In our latest fun-sized chat with Tobiah Panshin, we dig into the topics that really matter to working people, like the media depiction of Clowns, and how it’s affected their public perception. Is the happy clown character now a totally dead concept?
We briefly dive into the phenomenon of the Simpsons, and how what was once a controversial program has survived long enough to see an entire culture change around them. We pick at how the experiences of comic book stores and video arcades have fundamentally changed since we were children.
And finally, in a reaction to a recent Rob Kelly podcast, we ask: how can we make obnoxious people shut up in a movie theater?
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I have to say, your point about Homer Simpson being a guy who owns a house without a high school education, working as an unskilled (or semi-skilled?) laborer and supporting a stay-at-home wife and three kids was just as valid when the show first aired as it is now. I recall joking about that with friends back in the early 1990s (just after college – sheesh, I’m old). The same goes for Al Bundy in Married with Children: a shoe salesman with two kids whose wife doesn’t have a job, but with a pretty nice house in an apparently pretty nice neighborhood in Chicago. Even back then, in the late ’80s, that was something that was mostly implausible – it was a just a sitcom convention that families lived in homes in the suburbs.
I liked Solo, by the way…