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

Mark Lee somehow made it through middle school, high school, and college without ever reading or seeing Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s classic 1949 play. His only context before the curtain came up at the Winter Garden Theater for the Tony Award winning revival currently on Broadway was a vague sense that “it’s about capitalism” and the SNL sketch where Will Ferrell exclaims, “I drive a Dodge Stratus!” By the end of the show, he came away shaken and quaking with anticipation to talk about it with his co-host Pete Fenzel, who’s written his fair share of English papers on the topic and seen several different productions of the play.

Pete and Mark spend much of the episode comparing the current Broadway production starring Nathan Lane with a 2000 production starring Brian Dennehy in the role. Dennehy is a mountain of a man playing a mountain of a man, while Nathan Lane, who currently inhabits the role on Broadway, is compact and elastic, visibly shrinking and growing as the play slides between the broken present and the golden, half-imagined past. The 2000 production has a more naturalistic presentation, while the current one has a more surreal quality, detached from any sense of an actual home or any specific “post-war” period. A Starbucks cup, a 60’s automobile, and a Black attorney appearing before the Supreme Court all have small but significant impacts on the experience of watching this production.

In addition to production choices, Pete and Mark dive deep on the complex interplay between playwriting and psychology, the immigrant-ness of the Lomans, and the perspective of being dads while watching this show. Parenting advice is given, in terms of how not to cope with life’s challenges and pass on trauma to your children.

Correction: although the play was caught up in McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the 1950s, the McCarthy Pete was referencing in this discussion was activist writer Mary McCarthy, who criticized Arthur Miller for hiding the Loman’s Jewishness.

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Further Reading

• Brian Dennehy Death of a Salesman 2000 Showtime TV Movie
• Dysfunctional Family Dinner – SNL
• Bakugan
• Lewy Body Dementia
• “Death of a Salesman”: Deracination and Its Discontents by Julius Novick on JSTOR
• On Mary McCarthy’s criticism of “Death of a Salesman”

Matt Belinkie, Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather broke the One Wish Willow and it paid off, as a slate of fresh horror comedy has captured the attention of the moviegoing public and the zeitgeist at large… but to what end?

Following on Matt and Jordan’s recent two-hander on Backrooms, Belinkie shares his take on Obsession, which has become not just the hit film of the day, but something of a popular moment of connection, speaking to something deep and current in the culture, especially among young people, and particularly young women. To bring folks back into movie theaters together, the current moment in horror comedy seems to speak to not just shared fears, but shared relationships with fear, and a need to mirror to one another an understanding of a fearful reality that might be too seldom honestly discussed in good faith in society at large.

The Overthinkers propose candidates for this resonance, particularly in contrast to the broad cultural distaste for recent power fantasy tentpoles The Mandalorian and Grogu and Masters of the Universe, as well as a nadir for tentpole comedy that seems to accompany this zenith in tentpole horror.

Do you worry about problems? Yearn toward solutions? Veer toward thrill or safety? Listen to the episode, and make your One WIsh come true.

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Further Reading

• Backrooms, Liminal Spaces, and Gen-Z Anxiety, by Joseph Bernstein in the New York Times
• Obsession and the Rise of Incel Horror: When Men’s Entitlement Becomes the Monster, by Emma Cieslik in Ms. Magazine
• Roger Ebert’s 3 ½ star review of Matinee (1993)
• Why Did Hollywood Stop Making Comedies, a Statistical Analysis, by Daniel Parris, from Stat Significant on Substack
• New He-Man Movie is One of 2026’s Biggest Box Office Bombs, by Zack Zwein on Kotaku
• Dying of Laughter: The Intersection of Horror and Comedy by Dani Bethea on Dread Central

Peter Fenzel greets Mark Lee and Matthew Wrather with a rare “triple bang” Mike Breen impression and a report that, fifty-three years later, the New York vibes are good (give or take a flaming bus or two). The crew gaze upon a victory podium where the coach abandoned his speech to lead a rendition of “Who Let the Dogs Out” to overthink their own irrational allegiances.

Mark nurses a still-unhealed 1996 wound over Braves–Yankees; Matt, asked as a boy “what’s your favorite sport” and never “what’s your favorite emotion,” reps a Los Angeles he doesn’t technically live in; and Pete makes the case for hating Victor Wembanyama strictly for basketball reasons rather than anything that would survive contact with reality.

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Further Reading

• The origin of the term “Knickerbocker”
• Charles Barkley & not being a role model
  • His SNL Monologue
• The 1996 World Series (Wikipedia)
• Jose Alvarado (basketball) (Wikipedia)
• Robert Frost, “Carpe Diem”
• “Jose Alvarado after winning the Finals” (YouTube)
• LeLacheur Park at UMass Lowell

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