Episode 500 – Nostalgia Bait

10 Years and 500 Peaks and Valleys of Pop Culture

This week on the podcast, Brian and Darryl celebrate the Infamous Podcast’s most Infamous Milestone yet… 500 Episodes. Here, they will discuss how the pop culture landscape has changed since July 2015.

Episode Index

Intro: 0:07 Nostalgia: 5:00

The Rise and Fall of Pop Culture

Five hundred episodes in, Brian and Darryl have seen some things. Chief among them: the slow realization that Hollywood learned absolutely the wrong lessons from its biggest successes.

Take Marvel. Once upon a time, this was the gold standard. The MCU built toward Avengers: Endgame like it mattered, because it did. When nostalgia showed up, it was earned. Even the contentious stuff, like Captain Marvel or the very “look around, ladies” A-Force moment, happened inside a franchise people still trusted. Then the Disney+ floodgates opened. Too many shows, too little focus, and suddenly big ideas like Doomsday didn’t feel epic. They felt panicked. The machine kept pumping content, but the soul quietly clocked out.

Spider-Man: No Way Home briefly reminded everyone how this is supposed to work. Nostalgia wasn’t the point. Story was. Seeing multiple Spider-Men together actually meant something, and for a minute, Marvel felt dangerous again. Then everyone immediately tried to copy the trick without understanding why it worked.

Star Wars didn’t even get that far. Somehow, with the original cast alive and willing, the sequel trilogy never once put Luke, Leia, and Han on screen together. Not once. It’s arguably the biggest fumble in modern blockbuster history. Nostalgia wasn’t used to unite fans. It was used like window dressing, leaving audiences staring at the screen thinking, “How did you miss that?”

Indiana Jones followed the same road into the ditch. Instead of honoring what Indy stood for, the franchise tried to modernize the wrong things, misunderstand its own appeal, and slowly sand down the character until nothing recognizable was left. The so-called “Phoebe Waller effect” isn’t about one person. It’s about Hollywood confusing quippy cynicism and tonal shifts with actual evolution and then acting shocked when audiences check out.

And that’s the real takeaway here. Nostalgia can’t save a floundering global box office. Audiences aren’t idiots. They know when they’re being sold a memory instead of a story. Recognition has replaced risk, and comfort IP has replaced creativity. The result is a lot of familiar logos and a shocking lack of excitement.

And then there’s Dexter, quietly walking into the room and embarrassing half of Hollywood.

Instead of screaming “remember this?” every five minutes, Dexter did something radical. It changed the setting, brought in new characters, raised the stakes, and kept the core of the character intact. Same morally broken serial killer, new problems. No endless callbacks. No cosplay storytelling. Just character, consequence, and actual intent.

Which is wild, because Dexter figured out the thing billion-dollar franchises still can’t. If the only thing your revival has is memories, you don’t have a revival. You have a reunion tour. Dexter wasn’t trying to recreate Miami or trick audiences into nostalgia dopamine. It trusted that people missed the character, not the wallpaper.

So while Marvel is throwing multiverses at the wall, Star Wars forgot to put its Trinity in the same room, Indiana Jones got power-washed into irrelevance, and DC is still arguing with itself, Dexter just showed up, changed the scenery, and reminded everyone how this is actually done.

Same Dexter. New playground. No panic. No apology tour.

Five hundred episodes later, Brian and Darryl aren’t mad that pop culture changed. They’re annoyed that it changed this lazily. Because if there’s one thing a decade of podcasting proves, it’s this: people don’t stop loving franchises. Franchises stop loving their audiences.

And yeah… we’re still talking about it.

One more note from Darryl…

 

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