Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Richard Rosenbaum, and Matthew Wrather celebrate 500 episodes (Plus special supplements! Plus questions of the week!) of the Overthinking It Podcast with a look at their favorite titles, their favorite shows and themes, and how their lives have changed over the last 9+ years of podcasting.
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Congratulations!! And thanks for providing something to (over)think about and laugh about for all of these years.
One day a couple of years ago I listened to the Rainbow Connection and heard the lyrics, “Why are there so many songs about rainbows?” and could only come up with two songs in my mind. I googled the issue and Mark Lee solved it for me. I have been coming to the site since.
My favourite episode that wasn’t mentioned on the podcast was Episode 219 “Icons are always an accident.” This is where the creator of the Ghostbusters logo came on the podcast to make Binky defend his comments on the Ghostbusters 2 logo. It was incredibly interesting to see his insights and hilarious at the same time.
Once again congratulations and keep up the good work.
Michael C. Gross was amazing, and that interview was a real treat. I was very sad when he passed a couple of years ago. One way to really get to know someone is to know what really pisses them off.
Coincidentally, Netflix just told me to watch ‘A Futile and Stupid Gesture’ which is about the start of National Lampoon. Michael C. Gross is portrayed in this briefly as the Art Director for the magazine.
One of my favorite Overthinking shows was the splendid Freaking Out over the glorious Mad Max: Fury Road. You realized we had just seen something truly great, and MM:FR has since been declared The Greatest Action Film Of All Time. This film blew my mind, and I spent the next week locating the various pieces of my mind and stuffing them back into my Skull. Thank you, Overthinkers, for helping me do that.
Firstly, I agree that was a good one.
Secondly, I like numbers. I have always tried to force some meaning out of the number of comments made on each podcast. When you look at the comment numbers over the whole Overthinking it podcast canon there are three reasonably distinct eras.
Episodes 1 to 100ish: Pre Commenting Era. Generally less than 10 comments.
100 to 250: Commenting Era. Generally 20 or 30 comments
250 to now: Post Commenting Era. Once again less than 10.
What’s interesting – to me anyway – is the episodes we picked as favourites. Yours was 359 in the Post Commenting Era with 45 comments, noticeably more than any other since. I would also guess that the sheer number of words in the comments for this one beats nearly every other episode. Mine was 219 in the Commenting Era it had 3 comments. Noticeably less than any episode around it.
I wonder if that difference shows that the listeners also thought that these were standout episodes. Like mine was, “Wow, I’m speechless.” and yours was, “Wow. That was so cool! I have so much to say!”
I definitely would have picked the ruinationcast and the in media rescast as two of the strongest episodes so it’s good to see those get called out – I would add 218 in there as well, if I recall it correctly. Congratulations on a mind-boggling number of episodes!