This past Tuesday, January 13, I sat down and recorded a guest segment for Jack Mangan’s Deadpan Podcast. My segment will be in the next show, which will be released at some future date, yet to be determined. I hadn’t done any recording for a podcast since the Ghostlight Podcast wrapped up back at the end of October, and it felt really good to be back behind the mike.

The segment I recorded was 2 minutes and 33 seconds of me sharing my thoughts on the movie Big Trouble in Little China. It is the latest in the series of works that we’ve featured in our many Deadpan Paloozas over the years. What is a Deadpan Palooza? It’s a podcast episode (or, in many cases, a series of 2 to 5 podcast episodes) that discusses and celebrates a particular creative work, which may be a movie, a book, an album, or anything else. The very first Deadpan Palooza was called Zardozapalooza, and was dedicated to the movie Zardoz. It was released about a year into the show’s run, and started a tradition that became one of my favorite aspects of the podcast. (For the curious, the episode can be found here. The audio player still works; Zardoz-related content starts at the 15:15 mark.)

Every Deadpan Palooza to date celebrates a creative work that is important to the Deadpan podcast community. Most of these works were an important part of our collective childhood or adolescence. For example, we’ve featured Gross Pointe Blank, Watchmen, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, High Fidelity, and Blade Runner (including “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”), among others. Whenever there’s both a movie version and a book version of the work, we talk about both and compare them. Deadpan Paloozas are always a blast to contribute to and listen to, because everyone in the group always has something interesting and unique to say. I’ve always loved the collaborative, communal aspect of the Deadpan Podcast, and I will try to encourage others to contribute segments to my own podcast, whenever I start it.

In addition to all that, our Paloozas have introduced me to a number of works that I probably wouldn’t have checked out otherwise. I’m grateful to the Deadpan community for finally getting me to read “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, High Fidelity, Watchmen, and Slaughterhouse-Five. They were all well worth reading.

Big Trouble in Little China was another Palooza movie that I’m glad to have watched. Without repeating my podcast segment verbatim, it was an exciting movie with an intriguing story line and great visuals. I will make another post here when the episode with my segment in it goes live.