Special Topics in Media

Special Topics in Media continues its RETRO REWIND Season 2 focus on writer/artist Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. In this episode, Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry analyze the various mass media adaptions and textual legacy of Miller's DKR. While some may contend Miller's muddied pages belong to a bygone era, it's continuous impact on the caped crusader show no

In this episode, the Special Topics in Media RETRO REWIND Season 2 focus on Batman: The Dark Knight Returns winds down. We close our our literary focus and cultural analysis of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns with careful consideration of its text, context, author, and audience. Specifically, the dialogic duo explore facets of Miller's narrative form and how these literary decis

In this RETRO look back at Season 2 of Special Topics in Media, hosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry explore the narrative discourse emanating out of the pages of Frank Miller's seminal superhero spectacle, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. The dialogic duo discuss "Book 3" in which an aged Bruce Wayne comes to terms with the limits of his mythic presence across the dystopian

In this continuation of our Season 2 RETRO REWIND, Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry deepen their analytic criticism of Frank Miller's iconoclast graphic novel released as a comic book mini-series, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. In this episode, the dialogic duo further denote the cultural context in which Miller's Batman tale draws upon certain social anxieties of the time wh

In this RETRO SEASON of Special Topics in Media, host Garret Castleberry winds back the podcasting clock to the quarantine months of the 2020 global pandemic. The Comics Studies mini-series focuses on what many consider the great stand-alone superhero story ever told, Frank Miller's future shock crime thriller, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Released in four parts near the end of

In this "Prologue" preview to our RETRO SEASON of Special Topics in Media, host Garret Castleberry sits down with Scott McMurry to discuss one of our earliest seasons for Special Topics in Media. The dialogic duo offer a brief framework for the next mini-season on deck, a conversation series covering one of the most influential comic books in history, Frank Miller's Batman: The Dar

Our Film Listology exploration of variability in the cultural significance of film history continues with consideration of director George Roy Hill's ragtime-sounding, depression era "big con" feature The Sting (1973). A winner of seven Academy Awards and a top commercial earner in the year of its release, The Sting provided audiences of 70s cinema a populist escapism that feels li

On this episode, the Film Listology voyage sails onward with the commercial zenith of Disney's 2D Animation Studios era, The Lion King. Released in 1994, The Lion King handed the Mouse House one of its biggest hits of the decade, and more importantly, provided the kind of four quadrant entertainment capable of sustaining an intellectual property engine that continues to influence a

This week Special Topics continues its Film Listology focus on the '80s. No, not that '80s but 'an' '80s nonetheless. Hosts Garret and Scott discuss Otto Preminger's 1959 courtroom crime drama Anatomy of a Murder. In some ways, the film functions as a precursor to the #TrueCrime movement that will dominate popular interest in the late twentieth and twenty-first century. Does Anatom

This week the Special Topics in Media Film Listology season returns to a silent era heavyweight in Hollywood history, Charlie Chaplin. Cohosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry examine 1921's The Kid, a film written, produced, and directed by Chapline, who also wrote and conducted the film's score.The Kid ebbs and flows through film history, which resulted in numerous versions o