Matt Belinkie takes the hosting chair for the first time in nearly 20 years of the Overthinking It Podcast, an event so cosmically disorienting that he and Jordan Stokes spend several minutes trying to figure out which of the regular hosts they’re each a bizarro duplicate of. And that sets the scene for Backrooms, the A24 horror film directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, adapted from an internet phenomenon that began as a single photo of a Hobby Town under construction posted to 4chan.

This movie, in some ways, is not what you’d expect to get when you give a solo Youtube creator the budget to go big. Because Kane actually chooses to go smaller, rejecting an early screenplay focusing on a shadowy corporation exploring the complex and narrowing his focus to two people: Clark, a divorced, failing furniture-store-owner-who-wanted-to-be-an-architect, and his therapist Mary, who turns out to be — arguably — the actual main character because she’s the only one who gets flashbacks. Building on the lore, the Backrooms turns out to be a psychic funhouse mirror that makes flawed copies of whatever (or WHOever) it makes contact with. It starts with a pile of furniture with too many legs and eventually leads to the horrifying “still lives” — warped shells of human beings who don’t even complain when you eat them. While most people would run for the exits, Clark finds this world where he’s finally in total control more and more seductive. Is it messing with his mind, or was he twisted inside to begin with?

Also discussed: Silent Hill 1 vs Silent Hill 2, the film as a critique of capitalism and/or AI, and why the inevitable Backrooms 2 faces the Lost problem of having to eventually cash the mystery check.

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Further Reading

• The Backrooms (Found Footage)
• The Oldest View
• People Still Live Here

Matt, Pete, and Mark donned their discursive beskar armor and swore an oath to never take off their podcasting helmets before going to the theater to watch The Mandalorian and Grogu. This is the way, we were told. And yet despite Baby Yoda’s cuteness and the surprising depth of the incredibly swole Rotta the Hutt, we all found the movie to be unsatisfying for many different reasons. Mark argues that the movie was fundamentally set up to fail after Mando was denied the samurai/cowboy path by his corporate overlords and forced to take custody of a small child. Pete found the action sequences empty and pointless, noting that Mando acts like a Nazi hunter without any real internal conflict. In a surprise twist, Matt actually wished there were more Mandalore-lore, or at least any sort of depth to the plot and character development. Everyone agreed that Ludwig Göransson’s score was the high point of the movie. Maybe go listen to that on Spotify instead of watching this movie. Or just watch Season 2 of The Mandalorian again.

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Further Reading

• The Mandalorian and Grogu soundtrack on Spotify
• The Mandalorian Season 2 on Disney+

Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather follow their discussion of Zizek’s theories of cinema and desire to a definitive practice of cinema and desire, the late 90s teen romcom classic, Ten Things I Hate About You. Discussing a movie that not so much “holds up” as “remains excellent despite its deplorably cringe rap scene,” the three celebrate the movie’s craft along with its art, breaking down its style of iconic visual storytelling that make its comic types alongside its heartfelt leads feel resonant and effortless.

Recapping the key structural expectations of 16th and 17th century theatrical moralizing and the ways Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew falls shorter than short by modern standards (mostly around gender), the three delve into how Ten Things strives to rebuild a classic the way it should be, while running into its own lampshaded moral inadequacies, also characteristic of its time (mostly around race).

But even that fails to undermine legendary work by an all-star cast, led by immortal turns by Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles. Sometimes you write “iconic” more than once because it is the best word for the situation. As too are the film’s wall-to-wall needle drops.

All that plus consideration of hot-tub-as-luxury, and also balcony-as-luxury, not to mention that great yonic privilege indicator: hot-tub-on-balcony-as-luxury, which may or may not have been all that expensive 27 years ago. But this podcast is not “10 things I hate about inflation.” That’s every other podcast.

For your own challenge, join us on the Discord with your own version of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 141: “In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes.” And see if you can one-up a fictional 90s high schooler and write an actual sonnet.

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Further Reading

• 10 Things I Hate About You
• Written by
  • Karen McCullah Lutz
  • Kirsten Smith
• Heath Ledger
• Taming of the Shrew
• “The Taming of the Shrew – Meryl Streep – Raul Julia – Kiss Me Petruchio – 1978 Subs – Remastered 4K” (YouTube)
• The English Vogue of Prologues and Epilogues, by Autrey Nell Wiley, in Modern Language Notes, Volume 47, No. 4, April 1932, on JSTOR
• Julia Stiles
• List of Awards and Nominations Received by Allison Janney
• “Hypnotize” (YouTube)
• “10 Things I Hate about You” (The Poem)
• Shakespeare’s Sonnet 141 (Wikipedia)

Peter Fenzel, Jordan Stokes (for his sins, an academic), and Matthew Wrather overthink The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, a film essay written by and starring Slovenina philosopher/psychoanalyst(?) Slavoj Žižek. Žižek has forgotten more about Lacanian psychoanalysis than Lacan ever knew, and that makes this film essay (and its spiritual prequel The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, also directed by Sophie Fiennes, sister of He Who Must Not Be Named) a wild ride. Someone get this man a Kleenex. At the intersection of film, politics, and culture, Žižek’s offers provocative, not to say unhinged, takes on how cinema shapes and reflects cultural ideology.

But at least we get to hear directly from an academic figure whom Wrather is always name-checking. And yeah, he kinda does have a point about Titanic.

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Further Reading

• Slavoj Žižek – Wikipedia
• The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (IMDb)
• The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (IMDb)
• Lacanian Psychoanalysis – Wikipedia
• Post-structuralism – Wikipedia
• Jaws – Wikipedia
• Titanic – Wikipedia
• The Searchers – Wikipedia
• Taxi Driver – Wikipedia
• Sophie Fiennes – Wikipedia

Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather emerge from the toxic jungle to save humanity from its warmongering ways through incredible acts of bravery and self-sacrifice. Inspired by Mark’s successful family trip to the movies to watch My Neighbor Totoro, the Overthinkers turn their attention to a different Studio Ghibli film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Although it has many more stabbings and weapons of mass destruction than Totoro, both movies do feature at least one adorable woodland creature.

The panel explores the many artistic and thematic elements that makes this movie such a timeless classic: Hayao Miyazaki’s mastery of the canvas, expressed in the deliberate motion of drifting clouds and the kinetic geometry of the wind itself; Joe Hisaishe’s sweeping and stylistically diverse score; the vascular horror of the God Warrior embryo; and the symbolic power of a last bastion of humanity sheltering in a wrecked vessel, under siege from all sides.

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Further Reading

• • Watch Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind on HBO Max
  • Steven Chow: Actor, Producer, Writer
  • Joe Hisaish: Composer for many Studio Ghibli movies
  • Did Hayao Miyazaki really send a katana to Harvey Weinstein as a threat?

“Let them cook,” they said. So we did, and we watched. Matt Wrather and Peter Fenzel welcome the third season of “24 in 24,” a serialized one-day reality cook-off that is both the farthest and closest distance among cooking shows from actual cooking. Inspired, they track their personal tastes and influences in cooking in life and on the screen.

From the Championship Season rise of Guy Fieri’s Tournament of Champions and the era of cooking competition it has ushered in, back to the stand and stir classics of their childhoods, Matt and Pete talk about what is real about the depictions of food on TV, what is fantasy, and what comes all the way around again. They discuss their methods for making omelettes, their small-screen favorites, and at one point compare Yan Can Cook to streaming an EVO Fighting Game Tournament.

They also venture into the comforting tangible world of physical cookbooks; their favorites for guidance, their favorites for storytelling, and why Shaq is smiling so much holding that enormous cheeseburger. Why wouldn’t he?

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Further Reading

• Watch a Sneak Peek: ‘24 in 24’ Season 3 Comes to Food Network With Major Twists: Here’s everything you need to know (for some definitions of “you need to know”) on Food Network, April 8, 2026
• Guy Fieri Shares Inspiration for Food Network’s Groundbreaking Tournament of Champions, by Walter Scott on Parade, February 27, 2022
• “Stand and Stir” no more: Food Network hosts are mastering the art of the short-form cooking tutorial, by Ashlie D. Stevens on Salon, November 23, 2016
• How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food, by Mark Bittman on goodreads
• Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, by Michael Ruhlman on goodreads
• Shaq’s Family Style: Championship Recipes for Feeding Family and Friends, by Shaquille O’Neal, Rachel Holtzman, Michael Silverman, and Matthew Pierkarski, on goodreads
• Auguste Escoffier and his classic, Le guide clinarire, on Wikipedia
• Let her cook, on reddit

Matt Belinkie and Peter Fenzel gather to kick off summer movie season the only way they know how: by completely failing to talk about the movies they planned to discuss and instead spending over an hour unpacking the mythological architecture of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Along the way they ask the questions no one asked them to ask: Why doesn’t Rosalina just go find Peach? What are the stars even for? And why did Bowser let his son build a universe-destroying gun without so much as a stern talking-to?

The hosts argue that the Mario movies aren’t really psychological dramas but mythological ones, stories where Peach’s lost star-sister and Bowser’s tragic indulgent-dad arc operate less like character beats and more like foundational symbols of the civilization that takes its children to the movies. Bowser, it turns out, may be the antithesis of Mario and Donkey Kong’s distant fathers from the first film. He’s so desperate to be liked by Bowser Jr. that he’d let the fabric of reality unravel rather than enforce a bedtime. He doesn’t help his kid grow up, he reverts to his villainous archetype.

From there, the conversation pinballs into the broader question of how Hollywood adapts things that were never designed to make sense. The 1993 Super Mario Bros. film is held up as the cautionary tale — a movie agonizing over how to justify two plumbers stomping on the heads of mutant goombas (although to be fair, a live action Mario movie was always an uphill battle). The hosts triangulate between three adaptation philosophies (the Grounded, the Sonic Hybrid, and the Full Embrace) and wonder where the upcoming live-action Legend of Zelda will land given that its audience wants more lore, not less.

Finally, the conversation drifts — as these things do — into a long reverie about Saturday morning cartoons, the scarcity of media in the pre-streaming era, Turbo Teen’s Cronenbergian transformation sequence, and the surprising revelation that GoBots actually came first. Plus: a preview of Dune: Part Three and whether Dune Messiah’s deliberately unsatisfying anti-climax can survive the jump to a summer blockbuster.

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Further Reading

• Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore | Rotten Tomatoes
• Moana 2 was originally a Disney+ TV series
• Bowser Jr.
• Dry Bowser
• “Do the claws hurt when they come out?”
• Saturday Morning Cartoon Schedules Archive (Wikipedia)
• Turbo Teen Transformation Supercut
• “Phantom Pilot” | ALF: The Animated Series | FULL Episode: S1 Ep1
• GoBots predated Transformers

Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather 10x the company stock price by announcing a pivot to the lucrative lithium refinement services sub-industry, for which they have no expertise, equipment, or preparation, figuring the market will reward them anyway.

In a week dominated by the bubbly news of former environmentally conscious shoe company allbirds announcing its quixotic and lucrative “pivot to AI,” the Overthinkers discuss pivots major and minor, personal and cultural. To ground the discussion, they consider “The City,” a new-style video from a long-running YouTube Channel Historia Civilis, better known for specific narratives of narrower historical events. Is this a pivot? Is  ir more or less than one? With the memory of the History Channel not fully faded, is there something about histrotainment that lends itself especially to pivots?

Inevitably the gaze turns inward, to our own beloved show, its constancies and changes, and whether or if it ought to chase some greater or lesser change. For now, it is more of the same, which we all love in a world with one foot planted, spinning in circles.

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Further Reading

• “Sneaker Company Allbirds Plans to Pivot to A.I. Yes, A.I.” (NY Times)
• “Ens***ification” (Wikipedia)
• “The City.” (Historia Civilis)
• “The Battle of the Axona (57 B.C.E.)” (Historia Civilis
• What Happened to the History Channel? by darknite125 (Funk’s House of Geekery)
• Private Equity’s Quiet Takeover of YouTube Reshapes Online Media, by Ernes Berna Killic (Türkiye Today, Jul 24, 2025)

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)