Special Topics in Media
Special Topics in Media Studies is a lecture-based podcast that tackles media history one artifact at a time. Each season of the series we will investigate a different mass media theme, medium, or programming genre. While our focus is educational (it is an academic podcast after all), we tailor our conversations toward a broad audience of media enthusiasts.
Episodes
120 episodes
Future Shock Film: I Am Legend (2007)
In a world where society suffers the consequences of global biological contamination, one individual survives as the bridge between our recognizable past and an undetermined future. Box office superstar Will Smith stretches his action-comedy co...
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Season 3
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Episode 13
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1:04:04
Future Shock Film: Greenland (2020)
In a world where extinction events pose an imminent threat, one family enacts their survivalist instincts in a desperate ploy to stay alive. From director Ric Roman Waugh and starring his frequent leading man counterpart Gerard Butler,
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Season 3
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Episode 12
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1:04:02
Future Shock Sound Bite: Literature Review
In this interlude "Future Shock Sound Bite", host Garret Castleberry briefly overviews key academic scholarship selected to accompany the educational approach to studying future shock science fiction film. Future Shock sound bites will function...
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Season 3
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Episode 11
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18:45
Future Shock Film, Interlude
In a world where future shock seemed certain to wind down, one professor will rise from the ashes to teach it again. And bring pizza!In this "Interlude" to the Special Topics in Media season three focus on "Future Shock Fi...
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Season 3
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Episode 10
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28:40
Communicating Fears in Film: "Beetlejuice"..."Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"!
October is upon us! With scary movie season under way we continue our "Communicating Fears in Film" spotlight theme. Host Garret Castleberry is joined by Kyle Hammonds to analyz...
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Season 7
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Episode 27
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1:24:37
Simon Bacon - Horror Scholar, Part 2 (Future Folk Horror/Communicating Fears Crossover)
In this crossover episode, the Special Topics October spotlight series on "Communicating Fears in Film" continues with Part 2 of our conversation with horror scholar Simon Bacon, editor and contributor of the anthology Future ...
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Season 7
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Episode 26
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42:21
Simon Bacon - Horror Scholar (Future Folk Horror/Communicating Fears Crossover)
The Special Topics "Communicating Fears in Film" theme RETURNS with a 2-week limited engagement this October! First up, we transition from our Future Shock Film focus on Terry Gilliam's
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Season 7
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Episode 25
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33:58
Future Shock Film: The Zero Theorem (2013)
In a world where the search for cataclysmic equations unlock universal truths, one dystopian data analyst faces apocalyptic existential crisis. Completing his unofficial dystopian tryptic, famed director
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Season 3
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Episode 9
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1:02:50
Future Shock Film: Roundtable Reflection
In a world where free speech converges with film studies, one group of students fight the pandemic and enter the "forbidden zone" whereby their thoughts on Future Shock Cinema enter the public sphere. Following the accelerated fil...
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Season 3
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Episode 8
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1:15:34
Future Shock Film: The Hunger Games (2012)
In a world where civil war long ago reshaped the Americas as we know them, the "Districts" of Panem grow restless in a fixed resource economy. Their only raison d'tre to be satiated by the annual games in which they embrace a lottery system tha...
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Season 3
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Episode 7
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1:41:42
Future Shock Film: Minority Report (2002)
In a world where free will routinely faces interruption from government intervention, one agent faces the crossroads between duty to the status quo and revelatory transformation. Directed by Steven Spielberg, released in 2002, and starring glob...
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Season 3
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Episode 6
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1:28:39
Future Shock Film: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
In a world where ecological effects from advanced climate change force key shifts in social conditions, humankind enters a new age forged by the advent of AI companionship. In this episode, our Future Shock season burrows deeper into t...
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Season 3
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Episode 5
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1:44:29
Future Shock Film: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
In a world where resource scarcity leads to ravaging globals wars, societal remnants scavenge post-apocalyptic wastelands in search of fuels to sustain what little remains of civilization. Somewhere between projected future failures and unrelia...
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Season 3
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Episode 4
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1:26:41
Future Shock Sound Bite: Literature Overview
In this inaugural "Future Shock Sound Bite", host Garret Castleberry briefly overviews key academic scholarship selected to accompany the educational approach to studying future shock science fiction film. Future Shock sound bites will function...
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Season 3
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Episode 3
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18:27
Future Shock Film: Soylent Green (1973)
In a world where rapid overpopulation leads to accelerated resource scarcity, near-future police detective Thorn (an icy Charlton Heston) investigates a murder that involves an upper-class power player, an escort with limited social mobil...
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Season 3
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Episode 2
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1:08:54
Future Shock Film, Prologue
In a world where film podcasts stagnate along the information super highway, two hosts stand between humankind's filmic past and the futurist projections anticipated by the fading star of a dying mass medium. Special Topics in Me...
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Season 3
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Episode 1
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44:16
2024 Summer Movie Season Super-Pod, Part 2!
Labor Day Weekend marks to social and cultural end point to summertime for many people in the U.S. With this season of change upon us, the voices at Special Topics in Media bid a fond farewell in the most cinematic way we can--talking ...
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Season 10
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Episode 10
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49:43
2024 Summer Movie Season Super-Pod, Part 1!
As the Summer Season winds down, and people everywhere return from vacation to head back to work, school, and everywhere in-between, Special Topics winds back this year's clock to revisit the best (and worst?) of the 2024 Summer Mov...
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Season 10
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Episode 9
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51:14
Film Listology: #81 - 8 1/2
Winding down the categorical "80s" in our "Film Listology" season of Special Topics in Media, hosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry demonstrate intellectual strengths but maybe also foreign film limitations in their evaluati...
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Season 8
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Episode 33
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1:15:14
Film Listology: #82 - Laura
In this episode, we resume our "Film Listology" countdown with #82 on the Listology Super Index, a second film to emerge on the list from director Otto Preminger, 1944's
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Season 8
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Episode 32
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50:12
100th Episode Monologue!
This month Special Topics in Media celebrates its 100th episode with a monologue progress report that details the successful vision of the program, reviewing its epistemological tenets, while peaking ahead as the show begins ...
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Season 9
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Episode 9
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24:57
Film Listology: #83 - Back to the Future
In this episode, our Special Topics "Film Listology" focus captures the spirit of summer movie popcorn fun with the 1985 ti...
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Season 8
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Episode 31
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1:15:40
Film Listology: #84 - The General
In this episode, the Special Topics focus on Film Listology chugs forward with an examination of Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman's Civil War-set action-adventure-comedy, The General (1926). Considered by Keaton among...
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Season 8
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Episode 30
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35:00
Film Listology: #85 - Once Upon a Time in the West
In this episode, hosts Garret and Scott weigh the artistic beauty of Sergio Leone's 1968 masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West, and compare it against the film's lower profile as a pop culture artifact. Do fewer distribution ...
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Season 8
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Episode 29
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43:20
Film Listology, Reveal Episode! #85-81
In our July RETURN to the Film Listology experiment, Scott McMurry reveals the next five films currently ranked by the analytics super index. What movies emerge as the Dialogic Duo debate the #85-81? Should each of these be canonized in the Top...
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Season 8
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Episode 28
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42:15
