Make Me A Nerd with Mandy Kaplan

TruStory FM
  • 4.9 (73)
  • SOCIETY & CULTURE
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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 always held it all at arm's length. Not to get too deep, but maybe I never thought I was smart enough to follow it. Or maybe I have control issues and have never been able to embrace fantastical things like dragons and time travel. Until now! So, with an open mind and heart, I am ready to join this massive (and beautifully inclusive) club and GEEK THE #%$ OUT! It’s time for all my wonderfully strange friends to baptize me into NERD-DOM. Please join me on this journey. Who knows? Maybe you’ll discover or remember a side of yourself along the way. Or at least make fun of me as I try!

  1. No Time To Play… Ender’s Game with Erica Cochran

    3D AGO

    No Time To Play… Ender’s Game with Erica Cochran

    Mandy Kaplan has been handed a Hugo-winning, Nebula-winning, Mormon-authored military sci-fi classic about a six-year-old being psychologically tortured into committing accidental alien genocide, and reader, she has THOUGHTS. This week, her son Casey's high school chemistry teacher — the proud Trojan, theater company founder, and science-and-theater double-nerd Erica Cochran — walks Mandy through Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel Ender's Game, a book that predicted the internet, iPads, online political discourse, and rogue AI with such unsettling accuracy that you kind of want to check if Card also has next week's lottery numbers.Before they even open the book, there's The Orson Scott Card Problem to address — namely, that he is an anti-gay-rights activist who appears to have written a scene in which his six-year-old protagonist convinces a naked bully to also get naked before their fistfight. Mandy has some thoughts about this. Erica has some thoughts about this. Everyone has some thoughts about this. They proceed with their "art vs. artist" disclaimer firmly in place, with Mandy reserving the right to get in a few jabs. She gets in several.What unfolds is a joyful, slightly unhinged, deeply thoughtful conversation about a book Mandy read every word of and still couldn't quite follow ("I got a lot of beeps and boops"), while Erica — who has reread the series multiple times and done "a lot of therapy" — sees the full emotional architecture underneath. They dig into why so many of these dystopias center on children (the innocence, the smallness, the inability to consent), why Ender is Valentine with the capacity to be Peter, why the government commissions a third child from a family whose parents are, diplomatically speaking, not geniuses, and whether the book's climactic religion-founding is a defense of the Book of Mormon or a sly admission that anyone can make up a religion. Also discussed: Scientology's youth promotion track, the 2013 movie (Erica: "two thumbs down"), the inexplicable prevalence of the insult "fart-eater," and the fact that Petra is doing her absolute best and does not deserve Mandy's Gen-X scolding.By the end, Mandy is converted — not to loving the book, exactly, but to seeing what she missed in it. Which is, honestly, the whole point of this podcast.Connect with the ShowFollow Mandy on Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavensMake Me a Nerd runs on curious people. If that's you, the inner circle is at makemeanerd.com/join — it's where the show goes deeper between episodes, and where Mandy's most embarrassingly enthusiastic fans have found their people. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.

    1h 1m
  2. One For The Kids: Battle Royale with Jimmy Aquino

    APR 27

    One For The Kids: Battle Royale with Jimmy Aquino

    Mandy Kaplan has thoughts about 42 Japanese ninth-graders being forced to murder each other on a deserted island, and honestly, who among us doesn't? This week, Jimmy Aquino returns to Make Me a Nerd for his fourth-or-fifth appearance (he's lost count, we've lost count, the green jacket situation remains unresolved) to drag Mandy through 2000's Battle Royale — a film he insists inspired The Hunger Games, and which Suzanne Collins insists she has absolutely never heard of, nope, never, why do you ask.What follows is a spirited investigation into whether a Japanese dystopian thriller about government-sanctioned child-on-child violence can be considered a cultural touchstone (yes), whether Mandy watching the English dub instead of the original Japanese constitutes a personal betrayal of Jimmy (also yes), and whether the evil teacher's Tony Soprano velour tracksuit is the single most baffling costume choice in cinema history (unclear, but a strong contender). Along the way: a five-year-old shoves her would-be molester down a stairwell, Chigusa stabs a guy in the junk, Mitsuko emerges as the Regina George of Murder Island, and Mandy discovers she would survive a battle royale by hiding in the bushes like she hovers near the kitchen door at a catered event — which is, frankly, a strategy.Also discussed: Bram Stoker's Dracula (Jimmy loves it, the public apparently did not, Mandy is caught in the crossfire), Dane Cook's alleged joke-stealing from Louis C.K., the exact linguistic convention for Japanese first and last names (pending verification), and whether a dystopia needs to be in the future or just generally, you know, bad. Mandy concludes she would die begging and crying. Jimmy concludes he would "Mitsuko the crap out of it." Both are probably right.Links & MentionsJimmy Aquino — Comic News Insider: comicnewsinsider.com | Instagram: @JimmyAquino | BlueskyMandy Kaplan — Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavens (both with K's)Support the show — makemeanerd.com/join for ad-free episodes, early access, and Mandy's eternal gratitude --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.

    1 hr
  3. Moon Prism Power, Make Me a Gorgeous Podcaster: Sailor Moon with Jonny Lee Jr.

    APR 20

    Moon Prism Power, Make Me a Gorgeous Podcaster: Sailor Moon with Jonny Lee Jr.

    Sailor Moon was a cartoon made for five-year-old Japanese girls. It aired in America at 6 AM, required an eight-year-old Jonny Lee Jr. to set his alarm for 5:30 every morning — before DVR, before streaming, before any child should be conscious — and quietly became one of the most important pieces of queer representation an entire generation had access to. So, naturally, Mandy had never seen it.Jonny's back to fix that. Mandy was assigned 14 essential episodes and negotiated down to eight, but arrives with strong opinions anyway — about Tuxedo Mask ("He's so hot"), her talking-cat wish fulfillment, and the transformation sequences that feel like auditions for a Broadway musical. (There have been over 40 Sailor Moon musicals in Japan. Neither Mandy nor most of the listening audience will have been prepared for that sentence.) Along the way, they dig into why the American dub turned a gay male villain into a woman, how male directors wrote boy-craziness into the anime that didn't exist in the original manga, and the Snow White connection behind those enormous anime eyes.And so we have a conversation about why gay men gravitate toward stories about powerful women, what it meant to find yourself in a kids' show when there was almost nowhere else to look, and how a series marketed to kindergartners smuggled in real themes about identity and transformation.Guest Spotlight Jonny Lee Jr. is a lifelong anime devotee and one of Make Me a Nerd's original guests, returning this time to make the case for the show he's loved since he was eight years old and jet-lagged in Taipei. His enthusiasm for Sailor Moon is the kind that reorganizes a kid's sleep schedule and never fully lets go. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.

    54 min
  4. From Basement Nerds to Amazon Prime: The Improbable (and Inevitable) Rise of Vox Machina with Hem Brewster

    APR 13

    From Basement Nerds to Amazon Prime: The Improbable (and Inevitable) Rise of Vox Machina with Hem Brewster

    What do you get when you take eight adult friends — all professional voice actors — who've been playing a home D&D game for years and decide, on a lark, to put it on Twitch? You get Critical Role, a phenomenon now in its fourth campaign, spanning roughly a decade of streaming and somewhere between "a lot" and "an almost unhinged number" of hours of content. Hem Brewster, lead producer at Blighthouse Studio and a Critical Role early adopter, joins Mandy all the way from Iceland to break down The Legend of Vox Machina — the Amazon Prime animated series that took that basement game, ran a Kickstarter asking for a couple hundred thousand dollars, received millions in days, and then somehow turned it into a 100%/94% Rotten Tomatoes-rated show that works equally well for lifelong nerds and people who just showed up for the fart jokes. (Both are valid. The fart jokes are good.)Hem walks Mandy through the full Critical Role ecosystem — campaigns, modules, homebrew, the difference between a GM who knows every rule and a GM who's right for your table — and explains why Vox Machina nails something most adaptations fumble: you never need to know what a spell is called to understand what it does, because the show just shows you the giant hand. They also dig into the three episodes Hem chose for Mandy: the pilot's shotgun-approach introduction (Lord of the Rings fake-out, musical number, immediate R-rating — all of it in episode one), the glorious chaos of episode seven's triceratops incident, and the season finale's earned emotional heaviness. Plus: Sam Riegel himself answers two questions, Mandy learns what a class is, and Grog is confirmed a beautiful being.If you've been nerd-curious but felt like D&D was a door you couldn't open — well, Grog has thoughts on that. Specifically that not everything is a trap. Specifically that it very much was a trap. The point stands: this is the episode that makes the door feel a lot less locked.GUEST SPOTLIGHTHem Brewster is the lead producer at Blighthouse Studio, a collective of creators from across the US and beyond making escapist audio and actual-play content. Their shows include:The Lucky Die — a D&D actual play, with Hem as game masterThe Sprouting — a Call of Cthulhu eldritch horror actual playPlus additional fantasy shows and talk shows under the Blighthouse umbrellaFind everything at blighthouse.studio, including work from Blighthouse friends and collaborators outside the main umbrella.Connect with the ShowFollow Mandy on Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavensMake Me a Nerd runs on curious people. If that's you, the inner circle is at makemeanerd.com/join — it's where the show goes deeper between episodes, and where Mandy's most embarrassingly enthusiastic fans have found their people. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.

    53 min
  5. Movie Friends Michelle Rubinstein and Seth Vargas on the Strange Legacy of Ed Wood

    APR 6

    Movie Friends Michelle Rubinstein and Seth Vargas on the Strange Legacy of Ed Wood

    Here is a fun fact about the worst movie ever made: it was declared the worst movie ever made by people who hadn’t seen it. In 1980, the Medved brothers published The Golden Turkey Awards, a book crowning Plan 9 from Outer Space as cinema’s all-time nadir — a designation selected, in part, by a 16-year-old. The book was a hit. The label stuck. And for decades, that’s how Ed Wood got remembered: not as someone who made movies, but as a cautionary tale about making them badly.The thing is, when you actually sit down and watch Plan 9 — with its styrofoam UFOs, its shower-curtain cockpit, its graveyard that looks like a particularly ambitious mini golf course, and its dialogue (“Well he’s been murdered, and somebody’s responsible”) — something unexpected happens. You have a great time. You laugh. You get chills. You start asking questions. Which is, arguably, more than most movies manage.Mandy watched Plan 9 from Outer Space for the first time, then immediately watched Tim Burton’s 1994 love letter Ed Wood back to back, and showed up to this conversation practically sparking. Her guides are Michelle Rubinstein and Seth Vargas of the Movie Friends podcast, and together they trace the whole improbable arc: from Ed Wood’s shoestring productions (shot in single takes, cast with whoever was around, funded by a landlord who did not make his money back) to the Medved book, to Tim Burton using his post-Batman cultural cachet to make one of the most gorgeous black-and-white films of the nineties.Michelle derails the episode in the best possible way with a one-minute TED talk on Vampira — real name Maila Nurmi, Emmy nominee, friend of James Dean, and practitioner of a papaya-based waist-shrinking technique that Mandy immediately wants to try. Seth, who has been an Ed Wood evangelist since his teenage years working in a magic store, makes the argument that Ed Wood’s films aren’t bad so much as alive — confounding, curious, and genuinely impossible to ignore. Seventy-five years later, he’s right.Guest SpotlightMichelle Rubinstein and Seth Vargas are the hosts of Movie Friends, a podcast built on the idea that film discussion doesn’t have to be gatekeepy or exhausting — it can just be two people who genuinely love movies talking about them like friends. Together they’ve developed a three-tier rating system — schmoovie, movie, or film — that tells you everything you need to know about their sensibility. Find them anywhere you get your podcasts.Links & NotesMovie Friends podcastTotal Betty Podcast NetworkReferenced in This EpisodePlan 9 from Outer Space (1957, dir. Ed Wood)Ed Wood (1994, dir. Tim Burton)Glen or Glenda (1953, dir. Ed Wood)The Golden Turkey Awards by the Medved brothers (1980)Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992, Ed Wood biography)Vampira / Maila NurmiCriswellBela LugosiMartin Landau (Best Supporting Actor, Ed Wood)The Bride! with Mandy Kaplan (Mandy’s guest episode on Movie Friends)Spaceballs (1987, dir. Mel Brooks)The GodfatherYuri on Ice with Zehra Fazal (Make Me A Nerd)You Must Remember This (podcast)Christine JorgensenConnect with the ShowFollow Mandy on Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavensMake Me a Nerd runs on curious people. If that's you, the inner circle is at makemeanerd.com/join — it's where the show goes deeper between episodes, and where Mandy's most embarrassingly enthusiastic fans have found their people. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.

    56 min
  6. Nate McWhortor Makes Mandy a Future Folk Fan

    MAR 30

    Nate McWhortor Makes Mandy a Future Folk Fan

    Somewhere between O Brother Where Art Thou and the Lumineers' stomp-and-clap era, a folk comedy duo from the East Village made a movie about two aliens who abandon a mission to destroy Earth because one of them heard music in a Costco and simply could not get over it. The film cost approximately nothing, shot on the streets of Brooklyn with real bystanders as involuntary extras, features Dee Snider of Twisted Sister as a bar owner for reasons no one can fully explain, and won Fantastic Fest in Austin. It is called The History of Future Folk, and it is delightful in a way that Mandy, who went in skeptical, was completely unprepared for.This week, Nate McWhortor ... Phoenix improviser, minor league baseball veteran, hair metal radio devotee, and self-described "glue guy" ... brings the movie to Mandy's attention, and also brings a drinking game. They drink for every mention of the planet Hondo, every visible budget cut (there are many), and every Dee Snider scene (there are enough). What they find underneath all of that is a genuinely beautiful piece of folk music, a surprisingly unpredictable plot, and a love letter to New York that doesn't have enough extras to fill its own bar scenes. If you've never heard of Future Folk, you're about to understand why some people feel like this movie was made specifically for them.Nate McWhortor is a Phoenix-based improviser at the Neighborhood Comedy Theater and co-host of Gank That Drank, the Supernatural rewatch podcast where every episode comes with a drinking game. A sports nerd turned theater kid turned 16-year improv veteran, Nate is exactly the kind of guest who shows up with a drinking game, an Arizona tourism angle, and a genuine passion for a 2012 cult film that the algorithm sent him and he never forgot. Gank That Drink is currently heading into its final season of Supernatural — which means now is the time to get in on it. Find Nate and Krissy Lenz at the Neighborhood Comedy Theater at nctphoenix.com.Links & NotesThe History of Future Folk (2012) — available on YouTube; reportedly back on NetflixFuture Folk — the band --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.

    57 min
  7. It’s Manga Madness with Helen McCarthy!

    MAR 23

    It’s Manga Madness with Helen McCarthy!

    Manga has a first-impression problem. It's enormous, genre-defying, visually foreign, and comes wrapped in the kind of devoted fan energy that makes newcomers feel like they've wandered into the graduate seminar by mistake. Mandy Kaplan — who did her manga homework at the Department of Motor Vehicles while her son got his learner's permit — is here to represent everyone who's been lurking at the door. Her guide is Helen McCarthy: author of the very first English-language book on Japanese animation, the first English book on Hayao Miyazaki, and thirteen published works on the subject in total. Her fourteenth, The Manga Bible, drops March 24th. The woman does not stop.They work through three titles Mandy actually read: One Piece, which turns out to be a sneaky piece of social conditioning about building friendships when the world is terrifying (Eiichiro Oda knew exactly what he was doing); Nana, which delivers all the drama of Sex and the City set in 1999 Tokyo — a friendship story Mandy almost completely missed because she was reading it between DMV announcements; and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which she found deeply upsetting, and means that as a compliment. Helen contextualizes all of it: the cartoony violence, the naïve heroines, the Indonesian protesters waving a One Piece flag, and why manga that looks contemporary might actually be set in your mother's girlhood. By the end, Mandy may not be a manga nerd. But the door is open — and she can see the plushies from here.Helen McCarthy is the author of the first English-language books on Japanese animation and on Hayao Miyazaki — which is to say, she was there taking manga seriously before the rest of the English-speaking world had even formed an opinion about it. She's consulted on doctoral theses, spoken at universities from Akita International to the University of Maryland, and built a career out of a manga collection that started with Spanish-language comics her partner found on a graduation trip to Mallorca. Her latest book, The Manga Bible — an accessible, people-first entry into the world of manga and the artists behind it — is out March 24th from Prestel. Find her at HelenMcCarthy.net.Referenced in This EpisodeOne Piece — manga and anime by Eiichiro Oda; live-action series on NetflixNana — manga by Ai YazawaNausicaä of the Valley of the Wind — manga and film by Hayao MiyazakiPast Episodes You Might LikeOne Piece with Zach LoganWatchmen with Adam RoseSuperman Smashes the Klan with Jimmy AquinoConnect with the ShowFollow Mandy on Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavensMake Me a Nerd runs on curious people. If that's you, the inner circle is at makemeanerd.com/join — it's where the show goes deeper between episodes, and where Mandy's most embarrassingly enthusiastic fans have found their people. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.

    55 min
  8. Wonder Man: A Superhero Show About Not Being a Superhero

    MAR 16

    Wonder Man: A Superhero Show About Not Being a Superhero

    Wonder Man is, technically speaking, a Marvel show. It exists in the MCU. Captain America is out there somewhere. The Hulk is presumably smashing things. And none of that matters even a little bit, because this is a show about a guy who bombs auditions, self-sabotages every relationship he has, and quotes Pretty Woman during an improv because he's too afraid to access a genuine emotion. Simon Williams has a superpower, sure, but his actual problem is that he's every actor you've ever met who's three bad decisions away from selling real estate — which, by the way, Joey Pantoliano's character would enthusiastically recommend.Matthew Fox returns to the show and admits they’re the noob this time. Because while Matthew can navigate the MCU lore — explaining Trevor Slattery's bonkers journey from fake terrorist in Iron Man 3 to mystical land adventurer in Shang-Chi to reluctant government informant — it's Mandy who actually understands the world in which this show lives. The auditions that feel like psychological warfare. The directors who demand you "take risks" and then get furious when you do. The friends who call casting offices pretending to be your manager. All of it is painfully, hilariously real, and the show treats it with a respect that certain podcasts hosted by extremely famous actors have never managed.Matthew unpacks Wonder Man's superpower as a metaphor for passing — for anyone who's ever had to hide a fundamental part of themselves to get a job, keep a relationship, or just survive. It's the kind of reading that makes you realize why science fiction matters: not because the problems are unimaginable, but because they look exactly like the ones we can imagine. And if that doesn't get you, the show also features a black-and-white standalone episode about a guy called Damar the Doorman whose entire superpower is that people can walk through him, which is both the most absurd premise imaginable and a devastatingly accurate parable about how we consume and discard fame. Josh Gad plays himself as a monster. The episode description is literally just "Ding dong." It's perfect.By the finale, Simon hasn't become a hero in any traditional sense. He breaks his best friend out of jail — not to save the world, just because Trevor took the fall for him and that's what you do. It's personal and small and exactly right. Mandy and Matthew agree: this is a character study wearing a superhero costume it never actually puts on, and it's better for it.Links & NotesMatthew Fox's hub: TheEthicalPanda.comThe Marvel Movie Minute podcast (currently covering Captain America: Winter Soldier)Wonder Man on Disney+ If you like this episode ... The Goonies (featuring Mandy's Joey Pantoliano confession)Agatha All AlongCaptain AmericaThunderbolts (Make Me A Nerd)Thunderbolts (Superhero Ethics)Thunderbolts (The Film Board)The Penguin (with Matthew Fox)The Orville (with Matthew Fox)Last of Us (with Matthew Fox) Links & NotesFollow Mandy on Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavensJoin the nerdy inner circle: makemeanerd.com/join --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.

    54 min
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About

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 always held it all at arm's length. Not to get too deep, but maybe I never thought I was smart enough to follow it. Or maybe I have control issues and have never been able to embrace fantastical things like dragons and time travel. Until now! So, with an open mind and heart, I am ready to join this massive (and beautifully inclusive) club and GEEK THE #%$ OUT! It’s time for all my wonderfully strange friends to baptize me into NERD-DOM. Please join me on this journey. Who knows? Maybe you’ll discover or remember a side of yourself along the way. Or at least make fun of me as I try!

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