Imaginary Worlds
Imaginary Worlds sounds like what would happen if NPR went to ComicCon and decided that’s all they ever wanted to cover. Host Eric Molinsky spent over a decade working as a public radio reporter and producer, and he uses those skills to create thoughtful, sound-rich episodes about science fiction, fantasy, and other genres of speculative fiction. In this award-winning podcast, Eric talks with filmmakers, screenwriters, novelists, comic book artists, game designers, and anyone who works in the field of make-believe about how they craft their worlds. He also talks with academics and fans about why we suspend our disbelief, and what happens if the spell is broken. Imaginary worlds may be set on distant planets or parallel dimensions, but they are crafted here on Earth, and they’re always about us and our lived experiences.
Episodes
June 17, 2026 • 36 mins
In honor of the 250th anniversary of the USA, we are doing a series of mini stories across two episodes that explore American toys and games. This week, we look at early childhood objects that became vehicles of the imagination. I talk with Michelle Parnett-Dwyer, senior curator at the Strong National Museum of Play, about how the origin of the Radio Flyer Wagon. Author Michael Kimmel tells me about his great-grand uncle who invent...
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June 3, 2026 • 37 mins
Anime and manga are a global phenomenon, and their popularity continues to grow. Many of these stories are populated by supernatural beings called yōkai. Even though yōkai can be portrayed as ghosts, demons, or monsters, they're rarely purely good or evil. We trace the history of yōkai from ancient folklore to Studio Ghibli films and shows like Dan Da Dan. I talk with scholars Kaitlyn Ugoretz, Deborah Shamoon, and Michael Dylan Fos...
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May 20, 2026 • 37 mins
Charles R. Saunders loved Tarzan as a kid, but he was also repulsed by the racism in those books since Charles was Black. So he created a counter narrative about a warrior named Imaro who lived in a fictionalized version of precolonial Africa. Charles had invented a new subgenre of sword and sorcery that he called sword and soul. His books were groundbreaking in the 1980s, but he was also way ahead of his time. I talk with Milton D...
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May 6, 2026 • 39 mins
Pop culture has been full of Jekylls and Hydes: Bruce Banner and The Hulk, Norman Bates and Mother, Walter White and Heisenberg, The Nutty Professor and Buddy Love. They all echo the archetype that Robert Lous Stevenson established 140 years ago in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I explore at how these variations reflect different ideas about duality, depending on how “bad” the Hydes are and what the Jekyll...
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April 22, 2026 • 43 mins
John Watson is a former army doctor who became a true crime podcaster when he met a consulting detective named Sherlock Holmes. You can hear about the cases they’ve solved in the podcast Sherlock & Co. Sound familiar? Holmes and Watson may have been enshrined in pop culture for over 130 years. But their adventures feel fresh and relevant in the audio drama Sherlock & Co – which masquerades as a true crime podcas...
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April 8, 2026 • 40 mins
Imaginary Worlds has reached another milestone – 300 episodes! We already celebrated the 200th episode and the 10th anniversary of the show, but in those episodes, we mostly kept the spotlight off ourselves. This time around, my assistant producer Stephanie Billman and I reflect on how the podcast has impacted us. I often joke that the show feels like a train that I’m riding, and I’m laying down tracks as I go. So...
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March 25, 2026 • 38 mins
When I interviewed Andy Weir in 2021 about his novel Project Hail Mary, he told me that the movie adaptation was already being planned starring Ryan Gosling. The big question was how would they bring the alien character of Rocky to life. Would they use CGI or practical effects? Now that the film is in theaters, we have the answer. While there is some use of digital effects, Rocky is mostly performed by the puppeteer James Ortiz. Ja...
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March 11, 2026 • 37 mins
Gene Roddenberry’s name is synonymous with Star Trek, but he relied on a team to bring his vision to life. Most of his writers were men with one exception, the trailblazing Dorothy Fontana. Professionally, she went by D.C. Fontana to counter the belief that women couldn’t write genres like war, Westerns or sci-fi. Fontana became story editor and wrote some of the most beloved episodes of The Original Series, became the ...
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February 25, 2026 • 42 mins
Imagine if Bruce Wayne had no money, if Superman grew up on Krypton and came to Earth with emotional scars, or if Wonder Woman had been raised in Hell. Welcome to the Absolute Universe – a dark parallel universe created by DC Comics in 2024. The idea of a parallel universe is not new to comic books, but what is surprising has been the success of the Absolute Universe. Some of the Absolute versions of superheroes have been out...
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February 11, 2026 • 40 mins
Sinners got a historic 16 Academy Award nominations, which was remarkable for a film with vampires. But the film is also a rich exploration of race, religion, culture and music in 1930s Mississippi. Professor Yvonne Chireau played a key role behind the scenes. She’s a historian of the spiritual tradition of hoodoo. Since hoodoo and voodoo have long been reduced to horror tropes, she was brought on as a consultant. She also wo...
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January 28, 2026 • 37 mins
Scarlet Hollow is a successful indie video game – and that’s no small feat. It’s been a long journey, and the game is made almost entirely by two people: Abby Howard and Tony Howard-Arias of Black Tabby Games. Along the way, they even took a break to make another hit game called Slay the Princess. I talk with Abby and Tony about how animating Abby’s drawings allowed them to build a game where the players hav...
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January 14, 2026 • 36 mins
Darby McDevitt is a narrative director and writer at Ubisoft . He’s worked on multiple games in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, which spans time periods from Ancient Greece to Victorian England. But what does it mean to be a writer on a massive video game where your character is mostly running, climbing, jumping and fighting? The key to his work lies in historical research, but he is sometimes torn between what would ac...
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December 17, 2025 • 41 mins
In my annual audio drama, I interview several folklore figures who are synonymous with the holiday season outside America -- but they’ve been overshadowed by the cultural juggernaut of Santa Claus. So they’re on a tour to reintroduce themselves. While I went into this press junket with the best of intensions, some of my interviews went off the rails. It turns out when a supernatural being has been around for centuries, ...
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December 3, 2025 • 40 mins
When I was growing up, Bigfoot appeared regularly on the
covers of supermarket tabloids, so I assumed he was a joke. But I’ve discovered that he’s part of a larger and even stranger world of cryptids – creatures that people believe are real but haven’t been scientifically verified. Cryptids are having a cultural moment, and they’re a vital part of folklore. Native Alaskan storyteller James Dommek Jr. d...
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November 19, 2025 • 40 mins
As longtime listeners know, I worked in the animation industry before switching careers and going into broadcasting. Today’s episode features a trio of conversations that trace the history of animation in my lifetime, and my life in animation. The interviews come from Between Imaginary Worlds, a chat show that’s available exclusively to listeners who pledge $5 a month or more on Patreon.
Act I: I bond with comic book ...
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November 5, 2025 • 34 mins
When director Guillermo del Toro asked Tamara Deverell to be the production designer on his film adaptation of Frankenstein, she had a good idea of what he wanted. Del Toro had been dreaming of making a Frankenstein movie for years, and she had worked with him on several projects before. She told me they’re so much sync, “I find with Guillermo, it’s not speaking in words, it’s speaking with images.” Bu...
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October 22, 2025 • 41 mins
In honor of the spooky season, we present two monstrous origin stories --Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. We know when these books were written in the 19th century. But what inspired the imaginations of the rebellious teenager Mary Shelley, or the beleaguered theatrical promoter Bram Stoker? I talk with biographer Charlotte Gordon and Professors Gillen D'Arcy Wood and Ron Broglio about how “T...
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October 8, 2025 • 35 mins
In the 1950s, the avant-garde music scene in New York and the movie studios of Los Angeles might have seemed like opposite ends of a cultural spectrum. But they came together (and blew apart) when MGM hired Louis and Bebe Barron to write the score for the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet. It was the first all-electronic score for a Hollywood film, but not everyone was ready for the future of film music. I talk with Louis’ son ...
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September 24, 2025 • 37 mins
Movies that change cinema often come from outsiders – whether it’s Orson Welles making Citizen Kane or George Lucas making Star Wars a.k.a. Episode IV: A New Hope. The excellent graphic novel Lucas Wars by artist Renaud Roche and writer Laurent Hopman just came out in English (the original French title is Les Guerres de Lucas.) I talk with Renaud and Laurent about why the making of Star Wars was such a long shot, and h...
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September 10, 2025 • 34 mins
I’ve covered digital and practical effects in film and TV, but creating special effects for live theater is a whole other challenge. J&M Special Effects has been up to the task for 40 years. Their crew has worked on shows from Hadestown to Harry Potter and The Cursed Child to Disney musicals like Frozen and Aladdin. I get a behind-the-scenes tour of their Brooklyn warehouse, where failure is part of the process in figurin...
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