Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather woke up from a coma and started recording this podcast, not knowing who they were or how they got there. Thankfully they figured out in time to save the world from a mysterious interstellar organism, and along the way they became fast friends and learned a lot about themselves. That’s right, the podcast is back to its old form: tackling a movie that’s currently playing in theaters, because the Overthinkers managed to get out of their homes and see Project Hail Mary on the big screen!

Well, at least Pete and Mark did. Like Grace and Rocky in the movie, the duo manage to overcome their differences and accomplish the mission: in this case, unpacking the religious themes, pop culture references, and character arcs of Project Hail Mary. Matt did not see the movie but contributed a solemn rendition of the Hail Mary prayer in ecclesiastical Latin and otherwise served in the interlocutory role.

Be sure to join us on the Discord to discuss this great film, and to help plan a playlist for our karaoke party at the end of the world! Email podcast AT overthinkingit.com for an invitation.

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Further Reading

• “Sign of the Times” by Harry Styles
• The Hail Mary Prayer
• “Karaoke at the End of the World” Spotify playlist

There are two kinds of people: those that follow the outline and those that depart a the earliest opportunity. Peter Fenzel and Matt Wrather are the second kind. They set off to do one episode, but within the first 10 seconds Matt mentions the famous handshake meme from Predator, and it’s a whole other thing. That thing includes a hypotactical discussion of parataxis, which is why the Mr. Incredible meme is different from the Galaxy Brain meme, and why the Leonardo DiCaprio at the 2026 Oscars meme is different from the Orson Welles in Citizen Kane meme.

Of course this gets to a general typology of all human beings (different from the one in the first sentence of this description). Quite apart from whatever our memetic and linguistic metaphors may tell us from our future selves, it comes down to this: Some of us are adders, and some of us are subtractors.

If you’re starting to purge old belongings, and you end up having a conversation with your past self, say “hi” for us. Let ’em know it’s going to be OK.

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Further Reading

• The Handshake (YouTube)
• Memes
  • Epic Handshake
  • Woman Yelling at a Cat
  • Distracted Boyfriend
  • People Who Know
  • Galaxy Brain
  • IQ Bell Curve
  • Orson Welles Clapping
• “What is Syntaxis” (Language & Humanities)
• “Parataxis, Hypotaxis and other fun ways to help your writing do what you want” (Books around the Table)
• “Why There Are So Many Leonardo DiCaprio Drinking In Movies Memes?” (Screenrant)
• “A change of typeface: Microsoft’s new default font has arrived” (Microsoft.design)

Jordan Stokes, Matt Wrather, and Pete Fenzel take on Fackham Hall, a 2025 comedy inspired by one of OTI’s favorite shows: Downton Abbey. Written by the the British sketch writing team the Dawson Bros. in collaboration with comedian Jimmy Carr and his brother Patrick, Fackham is a romp of dirty jokes, harmless puns, upscale production design, scathing invective about traditional British social order delivered from a literal pulpit, vaudeville-esque farcical sequences, forbidden romance, and foreboding bassoon solos.

Stokes, Wrather and Fenzel muse on who the movie is for; its comedic style as it relates to the style of its creators; the stooping-to-conquer character performances of Katherine Waterston, Damian Lewis, and Draco Malfoy himself: Tom Felton; and where and how it resembles or differs from Downton Abbey, the touchstone of so much of its aesthetics.

The trio particularly press on the notion of the work as a satire, and what teeth it may have, or if it intends to bite. The people it seems to lampoon seem to have already seen their day come and gone – or have they? Is it a takedown of the glorification of the aristocracy, or a dress-up game cavorting to the fictional echoes of an era receding from living memory?

Discussion proceeds concerning Hugh Grosvenor, 7th Duke of Westminster as an exemplar of the aristocrats as they remain; Parliament’s recent vote to abolish hereditary peerage in the House of Lords and whether it means what it says it means; and which generation’s slang words related to manual self-pleasure (a frequent subject of Fackam Hall’s off-color gags) are relatively more or less obscene to say on a podcast.

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Further Reading

• Watch Fackham Hall on HBO Max
• Hugh Grosvenor, 7th Duke of Westminster, on Wikipedia
• My Blackberry is Not Working, by the Dawson Bros., on the BBC YouTube Channel
• Knowsley Hall: A Historic Jewel in Merseyside, from Heritage Explore (which played the eponymous Fackam Hall in the movie)
• Lee Boardman Loved being Karl, landlord of The Dog & Drake in Fackham Hall, on Instagram

Jordan Stokes and Pete Fenzel slam the revolving door on the life and works of Chuck Norris, the six-time world karate champion who became a legend, again, for completely different things. They track his trademark emotional self-possession back from his troubled childhood, through his rise as a karate master, expressed in the code of ethics of his martial art, Chun Kuk Do, and into his oeuvre of roundhouse-kick-related spectacles and tall tales.

Jordan and Pete rewatch and break down two of his films: Good Guys Wear Black, his first starring role from 1978, and Sidekicks, his rare self-referential meta-text, from 1992. They also map his other works, from modern frontier heroic tales like Lone Wolf McQuaid and Walker Texas Ranger to battles of might against prejudicial violence, like Delta Force and Top Dog, where he teams up with a sheepdog to fight Neo-Nazis.

Through the discussion, a central question emerges: if Chuck Norris’s artistic raison d’être is to portray a simple, straightforward moral and physical unity of thought, intention, preparation, and action in the context of morally fraught situations that fail to yield to it, does he make the case more for reconciling his methods to the world, or expressing a poetry of their irreconcilability?

In the struggle of the unstoppable force versus the immoveable object, which breaks first? It’s a trick question: they’re both Chuck Norris.

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Further Reading

• Chun Kuk Do and the Chuck Norris System Code of Honor, on Kung Fu For All
• 102 Chuck Norris Jokes to Celebrate the Ultimate Badass, on Men’s Health
• Lone Wolf McQuade, as of this recording, free on YouTube Movies and TV
• Chuck Norris describes his classic fight with Bruce Lee on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, from Conan O’Brien’s YouTube Channel
• Top Dog, as of this recording, also free on YouTube Movies and TV
• The theatrical release poster for Top Dog, on Wikipedia

Peter Fenzel welcomes Matt Wrather back to the podcast, and the two (with their two hands) overthink all aspects of coming back, whether to a childhood home, a beloved, classic film re-released in theaters, or the weekly rhythm of… a podcast. They contend with their internalized representations of the other as they wonder shared memories shape us, and how memories that shape us are shared. Organized labor is actually the key to it all.

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Further Reading

• “Internal Objects” (The Melanie Klein Trust)
• Romulan Warbird (Memory Alpha)
• Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood
• From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (Wikipedia)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (IMDb)
• David Warner (IMDb)

When Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Peter Fenzel planned this podcast, the intention was to visit a variety of topics related to winter. But once Matt started talking about the BookTok sensation Ice Planet Barbarians, it was clear that there wasn’t going to be time for anything else. This sci-fi romance novel, self-published by Ruby Dixon in 2015, was the beginning of a 21 book series that tells the story of a group of human women who are abducted from Earth and marooned on a desolate world (referred to in the book, to Mark’s amusement, as “Not-Hoth”). Luckily they are saved by hunky aliens who are skilled hunters and VERY generous lovers. They aren’t “barbarians” in the sense that they lack manners, but they do have a sort of rough and tumble Conan aesthetic that lends itself well to fan art.

Barbarians unites two powerful strands of escapism: first, wouldn’t it be great to escape from the crushing grip of late stage capitalism, even if it means replacing your 9-5 with a struggle of survival against the elements on a hostile planet. Secondly, wouldn’t it be nice if love and family was a matter of fate and biology, out of your hands entirely. The blue-skinned alien barbarians (and eventually the human women) have a symbiote implanted inside them that keeps them alive in the hostile environment but ALSO picks a life mate for them, giving them an instant irresistible lust for a single partner. (Speaking of lust, Matt takes mild offense to the aliens being upgrades over human men, in anatomical terms that he is too modest to specify but let’s just say there is vibration.)

Although the overthinkers are not the target demographic here, they get the appeal. There is a reason “isekai” is such a hot genre now. Modern life feels fraught and only getting more precarious. Young people are increasingly not dreaming of a better life here on earth but rather a blank slate on another world entirely (and maybe a hunky barbarian to keep you warm at night).

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Further Reading

• Ice Planet Barbarians – Wikipedia
• Isekai – Wikipedia

Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Peter Fenzel power slide their way into a Child’s Garden of Video Games. Partial adoption of Mario Kart World has rattled but not shattered more than a decade of global Kart unity. A toddlers become little kids, assisted gaming experiences give way to assisted ones. As little kids grow into big kids, glorified Minecraft machines rediscover that they are gaming consoles that can explore other genres.

Matt, Mark and Pete recount their decades with Mario Kart, culminating in introducing the game to their children. They look back bemused on the history of printed and online strategy guides. They reflect on how their racers of choice have changed through their lives, what they have learned about gaming with 3 year olds, and how even kids who love Sonic still so often gravitate to Mario.

They also expand from the now-orthodox bananas and bob-ombs to describe newer shared gaming experiences with children, such as Great Wolf Lodge’s immersive live-action adventure MagiQuest with the little ones or the Japanese walking simulator Exit 8, for those a little older and more prepared for non-turtle-shell-related psychological horror.

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Further Reading

• The Unofficial Guide to Mario Kart, from Topix Media Lab, on the Scholastic Parents’ Store
• An Unofficial Guided Journal for Fans of KPop Demon Hunters, from Topix Media Lab, on Media Lab Books
• Mercedes-Benz x Mario Kart 8, on the Super Mario Wiki
• Pushing Buttons: Finally, I’ve found a game I can actually enjoy playing with my child, by Keza McDonald on The Guardian
• MagiQuest at Great Wolf Lodge
• TIFF 2025: ‘Exit 8’ Is Liminal Videogame Horror at its Best

Matt Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, and Jordan Stokes slip through a crack in reality and wind up in the Backrooms, which started out as a posting on 4Chan about “liminal spaces.” In 2022 a 16-year-old Youtuber with a freakish mastery of computer graphics produced a found footage video bringing the photo to life. And on the day the hosts recorded this podcast, indie movie studio du jour A24 debuted the first teaser for their feature-length adaptation.

This won’t be the first internet meme to get a movie; that distinction belongs to Slenderman from 2018. But the twist here is that the director is none other than that teenaged Youtuber, Kane Parsons, now given 15 million dollars to play with.

The hosts put on their screenwriting hats to wonder how you craft a narrative out of something that gets its power from its irrationality. The Backrooms fandom over the past five years has been divided into people (like Parsons) who feel that the offputting weirdness of the concept is what makes it powerful, and the people who imagine the Backrooms as a place that can be divided into levels, mapped, outsmarted, and ultimately conquered. Come to think of it, a lot of horror movies are balancing acts between something bizarre (a haunted videotape, for instance) and an explanation for where it came from and how to beat it (the life story of Samara Morgan). Audiences need SOME answers. But answer too many questions and the scary thing might not be quite as scary anymore.

Finally, we consider what made the Backrooms such a viral idea and potentially a box office hit. Perhaps serial killers and monsters are the threats of a previous generation. What’s scary to us today is the idea that our whole world might unravel, the rug pulled out from under us and replaced with yellow office carpeting. What’s scary is the idea that things might stop making sense for no clear reason, and we might not be able to find our way back.

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Further Reading

• Slender Man Is Exactly the Wrong Kind of Bad – Paste Magazine
• The Backrooms Wiki
• A24 Horror Movie ‘Backrooms,’ Adapting Kane Parsons’ YouTube Series, Gets Ominous First Trailer – The Hollywood Reporter
• HobbyTown USA Oshkosh interior / The Original Backrooms Photo – Wikimedia Commons
• Know Your Other World: Subgenres of Isekai – Medium
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime – Crunchyroll
• Can’t Take a Joke? That’s Just Poe’s Law, 2017’s Most Important Internet Phenomenon – WIRED
• The terrifying internet urban legend that inspired Severance – Dexerto
• People Still Live Here (Software) – Kane Pixels Backrooms Fandom Wiki

Mark Lee, Jordan Stokes, and Peter Fenzel answer the anthem, energized by John Tesh’s live performance of “Roundball Rock” on the court at the NBA All-Star Game. They map the history of the track, from Tesh’s early days touring with Yanni, through his answering machine revelation of a song that would change the world, past the heyday of the NBA on NBC, through the valley toward the Dave Tesh SNL sketch, and back to the modern, nostalgic day.

They expand this consideration to sports jingles, sports anthems, and different musics associated with competition around the TV dial and the world. From what we know about Ancient Greece, to what we think we know about Ancient Rome (mostly due to movies), to the 19th century construction of bullfighting tradition, to the growth of rugby chants out of the traditions of the Maori and Zulu, to Hockey Night in Canada, the Wide World of Sports, and the FOX robot, the Overthinkers discuss who the music is by, who the music is for, and what it all has to do with, as Roland Barthes might put it, contest and spectacle.

ERROR WARNING: With a heavy heart, we must relay one stain of shame that perhaps no atonement might wash away: in this episode, Stokes briefly confuses Greek composer and keyboardist Yanni with the Romanian Gheorghe Zamfir, duly honored “Master of the Pan Flute.” In penance, until further notice Stokes will flagellate himself with a scented candle whilst laying down vocals for an adult contemporary electro-pop remix of Gregorian chant.

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Further Reading

• Roundball Rock Returns: John Tesh 2026 All-Star Performance from John Tesh on YouTube
  
• NBA ON NBC INTRO – 1993 NBA FINALS Bulls @ Suns GAME 1, from Michael Jordan Sportsvision on YouTube
  
• Roundball Rock – SNL, from Saturday Night Live on YouTube
  
• The Untold Story of Roundball Rock, NBA’s Iconic Theme, from John Tesh on YouTube
  
• Yanni – “Santorini”…Live At The Acropolis, 25th Anniversary!…1080p Digitally Remastered & Restored from Yanni on YouTube
  
• Barthes, Roland. “The World of Wrestling.” Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972, from MIT course readings
  
• How ‘Rugrats’ composer Mark Motherbaugh creates scores, from Pitchfork on YouTube
  
• The Music of Ben Hur, from Loki1982axala, on YouTube
  
• This Music Brings Me Back to My Days in Sunny Spain and Running with the Bulls, by Kevin Gordin, from WRTI, Your Classical and Jazz Source
  
• Haka and Aotearoa/New Zealand Rugby, a case study created by Kianna Mahony, MDiv ’25, under the editorial direction of Anna Mudd, RPL Program Specialist, from Harvard and Divinity School: Religion and Public Life
  
• Gatorade Love Hurts & Michael Jordan, from Rebecca Kordecki on YouTube
  
• And some of our favorite sports themes:
  • The NFL on FOX
  • American Gladiators Theme Song
  • MLB on ESPN Theme Song
  • Old Hockey Night in Canada Theme Song
  • ABC’s Wide World of Sports (1980)
  • Spanning the World with Len Berman
  • Ingemar Johansen vs. Floyd Paterson (1960)
  • Caccia: Tosto che l’alba by Gherardello da Firenze
  • Heavy Action
  • NHL on ESPN

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink the orthogonal cultural spectacles of the 2026 Super Bowl, considering the halftime show headlined by Bad Bunny and the perennial cultural battlefield of the commercials, this year weaving narratives of authenticity amidst a sea of grifting. The halftime show is approached first through its stagecraft and camera work which create an transporting, immersive environment for TV audiences (though probably not for stadium-goes). The presence of Gaga is debated.

And what does it all tell us about America in 2026? Maybe it’s that “in a world where nostalgia is commodified, even a minion can become a cultural icon.”

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Further Reading

• List of Super Bowl Halftime Shows (Wikipedia)
• Episode 22: DIY Naked News

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Mark Lee’s slide guitar, Jordan Stokes, and Matt Wrather use the power of music to channel the ancestors, bridge the gap between the living and the dead, and also discuss the 2025 Ryan Coogler film Sinners. It’s quite possibly a masterpiece; at the least, it’s certainly the best movie musical about vampires set in the Mississippi Delta that’s ever been made.

The panelists sink their teeth into the tradition of blues music in the rural south; what it means for different cultures to appropriate music; vampire lore across the centuries; and what exactly the vampires in this movie symbolize. Are they just racist villains, or is something else more complex going on here? And what does it mean that the vampires’ music absolutely slaps?

No souls were sold to the devil at the crossroads in the making of this podcast.

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Further Reading

• Watch Sinners on HBO Max
• Listen to the Sinners soundtrack on Spotify
• Crossroads (1986), starring Ralph Maccio
• Crossroads (2002), starring Britney Spears
• Saoirse Ronan and Jimmy Sing “Fairytale of New York”

Pete Fenzel and Matt Wrather convene cross-country, with snow piled in the East and sun set in the West, to clear their bottleneck of constrained podcast topics. In this storied two-hander, they dissect the perception and reality of bodies of work that strain our ability to perceive and accomplish.

The two share their subjective limits on the feet of snow that had just fallen, from the individual snow shoveler fighting a private war with the sky, to the kaleidoscopic social media snow spectator bombarded by accounts and moments from a hundred cold days while lounging in temperate comfort. These swarming pinholes alluding to some greater image beyond a veil, recall instagram stories about Taylor Swift concerts or the current state of public truth.

They further consider two masterpieces of slow and steady work done faster than seemed possible: Alex Honnold’s methodical ropeless climb of the skyscraper Taipei 101, and the Eliyahu Goldratt novel The Goal, an 80s classic about the Socratic method, narrative reinvention, communication in marriage, art’s relationship with truth, and very detailed, specific instructions on how to successfully implement lean manufacturing techniques in late 20th century bearing assembly manufacturing plants, which at this moment has a 50/50 shot of being on the waiting list at your public library.

The work continues, as we consider not how to optimize our own local maxima, but to maximize throughput – of mind, body, and soul. By which we mean duty calls on people especially in positions of authority to accept and enforce accountability for our duty to each other as humans, and also the New York Times rebooted Scrabble.

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Further Reading

• Three Hundred Sixty Thousand, Seven Hundred and Twenty Eight, at the Time of This Writing, Stock Images of Snow Storms on Getty Images.
• Which Snow Removal Tool is Best? Here’s A Comparison Between Methods, by Catherine Messier, USA TODAY NETWORK – New England, from The Providence Journal
• How To Play ‘Crossplay,’ The New NYT Game That’s Officially Out Now: The 2-player Word Game Has Its Own App, and It’s Already Making Waves, by Kelsey Pelzer, Lifestyle Director, Parade Magazine
• So What Did We Think of ‘Skyscraper Live?’ by Frederick Deler, Outside Magazine, January 27, 2026
• The Goal (1984), by Eliyahu Goldratt, in The 25 Most Influential Business Management Books, TIME Magazine, August 09, 2011

Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather overthink Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the latest installment in the Benoit Blanc Cinematic Murder Universe. The panelists appreciated the rich, cinematic presentation of the movie, especially compared to most made-for-Netflix movies, but they also took issue with how the film treats Catholicism more as symbolic wallpaper than as a lived, institutional reality. Where are the baptisms? The first communions? The immigrants? Most importantly, why is everyone so concerned about finding a lost diamond when it would’ve been a lot easier to embezzle the Sunday collection money?

Those critiques aside, everyone appreciated the portrayal of Father Jud as an authentic moral center for the story and as a thematic counterbalance to Benoit Blanc’s cold rationalism. It makes for a very different Knives Out movie compared to its predecessors; whether it’s better or worse than those is largely a matter of taste and perspective. But it’s beyond argument that Daniel Craig’s accent remains sublime through them all.

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Further Reading

• Watch Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery on Netflix
• The Sacred Heart of Jesus
• Lyrics to “Only God Can Judge Me” by Tupac Shakur
• The Council of Trent

Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather return to Downton Abbey (thrumming music and all), for what may be the last time. This show has been an exceptionally deep well for us over the years and this film is not no exception. It’s a little thin, honestly, but it knows the assignment and it has its charms, including the spectacle of Lady Mary cast out from polite society, Robert visibly flustered when he sees a showgirl, Edith finally bringing some main character energy, and Mrs. Patmore asking Mrs. Hughes-Carson about boning.

This is a film about what becomes of the children (do they get a prize at the fair?), and how we hand off our patrimony from one generation to the next; it’s only fitting that it has not one but three Fenzelian Downton Abbey Moments®. Matt and Pete go into them in detail, even though Matt is a little disappointed that the packed plot doesn’t leave enough room for each event to breathe.

If you’ve ever had a fight with a family member at a real estate viewing, you’ll be delighted by the supremely relatable Crawley family and their (now multi-generational!) foibles.

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Further Reading

• The long history of Downton Abbey on Overthinking It

Jordan Stokes and Pete Fenzel dash and dart in playful mayhem around the 2023 version of Tom & Jerry, a reimagining of the cat and mouse duo set against the vibrant backdrop of Singapore. The series (available on HBO Max and Cartoon Network Asia’s YouTube Channel), is a painstaking work of classic animation slapstick, with zero dialogue and maximum expression, and has been a captivating surprise.

Jordan and Pete discuss the history of Tom & Jerry as MGM’s answer to Walt Disney, the birth of Hannah Barbera out of Tom & Jerry’s success, and how the practical considerations of 1940s and 1950s animation shaped the aesthetic and kinetic vocabulary of Tom & Jerry, which the 2023 show recaptures and reimagines so expertly.

The duo also parse the new show’s pacing, complexity, and delicate use of theme and symbol, and the simple patterns that it spins into densely intertwined nonverbal plots with layers of setup and payoff, from its exploration of the smell and taste of Durian to its take on how notions of creation and destruction changed with the development of modern art.

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Further Reading

• FULL EPISODE: What’s That Smell? | Tom and Jerry | Cartoon Network Asia
• FULL EPISODE: Colorful Chase | Tom and Jerry | Cartoon Network Asia
• Tom & Jerry’s 85th Anniversary Celebration | Best Episodes | Cartoon Network Asia on YouTube
• Children’s recognition of slapstick humor is linked to their Theory of Mind, by Ebru Ger, Moritz M. Daum and Mirella Manfredi, Frontiers in Cognition: Perception, Volume 3, 21 May, 2024
• The Road to Mars, by Eric Idle on Wikipedia
• Traditional animation: Cels, on Wikipedia
• 60 years of tourism: Mapping Singapore’s journey as a top destination, by Sarah Stanley in the Straits Times
• Chef Donald on Disney Video

Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather overthink the various forms of household audit. Is it a purge? It it a culling? What is the difference in how the discerning overthinker addresses the freezer, or the toy chest, or the closet, or, worst of all, the snack basket well out of view high atop a kitchen shelf. Does the Sorites Paradox apply to a heap of goldfish crackers? And what about the nuggies? Are they made from real dinosaurs?

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Further Reading

Peter Fenzel, Matt Wrather, and Jordan Stokes overthink past New Year’s resolutions, and past New Years Resolution episodes of this podcast. Pete emphasizes the importance of planning (Matt calls it “scaffolding”) to support ambitious resolutions. But Jordan thinks the dominant strategy is shrinking the resolution to fit the scaffolding you’ve got, and aligning your resolutions with yourself rather than an idealized future super-self. Even the most longed-for self improvement is likely to fail if achieving it involves becoming someone that you’re not.

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Further Reading

• “new year’s resolutions” on Overthinking It
• There Will Be Blood
• Physical: Asia
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
• Finding Forrester
• Skee-Lo
• “A Kinder, Gentler Baboon” from Science

Matt Wrather returns to the Overthinking It podcast after a legendary wrestling match with Los Angeles traffic to join Jordan Stokes and Peter Fenzel in a discussion about finding an honest way to relate and experience overplayed Christmas pop songs. To do this, they chart the history of acting method and Constantin Stanislavski’s three major apostolic traditions: that of Lee Strasberg, that of Stella Adler, and that of Sanford Meisner.

The Overthinkers consider repetition: how in some situations it seems to sap words of all meaning, and in others it provides tiny crack in the door that might be forced open toward honesty with great personal emotional effort – or perhaps through singing at half speed and then speeding up the tape so we sound like anthropomorphic rodents. And there is no greater pursuit they might apply these techniques than The Reason for the Season.

When we sing what we sing, do we mean what we mean? How does ritual bring into being the acting of our own values in real life? Do we, in fact, know it’s Christmas time at all? Do we want a lot for Christmas? Do I still want a hula hoop? Do you still want a hula hoop? I still want a hula hoop. You still want a hula hoop? I still want a hula hoop.

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Further Reading

• The Actor’s Secret Spell: Why the ‘Magic If’ Changes Everything, by Maggie Bera on Backstage
• The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, by Isaac Butler, available for purchase from Bloomsbury
• Salome Jens on Memory Alpha
• Ross Bagdasarian, a.k.a. Davd Seville, on Wikipedia
• The Chipmunk Song from The Alvin Show, on YouTube

Jordan Stokes and Pete Fenzel take on the traffic-waylaid Matt Wrather’s challenge in our now-annual holiday literary episode: contrast the forms of knowledge in two enduring 1890s holiday classics. Jordan and Pete take on the New York Sun editorial commonly known as “Yes, Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus” by Francis Pharcellus Church, and the Sherlock Holmes holiday adventure “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

On one hand is faith, feeling, and phenomenology, and on the other, observation, measurement, and deduction. In both cases the mentor moves the mentee from ignorance to knowledge, though of different sorts, and from thence, to the Christmas Spirit, be it childlike innocence or goose-oriented Victorian mercy.

Marvel as Stokes calls for the triumph of human investigation over every dark corner of material reality. Stir as Fenzel invokes faith even in Sherlock Holmes’s assurance of a happy ending. Revel seasonally in the moral philosophy of Santa Claus.

As a bonus, the two also tackle Pursuit to Algiers, a latter Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes feature – perhaps the Fast & Furious 6 of 221B Baker Street. In this, they reflect on the middle career of clinical psychologist Marjorie Riordon, who between modeling for war bonds and her study in speech pathology took a few special moments to sing and play piano with Dr. Watson on an international steamboat thick with campy assassins.

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Further Reading

• “Is There a Santa Claus?” originally published in the New York Sun, included in “Virginia’s Letter & Church’s Editorial,” on the website of The Studio School, New York City
• “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus” assortment of readings, from LibriVox Audiobooks on Youtube
• “Adventures of Sherlock Holmes VII. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Strand Magazine, Volume 3, January-June 1892,(featuring original illustrations) on Wikisource
• “How “Do We Know Things About the World,” grade 8+ version, from the Canadian vaccine advocacy group and UNICEF partner Kids Boost Immunity
• “Great Minds – Part 4: Hegel: The Phenomenology of Geist, presented by Dr. Michael Sugrue
• “Yes, Harry, there IS a Santa Claus…” excerpted from Cold Days by Jim Butcher, courtesy of Random Ramblings of an Absent-Minded Professor, by Kent G. Hare
• “Sherlock Holmes and the Power of Observation,” by Christopher Roosen, February 28, 2019
• “Giant Penny” on the Batman Wiki
• Pursuit to Algiers (1945), Starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, and Marjorie Riordan as Sheila Woodbury, on YouTube
• “Actress Teaches Children: Finds Real Success Is In Serving Others,” by Jean Gallagher, Los Angeles Mirror, May 31, 1956, p. 26

Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink the work of Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born English playwright. He seems like a playwright designed in a lab for Overthinking It, and the guys dive into Arcadia (1993), a play about thermodynamics, academia, history, poetry, sex, uncertainty, and time. What matters, the individual scientist or poet, or the work they create? The answer is “yes.”

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Further Reading

• Tom Stoppard (Wikipedia)

The Phantom of the Opera is by most measures the single most successful piece of musical theater of all time. Somehow it’s escaped the scrutiny of the Overthinkers, until Mark Lee returned from a visit to the immersive reimagining of the show, Masquerade, as a changed man, utterly obsessed, driven to madness, and wearing a porcelain mask covering half of his face.

Enchanted by Mark’s newfound enthusiasm for Phantom, Pete Fenzel and Matt Wrather followed him to the underground lair to make the Podcast of the Night. The panel explores how a sense of place undergirds both versions of the show, the many different ways the “problematic” character and actions of the Phantom can be interpreted, and whether or not the show is any good at all—or if it’s all just a noisy maximalist thrill ride (DUN DUN DUN DUN DUUUUUN). Spoilers for the immersive version, in particular its ending, which radically recontextualizes the Phantom and his relationship with his own sense of self worth.

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Further Reading

• Masquerade, the immersive version of Phantom, now playing in NYC
• The 2011 stage version of Phantom at the Royal Albert Hall (free to watch via the Internet Archive)
• Lindsay Ellis video essay on the regrettable sequel, Love Never Dies

Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather overthink intrinsic and instrumental hats. From a toddler’s hilariously putting diapers on their head to a king solemnly doing the same with a crown, they weave experience, history, and philosophy into a tapestry that is, in the end, extremely silly.

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Further Reading

• “silly” at the Onlinie Eymology Dictionary
• Beer Helmet (Amazon)
• Another Kind of Beer Helmet (Amazon)
• “My Hat, It Has Three Corners” (Wikipedia)
• “Will Ferrell reveals ‘weird’ reason for his viral Buddy the Elf moment at NHL game” (New York Post)
• Bishop’s Mitre (Wikipedia)
• “Take your hat off.” (YouTube)
• “Hat” by A Halo Called Fred (lyrics)

Peter Fenzel and Matt Wrather overthink series 16 of The Great British Bake Off, a reality competition show that takes place in a comforting world swaddled in gingham, where the stakes are as low as a soggy bottom. With one contestant so dominant, this year’s competition was nearly devoid of suspense; and the presence of a Ukrainian baker nearly forced the show to confront a world with a tragedies many times worse than the collapse of a cake.

They puzzle out how the show tries to make meaning through its casting and through the relationship between the hosts and the judges, and try to imagine what the show must mean to its intended (British) audience, playing on both nostalgia for a simpler time of village fêtes and the contemporary diversity of modern Britain. In the end, everyone can agree: Alison Hammond has made the show’s flavor’s pop.

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On the Overthinking

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Further Reading

• “Inside the World of ‘The Great British Bake Off'” (The New Yorker)
• Ombré (Wikipedia)
• Types of Levers (Wikipedia)
• Rowan (GBBO S11)

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink the world of decision-making outside of the voting booth—a world where each vote might have a decisive effect on your future voting power. (Matt, for example, is never allowed to chose the movie again, after Phantom-gate.) They touch on decision theory, Pareto efficiency, and economics, ultimately deciding it’s the right move to hold onto your tickets for Hidalgo, even if you’re going by yourself, and throw away your tickets to Highlander: Endgame.

But how to make decisions in that ultimate kid-tatorship, the family. Do you Matrix your kids or let them experience the vertigo of unlimited choice? And how can Dads stay cool? They join a casual rock band, where enthusiasm outweighs consensus every time.

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Further Reading

• Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind (30 plays in 60 minutes)
• Frances de la Tour
• Rumors by Neil Simon
• Here’s a college doing Rumors. No dialog, but you get the point.

With the French crown jewels still in the wind after the recent daring daylight robbery at the Louvre, Mark Lee, Matt Wrather and Pete Fenzel turn from the sparkly to the skeletal, to overthink the grand seasonal decorations on display in their urban and suburban communities.

Among its many moments of horror, 2020 saw Home Depot release “Skelly,” a 12-foot plastic lawn skeleton with glowing LCD eyes, to amaze your neighbors and terrify their children. Like or unlike other trends from that year, Skelly and his ilk have advanced in the years since, unceasing. This year, the Depot released an entire “Boo Crew” of additional family for the boney bachelor, and Mark, Matt and Pete have seen not just Skelly, but similarly large and ostentatious Halloween display ramp up in a multi-year grand ornamental Dance of Death.

The Overthinkers tackle the cultural or psychological significance of grand Halloween displays, alongside other over-the-top carnivals of the cursed, such as the continued wearing of the Koh-i-Noor diamond in British coronations. They also muse on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 16th century panel painting “The Triumph of Death,” how to consider the changing meaning of “cheapness,” and the provenance of Dolly Parton in the cultural importance of spangles and rhinestones.

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Further Reading

• Meet Skelly’s Boo Crew: The Skeleton Family Expands at the Home Depot
• An Oral History of Home Depot’s 12-Foot Skeleton, by Addy Baird, from Vice
• The Curse of Kohinoor: How the Diamond Affects Its Male Owners, from the Times of India
• The Triumph of Death, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, at the collection of the Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain
• Dolly Parton Outfit from 1977 Fort Worth Concert Just Sold. It’s Value May Shock You, by Matt Leclercq, from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, December 19, 2023

The year is 2025. The United States has devolved into an authoritarian, dystopian society where violence is used as a form of social control. In a stunning act of defiance, three brave podcasters–Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather–fight back by analyzing the 1987 version of The Running Man, just in time for the Edgar Wright re-adaptation of the original Steven King novel to hit the big screens. We haven’t seen it yet, but it’s safe to say it will be very different from the quip-and-kill Schwarzenegger version that doesn’t really have anything coherent to say about the use of violence in entertainment, except, perhaps, “this is awesome.” But it does come down super hard against floral print button down shirts.

The panelists compare the movie to other notable examples where violence as spectacle is front and center: Gladiator, Robocop, and The Hunger Games. They also try to rationalize the role of the show in-universe as a method of social control, but mainly find that the world-building just doesn’t hold up as well as its higher quality contemporaries. But what the movie lacks in coherence and cohesion it makes up for with physicality and spectacle.

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Further Reading

• How to Do the Running Man
• The Struggle of the Two Natures in Man
• The Last Action Heroes by Nick de Semylen
• Steven de Souza, the writer of this film as well as Commando, Die Hard, and Street Fighter
• The Running Man (2025) trailer: starring Glen Powell, directed by Edgar Wright

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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Further Reading

• Getting Things Done

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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Further Reading

• Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (Wikipedia)
• Cue The Sun by Emily Nussbaum
• Liam Neeson | Improvisational Comedy | Life’s Too Short, from Flix & Clips on YouTube
• A Tale of Two Snowmen, from Pugween on YouTube
• Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker promote the autobiographical “Surely You Can’t Be Serious, The True Story of Airplane!” on Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, from NPR, May 2024
• Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole receives a zero out of 10 rating in faith and integrity from Dove.org

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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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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Suggested Viewing

• Spy Game (2001)
• All the President’s Men (1976)
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
• Indecent Proposal (1993)
• The Natural (1984)
• All Is Lost (2013)
• Sneakers (1992)
• A River Runs Through It (1992)
• The Horse Whisperer (1998)

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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Further Reading

• Normalize strangers holding babies, SubwayTakes with Kareem Rahma, featuring Giancarlo Soresi
• Microwaving is cooking, SubwayTakes with Kareem Rahma, featuring chef Jose Andres
• Stop using old photos on dating apps, SubwayTakes with Kareem Rahma, featuring Lily Hayes
• “It’s what the people want” – Maven on his YouTube channel success, on the Chris Van Vliet YouTube Channel
  • Clip
  • Full VOD
• Betty White and Joan Rivers lay into each other, on the Johnny Carson YouTube Channel
• Charles Grodin asks Johnny if he cares about his guests, on the Johnny Carson YouTube Channel
• “She didn’t want to get on the mike until she had a proper fit on” – Matthew Evan Shaw of Bebida Tailgate’s cameo on the AriAtHome improvised street music sessions
  • Clip
  • Full VOD

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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Further Reading

• Watch KPop Demon Hunters on Netflix
• Gat (traditional Korean hat)
• Jem and the Holograms
• KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park

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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Further Reading

• Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73
• Unico (Wikipedia)
• The Fantastic Adventures of Unico (1981) – English audio (YouTube)
• Diff’rent Strokes Theme Song (YouTube)
• Who’s the Boss Theme Song (YouTube)
• Full House Theme Song (YouTube)
• Family Matters Theme Song (YouTube)

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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Further Reading

• The Taylor Swift – Travis Kelce engagement announcement on Instagram
• The Progress of Love: The Lover Crowned by Jean-Honoré Fragonard
• Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O.
• X-Wing Virtual Machine

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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Further Reading

• Film Noir (Wikipedia)
• The Paramount Backlot
• The Great Gatsby (Wikipedia)
• J.S. Bach : Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 565 / Liene Andreta Kalnciema live at Riga Cathedral (YouTube)
• Max playing Bach (YouTube)

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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Further Reading

• Wild Kratts on PBS Kids
• Zoboomafoo with the Kratt Brothers | FROGS, on the Zoboomafoo WildBrain YouTube channel
• List of species seen on Wild Kratts, on the Wild Kratts wiki
• If you are in the UK, you can watch Octonauts here
• If you are not in the UK, you can watch Octonauts here, or on Netflix
• Beluga Whales at the Mystic Aquarium from Jonathan Bird’s Blue World, on YouTube
• Jimmy Z on the Near Pure Good Heroes Wiki | WARNING: “This Article Has 5 Sentences But Is Still Short and Needs to Be Expanded Some More”

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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Further Reading

• The Silliest Display of Wealth in ‘Mountainhead’
  

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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Further Reading

• Misattribution of Arousal
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Samuel’s Version)

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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Further Reading

• Space Jam: A New Legacy (Wikipedia)
• “Looney Tunes: 2025–2021” (Wikipedia)
• Book of Mormon Art Catalog

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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Further Reading

• The Most Disaffected Smashing Pumpkin
• Bold Move by Luana Marques
• Tool Academy
• Getting Things Done (GTD)

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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Further Reading

• 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony
• Clip from the sitcom 227
• Heinz 57, which is named after the favorite numbers of the creator and his wife
• The Curse of the Bambino
• The Curse of the Koh-i-Noor Diamond

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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Further Reading

• “Moving On, A Love Story” by Nora Ephron, in The New Yorker
• ‘The Bear’ Sets Record For Comedy Wins At Emmys—Despite Controversy Over Category Placement
• The Royal Tenenbaums – “You’ve Made a Cuckold of Me” via Brian Thesing on YouTube
• The Morning After | Final Scene | Superbad via Boxoffice Movie Scenes on YouTube
• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas on goodreads
• This Organon campaign for birth control jumps into BookTok’s ‘romantasy’ craze from Medical Marketing and Media
• Listening for Traffic on the Ones, by Glenn Eichler in The New Yorker

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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Further Reading

• The Commitments movie trailer
• “I’m Still Standing” from Rocketman
• “The Sun Whose Rays Are all Ablaze” from Topsy Turvy, the Gilbert & Sullivan movie
• Blinded by the Light movie trailer
• Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere movie trailer

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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Further Reading

• Power is not energy: why the difference matters (Technology Connections on YouTube)
• Lords of Dogtown

Matt Wrather, Mark Lee, and Pete Fenzel leave Indiana Jones behind to follow the dotted line across across the map of Italy and the history of modern streaming with the self-possessed, adroit, and eternally classy Stanley Tucci, in pursuit of his newly minted cross-platform rival Eva Longoria.

Tucci in Italy on NatGeo/Disney+ and Eva Longoria: Searching for Spain on CNN/HBO Max/Max/HBO Max may have emerged from the same project, but they now face each other as competitors, two curling threads of fragrant steam above that red, messy bowl of Warner Bros. Discovery corporate buccatini. We trace how it started, how it’s going, and how Stanley Tucci maintains his easy masculine confidence through it all. Is he acting? Well, who isn’t?

We think of the Roman Empire, and our own oft-chaotic world, and muse on the grounding power of travel and stillness, that Tuccian dyad. We also connect on our experiences with other shows that deal in travel and food, whether it’s Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations or Jose Andres and Family in Spain, or Conan O’Brien Must Go, or Be My Guest (a.k.a. You Must Go, to the Barefoot Contessa, Who Is In Her House).

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Further Reading

• Stanley Tucci Cooks Spaghetti Aglio e Olio on YouTube
• The Travel Writer’s Dilemma, to Share or Gatekeep, by Pico Iyer, in The New York Times
• Warner Bros. Discovery Is Splitting Into Two Companies, by Jess Weatherbed on The Verge
• CNN to Reboot ‘Searching For’ Travel Franchise, With Eva Longoria Set to Explore Spain (Exclusive), by Alex Weprin, in The Hollywood Reporter
• I couldn’t stop laughing as Conan O’Brien hilariously blasts Stanley Tucci, Eva Longoria travel shows, by Michael Balderston in y! Entertainment
• Tucci Gang Tucci Gang Tucci Gang Tucci Gang Tucci Gang Tucci Gang Tucci Gang

It’s Matt Wrather’s first Father’s Day, which means it’s finally time to tackle Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on the podcast. We’ve talked about Raiders and Dial of Destiny, and have written copious amounts of material criticizing Crystal Skull, but have yet to fully excavated this 90’s adventure classic until now, with all three of your regular panelists (Matt, Pete, and Mark) firmly ensconced in fatherhood, wearing funny hats and bashing their children over the head with fake Ming vases.

Befitting the occasion, we spend a lot of time on the father-son dynamic in this movie, specifically how the three trials are a metaphor for fatherhood. We explore other symbols in this movie: the Holy Grail, aka the Holy Grail of Holy Grails; the crusading knight jousting on horseback and motorcycles; and things that are both illuminated and provide illumination. We also deal with the over-the-top humor and action of the movie and grapple with whether or not they constitute actual plot holes. For example: how is a medieval French knight able to speak English? Hmmmmm?

We also manage to work the recent video game, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, into the conversation, particularly with how well it captures the essential features of a great Indiana Story. Hint: “greaser son” is not one of them.

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Further Reading

• Overthinking It Podcast: It Would Be Easier If “Raiders of the Lost Ark” Were Awful
• Overthinking It Podcast 784: He Wants to Die in Antiquity
• Subjecting “Fridge Nuking” to Scientific Peer Review
• Some further complaints about Indy IV (most likely the first in a series)
• From Scooby to Scrappy: An Analysis of Cartoon Doghood
• Henry Jones, Sr.’s Hat
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Game Trailer

It’s Gemini season, and Mark Lee, Peter Fenzel, and Matthew Wrather (and their dopplegangers), overthink the concept of twins and doubles in their lives and the popular culture. Whether the twin is a dark mirror, just another quark in the multiverse, or a satirical imitation of the original, it always opens up complex and multivalent possibilities in identity and time, whether the canvas is a needlessly complex Star Wars card game, Taylor Swift’s musical eras, or the natural world.

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Further Reading

• “The One: Most Epic Fights” (YouTube)
• Stefan Urquelle (Family Matters Wiki)
• “Star Wars Customizable Card Game 2023 Advanced Rulebook”
• “You wanna make that a mucho?”
• “Here’s to Football” Coors Light Commercial (YouTube)

Ben Adams, Pete Fenzel, and Mark Lee steal a TIE Fighter, huff some rhydo, and sacrifice everything they hold dear to bring you this podcast on the superb second season of Andor. After they sell some antiques to high society, our panelists escape to their secret rebel base to explore the many salient cleavages in the show: choice vs. free will, freedom vs. tyranny, chaos vs. order, planning vs. doing, and even the light and dark sides of the Force. Yes, the Force still binds all living things in the galaxy, even in a show without space wizards.

The panelists analyze as many of the fascinating characters as they can: Luthen, the ruthless, paranoid spymaster with friends everywhere and nowhere at the same time; Andor, the deadly spy who makes sure to water his plants before going out on a mission; Mothma, the senator who’s a killer on the dance floor and by proxy; Syril, the hapless tool of the fascist state who kept making the wrong choices until the end; and Dedra, the cog in the Imperial war machine brought down by her own acts of rebellion.

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Further Reading

• The Gwangju Uprising
• How code-breaking helped win the Battle of Midway

It’s that time of year, some years, when Pete Fenzel convinces Matt Wrather to join a storied 2-hander about the stories emerging from the NBA playoffs. Though really, it is about all of us. Aren’t we all experiencing the loss of Jayson Tatum’s Achilles tendon?

Paying ample respect to the pain and anguish the man himself and those close to him must be enduring in the face of a potentially life-changing injury, Pete and Matt broaden the discussion to the secondhand and thirdhand expressions of tragic grief, especially ESPN Analyst Brian Windhorst’s near-poetical declaration of a “dark cloud” hanging over the hometown victory of the New York Knicks, to the irritation and chagrin of Knicks fans, whose players also sometimes get injured.

From the perspective of a Knicks fan living in the Boston Area for two decades, Peter inducts Matt into the outsider view of Jayson Tatum mythology: the eternal future, the dynastic present brought low, what he means to Boston sports, and why his particular Achilles tendon was of such grave concern to so many, but not that many. They also talk about Damien Lillard for about 30 seconds.

Subtopics include the social role of tragedy; the ancient tradition, often defied these days, of valuing the tragedies of the mighty over the tragedies of the humble; the poetics and practicality of the “championship window;” a tangent about crying at Fuddruckers; and whether and to what degree old broken-down red tractors in children’s books are diegetically sentient.

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Further Reading

• Jason Tatum’s Injury Hangs a “Dark Cloud” Over Knicks Game 4 Win over Celtics, featuring Malika Andrews and Brian Windhorst, on ESPN’s NBA Countdown
• Jayson Tatum: American Basketball Player on Britannica
• The Untold Truth of Fuddruckers by Alexandra Cass on Mashed
• All About Jayson Tatum’s Son Deuce Tatum
• Otis the Tractor: 6-book series, by Loren Long, on Amazon
• For the Fallen, by Laurence Binyon, on Wikipedia
• Musée des Beaux Arts, by W.H. Auden, on Poetry Foundation
• The Story of Bing Bong, by Jacob Forchheimer on GQ

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather celebrate Handi-Cast ’25, overthinking the concept of handiness and and the related but distinct culture of DIY. (Do what yourself, though?) Gender roles, technological implications, collaboration & relationships, and the four-hour minimum—all these show up in their lives, and in the YouTube videos they watch.

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Further Reading

• Can James May Rebuild A 1959 Lawn Mower? | Reassembler (YouTube)

Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather overthink Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith on the occasion of its 20th anniversary theatrical re-release. Opinions are mixed on how well it holds up, but not surprisingly, everyone agrees that Ian McDiarmid absolutely killed it as Emperor Palpatine. Everyone else still suffers from the stilted writing, but the action, especially in a 4DX theater with moving seats and spraying water, remains highly entertaining, although admittedly pitched at a 10 year old boy’s level of interests.

The panel digs deep into Anakin’s turn to the dark side, the nature of evil, and the extent to which the story of a democracy’s fall resonates in 2025. Naturally, Andor works its way into the conversation: yes, the galaxy is big enough to have stories centered on both space wizards and everyday people, and the differences in storytelling are dramatically different.

No younglings were harmed in the production of this podcast.

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Further Reading

• Reddit post regarding the late rewrites/reshoots that built out Anakin’s fall to the dark side over concern for Padmé
• The Overview: The (Original) Star Wars Trilogy, with a bonus podcast on the Prequel Trilogy. These were all recorded prior to the release of the Sequel Trilogy.

Mark Lee, Matt Wrather, and Pete Fenzel, having been friends for a very long time, have no qualms with sharing deep, complex, personal, niche, or even annoying conversations. But in this podcast, we tackle the prospect of how to talk to other people, with whom we share far fewer than 850 podcast episodes on average, notably other parents we associate with in the context of our own children’s care, schooling, and activities.With the monoculture shattered by time and technology, and even commitment to local sports teams uncertain, how do you break the seal of silence on new and potential personal relationships?

We seek inspiration in shared experience, dance on the TMI knife blade of parenting challenges, and take wild ill-advised detours into horrific veterinary diseases in pets and wild animals. How do you talk about travel in a way that enjoins shared interest without frosting it in shame and elitism? How do you do more than listen and laugh, but also, how do you listen and laugh? What is the best way to talk about caring for an aging relative with someone you have only met twice in passing? And how might an overreliance on sympathetic negativity and self-deprecating humor create or reinforce negative feedback loops that damage your mental health as well as sell yourself short to others? We don’t know, we just have a podcast, it’s not like we’re doctors or anything. What do you think?

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Further Reading

• The Power of Vulnerability by Brené Brown, from TED on YouTube
• HBO Storybook Musicals: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
• Chronic Wasting Disease in Animals, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• Mange in Wildlife, from the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife
• Negative Core Beliefs in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dr. Aaron Beck, the Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on YouTube
• Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals, starring Andy Samberg, from Saturday Night Live on YouTube

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink rebirth in popular culture, discussing the digital resurrection of cultural icons like John Lennon or Tupac and the multivalent intellectual and emotional experience of encountering these ghoulish digital simulacra. Can we reclaim what has been lost? Technology has come to mediate memory and legacy, storytelling and nostalgia, loss and identity. A Tupac hologram or a new Beatles song may not be what we need, but it is certainly what someone wants.

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Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather are all middle-aged dads and painfully out of step with modern pop music. In an attempt to “get with it,” they all bring a new(ish) pop song to the table for discussion.

Mark’s children (or at least their older cousins) introduced him to “APT.” by ROSÉ and Bruno Mars. The kids may not fully understand what this song is about, but that’s OK, neither do most non-Korean speaking adults! Everyone goes on a journey of unlocking different levels of meaning across language and cultural barriers.

Matt selected a song by Chappell Roan, the spiritual successor to his beloved 90’s female rock/pop songstresses. “Red Wine Supernova” is possibly a reference to something very dirty, but it’s also wholesome in its exuberance.

Lastly, Pete evoked the spirit of his gym- and club-going past with the “hot dance/pop song” “It’s ok I’m ok” by Tate McRae. Who, or what, is really OK? The singer? This song? Are any of us truly OK in this day and age? You be the judge!

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Further Reading

• ROSÉ explains how to play her favorite game
• Mao (card game)
• “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister

Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Pete Fenzel map the branches of the Addams Family Tree. We start at the beginning with Charles Addams’s single-panel cartoons for The New Yorker, move through the classic TV show and legendary 90s movies, to the 2019 animated film and the Netflix comedy Wednesday. With a special focus on perhaps the franchise’s greatest single work, the 1993 comedy Addams Family Values, we focus on the inverted relationships between the Addamses and historical ideas of American sociopolitical norms and myths, spun in jokes and in horrors and modes of marginalization. From futile efforts to guillotine a baby to a murderous takedown of the First Thanksgiving, the Addams lampoon and problematize harm and harmlessness in human experience. Do they have superpowers? Are they really killers? What is Uncle Fester’s marriage saying about intimate partner abuse? What is the deal with the disembodied hand; is Thing enslaved? Is Thing happy? Is it all ookiness, set up and punchline, or, in the model of Gomez and Morticia, might it be the greater virtue to behold the horrors of the world, and, with them in full view, embrace duty and love? Plus, the obligatory Raul Julia appreciation that must be echoed whenever encountering the work of the legend.

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Further Reading

• The Hidden Message of Addams Family Values by Simon Abrams in The Hollywood Reporter
• Charles Addams ‘33: From Broad St. to Broadway, by Rebecca Downing, on the Colgate University 200th anniversary site, 2019
• Charles Addams: The Dark Side of Humor, by Robert Mankoff, in The New Yorker
• The Addams Family (2019), in The Addams Family wiki
• 10 Funniest Addams Family Comics Starring Gomez & Morticia (From the Original Comic Strip), by Casey Connor on Screen Rant
• Fear of Spiders May Have Its Evolutionary Roots in Aversion to Scorpions, by Emma Young in the British Psychological Society Research Digest
• Showbizads Press Reel for the 1992 Broadway Revival of Man of La Mancha starring Raul Julia and Sheena Easton on YouTube

Matt Wrather and Pete Fenzel embrace their changing lives and discuss the groaners that have come to define one of the most common and commonly lampooned interpersonal relationships: the dad joke. We trace the special characteristics in the relationships between parents and children that confound and distort humor. We follow the forms of parental jokes as, transposed, they go on to distort relationships between adults. We frame several theories of dad joke phenomenology, relying on several different definitions of the term, chief among them the Dad joke that gives, inviting the listener to be smart; the Dad joke that takes, asserting a mocking superiority; the Dad joke from affability, projecting nonthreatening helpfulness, and the Dad joke from isolation, calling up animals, foods, and everyday objects as subjects to replace a lack of shared experience and perspective. Kindness and yearning and cruelty, hope and fear and Donald Duck: all are Dad, and all are Joke. Plus, learn the newest form of dad joke, and be ready to spring it on your coworkers, like a slinky during a fire drill. Call us oldheads, call us Overthinkers, just don’t call us collect, because like a broken iPad, we don’t accept the charge.

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Further Reading

• The Reason Your Dad is Fat and Unfunny, by Akaash Singh on YouTube
• MY KIDS REACT: To My First TV Stand Up Appearance (Part 1) – Jim Gaffigan (Caroline’s Comedy Hour), on YouTube
• Jim Gaffigan & Drew Barrymore Ask Audience to Rate Dad Jokes, from the Drew Barrymore Show, on YouTube
• Bill Burr’s Favorite Dad Joke on YouTube
• Laugh During Social Isolation to Boost Your Immune System, from St. John’s Health in Jackson, Wyoming, posted March 25, 2020
• Bringing Up Bebe: One American Woman Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, by Pamela Druckerman, on GoodReads
• Eudora (email client) (Wikipedia)
• Ridicule (1996), directed by Patrice Leconte, on the Internet Movie Database (here’s a clip on YouTube). Matt highly recommends this movie.

Matt Wrather and Pete Fenzel sequester themselves for another storied two-hander as they consider Conclave, a pope-ular and mer-curial film with an all-star cast and an uneasy dramaturgy. See the movie first so as not to spoil the plot, then join us to discuss what genre it is or might be, and what it might be saying about order, patriarchy, tension, progress, and how much your artistic identity might change when you swap out the synth strings and bring in the real ones. We discuss the schema of archetypes these wily cardinals in their extended negotiation might represent, either in culture war or popcorn movie phantasmagoria. We consider the role of women in the movie and the film’s symbolic final shot. We wax on a performance of tantalizing complexity from Ralph Fiennes and the stunning set design and sometimes-controversial camerawork. We lament the poor showing of the Tucci gang when the Tooch needed them most. We recognize our show’s inevitable slide into solely Isabella Rosselini oriented material. And while we do not advise watching this sumptuous piece of visual art on your cell phone, for the podcast that will do just fine.

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Further Reading

• Did Ralph Fiennes Learn Italian and Latin for Conclave? By Upamanyu Biswas, on Cinemaholic
• The Secrets Behind the Vatican’s White/Black Smoke, by V.M. Traverso, on Aleteia
• Horror films: Reflections of Society’s Deepest Fears and Moral Anxieties, By Meenah Rincon, an Interview with Michelle Martinez, an instructor at Arizona State University
• Don’t Click On This Wikipedia Article If You Haven’t Watched the Movie
• The Wild West of Papal Conclaves, by Amelia Soth, Cabinet of Curiosities on JSTOR Daily

Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather use the recent Oscar-winning movie The Brutalist as a jumping-off point to talk about the profound effect of built environments on our lives. We may not have seen this movie, but we’ve all been in buildings, and we have opinions about them.

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Show Notes

Our architectural survey starts in New Haven, CT, where the ugliest building on Yale’s campus is ironically (or appropriately?) the architecture school.

By Ɱ – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=125929427

From there we visit another surreal Brutalist environment: the office building that serves as a phantasmagorical battleground of the video game Control.

Less phantasmagorical, but still brutal: Boston City Hall.

By andrewjsan – https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewsan/6776358460/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=101393496

More ecclesiastical, but VERY brutal: Newman Hall, a Catholic church in Berkeley, CA.

Less brutal, more gentle: we visit the animals at Franklin Park Zoo and Smolak Farms, and get frustrated by need to backtrack back to your stroller that you left by the entrance to the gorilla enclosure.

Lastly, we tackle the built environment in the streets of Culver City, Los Angeles, where an attempt to redesign the streetscape in favor of bikes and pedestrians at the expense of cars caused much consternation. It’s Los Angeles, after all.

Further Reading

• Boston City Hall Public Spaces Renovation
• The War on Cars Podcast

30 people getting coffee vs. 30 people getting coffee
byu/lushe3D inpics

Mark Lee and Pete Fenzel take up a solemn two-hander to commemorate film legend Gene Hackman in the wake of his tragic passing. Mark and Pete share a discussion of his unmistakable personal style, his trademark skill and grace, and how to act on film with your entire face. We track the archetypical Gene Hackman character – not superman, not everyman, but this man. We marvel additionally at Hackman’s command of stillness and silence and his complementary ability to bark nuclear launch orders in roiling rage. We dig deeper on perhaps Hackman’s finest performance, as spiraling wiretapper Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, the 1974 Palme d’Or winning spy film about burgeoning surveillance society, paranoia, modes of masculine self-delusion, and the misplaced confidence in one’s techy knowhow in a war of all against all. But we’re all there for the moustache.

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Further Reading

• Gene Hackman Loved Acting But Hated Everything that Went with It by Noor Nanji on the BBC
• Gene Hackman’s Movie Clothes Never Felt like a Costume by Jason Diamond on GQ
• The Reel to Reel Revival, Part 1: A Brief History of the Format, by Leslie Shapiro on Analog Planet
• Gene Hackman: Five Undersung Roles Showcasing His Threat and Heart, by Anthony Breznican on Vanity Fair
• Power and Conflict: Crimson Tide, on Christopher Thomas’s YouTube channel

Matthew Wrather faces hostile interlocutors Peter Fenzel and Matt Belinkie, who want to know why he’s so crazy about the so-called “comedian” Stewart Lee. Wrather takes them back to the first time he saw anything by Lee, a simpler time for streaming rights when Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle Series 3 was streaming on Netflix. He sets them to watch S3E2 (“England”), S4E6 (“Childhood”), and S3E1 (“Shilbottle”). Belinkie likes all the comedies except stand-up, and Pete wonders why Wrather is even so into this guy. The answer? The death of the post war social-democratic ideal and concomitant decline in the stature of the liberal public intellectual. Sometimes comedy is tough going. But I suppose it made me who I am today.

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Further Reading

• Stewart Lee (Wikipedia)
• Legally Download Stewart Lee’s Comedy
• If You Have Illegally Downloaded Stewart Lee’s Comedy
• Other Comedians
  • Jimmy Carr Does Crowd Work
  • Fluffy Iglesias

The gang takes this show all the way to Broadway, with Matt Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather celebrating Audra McDonald’s tour de force as Mama Rose with a look through the many adaptations and themes of Gypsy: A Musical Fable, by Arthur Laurents, Jule Style and Stephen Sondheim, based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee. Is it, as some critics claim, among the greatest American book musicals ever made? What would that even mean were it to be true? What does it have to do with King Lear? How does the fictionalization of its true story deal with reality vs. fantasy vs. the human condition? We discuss a paradox at the heart of many of the truly great theatrical parts: when they are played by the greatest actors in the greatest ways, do they ever really truly fall apart, or plunge from the heights into desperate ruin? What sort of dignity and sympathy does the ultimate fictionalized stage mom engender that may or may not be due to her historical antecedent? Who did it how, and how did it best? And where did Belinkie get a half-bottle of mead on a Tuesday? Everything’s comin’ up Otis!

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Further Reading

• Audra McDonald in Gypsy: Now on Broadway (2025)
• The Bette Midler Gypsy TV Movie (1993), from Chicken Soup for the Soul TV
• The Imelda Staunton Gypsy Savoy Theatre Production, London (2016), from YouTube Movies & TV
• The Twisted Accounts Behind Gypsy: A Musical Fable, from Drama Dorks
• “‘Gypsy’ The Musical Is LGBT History?’” From the Philadelphia Gay News, September 2017
• The Female Broadway Belt Voice: The Singer’s Perspective, by Christianne Roll, Journal of Singing Volume 76, Number 2 pp 155-162, November/December 2019
• Paradise Lost, Book V, 859-869

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather (temporarily regaining the throne as the host of the program!) undertake the annual tradition of interpreting the commercials and halftime show of the Super Bowl. This year, they find a strange landscape of dislocation and confusion: no one is where they are supposed to be. Either you look up and see a strange face—replaced, as with David Beckham and Matt Damon, or aged, as with Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan—or else you realize that you are the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time, like the inimitable Walton Goggins. The theme continues through the halftime show, with Kendrick Lamar playing the game of America while Uncle Sam keeps insisting he’s doing it wrong. But there is one social dislocation that is defiantly celebrated, in a trio celebrating the physical and economic strength of women.

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Further Reading

• The Commercials of Super Bowl LIX (The Athletic)
• Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime Show (YouTube)
• 2001 Halftime Show (blink and you’ll miss Nelly!) (YouTube)

Some of the most fascinating movies are the big hits that somehow faded from our collective memories. Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather revisit Disney’s fascinating Dick Tracy, a 1990 kids movie that was heavily promoted at McDonalds and features dozens of people getting mowed down by Tommy guns and the line, “You don’t know if you want to hit me or kiss me. I get a lot of that.”

This movie has an astonishing array of talent behind it. Warren Beatty’s previous directorial effort, Reds, won him an Oscar for Best Director and nominations for Best Actor and Best Screenplay. He’s joined here by Al Pacino (who would be nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his scenery-chewing and self-mocking villain), and Madonna at the height of her fame (she produced an entire concept album to promote the film). Mandy Patinkin, Paul Sorvino, Dick Van Dyke, Dustin Hoffman, and even Kathy Bates show up, most nearly unrecognizable.

But maybe the real stars are Stephen Sondheim, who contributed several delightful songs and picked up an Oscar for “Sooner or Later,” and above all cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, a legend who does astonishing work with matte paintings, giant sets, and ingenious trick photography. This movie is truly one-of-a-kind, and even if it doesn’t entirely succeed, it’s hard not to be nostalgic for a time when Hollywood could take big risks on creative people trying something new.

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Further Reading

• Dick Tracy: The Most Bonkers Comic Book Movie Ever
• 1991 Dick Tracy Movie Complete Trading Card Base Set
• Dick Tracy: The Official Book of the Movie
• This Invention Made Disney MILLIONS, but Then They LOST It!
• DUNKACCINO
• Vittorio Storaro (IMDb)

Matt Belinkie, and Pete Fenzel, and Matthew Wrather rummage through the sci-fi spare parts that comprise Section 31, the Emperor Philippa Georgiou spin-off movie that you never knew you wanted, because you never wanted it. Assembled under the aegis of Star Trek, this up-tempo outing hacks together the remnants of a possible streaming series shortened by Michelle Yeoh’s Oscar win and mutually agreed upon better things to do into what can only be described as “A Paramount Plus Original Movie.” The jaunty action comedy that starts with the protagonist killing her own family and a 90s video game cutscene narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis beams to and fro among a stinging slam on traditional Trek institutional optimism, a potpourri of borrowings from other more successful movies and shows across genres, and a pastiche of wild guesses at what “the kids are into these days.” The Matts, and Pete track influences, predecessors, ways to approach considering what this movie is or might be for those who watched it or liked it, and how different works balance the eclectic and the shared in the construction of fictional teams of misfits.

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Further Reading

• Introduction to Lexx, from the VHS Video vault
• FADE IN: The Making of Star Trek Insurrection – A Textbook on Screenwriting from Within the Star Trek Universe, by Michael Piller
• The Best of Emperor Georgiou – Top 10 Moments | Star Trek Discovery, from Milky Way Flier
• Let’s Play Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger (Mission 1 briefing)
• An instance of one of “The Devices” from 24, sold at auction in July 2020, at Propstore
• The Fifth Element (1997) – The Diva Dance Scene, posted by Screen Themes

Matt Belinkie (Good Matt), Matt Wrather (Evil Matt), Mark Lee (Good and Evil Mark at the Same Time), and Pete Fenzel (Fenzel, Walk With Me) honor the passing of the cinematic visionary David Lynch by watching and talking about Blue Velvet, his 1986 neo noir art cinema comeback in the wake of That Dune With Sting. We overthink the parallel and sometimes unrelated questions of how we find Lynch’s work compelling and if we enjoy our time watching it. We dive into psychological schools, genre influence, mastery of two worlds, how Laura Dern Is Queen, and symbolic dualities of light and color, seeking to ensconce our brains in the film’s language to “crack its code.” But Lynch was not a filmmaker seeking to be understood, and sometimes there’s just a dark-bearded man in an orange coat holding a giant empty frappuccino on the train in the winter who may or may not kill you. It’s a strange world, after all.

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Further Reading

• Lynchian, from the Oxford English Dictionary
• Farming with Soil Life: Macrofauna >> Insects, from Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education
• Embrace the Darkness: Carl Jung and the Shadow, from Einzelganger
• Thoughts on War and Death: Return to Freud, Episode 24, from Philosophy Portal
• Blue Velvet Cake Recipe, from The Spruce Eats
• Season 1: Red vs. Blue Complete, from Rooster Teeth
• David Lynch’s Last Public Broadcast Speech at Meditate America, September 13, 2024

Fenzel and Belinkie are lapsed wrestling fans, at least partially because we no longer have cable. But with Monday Night RAW moving to Netflix, this gives us the perfect opportunity to revisit one of America’s most unique artforms. The WWE (née F) has been a pop culture force to be reckoned with from the days of Hulk Hogan, through the TV-14 Attitude Era of The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin, and beyond (a generation of John Cena haters seems to have been replaced with a new generation of Cena worshippers). But it’s only in the last year that the company finally ousted Vince McMahon, a true visionary and scumbag who finally Me Too’ed himself into a corner he couldn’t suplex himself out of (the same week as the Netflix debut, the SEC filed more charges against him for massive hush money payments). Pete and Matt go over this history and then admire some wrestling skills like promo work, controlling the tempo of the match, and the multifaceted role of the announcers. Important to remember: Edge and The Edge are two very different people and only one has a manbun.

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Further Reading

• Full Raw highlights: Raw, Jan. 6, 2025
• FULL MATCH — The Rock vs. Hollywood Hulk Hogan: WrestleMania X8
• The Big Bossman interrupts the funeral of Big Show’s father
• Scott Steiner’s Math Promo Sacrifice 2008 ACTUAL FOOTAGE
• Sheamus to Drew McIntyre, ‘I can lose the weight, you can’t lose stupid!’ | WWE on FOX

Clint Eastwood has been one of America’s most iconic actors and directors for several generations now, and he’s kept busy well into his 90s. But with no projects currently in development, it seems like Juror #2 might be his swan song. Like many of his directorial efforts, this movie is about normal people who become swallowed up by our nation’s institutions, in this case the legal system. Pete, Mark, and Matt delve into this odd beast: part legal thriller, part morality tale, part negative Yelp review of a roadhouse called “Rowdy’s Hideaway.”

The panelists are at first skeptical about the ending, and maybe the entire second half. After introducing a genuinely interesting setup, does the movie know what to DO with it? Everyone has their own ideas of where the story COULD have gone. But the more they talk, the more they understand the story CLINT wanted to tell, one in which nobody wants to do the hard thing so ultimately we don’t get the Hollywood ending we’ve been trained to expect. If you’re looking for heroism, you’re going to have to consult Clint’s work pre-Unforgiven. The only hope for the future he’ll leave us with is a cryptic look from Toni Collette, but maybe that’s a start.

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Further Reading

• Juror #2 on Max
• Skin in the Game – Wikipedia
• Toby Keith – As Good As I Once Was Lyrics | Genius Lyrics

For years, Jimmy Carter was seen as a symbol of humiliating failure. (Back in 1993, The Simpsons did a joke where the town couldn’t afford a Lincoln statue and had to settle for a Carter one.) But Carter spent his post-presidency tirelessly working for Habitat for Humanity and winning Nobel Prizes, and by the time he passed away at age 100 his reputation had been transformed. Ben Adams, Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Pete Fenzel use him as a jumping off point to talk second acts. Mark Hamill was a has-been in the 90s (also mercilessly mocked by The Simpsons) but his decades of work voicing the animated Joker gave him a whole new legacy. Mike Tyson went from disgraced fighter to quirky Cartoon Network star. And Joe Rogan was a c-list actor and reality tv host before he was the biggest podcaster in the world. What’s the secret to reinventing yourself? Do we all have a second act within us?

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Further Reading

• A Guide to Mark Hamill’s Colorful Non–’Star Wars’ Career
• Jason Everman – Wikipedia
• Wristwatch Revival – YouTube
• ‘The Last of Us’ Continues Craig Mazin’s Hollywood Ascent – The New York Times

Matt Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather celebrate the last podcast of the year with the themes that made 2024 what it was. Lee defies gravity, Wrather buys reading glasses, Belinkie revs up his chainsaw sword, and Fenzel steps back for a logo 3. It’s not a year in review, because who could review it all, and it’s not a look forward to 2025, because who wants to spoil the surprise? We talk synchronic vs. diachronic framing of virtuosity and ask what Wicked has in common with the South Korean political crisis and what Warhammer 40k has to do with the Babysitters’ Club. It may be more than you think!

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Further Reading

• Warhammer 40k on the Babysitters’ Club Club fandom wiki
• Ed O’Neill “Al Bundy” the Journey to Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt from the Jiu-Jitsu Times
• Modern Family: Commencement, also on fandom featuring Sensei Ron
• Graeme O’Neal Shows Entertainment Weekly Showing Idina Menzel’s Reaction to Cynthia Ervino’s Cinematic Reinterpretation of Idina Menzel’s Stage Interpretation of Defying Gravity by Stephen Schwarz
• Henry Cavill’s Warhammer 40K Cinematic Universe Signs on the Line with Amazon and He’s Over the Moon: ‘A fantastic place to start,’ from PC Gamer
• Caitlin Clark: Athlete of the Year, 2024, from TIME
• Synchrony and Diachrony: James Stirling’s Students at Yale, lecture by Emmanuel Petit, PhD at the Yale School of Architecture
• Guin Saga to Resume 4 Years After Original Novelist’s Passing, from the Anime News Network

Mark Lee, Matt Wrather, Peter Fenzel, and Matt Belinkie, Hannukah preparations notwithstanding, triangulate and ascertain the True Reason for the Season with the freshest of holiday treats: 2024 Christmas movies. It’s a ginger-spiced promenade from the Rock to the Lohan and Hallmark to Hell and back, through approval, myth, family, heroism, and the worst kinds of miracles. Emotions run high, hopes rise and collapse, and we haven’t even cracked open the egg nog yet!

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Further Reading

• Red One, in theaters and on Prime
• Our Little Secret on Netflix
• Dear Santa on Paramount+
• Sugarplummed on the Hallmark Channel
• Toasty Tails: A PAW Patrol Holiday Fireplace | 24-Hour Fireplace for Kids #holiday #fireplace on YouTube
• What Is Reification?, on novelr
• Beware the Satanic Panic around Jack Black as the Devil in Dear Santa, as it might make the movie sound cool or fun 
• Incredible streaming performance raises possibility Red One might not be a complete financial disaster
• Lindsay Lohan Lives ‘Without Regrets’ After Learning from Her Past, ‘I Really Have Seen It All.’ from People.com

Hot on the heels of our discussion about Sequel Culture, Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee and Pete Fenzel re-enter the arena to discuss Gladiator 2. In the halcyon summer of 2000, it seemed to some people that liberal democracy had won a final enduring victory, and the original Gladiator’s framing of tyranny versus republican virtue didn’t seem like biting social commentary. Twenty four years later this sequel gives us essentially the same plot, but its endless speechifying about the lost dream of democracy and rule of law feels painfully on the nose. But what are the different strategies the movie presents for countering that tyranny? Meeting violence with violence? Organizing political resistance? Or the Denzel Washington option: chewing the scenery while seizing control of the rickety institutions of state from the inside? We don’t learn very much about real Roman history from this movie, but we might learn something about our future.

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Further Reading

• From Principate to Dominate: When Roman Emperors Became Boastful Autocrats
• Baboon Pictures | Page 4 | AfricaHunting.com
• Better Man | Official Trailer (2024 Movie) – Robbie Williams, Michael Gracey, Jonno Davies:

Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Pete Fenzel do something boldly original and never to be repeated: talk about pop culture trend pieces written by actual newspapers. In the immediate aftermath of seeing Moana 2 and Gladiator 2, it’s time to chat about the cluster of think pieces around Hollywood’s huge reliance on sequels this year to make up both the top and bottom of its litany of accomplishments. Beset by a category too all-consuming to be useful, we present a taxonomy of sequels, overthinking their similarities and differences, and tracking the relationship between franchise and oeuvre as creative voices move in and out of the mouths of favorite characters. Plus, the extent to which sequels may or may not be parties, the lessons about remakes movies might be logistically unable to learn from stage plays, and “That Gollum, he’s so hot right now!” Are you up and coming, here and now, or down and going? Did anyone see Bad Boys: Ride or Die? Listen to this week’s episode to find out.

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Further Reading

• “Is Hollywood’s Addiction to Sequels Cannibalizing Its Future” by Owen Glieberman, from Variety
  
• The success of Moana 2 is nothing to be celebrated – there is a real crisis in animation, by Louis Chilton, from The Independent
  
• Worldwide box office leaders from BoxOfficeMojo: 2024 / 2023
• From ‘Megalopolis’ to ‘Joker: Folie à Deux,’ these are 2024’s biggest box office flops, by Aidin Vaziri, from the San Francisco Chronicle
  

Pete Fenzel and Matt Wrather hold a storied two-hander on Ted Danson’s new Netflix retirement home spy sitcom, A Man on the Inside, which rides the lines among funny and solemn; easy and challenging; and polemic and hagiography. We dig deep on the “All the World’s a Stage” monologue from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which is heavily featured in the show, and broaden the conversation to the literary project of using storytelling to inspire humans to find common interest and empathy in their shared condition and mortality. Comedic floors come up, by which a baseline of silliness might be established to soften the cruelty of jokes and satire. We talk sandwiches, specifically those in their 40s and 50s caring for both aging parents and growing teenagers. Matt updates us on his transition into fatherhood and the experience of reading to his daughter, while Pete goes off about dementia, compassion, and dignity in all stages of life. The question as to how exactly this show will manage a second season will have to wait for another podcast.

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Further Reading

• “All the World’s a Stage: The Seven Ages of Man” from William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, performed solo by Benedict Cumberbatch (The Shakespeare Network
• “The Sandwich Generation: Rising Financial Burdens for Middle-Aged Americans” (Pew Research Center, 2013)
• The Iliad, Book 24: Achilles and Priam, performed by Ananke
• How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, by showrunner Michael Schur on Goodreads
• A Man on the Inside Cast: Who Stars Alongside Ted Danson, from RadioTimes
• OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies on the Internet Movie Database / A Man on the Inside Poster, from the Internet Movie Database

Matt Wrather makes a surprise stop in from parental leave to join Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee and Pete Fenzel as we discuss The Onion: its history, style, and modes of satire through the years. We overthink the A.I.-threatened art of clever photoshopping, the dialogue between image and text, doing topical humor on news figures with zero impersonation, and good-natured, tragic pathos. With the Onion back in print and proposing to expand its media empire with an acquisition of InfoWars, will everything that was old and funny become new again and also funny? Plus, a question of the week on our greatest hits for children’s bedtime stories, and a blazing take from area new father that 9/11 may have changed American culture.

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Further Reading

• Who are those six people in that one Onion section? – theonion.com | Ask MetaFilter
• “Frog and Toad”: An Amphibious Celebration of Same-Sex Love | The New Yorker
• De Blasio: ‘Well, Well, Well, Not So Easy To Find A Mayor That Doesn’t Suck Shit, Huh?’ – The Onion
• You Will Suffer Humiliation When The Sports Team From My Area Defeats The Sports Team From Your Area – The Onion
• Issue 37•34: The September 11th Issue – The Onion
• Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake – The Onion
• Pop Culture Expert Surprisingly Not Ashamed Of Self – The Onion
• Standards Lowered For Second Search Through Fridge – The Onion
• Man Returning From Vacation Settles On Single Concise Anecdote He’ll Tell Everyone Who Asks – The Onion
• Dog Looks At Owner Who Put It In Costume Like Mafia Don Betrayed By Loyal Consigliere – The Onion
• Bloodied, Bruised John Kerry Emerges Victorious At Kickboxing Tournament In Bangkok Prison – The Onion
• John Kerry Sits In Shadows Of Kiev Café Awaiting Woman Known Only As Dasha – The Onion
• Theme Park Guests Trapped For Harrowing 6 Hours On Stuck Merry-Go-Round – The Onion
• Outdoor Advertising Is A Blight On Our Society vs. I Just Wanted To Tell The Nice People About The Yogurt – The Onion
• r/AteTheOnion
• The new CEO of ‘The Onion’ is bringing back ‘the good internet.’ Here’s how

After six years as the only Overthinker to appreciate these masterpieces, Pete Fenzel has finally convinced Matt Belinke to watch the Tom Hardy Venom movies. And it’s just in time, as Venom: The Last Dance is here to escort the series to its Comic Book Death (and inevitable resurrection). What follows is Matt and Pete’s deep dive on the whole Venom trilogy and its four pillars: amazing relationship-driven character scenes, shockingly deep cultural and psychological symbolism, plots that make no sense, and brutal comic book violence. It’s the rare series whose best parts are its filler, the best in-your-head “Space Oddity” singalong you’ll see in an IMAX movie theater with 12 people in it this year, and our second new movie in two weeks with a direct stand-in for Randy Quaid’s character in Independence Day. The discussion topics are symbiotic tendrils pulling us forward – away from parasitism, toward healthy attachment. And unlike these movies, we don’t bite anyone’s heads off.

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Further Reading

• The Dependency Paradox in Relationships, by Dr. Terry Levy, Ph.D., B.C.F.E., Director, Evergreen Psychotherapy Center and the Attachment Treatment & Training Institute, Evergreen, Colorado
• The Christmas Tree Is A Tradition Older Than Christmas, by Troy Bickman, Professor of History at Texas A&M University
• How to Access the Secret Stage: Statue of Liberty – Maximum Carnage Guide – Hidden Cutscene Guide, from AcidGlow on YouTube

Mark Lee, Pete Fenzel, and Matt Belinkie check in with the mother of all cinematic franchises, Godzilla. After 70 years and 38 films, how can the big guy possibly surprise us, much less move us? Well shockingly, Godzilla Minus One from 2023 got a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes, and earned an Oscar for Best Special Effects. We break down exactly how Godzilla reinvented its future by reimagining Japan’s post-war past. We also recall some of the series’s history, such as a 1969 movie in which a little boy meets Godzilla’s son, who is being bullied by other monsters.

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Further Reading

• Depression & Anti-Bullying Awareness: All Monsters Attack/Godzilla’s Revenge (1969)
• Godzilla X Kong Ne-Yo Closer Meme Montage

Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Pete Fenzel make their vague dreams into iconic realities by overthinking The Greatest Showman. Is it a concept album with spectacular visuals and only a loose plot, or a symbolic visual poem packed with bangers? An idealistic romp about a great historical cynic, a flagrantly inaccurate yarn about a man who might have loved it, The Greatest Showman asks us to consider the difference between dreams and lies, and whether a dream must come true to matter deeply. For its subject, it also offers inadequate ramp-up or justification for a man’s obsession with and exploitation of “human oddities.” Watch the happiest movie about Hugh Jackman stealing bread, and come overthink it with us! This is the Greatest Podcast!

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Further Reading

• Alan Moore on Magic
• “This Is Our Story and Finale” from Shrek the Musical
• “Songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul Achieve EGOT Status With Emmys Win,” from Variety

Podfather Matt Wrather is notoriously adverse to scary movies. But as he is still on paternity leave, Pete, Mark, and Matt B overthink “Trap,” a movie that is about being a dad both explicitly and metatextually. Is it a good movie? No, it is not. Its premise is nonsensical, its structure is disjointed, and it exists largely to showcase the questionable pop music and even more questionable acting talent of M. Night’s daughter. But it is also deeply fascinating, because you don’t often see a movie that’s bad because the creator had too MUCH creative freedom and not enough studio executives to hold him back. This is the “Megalopolis” of thrillers. And underneath all the silliness are some interesting ideas about parenting. How do we balance our parent self with our other, more private selves? In a way, don’t ALL dads sneak off to the bathroom to use our phones to check on our murder victims? More importantly, did M. Night Shyamalan really cast Hayley Mills as an inside joke just because she starred in “The Parent Trap”? Because that’s crazy.

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Further Reading

“The First Movie About Pop Music to Nail Its Mediocrity” – New York Times

Matt Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, and Mark Lee step slowly up to the wrought-iron knocker on the old oak door of this haunted mansion we call a podcast and knock three times to welcome Halloween! The door creaks on rusty hinges to reveal a bowl of tricks and treats: the spooky-scary and the spooky-silly. These three fathers wonder then on the meaning of Halloween costumes for children: the scary, the aspirational, and the ones with retirement plans. Discussions follow of our favorite scarecrows at the crossroads of ghoulish and gigglish, from remembrance of Crypt Keepers past, to blazing hot takes on a chilling corpse of a topic: The Addams Family versus the Munsters. Are scary things here, or are they yet to come? You’ll have to wait and scream!!

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Further Reading

• Overthinking It Podcast, Episode 539: Halloween Candy
• Crypt Keeper Pun Time playlist, from Subgenre Fanatic
• “Hulk Smash” by Happy Birthday on Spotify
• The Addams Family intro on YouTube
• The Drag-u-La on the Munsters YouTube channel
• Mummies perform the Monkees Theme Song on The Masked Singer

Against all odds, Matt Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, and Mark Lee have reunited in tribute to the upcoming Oasis tour. Inspired by their once-intense but now fatigued, even deadened feelings for “Wonderwall,” they discuss the phenomenology of overplaying, the art of giving up on song meaning, and the erosion of phonetic memory, as they pertain to classic rock, arena rock, boy bands, proto-Romantic poetry, and, of course, the seminal album What’s the Story Morning Glory? Canonical tracks such as Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Smash Mouth’s “All Star” are considered, elevating this podcast episode from merely music celebrity news to True High Art. Bonus “Wonderwall” performance, for Members Only.

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Further Reading

• “How to Play Wonderwall on Guitar (Chords, Tabs, Instructional Videos, Lessons, and More)” on LectureOwl
• “Carrot Top vs. Gallagher” from the Blocks Podcast with Neal Brennen
• Strong Bad Email #36: Guitar, from Homestarrunnerdotcom
• “What Hotel California by Eagles Is Really About” by Lyristoric
• “Super ‘Sonic Saves the World’ World,” Allegedly by Maddy, on SMW Central
• “The Tyger” by William Blake, read by Tom O’Bedlam

In the 21st century, Dame Maggie Smith was celebrated for her portrayals of Hogwarts’s Professor McGonagall and Downton’s Dowager Countess Violet Crawley. But decades before that, she won two Oscars for movies that are now so obscure you can watch them for free on YouTube. What ties together her body of work is a delightful ability to express everything her character can’t say, and to show us how a sense of duty and propriety can restrain us but also empower us. Pete and Belinkie discuss her career highlights and especially California Suite, which won her a second Oscar in 1978 but has not aged well at all (Bill Cosby jokes about drugging someone with sleeping pills, yikes). Wrather makes a special appearance to update us on parenthood and tell us about seeing Dame Maggie on stage.

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Further Reading

• California Suite
• The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie

The Bachelor franchise has been chugging along for more than 20 years now, in a neverending ouroboros of broken hearts and moonlit dinners surrounded by hundreds of tea candles. Audiences want to see the fairy tale romance, and don’t seem to mind the awkward fact that the large majority of Bachelor couples break up shortly after the cameras stop rolling. Now, hot on the heels of the first Golden Bachelor (married in a televised special in January, divorced in April), ABC is giving us 61-year-old widow Joan Vassos and 24 suitors. And Mark, Pete, and Belinkie step out of a metaphorical limo in search of a rose, and some answers. How does aging up the formula change our experience as viewers? Is it okay for these people to want to be on TV, or is that not “the right reasons?” And why does Belinkie insist that this show pairs excellently with Warhammer 40k?

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Further Reading

• Golden Bachelorette’s Jack Says Family Wasn’t ‘Happy’ He Went on Show | Us Weekly
• Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion (eBook)

Overthinking It has been obsessing over, and often lamenting, the Terminator franchise going all the way back to the regrettable 2009 entry, “Terminator Salvation.” The latest entry to the franchise, “Terminator Zero,” is a Netflix animated series and is much better than Salvation and subsequent movies, but not without its issues. Matt, Pete, and the Internet’s Leading Authority on Terminator, Mark, stare deep into the anime eyes of the show’s heroes and villains to unpack its philosophical musings on the human condition, the many reasons why brilliant scientist Malcolm Lee is a terrible dad, and the meta-commentary on a franchise that seems fated to telling the same story of robots chasing humans over and over again.

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Further Reading

• The many, many podcasts and articles on Terminator we’ve released over the years
• “My Wife and My Mother-in-Law”

Beetlejuice is such an iconic character that it’s easy to forget how weird and confusing he is (for starters, his name is actually spelled “Betelgeuse” according to his own tombstone). In this episode, Mark, Pete, Jordan, and Matt Belinkie (your substitute Matt) try to figure out if we’re dealing with a wily trickster demon or an impulsive idiot. We also look at the Deetzes, Manhattan transplants that combine the narcissism of the art world with predatory Reagan-era capitalism… which might actually be grimmer than the eternal DMV of the afterlife. And then there’s Otho, a gay character who seems to be an important stand-in for the gay screenwriter. Ultimately, this is a fun little dark comedy with surprisingly deep insights about the difference between simply BEING alive, and HAVING a life.

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Once Matt Wrather heads off to parental leave, Overthinking It will be staffed entirely by parents. In the last podcast before this happens, this selfsame Impending Dad Matt, Peter Fenzel and Mark Lee each bring their own choice for “End of an Era” culture for discussion. Pete speaks on Ben Stiller playing a Gen Xer making his lasts grasps at youth, paired against the meteorically rising Greta Gerwig in Greenberg; Mark muses on the heady days of Hamilton in vivo; and Matt, in a grand parting stroke to alienate and confound, tells a personal story about a discussion he had 25 years ago about the first part in the Histoire des Treize (a.k.a. The Thirteen) section of La Comédie Humaine: “Ferragus, chef des Dévorants,” by Honoré de Balzac. It is his last joke that is not a dad joke.

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Further Reading

• Greenberg Star Greta Gerwig Steps from the Shadows of Mumblecore from The Guardian, June 4, 2010
• Why Generation Um is Keanu Reeves’ Worst Movie, from ScreenRant
• Overthinking It Podcast episode #628: An Extraordinarily Rich Meal, in which we discuss Hamilton on streaming at the height of That Championship Season
• You Great Unfinished Symphony: the History Behind Hamilton at the Massachusetts Historical Society
• The Thirteen, by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley and Ellen Marriage, from Project Gutenberg
• Mausoleo de Augusto, Piazza Augusto Imperatore, Rome, but who knows who that guy was anyway

Peter Fenzel, Jordan Stokes, and Matthew Wrather examine the Netflix series called The Decameron, which does bear some loose resemblance to Bocaccio’s similarly-titled work of medieval literature.

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Further Reading

• The Decameron (Wikipedia)
• A lecture on The Decameron (YouTube)
• “Parables of the Plague” by Elena Comay del Junco (LARB)
• The Decameron (film) (Wikipedia)

Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Peter Fenzel overthink those despicable Minions. Are they evil because they serve evil, or are they antibodies of a moral universe, because they undermine the evil they serve? What does it mean to be despicable? What fictional characters have made such an impact that we will still see them everywhere in 100 years? And why will the minions gradually conquer all AI training data to dominate future superintelligence?

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Further Reading

• “Minionpalooza: The Rise of Minion Culture” on Polygon
• “How Not Enforcing It’s IP, Universal Made The Minions Ubiquitous and Beloved” on Techdirt
• “TikTok’s Crucified Minion Meme, Explained” on Forbes
• “Funny Minions Best Comedy Songs” on Spotify
• Yogi Bear Parody: “Booboo Kills Yogi: ending

Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, and Mark Lee confront the demons to overthink DOOM. They discuss the risks and successes of the dawn of 3D gaming, the pump-action panache of the DOOM guy and DOOM shotgun, and how and why we never feel fatigued or insulted by a DOOM re-release. Plus bonus discussion of its four-letter capitalized companion: MYST.

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Further Reading

• DOOM + DOOM II Steam Store Page
• “The Pump Action Shotgun: The Sound and the Fury“: old Overthinking Article that touches on the appeal of the DOOM shotgun.

Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink the games of the XXXIII Olympiad in Paris, France. They discuss the opening ceremony, the fractured media landscape which has them consuming the games in various ways, and the tiers of sports you can relate to and can’t.

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Further Reading

• “What Makes the Shot Put Go Far?” (Track and Field Coach)
• The Madwoman in the Attic
• Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink Deadpool & Wolverine, starting with a provocative (G-rated!) question, and continuing through

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Further Reading

• “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel” (Jenny Nicholson on YouTube)

Middle-aged podcasters Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather investigate the “Kamala is Brat” meme and discover that it is actually a record album, such as you can play on a phonograph. They investigate Charli XCX’s BRAT, discussing its style and sound, its lyrical concern, its cultural connections, and the function of “brat” as a way of being in the world.

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Further Reading

• • BRAT on Genius
  • “Reload! A History of The Rewind” (<em>DJ Tech Tools</em>)
  • Essex on Wikipedia

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink Matt’s recent baby shower, and settle on the theme of baby stuff (or “stuffs”) as a peculiar and unique entry in the poetry of stuffs that makes up one’s life.

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted, a parodic film about the 1960s in America (and, incidentally about the invention of the Pop Tart). But they don’t tuck in before they’ve had breakfaast—in a nostalgic prolegomenon (inspired by the film’s nostalgia) they discuss their feelings about breakfast and how kids interact with breakfast before getting to the film’s (something less than trenchant) poking fun at mid-century corporate culture, the space race, and (awkwardly) January 6.

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Further Reading

• Jack LaLanne (Wikipedia)

Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather overthink Beverly Hills Copy: Axel F., discussing its undeserved critical reception (at least by the New York Times), its bemusing but unexpectedly resonant first sequence, the role of accountability and apology in relationships with an asymmetric power dynamic, and its unexpected Downton Abbey moment involving a fictitious hockey league.

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Further Reading

• “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F’ Review: It’s Busted” (NY Times)
• “Fred Rogers Took a Stand Against Racial Inequality When He Invited a Black Character to Join Him in a Pool” (Biography)

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather take another look at music generated by AI diffusion models, which have come a long way. They discuss the possible significance of this new technology and how it fits into our conception of creativity, and they play each other some tunes they’ve prompted.

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Further Reading

• Dirt Road Brew
• Puppy Patrol
• Temple of Taste
• Podcast Theme
• Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (Wikiquote)

And here’s the last time we tackled AI music:

Episode 803: It Is Kind Of Amazing. It Is Also Crap.

Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather overthink Inside Out 2 (2 Inside 2 Out), the anxiety-centered follow up to the 2015 Pixar hit. They both had a pretty difficult experience watching the movie, which was like a 90-minute anxiety attack, but they explore its allegory of the self, the presence and curious absence of the social world in the movie’s account of adolescence, and the quacking absence hanging over every frame of this hockey-centric story.

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Further Reading

• How To Tell If Your Relative Was Really A Keystone Kop

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather consider why the Pope brought comedians including Stephen Colbert, Whoopi Goldberg, and Chris Rock (?!) together at the Vatican and what he had to say to them.

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Further Reading

• “Stephen Colbert and Whoopi Goldberg Met the Pope in the Vatican. No Joke.” (NYT)
• Address of His Holiness Pope Francis to Comedians
• Prayer for Good Humor (St. Thomas More)
• “The story behind the Vatican’s colossal sculpture of Jesus rising from nuclear destruction” (America Magazine)
• “The Resurrection” (Wikipedia)

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink Richard Linklater’s film Hit Man, now streaming on Netflix. Topics include the film’s misreading of Nietzsche, the relationship of the movie to genre (action or romcom), the forays into philosophy and psychology, and how at every turn it ends up being a stranger and darker movie than you expect.

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink Madame Web, now streaming on Netflix, wondering both what on earth this movie is and how it got that way.

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Further Reading

• Form Criticism (Wikipedia)
• Hermeneutics (Wikipedia)

Peter Fenzel (fighting a cold) and Matthew Wrather (fighting anxiety over whether the recording works) follow up on how it felt to lose an episode last week, and overthink the phenomenon of consuming entertainment through short clips on a streaming service.

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Ironically, if I had been less scrupulous in updating the recorder, we wouldn’t have lost the recording.

Hi Overthinkers, it’s Matt Wrather. Owing to a technical problem, we lost part of the audio from the episode we recorded tonight, and for the first time in over fiteen years, we don’t have a new episode to post.

I’m responsible, and I’m so sorry. It’s been a point of pride that we’ve never missed a week, and it kind of breaks my heart that now we have.

We’re so glad you come back and listen to us, and I’m sorry to let you down. We love making the show for you. We’ll be back next week.

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink “Meltdown May”, which leads them to consider all aspects of melting, from whether this too, too sallied flesh would melt, to stopping the world to melt with you, to nuclear meltdowns, to tuna melts. They complicate the standard picture of “solid good, melted bad,” and propose that the cure to our many social ills is the restoration of a vanished social mesoscale which can contain all ingredients in the melting pot.

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Further Reading

• “Meltdown May is Finally Here” (MEL Magazine, Medium)
• “melt” (Etymology Online)
• “Jupiter’s heart is dissolving” (NewScientist)
• “Sonos says its controversial app redesign took ‘courage’” (The Verge)
• “The Best Slow-Cooked Bolognese Sauce Recipe” (Serious Eats)
• “Does Vodka Sauce Really Need Vodka?” (Serious Eats)
• Patois (Wikipedia)
• “Homestyle Bibimbap” (Serious Eats)
• Latent Heat (Wikipedia)
• Bruce Davison (IMDb)
• Modern English, “I Melt with You” (Genius)

Matthew Belinkie joins Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather to talk about his efforts on the Overthinking It YouTube channel and its annual chronicle of the Eurovision Song Contest. We talk about this year’s contest, how our efforts have changed over the years, and the nature of YouTube fame.

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Further Reading

• Wristwatch Revival (YouTube)

Jordan Stokes joins Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather to discuss a New York Times “Critics Notebook” by James Poniewozik decrying the phenomenon of “Mid TV,” shows with impressive pedigrees but muted artistic ambitions.

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Further Reading

• “The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV” (NY Times)
• “Towards a Theory of Television Snackability” (Overthinking It)
• E.R. (IMDb)
• The Anxiety of Influence (Wikipedia)
• Shogun (IMDb)

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather tackle a super-sized episode of Bluey, one that has fans wondering if the creators are bidding farewell to the Heelers. They discuss how the structure and metaphorical language for the episode provide a container for the difficult thematic material (no kid in history has ever loved the idea of moving), but they split on the ending, seeing it either as a pulled punch or else as a moment of almost existential failure for the father character. The brisk trade in Australian spiders is discussed.

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Further Reading

• “The old man lost his horse” (Wikipedia)

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather start from the technology shown in The Three Body Problem and jump off to talk about the extremes of “immersion” in entertainment and of experience, which leads (predictably) to The Matrix, and somewhat less predictably to weight-loss drugs and Romans chapter 7.

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Further Reading

• Mario Perillo, Mr. Italy and the SNL Parody (YouTube)
• “The Game” (ST: TNG Episode)
• Romans 7 (KJV)

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather each bring a topic to discuss, ranging from X-Men ’97 to the social phenomenon of talking about other people’s jet lag to how we lost our love of buying electronics at Radio Shack.

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Further Reading

• Franz Boas (Wikipedia)
• “Jet Lag Sends Brain Ahead A Time Zone, Leaves Kidneys In Another” (ABC News)

Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather are wondering what to do with their idle hands. Specifically, Pete has a question about what activity he could do while supervising his children which would occupy his attention un-greedily, i.e. without rendering him unavailable to parent.

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Further Reading

• Knitting, Crochet, Macramé, Scrimshaw, Decoupage, Papier-mâché

Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather talk tools, arriving at a theory that the tool is an instrument which excludes cases where it should not be used.

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Further Reading

• “Tool” (Online Etymology Dictionary)
• “Tool” (Wikipedia)