On this beastly, grizzly, hawkish two-hander, off-duty dads Jordan Stokes and Pete Fenzel ride the tiger of discourse through zoologically- and conservationally-minded children’s cartoons, with a focus on PBS Kids’ long-running cybernetic animal rescue fantasy, Wild Kratts.
The duo consider how Wild Kratts frames moral imperatives about the treatment of animals in the wild, while depicting few if any pets or livestock, and how that might identify evil in its exception not to universal law about animals, but rather to a will to a hypothetical maxim of Wildness that relates also to validating and connecting with children. We weigh the balance of the ways Wild Kratts, and other educational and fantastical animated zoological adventures, such as BBC’s Octonauts, might seek to ignite and foster passion for applied biological sciences in small children at the cost of modeling ecologically transgressive behavior, such as landing a multistory steel turtle-shaped airship in the immediate neighborhood of endangered nesting grounds. And we break down Wild Kratt’s villainous and heroic uses of animals as a means, contrasting the bodily exploitation of Zachary Varmitech with the deconstructive appropriation of Aviva Corcovado.
And we ask ourselves, not why we think we ought to care about wild animals, but why we really do, and how that came to be, tipping our hatts to the Kratts in their capacity to inspire.
Also on the show, an aside on the taxonomical puzzle of Tunip the Vegimal, an animal/plant hybrid enjoined with the talking animals who wear pants, but not fully of them, in their continuing mission to explore, rescue, and protect the animals who also talk, but do not wear pants.
Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Ryan Sheely, and Matthew Wrather overthink the nihilisitc satire “Mountainhead,” a film about the hollowness at the center of Silicon Valley’s elite. The movie, featuring Steve Carell and Jason Schwartzman, portrays self-absorbed moguls, their philosophical pretensions, and the absurdity of their existential crises in a chamber piece package.
The crew explores the authenticity of friendships intertwined with business, and the legitimacy (or intentional misapplication) of the characters’ philosophical musings, from Hegel to Kant, all the more ridiculous becuase of their marked lack of introspection. These guys could stand to do a little overthinking.
On the occasion of Ozzy Osbourne’s passing, the Overthinking It podcast piled into a van airbrushed with flaming skulls to discuss the genre of heavy metal music in its heyday. Resident metalheads Pete Fenzel and Mark Lee chose a slate of “heavy metal” tracks (which inevitably tiptoed towards trash and hair metal) and forced non-metalhead Matt Wrather to listen to them. The playlist is below for your head-banging, horn-throwing pleasure.
The panel unpacked the key musical and thematic signifiers of the genre, in particular its obsession with darkness, death, and the occult. Sometimes this is expressed in slightly cartoonish terms, especially as it relates to Satan. Although when taken to its logical extreme, things get a bit uncomfortable as we are forced to reckon with an explicitly Holocaust themed song that happens to absolutely rip.
Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee and Matt Wrather overthink the feature-length Looney Tunes cartoon, “The Day the Earth Blew Up.” They reflect the appeal of Looney Tunes characters, thrust into a modern world which doesn’t understand them and which they don’t understand. Maybe that’s why the genre of this film is so confused, swinging wildly from Merrie Melodies homage to buddy adventure comedy to porcine rom-com to sci-fi MacGuffin chasing with world-ending stakes. For what it’s worth, the crew strongly prefer the parts at the beginning of the film, which remind them of what made Looney Tunes great in the first place, with modern updates from influencer culture to Uber driving… er… horseback riding.
On the Overthinking It Podcast, Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather slide into the diner’s corner booth and face a yawning abyss that’s haunted students, artists, parents, and everyone with a to-do list: why do we keep putting things off? From the 24-hour term paper to a family tree that seemingly took nearly as long in the documentation as in the procreation, they overthink the strange paradoxes of avoidance.
On the auspicious occasion of the 888th episode of the Overthinking It Podcast, Pete, Mark, and Matt Wrather tackle numerology, luck, curses, and other forms of superstition. In case you weren’t aware, the number 8 is considered lucky in Chinese culture, and as such, this is the luckiest podcast we will ever make (at least until episode 8888 rolls along sometime in the next century). The panelists discuss their own experiences with luck, or lack thereof, the prevalence of luck and superstition in American sports culture, the difference between religious belief and superstition, and how luck offers a compassionate framework for making sense of the chaos and randomness of life.
Jordan Stokes, Matthew Wrather and Pete Fenzel overthink “Only Murders in the Building” (spoiler-free), the latest entry in the beloved “Steve Martin plays an artist struggling to make an example of the thing you are watching” oeuvre. Riding the line between low-affect sadness and broad comic shtick, the new Three Amigos: Selena Gomez, Martin Short and the aforementioned Martin form a polygon of character dynamic. The overthinkers follow with ruler and protractor in hand to chart their angles.
But is this show about podcasting, or is “Murders” about the struggle of millennials and the younger to find places to live and belong in the Children of Men heckscape that is the American housing market? We trace Murders’ style and influences back to the 2006 New Yorker personal history column, “Moving On a Love Story” by Nora Ephron, where she describes the eccentric characters and underhanded dealings at a rent-stabilized Manhattan apartment building. And we purse who can, and cannot hang with Martin Short, with a bonus never-before-heard Hollywood true story.
Plus, a bonus delve into the phama-sexual phantasia of the Hulu commercial plan, as we overthink “Chapter 22: House of Frostfire,” a romantasy-themed commercial for the Nexplanon etonogestrel implant—coming to a “Murders” showing or doctors office waiting room near you. Reproductive health is important—more important, perhaps, than tightly knit chain mail, flower lore for offscreen coitus, or practical footwear in the foods.
Mark Lee FINALLY convinced some other Overthinkers (Pete Fenzel and Jordan Stokes) to watch Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Now they’ve started a band and will surely have a meteoric rise to fame and a spectacular drug-infused crash, culminating in recovery and redemption.
Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather try to avert their eyes from a barrage of upsetting video endemic to our present, algorithmically driven, engagement-farming digital age. The explore their different levels of desensitization (or is it sensitization?) to videos, for example, of airline disasters, and discuss how to protect your mental well-being in an atmosphere of content verging on the traumatic.
The coping mechanisms they uncover are not unlike parenting, except that you are both the parent and the parented. And there is a particular focus of setting guardrails to avoid become upset in the first place. Once the cortisol hits the bloodstream, it’s too late.
Matt Wrather, Mark Lee, and Pete Fenzel leave Indiana Jones behind to follow the dotted line across across the map of Italy and the history of modern streaming with the self-possessed, adroit, and eternally classy Stanley Tucci, in pursuit of his newly minted cross-platform rival Eva Longoria.
Tucci in Italy on NatGeo/Disney+ and Eva Longoria: Searching for Spain on CNN/HBO Max/Max/HBO Max may have emerged from the same project, but they now face each other as competitors, two curling threads of fragrant steam above that red, messy bowl of Warner Bros. Discovery corporate buccatini. We trace how it started, how it’s going, and how Stanley Tucci maintains his easy masculine confidence through it all. Is he acting? Well, who isn’t?
We think of the Roman Empire, and our own oft-chaotic world, and muse on the grounding power of travel and stillness, that Tuccian dyad. We also connect on our experiences with other shows that deal in travel and food, whether it’s Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations or Jose Andres and Family in Spain, or Conan O’Brien Must Go, or Be My Guest (a.k.a. You Must Go, to the Barefoot Contessa, Who Is In Her House).
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