Podcasta la Vista, Baby! Episode 24 – Maggie

A father’s duty is to protect his daughter.

This month, we’re joined by author and chair of the Puget Sound Socialist Party, Chelsea Rustad to explore perhaps the most unexpected and interesting departure from the expected Schwarzenegger oeuvre, an independent zombie family drama: Maggie!

As civilization buckles under a deadly zombie pandemic, farmer Wade Vogel retrieves his runaway teenage daughter, Maggie, after she’s been infected with the incurable virus. Hoping to spare her an inhumane government quarantine and struggling to cope with his inability to protect her, Wade brings Maggie home to care for her in her last days. As her condition worsens, Wade wonders if he can bring himself to do the unthinkable.

Hex & Violence Episode 4 – The Latest in Pickling Technology

“That’s Jonah Hex, his own damn self. He’s killed more men than Hell has souls.”

After a long absence, we return with our fourth episode! This time, Mike and Casey claw our way through Jonah Hex’s 1993 Vertigo makeover as a weird western horror character in the five issue mini-series Jonah Hex: Two Gun Mojo by writer Joe R. Lansdale and artist Timothy Truman!

After being falsely accused of murdering a fellow bounty hunter, Jonah Hex runs afoul of short-tempered townsfolk, embittered Apache raiders, and Doc “Cross” Williams, a murderous snake oil salesman, grave robber, and conjurer who raises the bodies of the dead and bends them to his will — including the corpse of famed Western folk hero, “Wild” Bill Hickok!

JONAH HEX CONFIRMED KILL COUNT: 65 (+24 this episode)

Black Ops Episode 14 – More Stuff in the Basement

In our new episode, there’s some more stuff to clean out the basement.

Casey loves science fiction, but has grown tired of the ubiquity of sci-fi that treats dystopia, calamity and apocalypse as inevitability.  What happened to looking for positive alternatives and aspirational worlds in our genre media?

Is it a symptom of our inability to imagine that we can overcome the things that make the modern world a scary place, and instead just imagine futures where our problems are exactly the same, or  just amplified?

Mike is Back on the Film and Water Podcast!

DawnoftheDead

Mike makes a third appearance on Rob Kelly‘s Film and Water Podcast, to talk about the 1978 George A. Romero horror classic largely credited with the creation of the zombie apocalypse genre: Dawn of the Dead.

We get into the film’s graphic violence, scathing humor, timely social commentary, and often incredibly downbeat tone. And why this movie has stood the test of time as the quintessential zombie movie.

Check it out!

Radio vs. the Mailbag: You’re No Daryl Dixon!

mad-max-road-warrior-blu-rayThrow a rock in any direction, and you’ll hit someone’s zombie apocalypse survival plan. It’s astounding how ubiquitous it’s become. Everyone these days seems to have an elaborate strategy worked out to stay alive and thrive in the event that civilization falls in the wake of plagues, zombies, robot uprisings, alien invasions, natural disasters, nuclear war or even dragons.

There are even now magazines dedicated to this topic, and I’m not entirely sure how serious they’re intended to be.

But the truth is, it doesn’t matter how high your level is in Fallout: New Vegas, or how many issues of the Walking Dead you’ve read, or how many times you’ve seen the Road Warrior. Most people in the post-apocalypse are kinda…y’know…dead.

That prompts this month’s Mailbag question:

“Be Honest. How would you really fare in a post-apocalyptic setting?”

Here’s what our hosts had to say…

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Episode 3.5 – The Crocodile Tears of Castamere

martinIn our third mini-episode, Mike and Casey break open a cask of the latest geek news and drink deeply.

We commiserate about the public relations disaster that is the new XBOX One. We experience schadenfreude at the recent fan meltdown over Game of Thrones. We lament the growing wave of post-apocalyptic paranoid fetishism. And, we look at your feedback on the topic of spoiler warnings, the spoiled, and those that spoil them.

Episode 3 – Zombies

They’re coming to get you, Barbara….

Mike and Casey join forces with author and Seattle Vine columnist, Libbie Grant, and Ian Gould, the owner of Ace Comics and Games, to pillage the ravaged post-apocalyptic wasteland and argue about those ubiquitous walking corpses!

That’s right, we’re talking about zombies! We discuss their social relevance, the often derivative nature of zombie fiction, and why they shouldn’t be romantic leads. Ever.

Check yourself for bites and be sure to aim for the head!

Music:
“Main Title Theme to the Walking Dead” by Bear McCreary
“The Gonk” by Herbert Chappell

Previously titled: “Rotting Corpse Dick”