Hi!

I should have sent this out a couple weeks ago, so mea culpa, but Alissa and I are taking July to regroup and schedule stuff for the upcoming season. We have booked some new guests—one returning friend we think you’ll all be glad to see again, one wonderful novelist I’m very excited about, and some fellow podcasters—and picked our first couple months’ worth of movies. We’ll also have a subscribers-only episode for you next week, to thank folks who support us financially for sticking with us through the hibernation period.

But we did want you to know that we haven’t gone away and that we’re grateful to you guys for listening! We will see you in early August. We’re very excited for Season 2 of Young Adult Movie Ministry and we hope you are, too. Also, like… there’s a Dune movie coming out. We can’t just stop now.

Best,

Sam.

Details, credits, errata: This week we’re delighted to have the great comics writer Mark Russell on the pod to discuss another 1980’s classic action movie, Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi satire Robocop, much of which has come to pass in the years since its release. Mark calls it the best of the superhero movies; we are inclined to agree. It adapts and sends up all kinds of cool and weird comics without smoothing out any of their rough edges, and, of course, manages to be very much its own thing. Verhoeven is the creator of the controversial “Jesus Seminar,” a really unusual enterprise that is worth examining. Mark writes movingly about Christianity in a number of his terrific comics and has a new book coming up called Not All Robots with superstar artist Mike Deodato; we’re adding it to our pull list. His comics with artist Richard Pace about Jesus’s return to earth as a superhero sidekick, Second Coming, are wonderful; Vol. 1 is in print and Vol. 2 is currently being serialized and will be out in November. Mark is also writing one of Marvel’s terrific Life Story miniseries, this one for the Fantastic Four.

Our image on the website this week is taken from the sales page for Knightscope, a technology company that sells mall cop robots like the 300-lb K5, pictured here, which recently ran over a toddler in a mall in California and tragically drowned in Washington, D.C. If you see one, kick it.

Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Robocop is copyright 1987 MGM. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.

This is a free episode! We’d love it if you subscribed!

This week we are privileged to have the great Gregory Thornbury, author of Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music and some terrific essays as well, notably this one on QAnon, to talk with us about The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Jeff Feuerzeig’s 2005 documentary about the late, supernaturally gifted, near-unknown singer-songwriter whose struggles with bipolar disorder kept him out of the public eye even as he amassed a following of similarly talented people. Also, demons.

Demonology is something we talk about a little on the podcast when we watch The Exorcist or Hereditary; here we get a lot more intense about it, and Greg shares some of his own observations and experiences and I just want to say I’m really grateful to him for being so open and honest with us and with all of you. We hope you dig this one. Also if you’re just in it for good music, you’ve come to the right place, and you can listen to new, happy, funky, countrified stuff from Greg’s amazing daughter Kate Thornbury on Spotify, too.

Greg was kind enough to supply the image for this week’s episode, drawn by Johnston himself for a showing of his art that Greg moderated, and is used with our thanks and permission.

Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Devil and Daniel Johnston is copyright 2005 Sony Pictures Classics. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.

This is a free episode! We’d love it if you subscribed!