Pop Culture with Beards: Recent Episodes
Andy,Mike,Phil
Andy, Mike and Phil are here for your movies, music, television, toys, cartoons and macaroons. We ingest, invest, consume and exhume the best things we can find in world popular culture. From the Retro to the Right Now, we are talking it up from Down Under - Perth, Western Australia to be exact. You'll like the cut of our jib. And you'll love the cut of our beards. Join us every two weeks.
Andy, Mike and Phil are back with the second part of their Christmas Collection.
This episode (#14) focusses on the movies that the PCWBeards consider Yuletide classics. They provide details on:
- Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)
- Santa Claus Conquers The Martians (1964)
- It's A Wonderful Life (1946)
- Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
- Die Hard (1988)
- Bad Santa (2003)
- Last Christmas (2019)
Merry Christmas everyone!
Andy, Mike and Phil explore past and present pop culture while wearing beards in Perth, Western Australia.
Andy, Mike and Phil launch into Yuletide 2022 with their 2-part Christmas Collection.
This episode (#14) focusses on the music that the PCWBeards listen to in December.
They provide details on:
- Elvis' Christmas Album (1957)
- Elvis Sings The Wonderful World of Christmas (1971)
- A Bing Crosby Christmas DVD (1979)
And along the way get their viewpoints and takes on the Christmas music output of Mariah Carey, David Bowie, Ella Fitzgerald, The Beach Boys and Nat King Cole.
Listen now and prepare for Christmas Collection Part 2 (Movies) which will drop in the matrix of pod, very, very soon.
Andy, Mike and Phil explore past and present pop culture while wearing beards in Perth, Western Australia.
Graham Kennedy was an Australian entertainer, comedian and star of radio, theatre, television and film. Audiences loved him in IN MELBOURNE TONIGHT, BLANKETY BLANKS and COAST TO COAST. He was five-times winner of the television industry’s Gold Logie award and for three decades he entertained a nation with his irreverent wit and sharp comebacks. Andy, Mike and Phil look into Graham Kennedy’s career in television and film.
The video rental store was the place we went to find the movies we could enjoy at home on our video home systems. This was a revolution that took hold in the 1980s and dominated our viewing habits for three decades. We would rent highly anticipated new releases and grab some weekly videos to round off our visit to the "video library", as some of us called it. Sometimes this process took hours! Andy and Mike worked in video stores and discuss what that experience was like while Phil listens agog. So let's rewind back to the great days of renting your movies and incurring a late fine. (Duration - 20 minutes)
THE GOODIES was a UK comedy series that ran (mostly) on the BBC between 1970 and 1980. The Goodies of the title were three men, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden, who advertised themselves as being prepared to "Do Anything, Anywhere, Anytime". This mostly involved doing good, but occasionally they fell to in-fighting and things got very slapstick-y and surreal. Their targets were sometimes topical, often parodies and always involved sped-up physical gags and stunts. The trio actually ran around more than Benny Hill. The show was shot both in studio on video and on location on film; the low budget effects and Oddie's brilliant music made this a unique and beloved series for the Boomers and X-ers who were lucky enough to see it. Andy, Mike and Phil talk about one of their favourite comedy shows in Episode 11 of Pop Culture with Beards.
The 1970s was a transformative era in the evolution of world cinema. It was a time when film took on heavier subjects more openly and so matured as an art-form. Andy, Mike and Phil will be talking about this spiky, controversial era generally and naming some favourites specifically. Consider this Part 1, because the PCWBs will return with sequels to examine this fascinating age of cinema.
Since 1987, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has run the all-night music video show RAGE. It has had many forms, but over thirty-five years viewers have become used to the idea that music videos new and old will be shown on Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes these videos will be selected by musician presenters who pop up every few few clips to inform the audience about their choices. The show starts late (midnight-ish) and it goes on until morning. An entire generation of music fans know the experience of hanging on to see what the next video is going to be on RAGE. It's the show that we've fallen asleep to and woken up to. IT releases video after video to us until the sun rises and the dawn chorus begins.
FREAKS AND GEEKS is a US television comedy-drama made in 1999-2000 and set in 1980-81. It ran for 18 episodes originally on the NBC network. It was aimed at a teen audience and usually this kind of material from 20 years ago would be largely forgotten. However, although this series was cancelled before the end of its first season, it was was almost immediately rediscovered when it was repeated. Dedicated fans fought for the show to be preserved on a DVD box set, the producers fought to preserve as much of the licensed music as possible for the box set. Unusually, the fandom and the show's creators were very much in agreement that what had been created was special and they weren't prepared to let it go quietly.
Creator Paul Feig and Executive Producer Judd Apatow assembled a brilliant cast : James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Busy Philipps, John Francis Daley, Martin Starr, Samm Levine, and Linda Cardellini. They gave us stories that delved into areas not usual for a teen-centred show and the writing team mined their lives for some of the most excruciatingly honest stories of adolescent life. The result was both wonderfully specific to the era it was set in (1980-81) and amazingly universal in reminding us what it's like to be a teenager learning how the world works.
Andy, Mike and Phil talk about the the emergence and disturbance of sampling in music in the 1980s and 1990s. Mentioned are iconic sampling albums such as De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, DJ Shadow's Endtroducing and The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. The PCWBeards then branch into other controversies that have coloured the story of popular music since Edison dropped his first wax roll. As always, the question is: who wrote what and who deserves the money?
Laurence Tureaud in was born in Chicago in 1952. But the world didn't get to know him until he became Mr T and played the role of Clubber Lang in the movie ROCKY III in 1982. He followed this by playing B.A. Baracus in the 1980s TV hit THE A-TEAM. From there, followed movies, professional wrestling, numerous product endorsements. How Mr T became a fixture of the '80s and '90s is the subject of Episode 6 of PCWB. Listen in to Andy, Mike and Phil as they discuss the story of this icon of Popular Culture.
In Episode 5, Andy, Mike and Phil fondly recall the first things they saw on screen. They remember the sounds and images that hooked them on Pop Culture at a time when a beard was a distant ambition. Check out the following (with a couple of extra gems to discover.)
- Hoppity Goes To Town
- Jaws
- King Frat
The late John Hughes was the American writer, producer and director whose work included the following films: National Lampoon's Vacation, Mr. Mom, Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, Planes, Trains and Automobiles.; these and others were some of the most commercially successful movies of their time.
Some of the most popular were aimed at a teens and redefined what sorts of characters and subjects could be served up to that audience. His casts featured phenomenal talent and some of the memorable comedic moments of 1980s cinema. Travel with Andy, Mike and Phil back to that golden era, as we walk across the football field, pump a fist in the air and shout, "We'll drive home backwards!"
Andy, Mike and Phil are talking up the audio cassette. Invented in the 1960s, it replaced reel-to-reel and 8-track cartridges as the home enthusiast's audio recording and playback medium of choice. From the 1970s into the first decade of the 2000s, we bought our music and made mix tapes using these miraculously convenient spools of analog magnetic tape encased in a polymer shell. Cassettes were great - are still great - and the Beardies love 'em. (24m)
Television’s The Late Show ran from 1992-93 on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It was a ground-breaking comedy show from a team that was largely based on the
D-Generation group that had formed at Melbourne University a few years previously. The show was extremely popular for its sketches, live comedy, and purposely low production-quality pieces shot on domestic video.
Andy, Mike and Phil recount their thoughts about this 1990s TV favourite.
Andy, Mike and Phil discuss what they're watching movie-wise. In the way of the era, everything is a reboot or a sequel, but is there gold in them thar hills? Have a listen while they wait for lunch to arrive. Vegemite?
- FAST AND FURIOUS 9 (2021)
- GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE (2021)
- THE BEATLES: GET BACK (2021)