Once the podcast is done, Matt Wrather puts a post in the CMS about what the group of him, Peter Fenzel, and Mark Lee discussed on the podcast.
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Great podcast! I agree with Mark, it’s great to hear what goes on “behind the scenes”. One thing you didn’t touch upon that I’ve always wondered is how you pick the name of the podcast. I assume it’s Matt who picks the name, or do others get a say in it? Do you notice particularly interesting phrases and write them down as you go along, or do you listen back and choose them that way? Do you prefer to pick funny phrases, or ones that encapsulate what went on in the podcast?
Also, Fenzel, I wish I could erase what I’ve seen of the first two episodes of Torchwood from my mind. I was trying to figure out which episode you stopped with Cyberwoman? The one with the sex monster? There is a lot of options and it could have been any of them. The only explanation I have for why I watched it all is that my love for Doctor Who must have blinded me to the horror. Still, the third season is well worth watching and maybe you don’t get the same pay-off for some of the more emotional scenes that you would if you’d already been watching for two seasons and come to know the characters better, but meh…
“I assume it’s Matt who picks the name, or do others get a say in it? Do you notice particularly interesting phrases and write them down as you go along, or do you listen back and choose them that way? Do you prefer to pick funny phrases, or ones that encapsulate what went on in the podcast?”
Yes.
Just kidding, we never listen back.
Jokes aside: We generally coordinate in the Skype chat as we record, to help things go more smoothly. We keep a running list of title suggestions as we go. We put the suggestions in quotation marks so that we can distinguish them visually from the rest of the chatter, because when we hit “stop” we scan back, read out all the options. I’ve been accused of putting my finger on the scale, but it’s generally democratic.
The ideal OTI Podcast title will do several things at once: It will be funny, it will reflect whatever theme emerged during the hour, and—it wouldn’t kill us to focus more on this last one—it will contain a reference to a celebrated pop cultural property, so that people looking for podcasts on Batman V Superman will know they’ve found one and not, say, a random word association game.
From a listener perspective an ideal OTI title does one more thing; since it’s an organic emergence those of you on the production side never get to enjoy it.
It teases a particular twist of the conversation in harmony Jordan’s theory of spoilers. You can tell right away what subject it refers to, but you can’t see how it gets there; until about 1 minute before it actually happens, and then suddenly there is an endorphin burst of expectation (“oh here it comes!”).
That’s a good point. There’s a bit in Series 3 Episode 2 of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle that’s like that, where I saw a callback coming, and I nearly peed myself it was so funny and satisfying.
But I didn’t pee myself. That part wasn’t funny, but it was satisfying.
Cyberwoman is the worst, and I did watch that, God help me. But the episode I had to turn off in my living room because I was so embarrassed by it was, as you guessed, the one with the sex monster — in particular the scene where the sex monster goes up in the club, gets the guy in the bathroom, and has awkward and too-realistic sex with him on the sink for too long for before she turns him into dust.
I think the kicker was the part where they took a moment to show us the sex monster hiking up her skirt and sitting on the cold tile. It was just so not sexy and gross and trashy. That poor actress.
Well ACTUALLY… Root Beer is generally Caffeine free. With the exception of Barq’s (aka “the cola that is almost root beer”), but their diet version is Caffeine free.
None of this really matters, but it did raise the questions:
Does Pete intentionally seek out caffeinated root beer?
How much Caffeine would it take to push Pete past the threshold where he sounds like a superhero soundtrack?
Have you tried “Not Your Father’s Root Beer”?
When I _really_ drank root beer, and I mean a case every two days, I drank Diet A&W. I know it’s not caffeinated, but in the interest of moving the bit forward and not bringing the show to a halt, I didn’t adjust Wrather’s details in real time. And in a general sense, he was certainly true that I probably should switch away from caffeine at a certain hour and generally don’t.
Nowadays, now that my rootbeer drinking is back to appropriate levels, I of course always like IBC for things like floats, but my favorite brand is Virgil’s.
So, yeah to answer your questions:
– No
– I’ve only tried Five Hour Energy once – it kept me up until 9 a.m. Most of the night was spent swimming and the last thing I did before bed was walk a mile round-trip to get pancakes. So, probably, that.
– Not Yet! But I do enjoy Dad’s Root Beer for floats as well, which makes me suspicious of the snide tone of their name. Other root beers should be happy to be associated with Dad’s.
Heh, I didn’t even think of Dad’s Root Beer. I haven’t seen one of those in ages.
The branding though actually seems to be making a different kind of joke – http://smalltownbrewery.com/our-beers/ Combining the phrase “Not Your Father’s” with old-timey graphics seem to be implying “this is Root Beer your Grandad and Dad actually drank… not the glass of soda they gave to you.” It’s not as smooth as Virgil’s, but it’s a different interpretation of the same strategy (and much easier to find where I live).
I need to “Well ACTUALLY” you guys here… The musical composition that opens your podcast can’t really be called a theme song, since it has no lyrics — it’s just “theme music.” Unless there ARE lyrics that we don’t know about, in which case you are now hereby obligated to sing them on the next podcast.
Wrather is underestimating slightly with the estimate of an hour per podcast. The average length so far is about 69.5 minutes. Furthermore, if you include the 15 special episodes, supplemental episodes, and so on that have been included to date in the Overthinking It Podcast feed, the total runtime is well over 405 hours – it comes out to around 486 hours and 31 minutes, or 20.27 days, or nearly three weeks. This episode was Fenzel’s 382nd podcast appearance, Lee’s 299th, and Wrather’s 379th. Congratulations, stalwarts!
Bravo. You do better record keeping than we do.
I binged most (if not all) of Torchwood on Netflix a few years ago, which might have allowed me to view it less critically. I find that when fans have time to debate from week to week, over the various hiatuses, etc. we can think about it and consider our allegiance to the show. There were controversial aspects to the characters and storylines, of course, but I soldiered on. Maybe Eve Myles was a good enough reason to keep watching?