Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #27 Discusses the Impact and Aesthetics of Star Wars

Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt grasp the low-hang­ing fruit in pop cul­ture to talk about Star Wars: The unique place that these films have in the brains of peo­ple of a cer­tain age, how we grap­pled with the pre­quels, and why we feel the need to fill in and argue about the details.

We pri­mar­i­ly focus on the two most recent ema­na­tions of this beast, The Man­dalo­ri­an and Rise of Sky­walk­er. We talk alien and droid aes­thet­ics (how much cute­ness is too much?), sto­ry­telling for kids vs. adults reliv­ing their child­hood, pac­ing, plot­ting, cast­ing, whether celebri­ty appear­ances ruin the Star Wars mood, cre­ation by an auteur vs. a com­mit­tee, and what we’d like to see next.

We had enough to say about this that we did­n’t need to draw on online arti­cles, but here’s a sam­pling of what we looked at any­way:

• “The Robot­ic Famil­iar­i­ty of ‘Star Wars: the Rise of Sky­walk­er’ ” by Richard Brody
• “After ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Sky­walk­er,’ Where Does Dis­ney (and the Fran­chise) Go From Here?” by Noah Berlatsky
• “After ‘Rise of Sky­walk­er,’ Here’s How Lucas­film Should Han­dle Future ‘Star Wars’ Films” by Bran­don Katz
• “I Nev­er Knew How Much I Need­ed a Star Wars TV Series Before The Man­dalo­ri­an” by Rob Brick­en
• “‘The Man­dalo­ri­an’ and the Pow­er of an Unim­peach­able Sea­son Finale” by Ali­son Her­man
• “‘The Man­dalo­ri­an’ Cre­ators on the Week­ly Release, Choos­ing Direc­tors, and the ‘Star Wars’ Hol­i­day Spe­cial” by Christi­na Radish
• “Star Wars at 40: 5 Ways Star Wars: A New Hope Changed Every­thing” by Dan Brooks
• “Itho­ri­ans: Star Wars’ Strangest Aliens, Explained” by Vin­cent Pasquill

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. In this case, it’s all just more Star Wars talk, cov­er­ing droid body dys­mor­phia and human­iza­tion, the cycle of embod­i­ment via action fig­ures and re-pre­sen­ta­tion on the screen, tragedy in Star Wars vs. Watch­men, mak­ing up for racism in Star Wars through sym­pa­thet­ic por­tray­als of Sand Per­son cul­ture, watch­ing par­tic­u­lar scenes many times, clown bik­er troop­ers, and more. Don’t miss it!

This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.