Hey folks. Mandy Kaplan here. I’d like to share a bit about my intentions and mission for MMAN if you’ll indulge me. You will? Huzzah!Look, I am a lot of things. I’m a writer, actress, mother, and lover of musicals and cats, but NOT Cats, The Musical. Give me a little bit of credit, would ya? So...throughout my life, I’ve been surrounded (and intrigued) by all things nerd. A sister who plays D&D, a Star Wars-obsessed husband, friends who love anime, comic books, video games, and...well, you get the picture. Somehow, I have alw...
Latest episodes
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48 min
Brazil with Andy Nelson
Andy Nelson has been sitting on this one. He's been talking about movies on The Next Reel since 2011, and when Mandy asked him to come back and pick anything, he chose the film he…
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43 min
Stargate with Jonny Lee Jr. • Ancient Aliens, but More Fun
Until this week, Mandy Kaplan did not know the word "Stargate" existed. Not the 1994 movie, not the ten seasons of television that followed, not the conventions full of people who…
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46 min
The Rocky Horror Picture Show with Matthew Fox
The whole premise of Make Me a Nerd is that Mandy has never seen the thing. Matthew Fox arrives to honor the late Tim Curry with a movie he has attended dozens of times and, by the…
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40 min
Werecats and Beignets: Scooby Doo on Zombie Island with Journie Ma-Johnson
In 1998, Hanna-Barbera handed a direct-to-video Scooby-Doo movie to a crew of veterans and then, by all accounts, forgot to supervise them. The crew used that freedom to do the one…
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46 min
Super Sentai: The Spandex Empire Behind Power Rangers with Omari Miller
Mandy spent her son's Mighty Morphin years with one nagging question: why are the Power Rangers wearing their helmets in every single fight? She never asked anyone. This week Omari…
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57 min
What If There Were Too Many Dogs? The Andy Griffith Show with Breaking Mayberry
Marty Schneider and Dan Ludwig, hosts of the podcast Breaking Mayberry, explain that they once built two rating scales for The Andy Griffith Show: an Andy-meter for how good the ep…
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45 min
Fackam Hall with Justine Huxley
The British period drama is a genre built on restraint. Longing glances across drawing rooms. Inheritance law. A great many people declining, for six or seven seasons, to say the o…
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49 min
The Smell Test: Parasite with Sherry Mandujano
Three times in the theater. Twenty-odd more at home. Six years of having thoughts about Parasite, and roughly four minutes total in which anyone has let her share them. This week S…
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57 min
Formula 1 with Pete Wright: Everybody Wants Kimi
Mandy Kaplan came to this with three episodes of Drive to Survive and one other piece of racing knowledge, which is that she can recite Talladega Nights from memory. Ninety seconds…
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50 min
Pushing Daisies with Jessica Jimenez: Mandy Would Like a Cheese Box
Mandy has a real, non-joking anxiety about death. You'd think that's the sort of thing a person would mention to a friend before that friend assigns her a series about a man who re…
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52 min
We Bleed the Red of Hollywood Video: The Last Blockbuster with Jason Yeung
Jason Yeung spent more than a decade working in video stores — not Blockbuster, mind you, but Hollywood Video, a distinction he holds with the unwavering intensity of a man asked t…
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48 min
Twelve Percent and Worth It: Sphere with Kynan Dias
Every so often a guest arrives having chosen not the safe pick, not the crowd-pleaser, but the one movie they have been quietly waiting years for somebody to ask them about. Kynan…
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52 min
Neverland Has Xenomorphs Now: Alien Earth with Rick London
Rick London came for Alien: Earth — Noah Hawley's reportedly quarter-billion-dollar fever dream about corporations, immortality, and dying children installed in adult bodies — and…
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59 min
A Desire for More Cows: Arrival with Justin Jaeger
The instant a movie is pitched to Mandy as "aliens come to Earth," she has already changed the channel, mentally relocated to a spa, and started a calmer life. So naturally, this w…
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57 min
When the Music Is Happenating: The Grateful Dead with Jeffrey Nicholas Brown
The Grateful Dead's own biographer opens their official four-hour documentary by admitting it's really hard to love this band if you're not already a fan — which is a bold marketin…
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57 min
A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother: Psycho, Deconstructed with Jesse Fister
Mandy has never seen Psycho. She has, however, seen Hot in Cleveland, which — it turns out — quotes Psycho constantly, meaning Mandy has been unknowingly absorbing the cultural shr…
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1 h 01
My So Called Life with Sloan Just
There exists a specific cohort of women who, if you say the words "do you remember My So-Called Life," will respond — instantly, involuntarily, with the faraway look of someone rec…
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59 min
Dr. Horrible’s Sing a Long Blog with Krissy Lenz & Kyle Olson
This week we have a three-act superhero musical, shot on a borrowed studio lot during a labor strike, financed by one guy's personal credit card, in which approximately none of the…
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55 min
Batman Pulled a Gun: Batman Beyond with Jason Yeung
Batman: he does not use guns. This is practically the whole point of him — a man so committed to a single rule that he built an entire personality, a cave, and a frankly concerning…
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1 h 00
Leave the Gun, Take the Nerd: The Godfather with Seth Vargas
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who have seen The Godfather, and those who have built an entire personality around not having seen it (a group that, until this w…