Imaginary Worlds sounds like what would happen if NPR went to ComicCon and decided that’s all they ever wanted to cover. Host Eric Molinsky spent over a decade working as a public radio reporter and producer, and he uses those skills to create thoughtful, sound-rich episodes about science fiction, fantasy, and other genres of speculative fiction. Every other week, he talks with comic book artists, game designers, novelists, screenwriters, filmmakers, and fans about how they craft their worlds, why we suspend our disbelief, and what happens if the spell is broken. Imaginary worlds may be set on distant planets or parallel dimensions, but they are crafted here on Earth, and they’re always about us and our lived experiences.
270 episodes transcribedWe all know Godzilla’s iconic roar, but the musician who scored Godzilla's rampages is not as well known. The composer Akira Ifukube’s collaboration w...
One of the most popular anime series just became widely available when Netflix started streaming Neon Genesis Evangelion. Evangelion is also infamous...
Walt Disney pioneered the art of hand drawn animation, but it was really his top animators, “The Nine Old Men,” who were responsible for developing th...
Mexican wrestling (aka Lucha Libre) has a lot in common with the superhero genre, but trying to be a superhero in real life has its own set of challen...
I talked with legendary audio drama producer Dirk Maggs for an episode about the history of radio dramas last year-- but a lot of great material ended...
He's one of the most popular pro-wrestlers of all time, but Mark Calaway’s undead character The Undertaker is also an anachronism from a different era...
Imagine walking into your living room, and alongside your couch is a prop from one of your favorite childhood movies. Sure, it was costly but this is...
Burlesque has merged with geek culture to form nerdlesque – where characters from familiar fantasy franchises strip down to pasties and g-strings. Ner...
In the conclusion of our mini-series on sidekicks, we look at how Harley Quinn began as a sidekick to a villain, and found her way to the heart of the...
In part two of our mini series on sidekicks, we look at two characters that have travelled in parallel since they came out of the same radio station i...
To kick off our mini-series on sidekicks, we look at the most iconic and long-standing sidekick in pop culture: Doctor Watson. For 130 years, Watson h...
Witness if you will a writer: Rod Serling. This is the story of a man with a vision -- a vision of what television could be if only men ceased to oper...
Ever since George Lucas cited Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” as the inspiration for Star Wars, Hollywood screenwriters...
50 years ago this month, Kurt Vonnegut introduced Billy Pilgrim and the aliens who gave him time traveling powers in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Ma...
In the 1930s Margaret Brundage was the hottest pulp fiction magazine illustrator. She primarily painted covers for Weird Tales magazine, which publish...
Conan the Barbarian is generally thought of as a muscle-bound brute who fights his way through a made-up ancient world. But the character actually has...
In some video games, you can choose which character you want to play, and you can customize the look of those characters. For many transgender players...
One of the unique aspects of video games is that you can control the characters. But game developers are often torn between wanting to give the player...
Madeline Miller received critical acclaim for her novels The Song of Achilles and Circe – which reimagine The Iliad and The Odyssey told from the pers...
