What Did We Miss?

When William Gibson's debut novel, Neuromancer, came out in 1984 most people didn't have computers in their home, never mind a conception for the what the hell cyberspace was. But Gibson wasn't just helping to create the new genre of cyberpunk, he was pointing to the future and how we'd all be interconnected through this "consensual hallucination" we call the internet. We might not have all of the cybernetic implants and body-mods - or cool hacker edge - but what our present lacks in superficial similarities to Gibson's neon-soaked dystopia it more than makes up for in the technological dependencies he predicted.

Black Widow is finally getting her own solo movie in the MCU, and Wonder Woman's much anticipated sequel is coming soon. With female representation in comics and movies in mind, Matt and Tony decided to take a look at the Image Comics series Bitch Planet. Created by writer Kelly Sue DeConnick - whose work on Captain Marvel shaped the direction of her big screen portrayal - and artist Valentine De Landro, Bitch Planet follows the lives of a group of female inmates who have been exiled to the titular prison colony... in space! The comic is a feminist take on women-in-prison exploitation movies, dystopian tropes, and sci-fi sports action movies like The Running Man and Rollerball.

This week Tony is sharing one of his all-time favorite games with Matt - Doom. Matt knows its reputation(and Tony's palpable excitement for it) but up until now had never sat down with the groundbreaking 1993 first person shooter. When Tony is able to get his giddiness under control, the guys discuss their early PC gaming memories, how Doom emerged to turn its creators into the driving force behind PC gaming's popularity and technical evolution in the 1990s, having fun even when you're cheating in a game, and the appeal to Doom's controversial yet tongue-in-cheek gore and chaos.

Hey WDWMers, we'll be back with our regularly scheduled episode (DOOM '93) on Wednesday, but we wanted to share this special bonus episode.

It's Part Two of this special double episode where Steve Carroll and JP Camara, hosts of the wonderful podcast You Can Do It, Do It, join WDWM to discuss their mutual blindspot - The Beatles.

Matt and Tony have some pretty glaring blindspots, which is why they started What Did We Miss?, but this week's guests have a doozy. Steve Carroll and JP Camara, hosts of the wonderful podcast You Can Do It, Do It, join WDWM to discuss their mutual blindspot - The Beatles.

For whatever reason, Tony's finger has always been miles away from the pulse when it comes to music. After every music critic shared their "Best of the decade" lists it became woefully apparent that he had a bajillion blind spots. To remedy that, Matt put a bunch of "best of" lists through a statistical gauntlet to come up with a consensus on what the top five records of the decade were: Robyn's "Body Talk" (2010); Kanye West's "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" (2010); Kendrick Lamar's "To Pimp a Butterfly" (2015); Beyonce's "Lemonade" (2016); Frank Ocean's Blonde (2016).

Hooray for Hollywood? For better or worse, the Academy Awards are a good indicator of what critics and audiences have been talking about all year. So in honor of this weekend's ceremony, Matt and Tony picked a random year to see if any of that year's Best Picture nominees were blindspots. The result? 1973. That year's winner? The Godfather. Seen it, and worse it's been talked to death. But neither of them had seen any of the other four films up for Hollywood's highest honor, and two of them were pretty big blindspots.

Jackie Chan is a daring, one-of-a-kind performer with more than two decades of stunts and success on his resume prior to finally breaking in the States, yet Matt and Tony were really only familiar in his work from the Rush Hour movies. Looking to go back to some of the Hong Kong action movies that earned him is early fame - and his reputation as a daredevil perfectionist who is equal parts Buster Keaton and Bruce Lee - they dive head first into the first two installments of Jackie Chan's Police Story series.

Happy (belated) New Year WDWM-ers! Before we dive right into blindspots in 2020, Matt and Tony took a minute to look back at their 2019 in pop culture. They hit on all of the movie, music, TV, books, and video games they consumed over the year. You'll notice some notable end-of-year exceptions, but they recorded this before the year was actually out. Otherwise, drop 'em a line with any glaring omissions or disagreements, and stay tuned for next week's return to exploring the stuff they've missed!