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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Gloria Swanson and William Holden. They travel down the labyrinthine corridors of the decrepit mansion on the titual street, the border between civilization and the wild. Matt can’t get over the monkey, but still they dissect the film’s genre signifiers, representation of gender norms, buffet of acting styles, and parallels with the other great work of literary art where someone winds up dead in a pool.

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Episode 894: An Extraordinarily Desirable Street originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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On this beastly, grizzly, hawkish two-hander, off-duty dads Jordan Stokes and Pete Fenzel ride the tiger of discourse through zoologically- and conservationally-minded children’s cartoons, with a focus on PBS Kids’ long-running cybernetic animal rescue fantasy, Wild Kratts.

The duo consider how Wild Kratts frames moral imperatives about the treatment of animals in the wild, while depicting few if any pets or livestock, and how that might identify evil in its exception not to universal law about animals, but rather to a will to a hypothetical maxim of Wildness that relates also to validating and connecting with children. We weigh the balance of the ways Wild Kratts, and other educational and fantastical animated zoological adventures, such as BBC’s Octonauts, might seek to ignite and foster passion for applied biological sciences in small children at the cost of modeling ecologically transgressive behavior, such as landing a multistory steel turtle-shaped airship in the immediate neighborhood of endangered nesting grounds. And we break down Wild Kratt’s villainous and heroic uses of animals as a means, contrasting the bodily exploitation of Zachary Varmitech with the deconstructive appropriation of Aviva Corcovado.

And we ask ourselves, not why we think we ought to care about wild animals, but why we really do, and how that came to be, tipping our hatts to the Kratts in their capacity to inspire.

Also on the show, an aside on the taxonomical puzzle of Tunip the Vegimal, an animal/plant hybrid enjoined with the talking animals who wear pants, but not fully of them, in their continuing mission to explore, rescue, and protect the animals who also talk, but do not wear pants.

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Episode 893: You Come at the Elk, You Best Not Miss originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Ryan Sheely, and Matthew Wrather overthink the nihilisitc satire “Mountainhead,” a film about the hollowness at the center of Silicon Valley’s elite. The movie, featuring Steve Carell and Jason Schwartzman, portrays self-absorbed moguls, their philosophical pretensions, and the absurdity of their existential crises in a chamber piece package.

The crew explores the authenticity of friendships intertwined with business, and the legitimacy (or intentional misapplication) of the characters’ philosophical musings, from Hegel to Kant, all the more ridiculous becuase of their marked lack of introspection. These guys could stand to do a little overthinking.

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Episode 892: Ready Billionaire One originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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On the occasion of Ozzy Osbourne’s passing, the Overthinking It podcast piled into a van airbrushed with flaming skulls to discuss the genre of heavy metal music in its heyday. Resident metalheads Pete Fenzel and Mark Lee chose a slate of “heavy metal” tracks (which inevitably tiptoed towards trash and hair metal) and forced non-metalhead Matt Wrather to listen to them. The playlist is below for your head-banging, horn-throwing pleasure.

The panel unpacked the key musical and thematic signifiers of the genre, in particular its obsession with darkness, death, and the occult. Sometimes this is expressed in slightly cartoonish terms, especially as it relates to Satan. Although when taken to its logical extreme, things get a bit uncomfortable as we are forced to reckon with an explicitly Holocaust themed song that happens to absolutely rip.

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Episode 891: What Should I Do at the Slayer Concert? originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee and Matt Wrather overthink the feature-length Looney Tunes cartoon, “The Day the Earth Blew Up.” They reflect the appeal of Looney Tunes characters, thrust into a modern world which doesn’t understand them and which they don’t understand. Maybe that’s why the genre of this film is so confused, swinging wildly from Merrie Melodies homage to buddy adventure comedy to porcine rom-com to sci-fi MacGuffin chasing with world-ending stakes. For what it’s worth, the crew strongly prefer the parts at the beginning of the film, which remind them of what made Looney Tunes great in the first place, with modern updates from influencer culture to Uber driving… er… horseback riding.

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Episode 890: The Tentacle Invasion of Daffy Duck originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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On the Overthinking It Podcast, Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather slide into the diner’s corner booth and face a yawning abyss that’s haunted students, artists, parents, and everyone with a to-do list: why do we keep putting things off? From the 24-hour term paper to a family tree that seemingly took nearly as long in the documentation as in the procreation, they overthink the strange paradoxes of avoidance.

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Episode 889: Finish the Handoff originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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On the auspicious occasion of the 888th episode of the Overthinking It Podcast, Pete, Mark, and Matt Wrather tackle numerology, luck, curses, and other forms of superstition. In case you weren’t aware, the number 8 is considered lucky in Chinese culture, and as such, this is the luckiest podcast we will ever make (at least until episode 8888 rolls along sometime in the next century). The panelists discuss their own experiences with luck, or lack thereof, the prevalence of luck and superstition in American sports culture, the difference between religious belief and superstition, and how luck offers a compassionate framework for making sense of the chaos and randomness of life.

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Episode 888: Twenty Five American Dollar Burger originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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Jordan Stokes, Matthew Wrather and Pete Fenzel overthink “Only Murders in the Building” (spoiler-free), the latest entry in the beloved “Steve Martin plays an artist struggling to make an example of the thing you are watching” oeuvre. Riding the line between low-affect sadness and broad comic shtick, the new Three Amigos: Selena Gomez, Martin Short and the aforementioned Martin form a polygon of character dynamic. The overthinkers follow with ruler and protractor in hand to chart their angles.

But is this show about podcasting, or is “Murders” about the struggle of millennials and the younger to find places to live and belong in the Children of Men heckscape that is the American housing market? We trace Murders’ style and influences back to the 2006 New Yorker personal history column, “Moving On a Love Story” by Nora Ephron, where she describes the eccentric characters and underhanded dealings at a rent-stabilized Manhattan apartment building. And we purse who can, and cannot hang with Martin Short, with a bonus never-before-heard Hollywood true story.

Plus, a bonus delve into the phama-sexual phantasia of the Hulu commercial plan, as we overthink “Chapter 22: House of Frostfire,” a romantasy-themed commercial for the Nexplanon etonogestrel implant—coming to a “Murders” showing or doctors office waiting room near you. Reproductive health is important—more important, perhaps, than tightly knit chain mail, flower lore for offscreen coitus, or practical footwear in the foods.

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Episode 887: Traffic on the Ones originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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Mark Lee FINALLY convinced some other Overthinkers (Pete Fenzel and Jordan Stokes) to watch Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Now they’ve started a band and will surely have a meteoric rise to fame and a spectacular drug-infused crash, culminating in recovery and redemption.

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Episode 886: It’s Called Port Wine, Mozart, You Don’t Want Anything to Do With This! originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather try to avert their eyes from a barrage of upsetting video endemic to our present, algorithmically driven, engagement-farming digital age. The explore their different levels of desensitization (or is it sensitization?) to videos, for example, of airline disasters, and discuss how to protect your mental well-being in an atmosphere of content verging on the traumatic.

The coping mechanisms they uncover are not unlike parenting, except that you are both the parent and the parented. And there is a particular focus of setting guardrails to avoid become upset in the first place. Once the cortisol hits the bloodstream, it’s too late.

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Episode 885: Get Away from That Radical Rock originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]