Special Topics in Media

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 decisions speak to fictional themes and real-w...

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 Gotham City landscape. With its styl...

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 while also reinterpreting the psychological...

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 the real-world Cold War in 1986, Miller posit...

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 Dark Knight Returns (1986).  Each episo...

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 like an echo of Hollywood's Studi...

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 audiences thirty years after its release. The d...

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 Anatomy lay the groundwork...

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 of the movie circulating in private releas...

This year marks the critical peak in Christopher Nolan's quarter century of commercial filmmaking. In this episode, cohosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry wind up the countdown clock to consider the wide-reaching cultural significance of Nolan's 2010 blockbuster Inception. Written and directed by Nolan, co-produced by Nolan and career-life partner Emma Thomas, and distributed by Warner Bros., Inception "wowed&q...

In this Special Topics in Media Film Listology reveal episode, hosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry unveil the films results quantified by the McMurry SuperIndex (MSI) at ranking #90-86. Accompanying each entry, Scott provides data points for contextualizing each film's placement in the running, just as Garret reacts to the film's poll position as a cultural artifacts worthy of topical assessment. Which films land i...

Continuing our Graphic Design and Portfolio Management mini-series, host Garret Castleberry introduces listeners to  graphic designer Caleb Cole. An alumni of Oklahoma Baptist University, Caleb unpacks his formal educational journey and professional training in visual design, and thoughtfully individualizes his experience in ways that will allow listeners to learn about the interests and motivations that drive his early career succ...

In this extension to our Graphic Design and Portfolio Management mini-series, host Garret Castleberry connects with fellow academic and chair for the division of art and design at Oklahoma Baptist University, Corey Lee Fuller. Corey discusses the intricacies of a life (and lifestyle) devoted to art and graphic design. He helps unpack the evolution of art into contemporary professions like painting, illustrating, and integrated desi...

In this episode, Special Topics in Media bridges two themes tied to our Season 9 emphasis. Seasons 9 emphasizes two distinct professional arenas of digital communication, podcasting and graphic design. This week we blend and blur those words. We sit down with emerging graphic design artist Allison Garner. Alli shares parts of her creative journey, a somewhat untraditional path of artistic discovery that continues to gain momentum. ...

In this episode, the Media Methods and Content Creation mini-series welcomes Dr. Christine Becker, co-host and co-producer of the Aca-Media Podcast. As she explains, Aca-Media provides a cross-disciplinary series that serves as an mediated brand extension for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS).  Dr. Becker then walks us through Aca-Media's collaborative production process, providing key insights into the attentive...

This week we return to our Media Methods and Content Creation mini-series. Host Garret Castleberry interviews Scott Hardy and Cam Smith, cohosts of SpyHards -- A Spy Movie Podcast. Scott and Cam reveal the origins of their multimedia partnership and explain how their participatory roles within fan culture helped birth their current mission to engage audiences with the history of spy cinema.


Hosts: Garret Castleberry...

"What is real? How do you define, real?" In this episode, cohosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry unpack the wide-reaching cultural significance of 1999's The Matrix. Written and directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, produced and distributed by Warner Bros., The Matrix redirected popular cinema for the 21st Century through its ingenious remixing of philosophy, theology, and mythology baked into a dystopian actio...

This week the Film Listology season of Special Topics in Media continues with an all-timer that has evolved from lowbrow crowd-pleasing mainstream B-movie from 20th Century Fox and relatively unknown director upon release, Sir Ridley Scott, to a "Top-Shelf Classic" that finds increasing cultural cache for its simplicity, elegance, ingenious conception, and nightmarish aesthetics.

A.....L......I......E.....N.....<...

The Film Listology season continues with a welcome break from recent genre form.  Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry revisit Woody Allen's Academy Award Winner for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Original Screenplay from 1977, Annie Hall. The film captured the hearts of film critics and belongs in the pantheon of great "New York movies". Indeed, much of writer-directer Allen's oeuvre became...