Matt Wrather, Mark Lee, and Pete Fenzel keep a promise by overthinking Dog Man. Dog Man is a bigger deal than you think. Year-end bestseller lists for novels overall have had at least one new Dog Man book in them for 7 of the last 8 years. And the composition, themes, and artistic mission of the enterprise deserves as deep a look as we can give it. Enter the Overthinkers.

Matt, Mark, and Pete start broad, cataloguing the series’ unusual modes of style and critique, including a catalogue of the “inadequate moral authorities” that serve as the targets for satire and social commentary across the series. They then zoom in on close readings of the books that redefined the series: A Tale of Two Kitties (the Charles Dickens one) and Dog Man and Cat Kid (the East of Eden one). They discuss the relationship between Dog Man and The Great Books, which is one of influence, reverence, and trenchant criticism. They frame the books as deliberate art objects of physical media. They explore the meta-narrative of Dog Man as an artistic project of the fictional elementary school children George Beard and Harold Hutchins. They delve into Dog Man’s unflinching moral sense, which is one of human connection through artistic and expressive freedom and forgiveness.

Such depth might not be expected from a series so generous with its diarrhea jokes, but Dog Man is a gift that keeps on giving. The three discuss its staggering inconvenient truths about parenthood hidden not-too-deeply amid chaotic and frantic action, its relationship with educational accommodation and neurodiversity (which it carries over from Captain Underpants), and writer Dav Pilkey’s vocabulary of reference from the cinema of the 1930s, from Our Gang to the Three Stooges to the landmark horror-comedy Freaks (Gooba gabba! Gooba gabba!). Also, Big Jim is Jesus.

“Oh boy this is gonna be GREAT!” —Chief

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Further Reading

• • Superman and the Hulk are Great, But Dog Man Reigns as Comics’ Biggest Hero, by Angela Davis on Screenrant, Feb. 2025
  • These Were the Best Selling Books of 2024, by Emily Temple at Literary Hub, January 2025
  • Find Dog Man at the library:
    • A Tale of Two Kitties
    • Dog Man and Cat Kid
  • A Talk with Author Dav Pilkey from Scholastic on YouTube
  • Orphanhood Explored in Dickens, by Anonymous, from Reframing the Victorians on Blogspot
  • The Most Important Word in the World, by Sheila Tuller Keiter, Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2022
  • Freaks Movie Scene | Gooba Gabba Gooba Gabba | Warner Bros Classics on YouTube

Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather report for the first day of school in sweatpants — a garment Matt wore religiously until the sixth grade. Matt has in fact just started a new job, an occasion his boss called “syllabus week”; the swag package waiting at his workstation included a backpack, which seemed somehow apropos.

For Pete, back to school became metaphorical upon college graduation and then stopped being metaphorical again when his kids started school. The carnivalesque revolt against the monthless calendar of adult life has given way to actual backpacks and a frank plea for a return to normalcy after a summer of camps, travel, and a schedule in tatters. What the school year supplies, he argues, is an end to summer wtihout a denial: we’re stopping because something else is happening now, rather than because a parent has said no for the fifteenth time.

If you buy a new notebook this month, establish first why you are filling it. Is it an obligation or an aspiration?

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Further Reading

• Pancakes, Pancakes! (Eric Carle)
• Back to School (Wikipedia)
• “The Second Coming” (Poetry Foundation)
• Philip B. Meggs (Wikipedia)
• Film Art: An Introduction (McGraw Hill)
• “Birches” (Poetry Foundation)
• Mr. Pibb (Wikipedia)
• Civilization series (Wikipedia)
• The Snoopy Show (Wikipedia)
• Ms. Rachel (Wikipedia)
• Trapper Keeper (Wikipedia)
• The Artist’s Way (Wikipedia)
• Stewart Lee: Content Provider (IMDb)
• Aircraft maintenance technician (A&P) (Wikipedia)
• Number Munchers (Wikipedia)
• Saved by the Bell (Wikipedia)

Pete Fenzel and Mark Lee pay tribute to the artistic and cultural legacy of Dolly Parton on the occasion of her passing at the age of 80. They start with her humble origins as told through the similarly humble song “Coat of Many Colors,” noting that many of her big songs lack structural or harmonic complexity. The apparent simplicity of the compositions are of course just strong foundations upon which Parton layers her lyrical mastery, shimmering voice, and her larger-than-life persona.

Pete and Mark also celebrate Parton’s philanthropy, which, in fitting with her music, was often expressed in terms of human connection, rather than some sort of abstract manifesto. Mark also reminisces about the time he took his family to Dollywood, where everyone had a good time, except for when the soot from the massive steam train engine made his toddler daughter cough. Sorry, what were we talking about? Right. Dolly Parton was an amazing musician, a powerful cultural phenomenon, and a generous human being, and we hope this podcast provides you with some new ways to appreciate her legacy.

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Further Reading

• “Coat of Many Colors”
• “Jolene”
• ”9 to 5”
• ”I Will Always Love You”
• “A Lil’ Ole Bitty Pissant Country Place” from ”Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”

Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather don Mets caps and set out for the Valley of the Soul — settling, in the end, for a Rhode Island beach a half-hour from home. They overthink Kyle Gordon’s “Mr Jambo,” a comic river of pastiche that wends from Paul Simon’s Graceland and its South African collaborators through the earnest spiritual filter of Toto’s “Africa.”

Time, Fenzel argues, has made the figure of an ignorant American tourist safe enough to laugh at, but Wrather wonders if (s)he even exists any more, in a world where nobody eats, prays, or loves. Of course Fenzel does all three, at a brand-new, barely-opened car dealership whose coffee machine has no cups from which to partake in the sacrament, but where two or three are gathered around a freestanding popcorn machine.

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Further Reading

• Kyle Gordon – “Mr Jambo” (feat. Barry Bergen) (YouTube)
• “Mr Jambo” lyrics (Genius)
• “Africa” lyrics (Genius)
  • Mount Kilimanjaro (Wikipedia)
  • Mount Olympus (Wikipedia)
• Kyle Gordon – “Selekta (SIDEQUEST REMIX)” (YouTube)
• Kyle Gordon – “Planet of the Bass” (feat. DJ Crazy Times & Ms. Biljana Electronica) (YouTube)
• Kyle Gordon – “We Will Never Die,” live on Good Day New York (YouTube)
• Graceland (album) (Wikipedia)
• Ladysmith Black Mambazo (Wikipedia)
• Tony (2026 film) (Wikipedia)
• “Magical Negro” (TV Tropes)
• A Map for Saturday

Show art: “New Brunswick NJ Skyline at Sunset” by Forevaclevah, licensed under CC BY 3.0. Cropped.

Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather have each read the same few dozen books aloud every night for years, to the point where each one’s consciousness has been permanently altered. You could say it’s been eaten through by a hungry, hungry caterpillar. Without even needing to overthink, they run a five-round snake draft for the ultimate children’s bookshelf.

Three strategies emerge immediately. Mark drafts for utility, opening with Hands Are Not for Hitting and praising Martine Agassi for spending most of the book on what hands are for. Matt drafts for literary quality, which in picture books is inseparable from physical presentation. Where the Wild Things Are earns its place because the illustrations go full-bleed as the forest grows and Max’s ceiling hangs with vines as thick and green as Chaucer’s springtime, bathed by April showers. Pete is the only one actually considering how this team would perform on the court. He drafts for GOAT status and roster balance, taking The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Goodnight Moon back to back, then making the case for Margaret Wise Brown as the most metal children’s author who ever lived, since every book she writes is about DEATH (aka “sleep”).

Also discussed: Louis Menand’s deconstruction of The Cat in the Hat, which Matt has apparently been carrying around since 2002; Mark on I Am Golden and the Asian American picture books he didn’t have growing up in the Deep South; and Pete’s dinosaur encyclopedia, permanently ribboned to page 96.

(Content Warning: This podcast contains no children’s books about pooping.)

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The Bookshelves

Mark

• Hands Are Not for Hitting Martine Agassi, illustrated by Marieka Heinlen
• The Complete Calvin and Hobbes Bill Watterson
• The Going to Bed Book Sandra Boynton
• Dog Man: A Tale of Two Kitties Dav Pilkey
• I Am Golden Eva Chen, illustrated by Sophie Diao

Matt

• Where the Wild Things Are Maurice Sendak
• They All Saw a Cat Brendan Wenzel
• Green Eggs and Ham Dr. Seuss
• Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Bill Martin Jr., illustrated by Eric Carle
• I Will Be Fierce! Bea Birdsong, illustrated by Nidhi Chanani

Pete

• The Very Hungry Caterpillar Eric Carle
• Goodnight Moon Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd
• Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! Mo Willems
• Daniel Goes to the Dentist Alexandra Cassel Schwartz, illustrated by Jason Fruchter
• My Encyclopedia of Very Important Dinosaurs DK

Further Reading

• “Cat People” by Louis Menand (The New Yorker)
• Calvin and Hobbes — licensing (Wikipedia)

Irish actor and musician Glen Hansard died in a motorcycle crash outside Dublin on July 29th, which probably should have resulted in a discussion of his most famous work, the movie Once. Instead, Mark convinced Peter Fenzel and Matt Wrather to watch The Commitments, in which Hansard only has a small part. Something you should know about Mark: when he was in college, he started a classic soul cover band. Some things you should know about The Commitments: it’s a movie about an Irish classic soul cover band, and also one of Mark’s favorite movies of all time.

The panelists start by paying tribute to Hansard and how his busking career lent him ample artistic credibility as a working musician who fostered authentic connection with his audience. From there, they fully commit to the movie discussion, starting with the class / racial identity themes on display and why an Irishman saying “I’m Black and I’m proud” is not as ridiculous or offensive as it may seem in the abstract. 

The panel then turns to a less memorable line from the movie as a jumping off point for analyzing the role of music and the band in the characters’ journeys. An unnamed character cleaning candle wax at a church says, “A lot of work. If you didn’t do it for God, who would you do it for?” In this case, if the “it” is “starting a classic soul band under adverse circumstances with band members often at odds with each other,” the reasons turn out to be multitude and complex: sometimes it’s saving souls, other times it’s saving soul (music), but at the end it’s just good old fashioned self-actualization.

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Further Reading

• The Commitments (film) (Wikipedia)
• Mounted Unit — The History of Horse Patrols in Modern Irish Policing (Seán Daly, Medium)
• Procol Harum, “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (Genius)
• Glen Hansard, “The Parting Glass” (live, 2012) (Stage On Sixth, YouTube)
• Glen Hansard (Wikipedia)
• Roger Ebert’s 1991 review of The Commitments (RogerEbert.com)

Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather convene to dig into two Disney franchises most adults have never watched a frame of: Descendants (kids of Disney villains and heroes at a magical boarding school) and Zombies (Hairspray, but with the Black characters recast as the undead). Like all of Disney’s live-action musicals, these are chasing the generational high of High School Musical, which smashed television and music records and set the template for tween entertainment. That’s what let Disney bridge the gap from “Disney kid” to the lucrative “Disney adult,” who buys the pins, wears the color-blocked cosplay, and drags friends to the parks.

From there the conversation turns into a business-strategy breakdown, covering Disney’s ability to take young actors and turn them into stars (a pipeline dating back to the Mickey Mouse Club) and its unmatched vertical integration for merchandising anything that hits (versus Netflix’s comparatively toothless attempts at experiential tie-ins). More importantly, Disney never overspends on these things; even a guaranteed smash like High School Musical 3 cost only $11 million. These movies look cheap because they ARE cheap, but they deliver where it counts — kid-friendly pop songs, colorful costumes, and choreography from Kenny Ortega himself (the same guy who directed Newsies).

The back half is a close read of the Zombies franchise’s racial-and-otherness allegory: zombie protagonist Zed Necrodopolis, the Z-bands that keep the “monstrous” townspeople in check, and the cheerleading-competition integration plot, plus how each sequel swaps in a new marginalized group (werewolves, aliens, and vegetarian “blood fruit”-eating vampires). Mark pushes on the uncomfortable racial coding baked into the original film, and the group lands on a Zootopia comparison — Disney’s habit of building allegories legible enough for adults to read into, without ever committing hard enough to court controversy. They close out comparing the franchise’s shameless internal-lore expansion (did we really need to meet Smee’s kids?) to the lost art of pure, unpretentious summer schlock, with a shoutout to the Sharknado era as the adult equivalent of what Descendants is doing for tweens.

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Further Reading

• Kenny Ortega – Wikipedia
• How ‘High School Musical’ Broke Records and Boundaries: Interview | Billboard
• DESCENDANTS LORE (the biggest crossover ever)
• Black monstrosity and the rhetoric of whiteness in Disney’s Zombies trilogy, Critical Studies in Media Communication
• The Witching of Ben Wagner

Edit: Reposted due to some technical nonsense.

Peter Fenzel, Jordan Stokes, and Matthew Wrather overthink the critically acclaimed spy dramedy Slow Horses, where Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb commits full-out to the craft of acting by eating the hell out of some noodles. Understandably, the crew focus on Lamb, the day-drinking, noodle-slurping creature of appetite who is a terrible boss and, against all odds, a great spy. He knows the difference between winning a fight by doing something well, and winning a fight by doing nothing poorly. And he anchors a show that knows the  crucial difference between starting with a real chase scene and a fake one.

They also spend some time on  difference between spy shows and cop shows. Cop shows are about maintaining a certain moral order – whether that means protecting an innocent society from wicked criminals, or punishing a wicked society for being wicked. Spy shows are weirdly unconcerned with society. Spy heroes must necessarily fight spy villains: ultimately the world of the spies is a self-contained, self-referential system, in which every plot must be answered by a counterplot, and nobody outside of the spy world has more than a passing importance.

The crew also compare Slow Horses to a handful of other important franchises, such as Law and Order, The Wire, Spy vs. Spy, and Where’s Waldo.

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Further Reading

• Slow Horses, by Mick Herron
• Meditations on Violence, by Rory Miller
• Gary Oldman Eating Noodles Dot Gif

Jordan Stokes and Pete Fenzel mourn the loss of Sam Neill, and celebrate his exceptional skill and technique in imbuing the impossible with a human sense of reality. As of this taping, Sam Neill’s final film project is slated to be Gozilla x Kong: Supernova (to be released in 2027); Jordan and Pete break down why of course he is the actor anyone would want for that, and trace that path through several film roles and evidence from the public aspect of his personal life.

For Sam Neill as well as anyone ever has, looked at nothing, and by the looking, made it real. To the eyes watching the eyes of Sam Neill watching, the fantastical becomes the fantastic. Jordan and Pete discuss this work in, of course, Jurassic Park, but also in horror touchstones Event Horizon and In the Mouth of Madness.

The two then break down other, similar performances that succeed or fail at this technique. Of course there’s Brendan Frasier, whose excellence at it is well known, but further focus and analysis is directed, as it perhaps too rarely is, at The Desolation of Smaug and Bride of Chucky in quick succession.

And finally Jordan and Pete muse on Sam Neill’s excellence at the art of mirroring as it applies to a more practical real-world challenge, the leap of faith toward common understanding, even love, between humans and non-human animals. Sam Neill was a well-known and public animal lover, in particular known for his love for his pet pigs, and Jordan and Pete parse the hope and challenge of such a commitment, from the existential courage to love the unknowable, to the cultural peril of extrapolating familiarity from fiction.

For as the lungs of the triceratops fill and empty, we all rise and fall with the bliss of a child borne in its mother’s dinosaur arms.

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Further Reading

• Sam Neill, Leading Man of Jurassic Park, Dies at 78, by Natasha Frost and Zachary Woolf in The New York Times
• The Sick Triceratops Scene
• The Hunt for Red October: Living in America
• Acting at the unreal to imbue it with reality, examples:
  • Sam Neill Meets the Dinosaurs
  • Sam Neill Loses His Mind Riding a Bus
  • Brendan Fraser vs. the Mummy Army
  • Martin Freeman with Smaug
  • Jennifer Tilly with Chucky
• Three Animated Gifs of Sam Neill Being Held at Gunpoint by What We Are Led to Believe Is Invisible Chevy Chase, from Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), courtesy of fyproprietor on Tumblr
• Research Starter: Ethology, by Michael, A. Steele, 2024, on EBESCO
• What Is It Like to Be a Bat, by Thomas Nagel, Originally Published in The Philosophical Review, Volume 83, No. 4, Oct. 1974, Duke University Press, re-hosted by The University of Pennsylvania
• 10,000 Dreams | 1504 | Sam Neill, from 10,000 Dreams on YouTube

Hey, old friends. Who’s like Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather? Damn few. The crew overthink Merrily We Roll Along, and Mark offers one piece of advice: budget the full two and a half hours in one sitting, and do not, as he did, watch it on your phone in four segments while doing the dishes.

Matt posits that the backwards structure inverts the basic grammar of musical theater, where reprise should follow song. The cut frame story from 1981, a high school graduation, would maybe have hit this note a little too hard, but it does show something about how our youthful experiments calcify into something bombastic and blaring when you sell out. Pete is not convinced, insisting that Frank does not “sell out” so much as get talked into things by people he admires and then punish them for it. This is not Aristotle; there is no unity of action. It only feels like there is because you see the consequences before you see the confusion.

In the end, the characters’ real problem is that they never once stop and have the conversation they need to have. They roll along. So think about the choices you’ve made, and go see Merrily at any high school in America, where production is mandatory and what’s more is approriate, since the “mature” themes are mature in the boring sense, not the sexy sense.

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Further Reading

• Merrily We Roll Along (Wikipedia)
• Streaming on Netflix