Overthinking It Podcast

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink the complexities of time management, especially as parents. Matt wants to know how Mark and Pete “have it all,” balancing work, family, and personal time, overseen by an all-knowing paper calendar. Is your schedule “squishy” like a waterbed, or “firm” like the rock you need to sleep on to keep from throwing your back out now that you are old?

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Episode 902: It’s Not for You; It’s for You Later 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, Matt Wrather, and Pete Fenzel whoop whoop (that’s the sound of the police!) for Liam Neeson’s arrival on streaming as Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr. of Police Squad in The Naked Gun. The overthinkers welcome this successor to the legacy of spoof, tracing the broader historical journey of latter-day parody from the alpine peaks of inflatable pilots and Reggie Jackson, to the dark forest of Poe’s Law and reality more absurd than fiction.

Is The Naked Gun more than the sum of its naked parts, in either its current of previous incarnations? The three parse the themes of the latest film, as well as its predecessors, and the different contexts and relationships with hyperbolic performance that they represent. They chart styles and exemplars of parody, comedic microstructure and macrostructure, and just how surprisingly funny and excellent Pamela Anderson is.

Plus, if you’ve saw the snowman scene, you knew we’d overthink it, as both revellers in madness and aging adolescents of the late 90s, the two creative energies that perhaps more than any others underpin the latest entry in the storied franchise.

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Episode 901: J. K. r-OWL-ing 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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Matt Belinkie, Pete Fenzel, and Mark Lee are just as astonished as you are that this show has reached its 900th episode. To mark the occasion, we take a look back at pop culture and broader cultural trends that have come and gone since the podcast began way back in 2008. Remember when female-led movies such as The Hunger Games, Twilight, and Wonder Woman had their moment, and how it all seemed to peak purely coincidentally with the 2016 election? Remember how the streaming age of television gave us an ever-so-brief respite from the onslaught of advertising? Remember when Game of Thrones absolutely dominated the cultural conversation before it collapsed under its own heavy production weight? We were there, podcasting through it all, and we’re still here, podcasting about us podcasting through it all.

And you’re still here–at least some of you! Thanks again to our loyal audience members, especially those of you who were with us from the beginning. We can’t promise you 900 more episodes, and we forbid the use of AI to generate enough episodes to get us to 9,000 after we’re all dead, so you’ll just have to wait a couple years until we hit episode 1,000 and do something really wild to celebrate.

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Episode 900: Here’s a Ton of Dirt Cheap Vampire Kissing 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 pay tribute to the life and work of Robert Redford by overthinking Spy Game (2001), directed by Tony Scott and starring Redford and Brad Pitt. It is a deeply strange movie where the bad guys are absolutely right. They delve into the unique charisma Redford brings to the performance, the ways in which Brad Pitt seems to be made of discarded pieces from the floor of the workshop where they made Redford, and the Janus-faced aspect of this film’s politics, written and shot before 9/11 but released after.

Contrary to what you might expect, it doesn’t seem like the filmmmakers saw 24

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Episode 899: We Don’t Know. He Just Redfords Everywhere. 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, Matt Wrather, and Pete Fenzel weather a tough week in talk shows by looking to the classic exemplars and deconstructed scions of the medium, especially the internet talk show Subway Takes. Is the MetroCard in Kareem Rahma’s hand more or less postmodern than the microphone on Jimmy Fallon’s desk? Why does the 100% agree / 100% disagree formula work so well? Is that jacket a jacket? What is the role of celebrity in a medium where they ride the trains, just like us, rather than regale us in showbiz clothes like Joan Rivers and Betty White? Have we sold the past short, or have we misunderstood past senses of belonging?

Broadening their scope to the interview-intermediated podcast in the modern era, how does the authenticity the public seeks now different from the authenticity of the Instagram-filtered 2010s? And through it all, what is the work being done? And how do we know. In an era where Spotify, an audio app, can load a podcast, an audio medium, and default to video, everything we know seems balanced on the edge.

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Episode 898: One Hundred Percent Agree 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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Matt Belinkie, Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather form a demonic boy band to dissect KPop Demon Hunters and its rabid global following. Things started out small: it seemed like this would be some sort of parody movie, a lazy cash grab, or both. But the movie turned out to be really good, and the summer camp counselors played the song on repeat for our kids, and the next thing you know, this movie has become the most watched movie ever on Netflix, and the only movie to ever have four songs in the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time.

The panel unpacks the reasons behind the movie’s massive popularity with its target Generation Alpha audience, the thematic resonance of Rumi’s struggle with her half-demon identity, and the Jungian / Marxist / Calvinist readings of the film, because if we’re not going to do that, then who will? They also evoke the musical superhero media of yesteryear, including Jem and the Holograms and the truly dreadful but nevertheless significant KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park. It’s really bad. Take our word for it. You’re much better off watching KPop Demon Hunters for the twentieth time with your kids than watching KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park.

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Episode 897: Come to Our Concert at the Mouth of the Hell Hole 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 and Matthew Wrather feel the crisp promise of autumn in the air and head back to school. They may not be wearing sweatpants, but they do remember the teachers who left indelible impressions with the lessions they taught in and out of the classroom, like when a teacher’s gift of Unico stickers can have a decisive influence on a student’s life.

Of course, Matt recites some Shakespeare. But the twist is he is doing it as a bedtime story for his baby.

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Episode 896: If You’re Going to Learn It, Learn It 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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Pete Fenzel and Mark Lee tackle two very different topics in this week’s episode. First up is something hot off the presses: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement announcement. On one hand, it’s an important moment in the lives of two people in love. On the other hand, it’s a highly intentional and curated PR piece intended for mass consumption. On one hand, it’s evoking Romantic era artwork and classic symbols of feminism. On the other hand, Travis Kelce is wearing short pants and a … knitted polo shirt?

Second up is something slightly less prominent in the pop culture zeitgeist but slightly more important for middle aged gaming dads: modern remasters of old video games. The panel tackles two very different examples of this phenomenon: Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O., a first-party commercial update to a fighting game originally released in 2006; and X-Wing Virtual Machine, a fan made update to a space combat sim originally released in 1993. They consider why they’re playing old games instead of new games and ponder what they’ve lost when old games make exponential gains in graphical fidelity.

Nostalgia and memory are the common threads between these two seemingly unrelated topics: both the Swift-Kelsey engagement announcement and new-old video games intentionally reshape the past for present consumption.

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Episode 895: Ultra-Realistic Settlers of Catan 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 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)]