Timothy Hutton starts to go a little cuckoo when The Dark Half of his creative mind - the part responsible for writing all of his salacious bestsellers - takes physical form and strikes out at the family and friends that push the author to be more wholesome.  Is this latest Stephen King story just a thinly veiled tell-all of the horror writer's struggles with alcohol and alter ego Richard Bachman? Or should we consider this more like a new chapter in director George Romero's Living Dead saga?  See if Stuart, Jakob, and Arnie are on the same page when you Listen Now!Novelist Timothy Hutton starts to go a little cuckoo when The Dark Half of his creative mind - the part responsible for writing all of his salacious bestsellers - takes physical form and strikes out at the family and friends that push the author to be more wholesome.  Is this latest Stephen King story just a thinly veiled tell-all of the horror writer's struggles with alcohol and alter ego Richard Bachman? Or should we consider this more like a new chapter in director George Romero's Living Dead saga?  See if Stuart, Jakob, and Arnie are on the same page when you Listen Now!

Arnie, Jakob, and Stuart continue to dig into Stephen King’s extensive filmography, this week reaching the much-maligned adaptation of Tommyknockers. Marg Helgenberger (CSI) and Jimmy Smitts (LA Law) cause a meltdown in their little Maine town when they excavate a UFO in their backyard. Were fans too quick to bury this ABC-TV miniseries?  Why would anyone want E.T. to go home when the aliens make such ingenious modifications to lipstick, magic shows, and Coke machines? Answer that knockin’ at the door by downloading and listening now!

Businesswoman Gwenyth Paltrow comes into contact with a novel virus. Now can an all-star cast stop her Contagion from spreading worldwide? And why does Matt Damon have a "Borne" immunity? Now Playing’s Viral Outbreak Retrospective reaches its dramatic conclusion with a podcast review of Steven Soderbergh’s sprawling, newly relevant 2011 medical thriller. Join Arnie, Stuart, and Jakob as they analyze the ways the fictional MEV-1 outbreak mirrors today’s COVID-19 pandemic. Listen Now!

The Andromeda Strain has mutated again!  Michael Crichton’s landmark 1969 novel came back in 2008 as a two-night TV mini-series produced by Ridley and Tony Scott!  But is this cast of sitcom stars - including Eric McCormack (Will & Grace), Ricky Schroder (Silver Spoons), Christa Miller (Scrubs), and Andre Braugher (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) - capable of selling the science to a cable television audience? Follow Jakob, Arnie, and Stuart into the wormhole as they continue contact tracing the history of viral outbreaks in movies with this latest podcast.  Listen Now!  

The 1990s gets a whole lot grungier after an infected African monkey is smuggled into Northern California, and causes a deadly Outbreak.  Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo star as divorcing virologists tasked with flattening the curve of a super-Ebola before nervous military brass Morgan Freeman and Donald Sutherland opt to level the hot zone and everyone inside with jetfire.  Find out if Stuart, Arnie, and Jakob think this 1995 medical thriller is nothing to sneeze at when you download the latest installment of their pandemic-themed podcast.  Listen now!

Gag me with a spoon! Those glow-in-the-dark boils under your eyes aren’t just an ‘80s fashion statement, but a Warning Sign that your local agro-research lab is cooking up more than genetically modified food. Before he kept Law & Order on television, sheriff Sam Waterston shot it out with enraged scientists infected with Borna disease in this fourth installment of the Now Playing Viral Outbreak Retrospective. Is this another brainless zombie movie? Or can Jakob, Arnie, and Stuart sink their teeth into some hard science too? Listen and find out!

A whole new kind of sickness struck the 1970s with the release of The Andromeda Strain. Four scientists hunker down in a top secret lab to study the space plague inadvertently brought to Earth by a fallen satellite. Can they find a cure for the killer alien bug before politicians use nukes to inoculate the planet? And will this first film adaptation of Michael Crichton’s bestseller develop a fatal case of disco fever coming from the director of musicals West Side Story and The Sound of Music? Find out now! 

Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers help folks see the lighter side of apocalypse with their 1964 Cold War classic Dr. Strangelove. What happens when a paranoid general (Sterling Hayden) decides to protect American bodily fluids by ordering fighter pilot Slim Pickens to drop 50 megaton bombs on unsuspecting Soviet targets? Can George C. Scott and a Nazi scientist convince the US President there’s an upside to starting World War III? Find out when you become a Now Playing Patron and join Arnie, Stuart, and Jakob in the bunker this April.

Pandemic movies infect the Swingin’ Sixties courtesy of The Satan Bug - a 1965 spy caper that becomes the second installment of Now Playing’s Viral Outbreak Retrospective. TV star George Maharis (Route 66) attempted to be an epidemiological James Bond when he slipped on an isolation suit, and hunted down the reclusive billionaire who broke into a top secret bioweapons lab to release a highly lethal virus.  Find out if Arnie, Jakob, and Stuart wash their hands of these dirty double crosses when you take two earbuds and call on Now Playing this morning!