Tale as old as time? It’s old, alright. True as it can be? Hmm, about that...

Beauty and the Beast is an old and not-so-necessary model for romantic love. 

Hiding in the remarkable Howard Ashman score to this 1991 film is a not-like-other-girls feminism and a reified classism that isolates poor Belle and gives her no choice but to fall for her captor. The sisters grapple with the conditioning from this movie (and so many other sources) that invites us to find meaning and satisfaction in providing kindness and accommodation to beasts in order to transform them into husbands. 

The Disney version of the story, with its animated inanimate objects, provides a classism that is deeply essentialist. To wit: a clock can never climb the social ladder, and obviously the clock’s owner doesn’t consider its well-being when making major life decisions. Tracie & Emily spend some time lamenting the fact that this curse was rendered, originally on an 11-year-old, but they find some comfort when imagining the beast as an allegory for self-hatred. 

Be our guest, and throw on some headphones for some deep thoughts about Disney’s Beauty & the Beast. 

Tags:

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, pop culture, romance, comedy, storytelling, cultural commentary, feminism, Disney, animation, gen x childhood, gen x nostalgia, millennial childhood, millennial nostalgia, howard ashman, feminism, classism

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

It smells like the funk of 40,000 years in here!

In today’s episode, Tracie shares her deep thoughts about the iconic and groundbreaking 1983 music video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller. From the way the mini film subverts expectations to the meaning behind the horror tropes it relies on to how to contextualize Jackson’s immense talent with the troubled and abusive life he led, the Guy girls explore what it means that a novelty song featuring a zombie flash mob and Vincent Price saying “y’all’s” helped make MJ king of the world.

Throw on your headphones and listen…before darkness falls across the land!

Content warning:

Oblique references to the allegations against Michael Jackson and the childhood abuse he endured.

Mentioned in this episode:

Our TikTok about Horror
Deep Thoughts about Clue
Inflation Calculator
The full Thriller video

Episode 29 was released March 26, 2024.

Tags:

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, pop culture, horror, comedy, storytelling, cultural commentary, feminism, pop music, mtv, gen x childhood, gen x nostalgia, music video, thriller, michael jackson, john landis

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Sometimes you wanna go

Where everybody knows your name

This week on Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Tracie revisits the must-see-TV comedy that was always on at the Guy Sisters' house: Cheers. This powerhouse of 80s and 90s pop culture, created by the Charles brothers and the late James Burrows, is genuinely funny: the pilot episode is used by TV writers to teach efficient storytelling to establish a new sitcom. And while the ensemble cast offers great physical and verbal comedy, some of the cultural commentary from the 1980s doesn't pass the sniff test in 2026. While pop culture back then could accept that a womanizing ex-baseball player (as played by Ted Danson) was still a great guy at heart despite how he harassed women, it gives both Tracie and Emily the ICK in the modern era. Similarly, pop culture's insistence on taking strong women down a peg, just for the audacity of having ambition or thinking they are smart, seems like a terrible expectation with hindsight.

Our troubles may not all be the same--but throw on your headphones, and you can take a break from all your worries!

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, pop culture, women, comedy, storytelling, cultural commentary, feminism, romance, gen x childhood, gen x nostalgia, sitcom, cheers, james burrows, ted danson, shelley long, kirstie alley

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Grease is the time, is the place, is the motion

Grease is the way we are feeling

This week on Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Emily revisits one of the classic movies of her Gen X childhood: Grease. This musical comedy was set in high school, but all of the lead actors were in their 20s and 30s, which may help explain why much of the lessons about romance, performing adulthood, and gender expression sailed over her head as a child. 

The lyrics in many of the songs were unapologetically ugly--the Greasers actually ask Danny if Sandy put up a fight!--but the actual characterization of the young men and women show that they are adolescents flailing their way through what they think masculinity, femininity, sexuality, adulthood, and romance are supposed to look like. Even the ick factor of Sandy changing into a leather-clad Greaser girl for Danny at the end is a little more nuanced than the Guy sisters remembered, since all she did was change her clothes, while Danny actually ran track for the entire school year. Talk about romance--maybe?

We'll be hopelessly devoted to you--if you listen to this episode!

Mentioned in this episode:

Grease: Performing Gender

Yes, Grease was deeply problematic – but it was ahead of its time, too

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, romance, women, feminism, classic movies, film, gen x childhood, film analysis, nostalgia, cultural commentary, analyzing film tropes, comedy, movie reviews, storytelling, comedy podcast, pop culture, musical comedy, grease, john travolta, olivia newton john

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

I am standing here beside myself.

For this week's episode of Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Tracie returns to one of the beloved movies from her and Emily's shared Gen X childhood: Short Circuit. The sisters remembered the charming robot Number 5 who gained sentience, the romance between Newton (Steve Guttenberg) and Stephanie (Ally Sheedy), and the funny malapropisms from Ben, the Indian character played by Fisher Stevens--a white actor in brown face. Even though brown face in pop culture was never "okay," for some reason it was "acceptable" in 1980s-era movies. In Short Circuit, the racism puts a pall over this otherwise life-affirming comedy. While the comedy of Stevens' Ben is mostly based on his humorous misuse of the English language, Tracie discovered that Ben was originally written as an Eastern European character. Which means making the white actor into an Indian caricature for both Short Circuit movies--Ben returned as the hero of the sequel--was entirely superfluous.

You need input. Throw on your headphones to input this episode!

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, movies, pop culture, romance, 80s and 90s movies, sci fi, storytelling, comedy, women, feminism, psychology, mental health, film, cultural commentary, analyzing film tropes, steve guttenberg, ally sheedy, fisher stevens, aziz ansari, gen x nostalgia

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

“…all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings.”

This week, Emily revisited everyone and their aunt’s favorite late-90s advertisement, er, romcom, You’ve Got Mail. The film was a feature-length commercial for America Online starring two of the biggest names in romcom, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. With the biting interactions that lead to romance between Kathleen Kelly (Ryan) and Joe Fox (Hanks), this Nora Ephron-written and -directed film showed us something so true about what life was like for women in the late 20th century, it took decades before we realized just how infuriating it was. In the sisters’ conversation they unpack the sins Hanks’ charm manages to cover, the irony-not-irony in a romcom about the destruction of a small business being bankrolled by brands like AOL and Starbucks, and what ingredients made this film so beloved (comedy, pacing, chemistry, and dramatic irony). And in what may be a first, the sisters note how this movie makes New York City feel cozy. 

Emily and Tracie may not be Hanks and Ryan, but we have our charms. Throw on your headphones and be charmed!

Tags:

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, romcom, comedy, film, storytelling, cultural commentary, 80s and 90s movies, movies, psychology, movie reviews, women, classic movies, romance, analyzing film tropes, millennial nostalgia, nostalgia, film analysis, tom hanks, meg ryan, nora ephron

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

No-one said anything to me about the full monty!

For this week's episode of Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Tracie returns to the 1997 British comedy The Full Monty. The film is a meditation on masculinity from multiple angles, including economic, sexual, psychological, physical, parental, and societal, as well as a treatise on the political aftermath of Thatcherism that left an entire generation of British men without jobs. But instead of a snooze-fest of dry cultural commentary on these issues, writer Simon Beaufoy and director Peter Cattaneo wisely wrapped these important social issues in comedy storytelling with hilarious results. Through comedy, the audience gets to see how the mental health of these men was affected by Thatcher's policies and how they get through the tough times by leaning on each other--and putting together a truly ridiculous strip show. It's the spoonful of sugar that lets the political messaging go down.

You don't have to take your kit off. Just put your headphones on and listen in!

Content warning: Brief discussion of suicide ideation/attempt.

tags: deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, comedy, film, storytelling, mental health, cultural commentary, 80s and 90s movies, movies, psychology, movie reviews, women, classic movies, romance, analyzing film tropes, millennial nostalgia, nostalgia, film analysis, simon beaufoy, the full monty, british film

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

By the Power of Grayskull!

On Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit this week, Emily returns to her first pop culture crush: He-Man, aka, Adam, prince of Eternia. As a very small child, she loved the cartoon He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and she was somewhat disheartened to learn that this beloved staple of her Gen X childhood was created specifically to sell He-Man toys. The animation, storytelling, and even the cultural commentary (via little public service announcements at the end of each episode) were all in service of Mattel convincing children to bug their parents to buy action figures.

But something funny happened on the way to the cash grab. Mattel created a pop culture phenomenon, in part because they created a cult classic cartoon by catering to the exact interests of their target audience of five-to-ten year old boys. The toy company's market research determined that demographic was most interested in soldiers, space technology, and fantasy barbarians--so Mattel shrugged and gave it to them, thereby creating an enduring pop culture franchise that remains beloved 40-some years later. (Mattel also created a queer icon with some serious homoerotic subtext, but that flew right over baby Emily's head at the time).

You have the POWER! To listen to this episode…

Mentioned in this episode:

How He-Man Changed the World & How It All Fell Apart: The Story of The Masters of the Universe

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, pop culture, animation, storytelling, cultural commentary, cult classic, sci fi, gen x childhood, nostalgia, gen x nostalgia, he-man, skeletor, mattel, social, television, masters of the universe, nicholas galitzine

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

"E.T. phone home!"

On this week's episode of Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Tracie revisits one of the classic movies of her Gen X childhood: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Director Steven Spielberg is at the top of his storytelling game with this sci fi film that introduces E.T., a gentle alien botanist who is accidentally stranded on Earth and taken in by 10-year-old Elliott, the middle child of divorced parents. Not only does Spielberg use every visual tool available to show his storytelling rather than drown the audience in exposition, but he also makes it clear that he truly understands the psychology of children. 

The film doesn't condescend to children in its audience and it recognizes how kids see the world. And because Spielberg relies on visual storytelling rather than exposition, he ensured that baby Emily and Tracie, aged 3 and 6 when the film debuted, understood what was happening on screen. This movie deserves every bit of your nostalgia.

Beeee goooood, and listen to this episode!

Tags
deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, storytelling, classic movies, gen x childhood, film, movies, psychology, 80s and 90s movies, pop culture, movie reviews, women, sci fi, gen x nostalgia, nostalgia, film analysis, steven spielberg

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

"I see dead people..."

This week on Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Emily returns to M. Night Shyamalan's 1999 masterpiece The Sixth Sense. The film was a pop culture phenomenon when it debuted, and all everyone could talk about was the last ten minutes of the plot, when Bruce Willis's Malcolm Crowe (and the audience) realizes that his situation is much different from what he had believed. And to give Shyamalan his due, this plot twist uses masterful storytelling, playing by the rules and giving the audience all the clues necessary to connect the dots.

The problem is that pop culture as a whole and Shyamalan in particular grabbed onto the idea that the twist is what made the film great, rather than the storytelling, psychology, relationships, and acting. As Emily remarks to Tracie, The Sixth Sense is a remarkable film that happens to have a twist ending, not a remarkable film because of its twist ending. The result is that a promising young director became a bit of a pop culture punchline as Shyamalan kept trying to recreate the twist rather than leaning into his remarkable storytelling and directorial abilities. Which is a damn shame.

Throw on your headphones to hear two live sister podcasters making each other laugh over this film!

Mentioned in this episode:

Roger Ebert’s review of The Sixth Sense

Tags: deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, pop culture, storytelling, psychology, mental health, film, classic movies, bruce willis, m night shyamalan, 80s and 90s movies, movies, movie reviews, haley joel osment, toni colette, analyzing film tropes, millennial nostalgia, film analysis, cultural commentary, ghost story, plot twist

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Whether you like it or not, you're in the middle of a war that has been raging for the better part of a thousand years.

Tracie returned to the 2003 film Underworld to find a delightful – but maybe not very good – vampire and werewolves version of the Matrix. Starring Kate Beckinsale as Selene in skin-tight leather, Underworld is a visually beautiful, blue-tinged movie that marries some of the ideals of feminism with the same sexist tropes that feminism has been shining a light on since the invention of movies. Because so much of our storytelling requires badass women to fall in love with "chosen ones" rather than simply be the protagonists on their own.

The sisters also unpack an explicit fantasy allegory about interracial relationships that is well-meaning but perhaps not as effective as the movie-makers intended: race is made up, but the difference between werewolves and vampires is visible under a microscope. Sex and sexiness are also key topics of conversation, because vampires. And Kate Beckinsale. (Even though the feminism of a sexy Kate Beckinsale in skintight leather is definitely suspect.)

Though we cannot predict the future, the consequences of this episode will reverberate through 54 minutes of listening pleasure. So put on some headphones and stay out of the shadows.

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, feminism, women, fantasy, film, movies, storytelling, allegory, underworld, kate beckinsale, michael sheen, vampires, werewolves, race, analyzing film tropes, cult classic, cultural commentary, pop culture, film analysis, psychology

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

I am Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. I was born in 1518 in the village of Glenfinnan on the shores of Loch Shiel. And I am immortal.

On this week's episode of Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Emily revisits one of the most unhinged pieces of Gen X pop culture: the 1986 cult classic film Highlander. Starring French-American actor Christopher Lambert (who didn't speak English prior to being cast) and noted Scot Sean Connery (who was playing an Egyptian character with a Spaniard's name), the movie's surface storytelling is about immortal beings decapitating each other over the centuries.

But director Russell Mulcahy (himself a gay man) offers some pretty unsubtle queer subtext throughout the film--including the homoeroticism of the training montages between Lambert and Connery and AIDS metaphors that would be abundantly clear to any LGBTQ audiences of 80s and 90s movies. Mulcahy created a pop culture phenomenon that deeply resonated with everybody's dad (and specifically Tracie & Emily's stepdad) in the 1980s, even though the cultural commentary about the American queer experience of living through homophobia, the AIDS epidemic, and societal indifference and hostility, all while trying to remain open to romance, sailed RIGHT OVER THEIR HEADS. Because swords are cool. And where else you gonna get your decapitation fix in the average piece of pop culture?

There can be only one...podcast episode to listen to over the next hour. So throw on your headphones and get started!

Mentioned in this episode:

Highlander: Love, Violence, and Sword Metaphors

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, pop culture, cult classic, cultural commentary, storytelling, 80s and 90s movies, romance, analyzing film tropes, queer lens, film, film analysis, gen x childhood, gen x nostalgia, mental health, movies, nostalgia, psychology, sci fi, women, sean connery

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

We must have a wawwy. You know, a large gathering of mice for a reason.

This week on Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Tracie returns to one of the classic movies of the animation storytelling boom of the 1980s: An American Tail. Animated by Don Bluth, the film follows young Fievel Mousekewitz, a Russian mouse immigrating to America to escape the pogroms (perpetrated by Cossack cats and humans in this world) who is separated from the rest of his family. But Fievel is smart, curious, and able to prevail through the power of storytelling--specifically because he recalls the story of Rapunzel (the Mouse with Really Long Hair) and the Mouse of Minsk (a golem allegory).

The film offers some interesting cultural commentary about populist politicians and the importance of the immigrant experience in American history, but Tracie points out that the newly arrived mice seem somewhat insular rather than integrating into American culture--although that is true to the lived reality of immigrants in the late 19th century. And while Fievel and his family are Jewish, it's also interesting from a storytelling perspective that cats represent oppressors in general (including the Mafia, gangs, and criminals) rather than anti-semitic oppressors in particular. Also, where are all the dogs?

If you are somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight--throw on your earbuds and take a listen to this episode!

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, storytelling, animation, pop culture, cultural commentary, movies, film, analyzing film tropes, classic movies, film analysis, don bluth, steven spielberg, gen x childhood, gen x nostalgia, movie reviews, 80s and 90s movies, madeline kahn, dom deluise, somewhere out there

Deep Thoughts Episodes mentioned in this episode:

The Land Before Time: Deep Thoughts About Grief, Animation, and How Much Scientific Verisimilitude We Require From Talking Dinosaur Cartoons

Avalon: Deep Thoughts About Family, Money Psychology, and Waiting to Cut the Turkey

Airplane!: Deep Thoughts About Comedy That Questions Everything--Except a Woman as a Prize

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

The Big Apple needs a worm like Fielding!

This week on Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Emily revisits a favorite television comedy from her Gen X childhood: Night Court. Not only did the Guy sisters watch this workplace comedy in syndication in the afternoons starting in elementary school (despite the fact that much of the humor was very much not meant for children), but it was also part of the Must See TV lineup on Thursday nights that Tracie and Emily watched with their parents.

Showrunner Reinhold Weege (and yes, that's really his name) created a true laugh-a-minute comedy that also offered well-meaning storytelling that was surprisingly progressive about trans acceptance, mental health, and racial equality. But the treatment of women in the show, especially how John Larroquette's Dan Fielding constantly hit on every woman indiscriminately and Markie Post's Christine Sullivan in particular, feels much slimier now than the writers intended. While Fielding was always the butt of the joke and made to pay for his sleazy ways, Night Court is a pop culture reflection of the belief that unwanted male attention was the price of being a woman. The fact that Larroquette still managed to make Dan likable is a testament to his acting skills and the strength of the ensemble cast, headed by Harry Anderson.

Throw on your headphones and take a listen...and we'll consider the case of The People vs. The Podcast Listener dismissed!

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, comedy, gen x childhood, storytelling, sitcom, television, night court, john larroquette, markie post, harry anderson, women, mental health, pop culture, gen x nostalgia, cultural commentary, society, new york city, criminal justice, slapstick, 1980s pop culture

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood
A beautiful day for a neighbor.|
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?

The Guy Girls' neighborhood is full of nostalgia this week as the sisters return to the gentle, sunny television show that helped raise millions of American children: Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Tracie shares how Fred Rogers' plan to go seminary was changed when he was horrified to see people throwing pies at each other on his parents' brand new television set in the 1960s. (One can only imagine how upset Mr. Rogers would be by 2026 pop culture.)

Instead of becoming a minister right away, Mr. Rogers developed his countercultural television show that made intentional choices about everything from pacing to storytelling to word choice to help protect and develop the mental health and growth of his audience. With every decision Fred Rogers made, he considered the psychology of children, believing them capable of handling straightforward conversations about difficult topics.

Our collective nostalgia for Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood is well placed, whether you were among the youngest baby boomers watching in 1968 or the eldest Gen Z watching in 2001: Fred Rogers was an authentic, humble, and deeply thoughtful man who really was singing directly to us. His intentionality in creating a program that fed our minds and spirits as children means we can go home again to this neighborhood as adults. It's nostalgia that actually pays off.

Hi, podcast neighbor! We're glad we're together again!

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, nostalgia, television, pop culture, storytelling, mental health, psychology, fred rogers, mr rogers’ neighborhood, cultural commentary, religion, public broadcasting, children's television, childhood, land of make believe, king friday, 80s nostalgia

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.

On this week's episode of Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Tracie and Emily welcome Tanesha Myles to discuss the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada. Like Anne Hathaway's Andy, Tanesha worked for a stylish, demanding, and overwhelming boss, who she describes as a "Black Miranda Priestly," referring to the character played by Meryl Streep. Both women bosses saw themselves in their employees and pushed them to their limits. But as Tanesha shares with the Guy sisters this week, both these women bosses also taught their protégées how to take up space in a world that expects women to make themselves small, perform niceness, and cater to men.

But Miranda's mental health definitely suffers from her way of living, as Andy realizes over the course of the film. She doesn't want to emulate her boss's approach to romance or friendship, even if she learns to take up space from her Prada-wearing "devil" of a boss. And as Emily (who has never seen the film!) points out, Miranda is sometimes kind even if she is never nice. That distinction is an important one.

By all means, move at a glacial pace. Whenever you put on your headphones and listen, you're in for a treat!

Tanesha Myles is the mind behind Her15Minutes. You can find her at instagram.com/herfifteenmins/

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, women, romance, film, feminism, movies, anne hathaway, meryl streep, cultural commentary, pop culture, classic movies, comedy, film analysis, mental health, psychology, fashion, prada, storytelling

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Experience has made me rich / And now they're after me

On this week's episode of Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Emily and Tracie discuss Madonna's 1985 music video Material Girl in front of a live studio audience. As a six-year-old child, Emily did not recognize how Madonna's video was intentionally in conversation with Marilyn Monroe's performance of Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend from 30 years prior. Both women are singing about the importance of financial security, although Monroe's cultural commentary is more of a practical guide for navigating misogyny than rallying cry for feminism and women owning their financial and sexual freedom. What a difference 30 years makes.

Of course, baby Emily was unaware of this pop culture homage within Madonna's video. She was much more concerned by the storytelling intercut within the music video, wherein a rich producer woos Madonna by pretending to be a poor suitor. It bothered the budding financial expert that the producer spent more money trying to look poor than he would have paid for expensive gifts, and it truly annoyed her that Madonna seemed to be taken in by his fakery. Women with her level of financial and sexual agency should be savvier than that! 

Ultimately, Emily and Tracie are glad they had Material Girl as an example as little kids. It helped them recognize that boys needed to give them proper credit...or they'd just walk away.

We are living in a material world…and you are a podcast listener!

Note to listeners: We teased Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood for next week, but we’re actually welcoming guest Tanesha Myles to come talk about The Devil Wears Prada instead! We’ll be sharing our deep thoughts about Fred Rogers the following week.

Mentioned in this episode:

https://www.emilyguybirken.com/post/everything-i-know-about-money-i-learned-from-pop-culture

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, women, feminism, pop culture, madonna, marilyn monroe, cultural commentary, storytelling, gen x childhood, gen x nostalgia, money, romance, nostalgia, music video, material girl, diamonds are a girls best friend, mtv, psychology, comedy, comedy podcast

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

It's better to help people than garden gnomes.

When Tracie rewatched cult classic Amélie, the 25-year-old film delivered visual metaphors, magical realism, and romance that delighted as much as they did a quarter century ago. There were also moments that did not age as well as nostalgia would have suggested, and others offered cultural commentary that wasn't quite fleshed out.

The assumptions underlying the central romance between Amélie and Nino seemed to suggest that each of us has one true love out there. Tracie calls bullshit. The titular character Amélie decides to make it her mission to help those around her, but is she really helping? Is it possible Amélie is on the autism spectrum? And if yes, what are the implications of that? 

In the conversation between the sisters, they wonder about what might get lost–and found–in translation for American viewers of this film, or any consumers of movies created by and for a different culture. Whether the quirky characters (and their attitude toward romance) are quintessentially French or just delightfully weird, the visually beautiful film remains deeply enjoyable.

So, my little listener, you don't have bones of glass. You can take life's knocks. If you let this chance pass, eventually, your heart will become as dry and brittle as my skeleton. So, go listen, for Pete's sake!

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, romance, pop culture, film, cult classic, france, nostalgia, cultural commentary, mental health, psychology, storytelling, movies, film analysis, french, romcom, women, analyzing film tropes, comedy, audrey tautou, Paris

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Hey, I tell you what is. Big city, hmm? Live, work, huh? But not city only. Only peoples. Peoples is peoples. No is buildings. Is tomatoes, huh? Is peoples, is dancing, is music, is potatoes. So, peoples is peoples. Okay?

Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit returns this week with Emily's take on The Muppets Take Manhattan. Although this 1984 film, directed by Frank Oz, still offers plenty of comedy, music, and whimsy, its treatment of women is a little less charming than the Guy Girls remembered.

Kermit, Miss Piggy, and the rest of the gang have just graduated from college and bring their senior musical Manhattan Melodies to New York to try to make it on Broadway. Of course, it's not so easy to find a willing producer, and Oz's storytelling scatters the Muppets across the country while Kermit stays behind. Unfortunately, the screenplay also seems to think that misogyny is just a fact of nature that women must deal with, so the audience must watch Miss Piggy become a badass in the face of catcalling construction workers and purse-snatching scumbags.

And all women in the film are similarly treated, with Janice remarking that she won't take off her clothes no matter how artistic the shoot is, Yolanda the rat constantly getting hit on by Rizzo, Brooke Shields also getting hit on by rats, and the Muppets' college audience laughing off Animal chasing a co-ed. So much for Gen X nostalgia if this was the pop culture written for children.

Still, as Pete might say, Muppets is Muppets. So please, join us!

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, women, gen x nostalgia, pop culture, film, comedy, storytelling, cultural commentary, feminism, movies, movie reviews, muppets, kermit the frog, miss piggy, misogyny, romance, 80s and 90s movies, analyzing film tropes, classic movies

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

There's no crying in baseball!

This week on Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t, Tracie returns to the 1992 Penny Marshall comedy A League of Their Own. Both Guy sisters loved the unabashed feminism and women-centered storytelling of this film when it debuted, and much of movie holds up to their Gen X nostalgia. Marshall lets the audience see how being part of a team creates a sense of belonging and self-worth, how women must excel as an athlete and a lady to be taken seriously, and how putting any kind of qualifier before the word "athlete" becomes a threat to the status quo. 

But the feminism isn't entirely joyful, in part because this isn't just 90s era pop culture, but historical fiction based on a real baseball league. And unfortunately, the real-world misogyny Marshall illuminates via feel-good feminism hasn't gone away. It's alive and well and continues to devalue women's abilities, skills, and contributions even in 2026.

Don't worry! There's no need to run to catch this podcast. Just put on your headphones and listen in!

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, feminism, pop culture, women, film, comedy, gen x nostalgia, storytelling, movies, cultural commentary, penny marshall, baseball, classic movies, film analysis, nostalgia, 80s and 90s movies, geena davis, tom hanks, analyzing film tropes

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

I think we've all arrived at a very special place. Spiritually, ecumenically, grammatically.

Before the 2003 blockbuster film Pirates of the Caribbean was the pop culture juggernaut that spawned more sequels than most pirates can count on one hand, it was the first movie Emily went to see with her spouse in their early courtship. This week on Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Emily brings her film analysis to what should be nothing more than a ridiculous piece of pop culture:

It's a big budget action adventure movie, based on an amusement park ride, starring an intentionally uglified Johnny Depp, channeling Keith Richards, to play an infamous pirate. It's no wonder Michael Eisner worried about the mental health of director Gore Verbinski for letting Depp do what he wanted.

But for all its silliness, Pirates offers tightly-written storytelling, professionals taking their craft seriously but not themselves, and a scene-stealing and pop culture changing performance by Depp. How we think of pirates has been completely altered because of Depp's portrayal of Jack Sparrow, which reinforces what a creative talent the actor is, even if he seems like a complete creep IRL.

Yo-ho, yo-ho, a podcaster's life for me! Grab a tot of rum and listen in!

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, pop culture, film, film analysis, mental health, storytelling, analyzing film tropes, classic movies, comedy, cultural commentary, movie reviews, movies, romance, feminism, women, gore verbinski, johnny depp, keira knightley, orlando bloom

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Earthman, your Mickey Mouse is one big stupid dope!

This week on Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Tracie delves into a forgotten sci fi gem from her Gen X childhood: Wolfgang Petersen's 1985 film Enemy Mine. A commercial flop when it debuted, Enemy Mine never quite reached cult classic status, in part because it is a sci fi film that's remarkably light on space battles and much more interested in theology, interpersonal relationships, dignity, and parenting.

This film is also the pop culture that first introduced baby Tracie and Emily to the idea of nonbinary individuals. The heroic agender aliens (that reproduce asexually to the confusion of Dennis Quaid's Will Davidge) seem like prescient cultural commentary in a sci fi film forty years removed from our current political "discourse" about whether gender is binary. If only more people had seen this little-known film when it came out, perhaps they may have learned that truth is truth.

We promise not to say you look terrible. Please just listen!

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, sci fi, pop culture, film, cult classic, cultural commentary, gen x childhood, film analysis, 80s and 90s movies, gen x nostalgia, movies, movie reviews, storytelling, wolfgang petersen, louis gossett jr, dennis quaid, allegory, analyzing film tropes, science fiction

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early 

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Thought is real. Physical is the illusion. Ironic, huh ?

The thoughts are deeper (and potentially more upsetting, so mind the CWs) than usual on this week's episode of Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, where Emily shares her film analysis of the 1998 cult classic What Dreams May Come. Based on the novel by Richard Matheson (who had some truly fucked up views of women, romance, and gender dynamics), director Vincent Ward and leads Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Annabella Sciorra make a concerted effort to elevate the source material beyond its misogynistic roots, giving us a visually stunning examination of the afterlife and a compassionate look at the difficulty of loving someone with mental health challenges. But the trope that Williams' Chris and Sciorra's Annie are soul mates keeps their romance from being something to emulate, erases Annie's agency, and recreates Matheson's misogynistic belief that women are nothing without their men.

Additionally, although casting Gooding as Chris's deceased mentor may have seemed progressive for the 90s, finding out that the actual mentor was cosplaying as Max Von Sydow, a white German actor, while Chris's daughter took on the form of Rosalind Chao because of a casually racist comment Chris once made about the beauty of Asian women, feels rather less worthy of nostalgia from the vantage point of 2026. That said, while Matheson's view of women is foul, the romance and imagination of the afterlife he envisioned and Ward put on the screen is nothing short of captivating and thought-provoking--and this film offers an lovely and compassionate take on how to support someone when there is nothing you can do to make things better.

Your brain may be nothing but meat, but it's meat that's craving some stimulation in the form of a delightful podcast conversation between your favorite Guy sisters! So take a listen!

Content warning: Discussions of child death, suicide, and depression. Take care with this one, y'all.

Tags:

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, romance, pop culture, women, mental health, psychology, cult classic, cultural commentary, film analysis, movies, movie reviews, feminism, film, nostalgia, 80s and 90s movies, robin williams, cuba gooding jr, richard matheson, annabella sciorra, rosalind chao

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

"But I've got style, I've got flair. How did I become the nanny?"

On this week's episode of Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, the Guy sisters welcome Emily's colleague Zina Kumok to share her analysis of the 1990s-era sitcom The Nanny, starring Fran Drescher. All three women appreciated the pop culture representation of a beautiful and funny working class Jewish woman on this TV show, since Drescher's portrayal of the titular nanny subverted many stereotypes about Jews, even as it leaned into others as part of the weekly fish-out-of-water comedy.

While not everything in the show has aged as well as Nanny Fine's amazing sense of style, comedic timing, and parenting psychology--specifically, there's some unpleasant 90s era fat shaming that we don't have much nostalgia for, and it's a little difficult to tell if there's an undercurrent of feminism in a show whose main character is obsessed with romance and marriage--but this piece of late 20th century pop culture is definitely worth a rewatch. Come for the one-liners and blue comedy that soared over your head the first time you watched it, stay for subversive pop culture that offers some trenchant cultural commentary on class, money, religion, and sex.

Good things come to those who wait, sir. Unless they wait too long and then they slip through their namby-pamby fingers. So don't delay in throwing on your headphones and listening in to this episode!

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, nostalgia, 90s television, comedy, cultural commentary, fashion, feminism, fran drescher, millennial nostalgia, pop culture, psychology, romance, sitcom, storytelling, the nanny, todd oldham, women

Zina Kumok is available for one-on-one financial help at chdouglas.com

Find her on Instagram

And on LinkedIn

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

With friends like these, who needs enemas?

This week on Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Tracie revisits the star-studded yet mostly forgotten 1994 comedy The Road to Wellville. Set at the turn of the 20th century, this film offers cultural commentary on the bonkers health crazes that gave us breakfast cereal as health food, opium as an all-purpose panacea, and the idea that an erection was a flagpole on the grave. And yet, the psychology of John Harvey Kellogg, as played by Anthony Hopkins with prosthetic teeth, shows that he was no snake-oil salesman, even if he was overly invested in his patients' bowels and genitals. He truly believed that his regimen of roughage, calisthenics, enemas, and never ever ever touching yourself would improve your physical and mental health. And there's a great deal of comedy to be found in the bodily functions that result from his methods, if farts, poop, and masturbation are your sort of humor. (Emily feels no nostalgia for the experience of watching this comedy with her father and hoping for a sinkhole to release her from her nearly fatal level of embarrassment.)

That said, the Guy sisters enjoy a fascinating conversation about women and sex, health as a business, neurodivergence, and whether it's pronounced sanitAIRium or santORium.

We promise that no one has ever died listening to our podcast. So you can feel confident about throwing on your headphones to listen in!

Tags:

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, comedy, pop culture, movies, film, psychology, mental health, women, nostalgia, 80s and 90s movies, cultural commentary, analyzing film tropes, comedy podcast, cult classic, feminism, film analysis, storytelling, matthew broderick, anthony hopkins, bridget fonda

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

I'm incarcerated, Lloyd!!

This week on Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Emily shares her analysis of one of the classic movies that happened to miss the Guy girls the first time around: Say Anything. Cameron Crowe's 1989 romance/comedy created some iconic moments in our collective Gen X childhood--notably the scene of John Cusack's Lloyd Dobler holding the boom box playing Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" over his head. 

Crowe's storytelling also turned a curious eye to toxic masculinity by showing a romance where the young woman's intelligence is a feature, not a bug, for the less-impressive young man who loves her. John Mahoney, who plays Ione Skye's nurturing but corrupt father, also offers an incredibly nuanced take on the psychology of how money can infect even the most loving of parental relationships. While Tracie and Emily both worry about how this romance between two teens will work out--especially if they do "make it" and stay together--the slice of life comedy and realism in this film are lovely to watch, even if they can feel a bit dated after 37 years.

You don't have to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything. Just throw on your headphones and listen.

Tags
nostalgia, 80s and 90s movies, cameron crowe, classic movies, comedy, deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, film, film analysis, gen x childhood, gen x nostalgia, John Cusack, mental health, movie reviews, pop culture, psychology, romance, romcom, storytelling, women

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

I don't have low self-esteem. I have low esteem for everyone else.

On this week's episode of Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Tracie returns to an icon of 90s era feminism, the animated MTV television show Daria. Just like the eponymous Daria Morgendorffer, the people around Tracie thought she was a "misery chick" who wore her feminism, sarcasm, and impatience with the idiocy of the rest of the world on her sleeve (although Emily objects to that characterization of her beloved sister).

Still, in her early 20s, Tracie found a lot to love about this pop culture take on how smart and disaffected young women navigate unreasonable expectations in a chaotic world. In addition, Daria was savvy enough to let smart jokes land without explaining them to the audience and self-aware enough to offer cultural commentary that doesn't let Daria herself off the hook for her role in perpetuating unjust systems. It also does a great job of holding a mirror up to reality when it comes to the psychology of high intelligence, since recognizing the brutal nature of the world can lead to poor mental health outcomes that look like low self-esteem. And even though Daria falls victim to some of the ideological purity testing of 90s feminism, it also offers some pretty great examples of feminism in action.

La la la la...Before the theme song is stuck in your head forever, throw on your headphones and listen to this episode!

Tags: deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, feminism, animation, mtv, women, pop culture, cultural commentary, psychology, mental health, comedy, comedy podcast, cult classic, millennial nostalgia, mike judge, 90s television, daria, daria morgendorffer, social justice

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Earn more sessions by sleeving!

This week on Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Emily enjoys analyzing film tropes in the 1987 Steve Martin comedy Roxanne, based on the Edmond Rostand play Cyrano de Bergerac. As a romance loving child, Emily adored the updated storytelling of the remarkable man with a big nose who falls in love with a beautiful woman and helps his handsome but shy lieutenant woo her in his stead.

While much of the comedy from the original French play translates remarkably well into 1980s era Washington state, writer and star Steve Martin wanted the humorous tale to be a true comedy rather than the tragic tale of missed opportunities and self-loathing (and lack of agency for women) that Rostand originally wrote. Which is why Roxanne and CD get to have their (slightly awkward) kiss and happily ever after at the end, and Chris gets to live on in Tahoe with Sandy the cocktail waitress instead of dying nobly.

Throw on your headphones, pour yourself a glass of wine to snork, and take a listen!

Mentioned in this episode:

https://seeingthingssecondhand.com/2022/04/10/roxanne-1987/

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, comedy, women, pop culture, storytelling, romance, analyzing, film tropes, movie reviews, film, cultural commentary, feminism, film analysis, gen x childhood, 80s and 90s movies, romcom, nostalgia, steve martin, daryl hannah, cyrano de bergerac

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

"I know how you feel. You don't know if you want to hit me or kiss me. I get a lot of that."

On this week's episode of Deep Thoughts, Tracie revisits the 1990 film Dick Tracy, the big budget Oscar winner that pop culture forgot. Director and star Warren Beatty wanted to recreate the comic strip detective as a live action hero, complete with all the weird villains that populate the funny papers, as well as the romance Tracy enjoyed with both his loving girlfriend Tess Trueheart and the villainous femme fatale, Breathless Mahoney. In some ways, Beatty succeeded: the visuals of the film are arresting (pun very much intended). But although contemporaneous movie reviews were glowing, Dick Tracy has gone unremembered, even as a cult classic--in part because the story has very little heart and Beatty's turn as Tracy is kinda meh.

That doesn't mean this movie isn't fun (if a little infuriating) to watch. The "romance" plot that puts Tracy in a love triangle with Mahoney (played by Madonna), and the long-suffering Tess (Glenne Headly) doesn't give the viewer much to go on as to why these women want the rule-breaking detective. But if you can overlook the outdated romance, Dick Tracy can take you back to the nostalgia of watching a square-jawed detective fight the bad guys in the Sunday comics.

We promise not to put you in the cement bath. Just take a listen!

Tags: deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, romance, pop culture, film, movie reviews, cult classic, women, 80s and 90s movies, nostalgia, feminism, cultural commentary, storytelling, warren beatty, comic strip, gen x childhood, analyzing film tropes, madonna, dick tracy

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?

On today's episode of Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Emily delves into Tim Burton's 1989 film Batman. This pop culture phenomenon was controversial prior to its release, as comic book purists objected to the casting of Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman. They assumed his acting would make the film a comedy rather than gritty storytelling. While Emily agrees that Keaton brings a level of gravitas and pathos to his depiction of Wayne, she finds something unsettling about how pop culture gives us a billionaire who spends his time and money beating up purse snatchers rather than fixing the infrastructure of Gotham City. That said, Batman--or at least this iteration of the Dark Knight--is ultimately a mafia movie, which is not at all interesting to Emily, until you add a psychopathic clown to the mix. And of course, casting Jack Nicholson as the Clown Prince of Crime (with serious mental health issues) was inspired.

Keaton's Batman may not be the pop culture hero we deserve to overthink right now, but he's the one we need to spend too much time overanalyzing. Throw on your headphones and overthink the caped crusader along with us!

Mentioned in this episode:

Review: Learning to Love Tim Burton's BATMAN (1989)

Why Fans Didn't Want Michael Keaton As Batman

Tags

deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, pop culture, film, psychology, mental health, batman, comedy, movie reviews, storytelling, comic book, analyzing film tropes, classic movies, tim burton, cultural commentary, film analysis, gen x childhood, nostalgia, 80s and 90s movies, kim basinger, michael keaton

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

The truth is, I thought it mattered. I thought that music mattered. But does it bollocks. Not compared to how people matter.

Tracie goes back in time to her semester in London in 1997 by revisiting the British film Brassed Off. This “emphatically empathetic” piece of 1990s pop culture crystallized the importance of collective bargaining, worker solidarity and mutual aid for a not-quite 21-year-old Tracie. With today’s eyes, both the film and the politics of 1980s-1990s Great Britain it depicts are more complicated than the pop culture made it seem 30 years ago. Nevertheless, there are some beautiful storytelling–and musical–beats in this real-life story of a coal mine and the brass band associated with it. North American audiences may never have realized this, if they only went by the marketing copy that inaccurately described the film as a “delightfully entertaining comedy treat.”

Remember, band’s on Tuesdays. Tonight’s origami class, so throw on your headphones and take a listen. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Den of Geek: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/brassed-off-a-90s-uk-film-that-demands-not-to-be-forgotten/

Tags: deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, pop culture, film, movies, storytelling, movie reviews, comedy, comedy podcast, romance, women, fiction, cultural commentary

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Yes, I did go to my high school reunion. It was just as if everyone had swelled.

On this week's episode, Emily revisits the ultimate high school reunion film, Grosse Pointe Blank. Rewatching John Cusack's charming and hilarious performance of professional killer Martin Blank made it clear to her that this is one of the movies that you can either enjoy as a dark comedy with a second chance romance and a happy ending, or you can dig into the moral, ethical, and mental health implications of Martin's "moral flexibility," but it's a little difficult to do both. But even while questioning the cultural commentary (or lack thereof?) of a comedy film about a hardened killer, the Guy sisters find a lot to love in the movie's humor, banging soundtrack, examination of masculinity, and exploration of the importance of connecting with your past. Also, apparently even paid assassins want to unionize.

If you're ready to give this comedy a shot (but don't shoot anything!), put on your headphones and take a listen!

Tags: deep thoughts about stupid sh*t, comedy, movies, pop culture, comedy podcast, romance, cultural commentary, mental health, psychology, john cusack, film, movie reviews, classic movies, fiction, society, storytelling, women, feminism, soundtrack

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

...And that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus.

Today, Tracie returns to another one of the movies that traumatized her and Emily in early childhood: the 1984 film Gremlins. Written by Chris Columbus and directed by Joe Dante, the film was advertised as a fun family fantasy, with the adorable mogwai Gizmo (described by Roger Ebert as a cross between a Pekingese, Yoda, the Ewoks, and a kitten) as too cute for little kids to pass up. What the 1980s movie going audience didn't know was that this film was playing with storytelling and fiction tropes and really tap-dancing on the fine line that separates comedy from horror. Columbus and Dante created a film about their love of movies, using Gremlins as an opportunity to recreate some of their favorite scenes, characters, and moments from classic movies. And then, like one of the eponymous rampaging gremlins, they stuck it all in a blender and hit frappe.

The result is a fun, weird, scary, bizarre, and sometimes offensive mashup of movies and messages and lessons and metaphors that don't entirely make sense all together, because making sense was beside the point.

Put on your headphones and take a listen. Just don't turn your back on any nearby Christmas trees. 

Mentioned in this episode: https://www.cracked.com/article_38101_sexual-anxiety-racism-the-vietnam-war-no-one-knows-what-gremlins-is-a-metaphor-for.html

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.

This week, Emily brings her deep thoughts about the first of two Christmas movies the Guy Girls will be covering for the 2025 holiday season: Richard Curtis's 2003 romcom Love, Actually.

While both sisters thoroughly enjoyed the 10 interlocking stories of romance, parental love, heartbreak, dubious comedy, and even dubiouser feminism when the film debuted, Curtis's storytelling style hasn't exactly aged well. Not only does Love, Actually lean into the ubiquitous early 2000s culture of fat shaming despite Curtis trying write pointed cultural commentary about how ridiculous that was through the story of Martine McCutcheon's character Natalie, but the women in the movie are consistently treated as objects and prizes to be won, rather than fully formed people. But as Tracie argues, if Curtis believes in True Love, which can happen At First Sight (with the capitalization of those romantic ideals implied), then of course he paints himself into the corner of love based on physical attraction, which means young, slender, beautiful women--and it something we see repeatedly in his movies.

There are still plenty of laughs and poignant moments in this film, so no shade on anyone who puts this in their rotation of Christmas movies to revisit each year. But it definitely works as a time capsule for where we were in 2003.

If Christmas is all around you, put in your earbuds to get it out of your head for once!

Mentioned in this episode:

https://www.jezebel.com/i-rewatched-love-actually-and-am-here-to-ruin-it-for-al-1485136388

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Let your heart guide you. It whispers, so listen closely.

This week, Tracie brings her deep thoughts about the 1988 Don Bluth animated film The Land Before Time. Although both Guy girls were a little too old to appreciate this staple of Millennial nostalgia when it originally came out, Tracie loved the hand-drawn animation, the way Bluth's storytelling offered a kid-friendly meditation on grief, and the pop culture trope of found family when she watched the film repeatedly while regularly babysitting dino-obsessed kiddos. There's still a lot to love in this gorgeous animation, even if you discount the technical skill of the artists. The story offers kids a framework for understanding loss and death and the long-term mental health challenges that can remain after experiencing grief. Considering how often children's movies don't allow their protagonists to feel sad for more than a scene, this is truly remarkable.

But as much as the animation doesn't talk down to its audience in regards to Littlefoot's grief over his mother, it also underestimates kids' ability to understand what's happening on the screen and their ability to handle anything other than a MegaHappy ending.

(Also: those dinosaurs lived millions of years apart. Tracie and Emily feel kind of hypocritical that they don't care.)

Throw on your headphones and join us for a scientifically inaccurate but artistically beautiful prehistoric adventure!

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus content, live zooms with Tracie & Emily, discounts on merch, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

A life lived in fear is a life half lived.

On this week's Deep Thoughts, Emily brings her analysis, nostalgia--and quite a bit of drool--to the 1992 Baz Luhrmann comedy Strictly Ballroom. Though this indie film, which was Luhrmann's directorial debut, may have gotten lost among the 80s and 90s movies that were bigger blockbusters, the comedy offers an incisive skewering of the insular world of amateur ballroom dancing in regional Australia.

And yet, Luhrmann's direction, the beautiful choreography and dancing by the leads, and the pure joy of Paul Mercurio's Scott Hastings refusing to adhere to arbitrary rules about strict ballroom steps and his willingness to learn from Tara Morice's Fran about the traditional Spanish dance steps brings the viewer along on the journey. As we watch, the film goes from a comedy that exposes the entire ballroom culture as a ridiculous tempest in a teapot to the place where Scott and Fran must make a stand for creativity, art, bravery, romance, and costumes that don't look like someone bedazzled your head.

Unlike many 80s and 90s movies, this one holds up beautifully in 2025 and is delightful from start to finish. If you haven't watched it, please do check it out, possibly before listening to this episode's spoilers. For once, Tracie and Emily's nostalgia was not misplaced!

There's no need to master the bogo pogo before listening in. Just throw on your headphones and let the rhythm move you.

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Well, that was absurd, let's eat dead bird!

Just in time for Thanksgiving, Tracie brings her deep thoughts about the 1995 "romantic" comedy Home for the Holidays. Although the dysfunctional dynamics of the Larson family makes for realistic and funny storytelling, the romance between Holly Hunter's Claudia and Dylan McDermott's Leo seems to imply that women are just lacking a handsome man's tongue down their throat, no matter what they claim. (To be fair, Leo was simply following pop culture expectations of romance of the mid-1990s, but his actions seem pretty gross when analyzing film tropes in 2025.) 

Still, the film offers lovely commentary on the nature memory, joy, and family connections. Tracie and Emily conclude that even the actions of the biggest asshole in the film--Tommy, played by Robert Downey, Jr.--make sense within the context of his family's homophobia. The naked polaroids ain't cool, though, dude.

Whether your family is more or less dysfunctional than the Larsons, throw on some headphones and listen in!

Mentioned in this episode:

https://womenshealth.obgyn.msu.edu/blog/memory-telephone-game

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

On today's episode, the Guy sisters welcome Emily's friend and co-author Joe Saul-Sehy, co-host of the wildly popular Stacking Benjamins podcast, to talk about the 1987 Oliver Stone film Wall Street. Even though it has had an enormous impact on the culture of finance (and Emily has written in the realm of finance for 15 years), neither of the Guy girls had seen the film, which Joe first watched in the theater as a teenager.

While Oliver Stone's storytelling offers pointed social commentary about the lack of morality and ethics on Wall Street, his masterful directing of Charlie Sheen, Michael Douglas, and Daryl Hannah also makes the culture of insider trading seem not only understandable but even glamorous to the audience. Sheen's Bud Fox follows the hero's journey as he learns that the high-flying life of immoral wealth he thinks he wants is nothing more than a fantasy--and it's not worth selling his soul to be accepted into Gordon Gekko's culture of greed.

Slick back your hair, grab those red suspenders, and take a listen!

Find Joe at stackingbenjamins.com

Check out the book Joe and Emily wrote! Stacked: Your Super-Serious Guide to Modern Money Management

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

You mean I'm gonna STAY this color?

On this week's episode, Tracie shares her deep thoughts about the 1979 Steve Martin film The Jerk, a comedy that never failed to delight the Guy sisters' father, no matter how many times he watched it. And for good reason. Martin's broad physical comedy and cultural commentary rooted in racial stereotypes conceals multiple layers of storytelling and humor in the tale of dim-witted Navin R. Johnson. Not only does the film follow Joseph Campbell's hero's journey from the world of fantasy, but the comedy works on so many levels that you can laugh at something different every time you watch it. (Although holding a dog in front of your crotch as you run naked down the street after the love of your life is always funny.)

Whether you can tap your foot to the beat or not, we'd love for you to listen in!

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

We're releasing this episode (109) four days early in honor of Halloween!

There are certain RULES that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie.

In December 1996, teenaged Emily learned to love horror movies when she saw Wes Craven's Scream in the theater. Twice.

Unlike most pop culture specifically created for her demographic, Scream offered feminism, cultural commentary, badass women as protagonists and antagonists, a banger of a murder mystery, and plenty of comedy--all while simultaneously analyzing film tropes, leaning into them, and subverting them all at once. It's no wonder it lit Emily up so much she convinced her scaredy-cat big sister to go see the film, too.

But there's a reason Emily hadn't watched this film for nearly 25 years even though it had once been one of her favorites. The murder of peer while she was in college brought home to her the fact that pop culture makes violent death into entertainment. And despite the superb storytelling, rewatching Scream as a 46-year-old mother of teenagers only highlighted the tragedy behind the perfectly-constructed fiction.

But even with her misgivings about the film's violence, Emily is still grateful to director Wes Craven, screenwriter Kevin Williamson, and actor Neve Campbell for giving her Sidney Prescott as a pop culture role model for setting sexual boundaries. Sidney has complete bodily autonomy and agency, and neither the film nor any of the non-homicidal characters shame her for her sexual decisions--even when she trusts the wrong man. This was a message that millions of teenagers took in with the quips and scares without realizing it. Nice work, Scream team.

Listen in--but don't tell anyone that you'll be right back!

Content warning: Discussion of murder, serial killers, sexual violence, Harvey Weinstein, and other types of violence. 

Mentioned in this episode

How Scream Got Its R Rating

Roger Ebert's Review

Self-heating Soup Cans

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

What kind of a host invites you to his house for the weekend and dies on you?

Despite its status as a benchmark of late 80s pop culture, the film Weekend at Bernie's sounds like it should never have been greenlit. Two lowly young insurance employees find their boss dead of an apparent overdose at his beach house--and pretend he is still alive. The mafia boss who ordered Bernie's death sends the enforcer back to kill him again and again, and there's a love interest who has to be kept in the dark. Many shenanigans ensue. The storytelling is bonkers, the biology is suspect, and although the physical comedy is top-notch, the humor is remarkably juvenile.

Honestly, Weekend at Bernie's shouldn't work. But this stupid comedy is not only genuinely funny, but it gave us a pop culture shorthand we're still using nearly 40 years later. This is partially thanks to the chemistry and amazing physicality of the three lead actors who sold us on the idea that Bernie's death was a funny situation rather than a mental health nightmare. The film is still a pop culture product of its time, including the misogyny and homophobia that was par for the course in the 1980s, but it still offers more laughs than you'd expect from a one-joke movie.

Throw on your headphones and sunglasses, relax in a sun lounger, and take a listen! Just make sure you move every once in a while.

Mentioned in this episode:

Roger Ebert’s review of Weekend at Bernie’s

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

You're the vulgarian, you fuck!

Tracie expected to enjoy revisiting the classic comedy A Fish Called Wanda, but she forgot just how much of this film's humor was derived from cringe comedy (John Cleese speaking Russian in his underwear when a large family stumbles upon him) and punching down (the dubious "comedy" of making fun of Michael Palin's stutter), both of which made the film painful to rewatch.

Wanda has some truly interesting cultural commentary about the differences between Americans and Britons, and Cleese's screenplay offers some brilliantly funny wordplay and storytelling that allowed Kevin Kline to ham up his role as Otto, the ridiculous epitome of American masculinity, all the way to an Oscar. But the well-crafted fiction comes with a side of homophobia and ableism that's just hard to watch in 2025--although the comedy beats are just as masterful as they were originally.

Throw on some headphones, make sure you're on the correct side of the road, and take a listen!

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Pop quiz, hotshot!

As Emily tells Tracie this week, the 1994 film Speed is, in a word, BONKERS. This pop culture icon of the early 1990s not only gave us the impossible bus jump that we've always wanted from the movies and catapulted Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves to mega-stardom, but it also offered a pretty darn good romance plot in among the explosions, high-speed chases, baby carriages full of cans, and shockingly high body count. But as Emily found on this rewatch, this film is also surprisingly all about money--and that's not just because Emily thinks about money for most of the week in her day job.

Just consider how Dennis Hopper's villainous Howard Payne asks for a paltry $3 million (which he then ups to a baffling $3.7 million). Any actuary worth their salt would have considered the ransom chump change compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of destruction wreaked upon Los Angeles over the course of a single day. But perhaps money isn't everything...Yeah, right.

Take a listen...just remember to keep your speed below 50 mph!

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

I'm not sure that it's business of yours, but I do like to waltz with a log driver.

Tracie and Emily welcome six-time Webby Award winner Aaron Reynolds (of Effin Birds fame) to the podcast this week to share his deep thoughts about the animated short The Log Driver's Waltz. Created by the Canadian National Film Board in 1979 and aired between gaps in children's programming (because there were no commercials!), this three minute animation ran so often that it became burned in Aaron's brain. He thought that meant the song was just what he uses to tune his ukulele and introduce Americans to Canadian culture. But, as he discovered during the conversation with the Guy sisters, The Log Driver's Waltz has also had an outsize effect on his understanding of comedy, romance, and masculinity, and it gave him permission to be unexpected.

You can find Aaron at EffinBirds.com

Check out The Log Driver's Waltz here:

https://www.nfb.ca/film/log_drivers_waltz/

Throw on your headphones and go birling down and down the podcast! It will please you completely!

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Okay, Joan Wilder, write us out of this one.

On this week's episode, Tracie revisits the 1984 film Romancing the Stone. Both Guy girls loved this film in their childhood, enjoying both the romance and comedy of seeing Kathleen Turner's Joan Wilder go from hapless writer to confident and capable badass. Baby Emily, as a budding writer, especially loved how the storytelling made it clear working as a novelist translated to practical life skills.

While the film is just as fun and easy to enjoy as it was 40 years ago, the feminism written into the fiction is only for white women. Joan Wilder is a dynamic, proactive, and delightful character, but Colombia is nothing more than a stereotypical backdrop for her story. Every character in Colombia--other than the white love interest played by Michael Douglas and the bumbling white villain played by Danny DeVito--are either menacing, drug dealers, or background villagers. And Joan doesn't actually need her love interest to save herself and her sister by the end.

Still, there's a lot to love in this film, as long as you remember that Colombia is a real place full of real people, and not just the flattened set piece full of cardboard cutouts used in this film.

Throw on your headphones, keep an eye out for Devil's Fork, and listen in!

Mentioned in this episode:

https://www.splicetoday.com/moving-pictures/the-romance-of-imperialism

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

And if I don't see you: Good afternoon, good evening, and good night!

Peter Weir's 1998 film The Truman Show, based on a screenplay by Andrew Niccol and starring Jim Carrey, was praised for its pop culture prescience because it came out just before the explosion of reality television. But as Emily argues on this episode, that cultural commentary misses the point. Reality TV may be the storytelling backdrop of The Truman Show, but the fantasy world that Ed Harris's Christof creates for Truman without his knowledge or consent gets to a deeper social and cultural issue than having cameras everywhere. This film offers a pop culture allegory for abusive control that calls itself love--to the point where many who have escaped from high control religions see themselves in Truman. (Also, product placement is never seamless!)

You may not be able to cue the sun, but you can cue up this episode!

Mentioned in this episode:

What The Truman Show Reveals About Its Characters

The Truman Show, Mormonism, and the Philosophy of Questioning

When Does Truman Figure It Out?

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

When I was a little kid and I got scared, the Rain Man would come and sing to me.

Join us this week as Tracie shares her deep thoughts about the 1988 film Rain Man, for which Dustin Hoffman won the Oscar for his nuanced portrayal of autistic savant Raymond Babbitt. This comedy/drama, written by Barry Morrow and directed by Barry Levinson, was singled-handedly responsible for introducing autism to American society, it also prompted Raymond's verbal tics to enter the pop culture lexicon as comedy shorthand and left much of our culture believing that autism is synonymous with math savantism.

While the film was careful to show Raymond's dignity and had at least one medical professional point out that his neurodivergence is a difference in psychology ("His brain doesn't work like other people's"), it also conflates "improvement" with Raymond acting more neurotypical--as if autism is something that needs to be cured. (In addition, Tom Cruise's Charlie Babbitt is a jerk who keeps yelling at Raymond which can't be good for his mental health.)

We agree that you are an excellent driver. Please listen along while you drive excellently.

Content warning: The film uses the R slur for disabled individuals, which we discuss in the episode.

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

"It's like we say in St. Olaf—Christmas without fruitcake is like St. Sigmund's Day without the headless boy."

On this week's episode, Tracie and Emily prove that you can go home again to beloved pop culture from the 1980s, as long as you're talking about The Golden Girls. The episodic adventures of Dorothy, Blanche, Rose, and Sophia weren't written with the Guy sisters in mind (they were in elementary school when the show debuted in 1985), but they loved the snappy comedy, the relationships between the four women, and the comforting knowledge that every problem would find a solution within 22 minutes, plus commercials.

Emily also found comfort in Betty White's portrayal of the constantly underestimated Rose Nylund, whose sweet-but-dim persona allowed her to make some of the most biting commentary of any of the characters since no one expected it. As someone who was also consistently treated as "sweet" because of how she looked, White's example taught Emily how to use being underestimated to her advantage.

While much of the more risque comedy sailed right over their oblivious heads as children, Emily and Tracie learned a number of feminist and socially progressive lessons along with the delicious snark and silly St. Olaf stories since show runner Susan Harris intentionally set out to make a subversive show and the four lead actors were all committed to gay rights, anti-racism, and feminism in addition to being gifted comedians.

While not everything in The Golden Girls has aged as well as the four main characters, it is one of the rare 1980s pop culture phenomena that is both of its time and very much ahead of its time.

Thank you for being a listener. Throw on the headphones and listen again!

Mentioned in this episode:

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/09/30-years-later-golden-girls-still-most-progressive-show-television

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/aug/02/golden-girls-tv-sitcom-enduring-joy-dorothy-rose-betty-white-blanche

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1074829590

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

You cannot kiss an idea, cannot touch it, or hold it. Ideas do not bleed, they do not feel pain, they do not love...

The (relatively) recent news that Stephen Colbert's show was cancelled put Emily in mind of the fate of Stephen Fry's character Gordon Dietrich in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is why she decided to revisit this pop culture mashup that took Alan Moore's graphic novel response to 1980s Thatcherism and updated it with early 2000s American angst over Bush-era government overreach.

The result, written by the Wachowski sisters and directed by their protege, James McTeigue, in his directorial debut, offers hope through beautiful storytelling, empowering feminism (even if the film doesn't exactly pass the Bechdel Test), and a partial breakdown of the psychology of fascism. Moore, who famously hates every adaptation of his work, specifically hates this film because it makes the fascist Norse Fire government look stable, when part of his cultural commentary in the original graphic novel was pointing out the inherent instability of authoritarianism. Rewatching this classic film in the current social environment did reinforce Moore's point to Emily, considering how generally competent everyone in the government appears to be in this movie.

Still, the message of hope and resilience in V for Vendetta is a welcome one, even if the pop culture revolution isn't exactly like the real world.

Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so why not throw on your headphones and listen to the episode?

Content warning: Mentions of torture, attempted sexual assault, and pedophilia

Mentioned in this episode:

Dominic Noble Lost in Adaptation V for Vendetta

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Hockety pockety wockety wack! Odds and ends and bric-a-brac!

In revisiting this classic Disney animation from 1963, Tracie found that the charm she remembered from her childhood wasn't nearly as charming this time around. While the comedy of Merlin, Archimedes the Owl, and Arthur (known as the Wart) was still humorous, the film feels more like a series of unconnected events rather than any kind of storytelling. The only named woman in the story is Madam Mim--although looking for feminism in any kids movies from the 1960s, animation or otherwise, may be a fool's errand--but at least she's a wonderfully subversive pop culture witch who is fun to watch. But the oddest thing about the film is Merlin's ineffectiveness as a teacher. His instruction does nothing to help Arthur pull the sword from the stone. In fact, the wizard is a terrible and irresponsible tutor.

Even with these uncomfortable realizations, there's much to admire. Even though The Sword in the Stone was made during Disney's low period, the animation is lovely and there are several parts that made Tracie laugh out loud. Just make sure that's really a squirrel before you fall head over heels in love with him!

To and fro, stop and go, listening to podcasts makes the world go round!

Mentioned in this episode:

https://disnerdmoviechallenge.com/blog/review-the-sword-in-the-stone-dmc-38

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

"To die would be a grand adventure!"

Emily is delighted to welcome her dear childhood friend--and lifelong Peter Pan enthusiast--Jenn Book Haselswerdt to the podcast this week to discuss Steven Spielberg's 1991 film Hook. Although this fantasy film suffers from a lack of editing as well as some lazy 90s pop culture stereotypes regarding fatphobia and distracted dads, Jenn explains how magical it felt to see this love letter to Peter Pan in the theater as a child.

While the storytelling gives Peter a number of strange opportunities for romance (which is partially a vestige of J.M. Barrie's personal antipathy to romance and his period-typical view of women as jealous), Jenn finds some delightful feminism in the film, especially in the form of Peter's daughter Maggie. The 7-year-old girl never backs down, even in the face of Dustin Hoffman's campy turn as the evil Captain Hook.

Jenn and the Guy sisters also talk about the deeper meaning the Neverland myth, considering the fact that Peter Pan was based on Barrie's deceased brother who never had a chance to grow up. Together, they wonder why pop culture has embraced the concept of a boy who never grows up and what it means to be a child who is never and adult, as in the original story, and an adult who was never a child, as Robin Williams' Peter Banning is at the beginning of this film.

Your adventures aren't over! To listen...to listen to this episode would be an awfully big adventure!

You can find Jenn on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/sunbonnet_sue_is_tired/

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Though it's now consistently named #1 on IMDB's top 250 list of classic movies, Frank Darabont's 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption started out as a commercial flop with no pop culture cache. It's understandable why Shawshank struggled to find its audience: there's no romance or women, the storytelling is slow with anything resembling action occurring in the final 30 minutes, and nearly the entire film takes place within the walls of a prison. But just as the story takes its time to explore the psychology of Andy Dufresne, the innocent banker who refuses to let the brutality of prison break his spirit, the film itself took its time to find that audiences appreciated its message of hope, resilience, and redemption.

In this episode, Emily never once utters the phrase "shenanigans ensue" about this gorgeous film. She and Tracie unpack the cognitive dissonance of this film topping Americans' list of favorites even while our country's prison system continues to institutionalize men like Red, Brooks, and Andy and discuss the Christian allegories within the film that they may have missed, as nice Jewish girls. The sisters also discuss the rarity of watching male friendship on screen and how Andy's view of money resonated with Emily even before she became a financial writer.

I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy listening on your headphones or get busy listening on your bluetooth speaker.

Content warning: Discussion of sexual assault and physical and emotional abuse

Mentioned in this episode:

Why ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ is the best movie about investing ever made

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

I have my eyes... I have my cunning... and I have my strength.

This obscure sword-and-sorcery fantasy film from the early 1980s was a staple of the Guy sisters' formative pop culture years because it was on regular rotation on HBO (which people jokingly claimed stood for "Hey! Beastmaster's on!"). This week, Tracie delves back into the bizarre five act storytelling choices that animate the journey of Marc Singer's Dar, a prince stolen from his mother's womb by an evil priest--played by Rip Torn in a prosthetic nose--who is telepathically connected to animals. 

The Guy girls remembered Dar's animal companions with fondness, especially his little ferret friends, and the over-the-top level of male nudity (it was a lot even for the early 1980s) was certainly, ahem, interesting in ways Tracie and Emily couldn't articulate as small children, but the movie offers some ugly cultural commentary about race, women, romance, consent, and sexuality, not to mention the film's covert reference to blood libel in Rip Torn's big-nosed child-sacrificing religious leader. The Beastmaster also weirdly subverts storytelling expectations by continuing past the third act, making a relatively short film feel way too long. Still, there are many pretty people, cool animals, and fascinating storytelling details to admire in this forgotten 80s cult favorite.

No need for bat-people hearing. Just put on your headphones and listen in!

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Draw me like one of your French girls...

This week, Emily finally introduces Tracie to the pop culture juggernaut Titanic, which the elder Guy sister somehow completely missed. Even in 1997, Emily appreciated how the spectacle, costumes, special effects, and even the storytelling serve writer and director James Cameron's purpose, because the rich girl/poor boy romance allows us to see the entire ship. 

But Cameron's purpose doesn't seem to amount to anything more than "this is a thing that happened." Like Cameron's occasional pop culture examination of social class, feminism, and mental health within the 3+ hour runtime, the film shows us things that happened with no moral, thesis, or commentary. Which is why Emily appreciates a fan theory that Jack is actually a trans man. This puts a different spin on the relationship, turning Jack from a Manic Pixie Dream Boy who is practically perfect to a kindred spirit who understands being trapped by society.

No matter your opinion about Jack's ability to fit on that door, throw on your headphones and take a listen!

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

It was a run-by fruiting!

Revisiting the beloved 1993 Robin Williams film Mrs. Doubtfire this week was a reminder to Tracie that you can never go home again. Though she was expecting some early nineties transphobia (and was mostly pleased at its absence), she was horrified to realize the film's plot relied on a kind of men's rights activist feminist backlash, where every woman and girl in the movie represented a different feminist stereotype, from the humorless social worker to the ball-busting workaholic wife. Tracie had also forgotten how much of the film's humor came from cringe comedy, which both Guy sisters find unbearably painful, making the rewatch more of a squirm-fest than she anticipated. There are still some sweet moments and genuine humor underneath the regressive hijinks and heavy makeup--just recognize how deep you might have to dig for them.

Carpe podcast. Seize the headphones and take a listen!

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Two things I love to do: fight and kiss boys!

This week, Emily revisits another of the silly Pygmalion movies from the Guy girls' childhood: Michael Gottlieb's 1987 film Mannequin, starring Kim Cattrall, Meshach Taylor, and Andrew McCarthy. While the story of an underemployed Philadelphia artist who falls in love with a department store mannequin is as insubstantial as dandelion fluff, the film slipped some delightfully subversive and progressive gay representation into the movie with the character of Hollywood Montrose, played to flamboyant-but-fleshed-out perfection by Meshach Taylor. Not only is this one of the few movies of the era to allow a gay character to have a romantic and sexual life (off-screen, unfortunately), but Gottlieb's script allows Hollywood to be a hero, friend, and integral part of the plot of the film. Additionally, the scene where Hollywood holds off the police-coded bad guys using a firehose is both hilarious and historically powerful, making it even more impactful by being included in an unserious romcom.

Be careful! If you stand very still while you listen, someone might think you're a mannequin.

Mentioned in this episode:

Hollywood Montrose: Mannequin's Gay Hero

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mannequin-1987

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

So, what would you little maniacs like to do first?

This week, Tracie takes a deep dive into Weird Science: yet another of the John Hughes movies that helped to define Gen X pop culture. This 1985 teen comedy is a modern retelling of Pygmalion, the Greek myth that finds a sculptor falling in love with his artwork that comes to life. Except in this version, Anthony Michael Hall's Gary and Ilan Mitchell-Smith's Wyatt create Lisa (played by Kelly LeBrock) via Memotech MTX 512 microcomputer, because 1980s movies taught us computers are magic.

While Tracie was pleased to find the raunchy comedy isn't as bad as she expected—Lisa, as a benevolent agent of chaos, has more agency than anyone else, which is a definite improvement over Galatea in the original Greek myth and Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady—the movie struggles to universally apply the message that you don't have to change to be worthy of love. And like many movies continue to do in 2025, Weird Science treats Gary and Wyatt's teenage love interests as prizes to be won. 

On the bright side, now we know that computers can't magic Kelly LeBrock from the ether.

No need to wear a bra on your head. Just some headphones will do.

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Welcome to Earth.

The 1996 Roland Emmerich-helmed film Independence Day was one of the touchstone movies for Emily's generation, so her flabber was absolutely gasted to learn Tracie had never seen it until a few years ago. Just in time for the 4th of July, Emily walks Tracie through what made this movie such a monumental hit in the U.S. and abroad, despite its jingoistic American exceptionalism and skin-deep application of science fiction storytelling tropes. 

Both in 1996 and again in 2025, Emily appreciated feeling seen as an American Jew via the characters of David and Julius Levinson (played by Jeff Goldblum in his absolute prime and Judd Hirsch, respectively) and she loved the way German-born Emmerich celebrates America's diversity as our greatest strength. That celebration of diversity includes Emmerich's behind-the-scenes fight to have Will Smith in the lead role when the executives balked at a Black leading man. 

But this mashup of disaster and sci-fi movies also appeals to some ugly stereotypes Americans believe about the rest of the world while refusing to ask any deeper questions about how aliens or people would react to enormous, world-changing events.

Release…me…   by listening in to this episode!

Mentioned in this episode:

Space Opera by Catherynne Valente

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

25 cents per day, plus expenses. No case too small!

Adam Gwon, Emily's childhood friend and award-winning musical theater writer, joins the Guy sisters today to share how Donald Sobol's Encyclopedia Brown had an outsize influence on his understanding of storytelling. The delightful format of each short Encyclopedia Brown mystery--which gave the reader all the same information the boy detective had and invited you to test your wits against that of the sleuth before checking the answer in the back of the book--taught Adam how to curate information when telling a story. These mystery stories also gave children a needed sense of order and rules for the world. But when the boy detective grows up, can pop culture grapple with the mysteries that have no answers?

If you're ready to test your observational skills against the boy detective, throw on your headphones, turn to page 119, and take a listen!

Learn more about Adam at his website

Follow Adam on Instagram

Mentioned in this episode

The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno

The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

This is no dream! This is really happening!

On this week's episode, Tracie and Emily are delighted to welcome award-winning writer/director and producer Ryan Cunningham to talk about Rosemary's Baby, the film that most influenced her own filmmaking and storytelling--but also made her wonder if she was a bad feminist considering the terrible deeds Roman Polanski later went to commit. The conversation covers the absurdity of two Jewish men shaping the idea of Satanism in pop culture, the mundane evil of how pregnant women are routinely gaslighted by the "guys" and doctors in their lives, and the complexity of admiring Polanski's genius. Also: Ruth Gordon as Minnie Castevet is delightful.

We won't make you eat the mouse. Just take a listen!

Content warning: Brief mentions of sexual assault and statutory rape

Learn more about Ryan here. And see her TED talk here.

Mentioned in this episode: 

Rebecca Solnit on Women’s Work and the Myth of the Art Monster

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

They're heeeeere!

In a moment that would echo through the 42 years that followed, Tracie and Emily's father let the girls watch the 1982 film Poltergeist on TV sometime in 1983, when the sisters were only 7 and 4 years old. This classic of pop culture horror drew the Guy girls in because of 5-year-old Heather O'Rourke, the adorable blonde-and-blue-eyed actress who played Carol Ann, who is sucked into the TV by the poltergeists. By the time the truly terrifying stuff appeared--including a tree that tried to eat Carol Ann's brother and a clown doll that came to life--Tracie and Emily were too scared to leave the room and their Dad was too invested to turn off the film.

This week, Emily finally revisits this traumatizing pop culture phenomenon, and finds a lot to enjoy. Not only does she recognize a number of movies that were influenced by this film--which was penned by Steven Spielberg, who again shows off his storytelling chops--but it offers a fascinating and feminist examination of the relationships between women and the roles of mothers and daughters. Although, some of the behind-the-scenes information she learned about the film makes it clear the filmmakers really didn't understand the film they were making.

You don't need to hang back. We won't jam your frequency while you listen in!

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one.

When Tracie first encountered the fan-favorite Western-in-space television show Firefly 20 years ago, she was delighted by Joss Whedon's subversion of tropes, his mastery of the written word, and his commitment to excellent storytelling. At the time, Whedon was heralded as a modern feminist and Firefly (and its follow up film Serenity) were presented as proof of his feminism bona fides. This franchise gave us kick-ass women like Zoe, Inara, Kaylee, and River and a future society where sex work is revered. 

But in hindsight, Whedon's storytelling shows a few cracks--from the weird absence of any Asian characters (despite everyone speaking Mandarin) to the sometimes toxic romance tropes. There are still plenty of delights in store for the modern viewer, including cultural commentary on how humans will continue to be awful to each other in space, as well as the beloved crew of misfits and outlaws who navigate the horrors with aplomb and cunning hats.

Everything's shiny, Captain! Just throw on those headphones and take a listen.

CW: Mentions of sexual violence

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

What was sundered and undone shall be whole–the two made one.

On today's episode of Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t, Emily returns to a beloved film from the Guy girls' childhood: Jim Henson's 1982 epic fantasy The Dark Crystal. Though the film's main character Jen the Gelfling follows the familiar beats of the hero's journey, baby Emily didn't understand the allegory of divine beings that are incomplete as Mystics and Skeksis without each other–and for good reason. Jim Henson drew inspiration from the book Seth Speaks by psychic medium Jane Roberts, which he claimed not to completely understand. But Henson's masterful attention to world building, his willingness to create a scary story for children, his exploration of spirituality through fiction, and his loving creation of ugly characters, all made for a meaningful--if imperfect--film.

Listen, Gelfling, there is much to be learned. So throw on your headphones and begin!

Mentioned in this episode

The Hero’s Journey

The Virgin’s Promise

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

All my life I've been waiting for someone and when I find her, she's... she's a fish.

When Tracie and Emily saw the 1984 Ron Howard film Splash as little girls, they fell in love with the badass mermaid played by Daryl Hannah. She was smart, determined, and romantic--and she had a gorgeous tail she could unfurl in Tom Hanks' bathtub. But on revisiting the movie this week, Tracie found some rather ugly and sexist assumptions bundled together with the romantic notions. Madison the mermaid learns how to be a human woman by shopping and her devotion to Allen makes very little sense. But like Disney's The Little Mermaid, it's possible to look at Splash as a trans allegory, which makes their romance and Allen's decision to join her in the sea a much more subversive story.

Sit back, relax, soak your fins, and take a listen!

Mentioned in this episode:

Why Magic Pixie Dream Girl Movies Are Uncomfortably Dark

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Mickey's a mouse, Donald's a duck, Pluto's a dog. What's Goofy?

Emily and Tracie always assumed their father loved the 1986 Rob Reiner film Stand By Me because the music and pop culture references were a delightful reminder of his childhood. Reiner’s period masterpiece features incredible performances from its child actors–a rarity in movies about childhood–and offers a sometimes-idyllic portrayal of the freedom enjoyed by kids in the 1950s.

But as Emily discovered this week, Stand By Me is not nostalgic for the toxic masculinity, mental health struggles, abuse, and neglect that were normal for a mid-century boyhood. This coming-of-age story is clear-eyed about what was harmful in the late 1950s while celebrating the joy and unintentional comedy of adolescent friendships. 

If you have also wondered what the hell Goofy is, throw on your headphones and take a listen.

CW: Discussions of parental abuse and neglect, fatphobia, violence against children

Mentioned in this episode:

‘Stand by Me’ Oral History: Rob Reiner and Cast on River Phoenix and How Coming-of-Age Classic Almost Didn’t Happen

Everything There and Around Us

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

"Where are the people who know where the people are?"

On today's episode, Tracie introduces Emily to the 1990 Barry Levinson film Avalon, the director's love letter to Baltimore and his own Jewish immigrant family. The movie follows the Krichinskys from 1914 through to the 1960s as the large, tight-knit, extended family moves, changes, assimilates, and fractures. 

As a lifelong Baltimorean and the great-great-granddaughter of a Jewish immigrant from Europe, Tracie feels seen by Levinson's story, and she recognizes the ways in which American culture, money, and changing technology have altered family dynamics and expectations in her own family history just like they do for the Krichinskys. Though Emily has never seen Avalon--which mystifies Tracie--she helps tease out some of the meaning behind the money psychology's role in difficult family dynamics in the film.

Take a listen, but don't cut the turkey without Gabriel!

Mentioned in this episode:

Money Scripts
https://www.yourmentalwealthadvisors.com/our-process/your-money-script/

The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691136318/the-price-of-whiteness?srsltid=AfmBOopiKo92X3Sx99xGBbAYpuZP-MZ2Fr5rRBqipGdja19_bRORET-q

Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America https://uncpress.org/book/9781469635439/ambivalent-embrace/

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

“We say who; we say when; we say how much.”

This week, Emily takes a deep dive into Pretty Woman, the 1990 blockbuster romantic comedy that catapulted Julia Roberts to stardom. The film was originally written as a tragic story about awful characters, and many people (including those close to the Guy sisters) lamented the Hollywood happy ending as “unrealistic”–but Emily argues that by giving Vivian and Edward the fairy tale ending, the film offers a feminist blueprint for knowing one’s worth. While the movie does not offer a nuanced view of sex work and falls into the “not like other girls” trope, it does show a woman who claims bodily autonomy and sets clear boundaries without shame or apology.

Not listening to this episode? Big mistake! Big! HUGE!

Content warning: Discussion of attempted sexual assault and death by drug overdose

Mentioned in this episode

Why ‘Pretty Woman’ Should Be Considered a Feminist Classic

‘Pretty Woman’ 25 years later: The good, the bad and the revenge shopping

30 Years Later, Pretty Woman Is So Much More Than A Guilty Pleasure

Response to treatment of sex work in Deadpool

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

By Grabthar’s hammer, you shall be avenged!

The 1999 film Galaxy Quest was almost tailor made for the Guy sisters and their dad–all lifelong Trekkers. The sci-fi satire pokes gentle fun at Star Trek, lightly skewering everything from the story tropes to the actors to the fans, all while offering a lovely tribute to folks who get really enthusiastic about their favorite media. The film also does one of our favorite things: it takes the craft of sci-fi storytelling seriously without taking itself seriously. But as Tracie points out in her analysis, the rosy depiction of fandom in Galaxy Quest is partially a product of its time, since gatekeeping, cruelty, and vitriol have become synonymous with fandom in the intervening years.

Never give up; never surrender–and take a listen!

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

In 1989, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure introduced Emily to a baby-faced Keanu Reeves–and to the idea that two easy-going dopes could change the world by encouraging us all to be excellent to each other. In this episode, Emily shares how this surprisingly well-crafted comedy teaches us that destiny can’t be achieved without putting in the work and why it’s important to look at history from the perspective of average people, not just rulers. While the film is a product of its time (sorry, Missy), the laughs, intelligence, and sweetness shine through the future Wyld Stallyns.

Put on your headphones, do some air guitar, and take a listen!

Mentioned in this episode:

A Historiographical Analysis of Bill & Ted

15 Most Excellent Facts About Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Time Travel Movie Reviews

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind. Or forgotten.

In addition to dazzling her with its old-school hand-drawn animation and delighting her with its sweet and funny story, the 2002 Disney film Lilo & Stitch introduced Tracie to indigenous Hawaiʻian culture. The writing and directing team of Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois traveled to Hawaiʻi for extensive artistic and cultural research and sought the input of native Hawaiʻians, including voice actor and friend of the show Tia Carrere, to write this story. The result is a touching tale of found family that echoes the colonialist history of Hawaiʻi.

Give Pudge his peanut butter sandwich and take a listen!

Mentioned in this episode:

The oral history of the film in Vulture: https://www.vulture.com/article/oral-history-of-lilo-and-stitch-a-hand-drawn-miracle.html

Iolani Palace: https://www.iolanipalace.org/

The blog Tracie wrote after her first visit has been unpublished. Check back and we’ll republish it when we find it.

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Does anybody here know how many times I had to watch Funny Lady?

The 1997 film In & Out, directed by Frank Oz (yes, the one who voices Miss Piggy) and starring Kevin Kline, Joan Cusack, and Tom Selleck, has mostly been forgotten–but this feel-good comedy had a lasting impact on Emily. When she saw it in the theater as an undiagnosed neurodivergent 18-year-old, she was confused as all hell when Kline’s character comes out at his wedding (to a woman) about three-quarters of the way into the movie, despite his protestations of heterosexuality up until that point. 

Baby Emily understood something that may have been unclear to the intended audience: that the stereotypical characteristics of “masculinity” have approximately jack-all to do with sexual orientation. Although Oz created a lovely story about acceptance (and one that was likely an important stepping stone for straight Americans to embrace LGBTQ rights), the reliance on stereotypes for humor makes the movie a cringey, if well-meaning, time capsule. 

Throw on your headphones and take a listen–and don’t compliment the fabulous window treatment.

Mentioned in this episode:

“In & Out” Is a Great Gay Movie and Deserves as Much Love as “The Birdcage”

Classic Film Review: “In & Out” turns 25, old enough to be a “classic”

Tango Men, Choreography by Ezequiel Sanucci 

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

I talk to God all the time, and no offense, but He never mentioned you.

On this week’s episode, Tracie traces some of her earliest ideas about romance to the 1985 Richard Donner film Ladyhawke. Although both contemporary and retrospective reviews are scornful of the anachronistic, Alan Parsons-produced, synthesizer-heavy soundtrack (so unrealistic in a film about a woman cursed to live as a hawk during the day!), Tracie and Emily are more interested in why the film takes away the leading lady’s agency when it otherwise gets a lot right about equitable romantic relationships.

If you are neither flesh nor spirit but sorrow, listen and laugh along with the Guy girls.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

What is a place like me doing in a girl like this?

The 1999 Brendan Fraser film The Mummy has an extraordinarily beautiful cast, a delightfully bonkers plot, and a whole heap of unexamined colonialism, racism, and othering. Emily shares with Tracie the historical background of the West’s fascination with Egypt–which led to little Emily’s own interest and delight in all things Egyptological. But the Egypt we encounter in movies likeThe Mummy has little to do with the real history of ancient Egypt (check out all the white actors!) and helps promote the fiction that Western scholars make the best Egyptologists.

But not to worry: our Mummy movie review isn't all bad. The drool-worthy cast was the impetus for many a Gen X and Millennial bi awakening, and the characters (sometimes) reject traditional gender roles in delightful ways.

Even if you’re on the wrong side of the river, put in your earbuds and listen!

Content warning: Discussion of sexual harassment 

Mentioned in this episode:

https://www.tumblr.com/unic0rnsandmurder/776100576860749824?source=share

https://www.tumblr.com/unic0rnsandmurder/776100594905726976?source=share

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Mertz

https://nilescribes.org/2022/01/08/egyptological-review-of-1999-mummy/

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

When SpongeBob SquarePants debuted in 1999, 23-year-old Tracie was not the intended audience for everyone’s favorite absorbent and yellow and porous hero–but she was charmed and entertained by the show that became a Millennial and Gen Z touchstone. This week, Tracie talks about how SpongeBob gave a generation a framework for understanding capitalism, motivation, community, and absurdist humor. She also explains how challenging the medium of animation may have encouraged the current batch of newly-minted adults to confidently break rules that don’t work for them.

If you’re ready! You’re ready! You’re ready! Throw on your headphones and join us in Bikini Bottom.

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

I do wish we could chat longer, but... I'm having an old friend for dinner.

On today’s episode of Deep Thoughts, Emily revisits what is arguably the most influential pop culture of our lifetime: The Silence of the Lambs. Although director Jonathan Demme and lead actor Jodie Foster illuminate the spectrum of misogyny women experience, from casual workplace putdowns to the violent treatment of women as objects, the film does this at the expense of our trans siblings. 

To its credit, the movie attempts to differentiate the murderous Buffalo Bill from “real” trans women via exposition, but we can draw a straight line from the chilling depiction of the film's villain to current hysteria over trans women in bathrooms. And though Demme and Foster avoided the “men writing women” aspect of Thomas Harris’ novel that was the source material for the movie, our culture once again remembered the psychopathic psychologist Hannibal Lecter and forgot the dynamic and fully human badass Clarice Starling.

Put some lotion on your skin and prepare to listen in…

Content warning: Discussion of gendered violence toward women, fatphobia, homophobia, transphobia, cannibalism, serial killers, rape, and other really really unpleasant stuff. Just…this movie is a lot, y’all, and we talk about it all.

Mentioned in this episode:

The line in the book that made Emily throw it across the room
Before we knew better: Silence of the Lambs is a win for women—but fails LGBTQ culture
The cultural impact of The Silence of the Lambs
Why The Silence of the Lambs is a feminist fable
The Loud Feminism Of The Silence Of The Lambs

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!

It's the karmic credit plan: buy now, pay forever.

Tracie shares her deep thoughts about the 1991 Kenneth Branagh film Dead Again on this week’s episode. Branagh brought intelligence, style, and some pretension to this noir homage that tells the tragic love story of Roman and Margaret Strauss–who have apparently been reincarnated as Mike Church and the amnesiac Jane Doe he calls Grace. While the movie hits all the right mystery beats while you’re watching, Branagh’s story insists on false binaries that do the audience’s thinking for them. And despite being the romantic lead, the character of Mike makes it entirely clear why so many women would choose the bear.

Put away the scissors and put on your headphones, because this is for you…

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find. 

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com 

We are on socials! Find us on Facebook at fb.com/dtasspodcast and on Insta at instagram.com/guygirlsmedia. You can also email us at guygirlsmedia at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you!