Pop Culture Happy Hour - Our 15th Anniversary Time Capsule

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

We launched Pop Culture Happy Hour 15 years ago this summer, and we had a lot of pent-up hot takes. To celebrate this milestone, today we’re breaking open a time capsule to revisit some of our memorable early moments and see how they’ve held up. To access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening for Pop Culture Happy Hour, subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+ at plus.npr.org/happy.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

We launched Pop Culture Happy Hour 15 years ago this summer, and when each of us began, we had a lot of pent-up hot takes. So we thought we'd play back some of our earliest moments and see how they've held up since. I'm Linda Holmes. And I'm Stephen Thompson. Today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we are breaking open a time capsule to revisit some of our memorable early moments. Joining us today are our wonderful co-hosts, Aisha Harris. Hey, Aisha. Hello, Stephen.

It is a pleasure. Also, Glenn Weldon. Hey, Glenn. Shut up. Leave me alone. I'll be in my room. See, I'm 15. 15 is the joke there.

That's the joke I did just then, seconds ago. We are sullen teens. Love it. This is how this episode is going to play out. For each of us, our producer, Liz Metzger, found a piece of tape from our first few months on the show. Then we'll see how that clip has aged. Like this clip from our very first, what's making us happy segment with our pal and founding host, Trey Graham. I'm really just falling in love seriously for the first time with Netflix instant streaming.

Uh-huh. I stopped paying for cable a few months ago, and it used to bother me a little bit, but there's so much now on the Netflix that I can just get. Oh, wow. This is how old this show is. Netflix, who knew? People still referred to it as Netflix instant streaming. Yeah. Because it was somewhat new.

Miss. Nees. Yeah. Tech pioneered. Who knew that this show would be such a treasure trove of old takes? We love you, Trey. We do love Trey. And, hey, he was right about Netflix instant streaming.

Yes, he was. Now, Linda Holmes, you and I created Pop Culture Happy Hour in the summer of 2010 while drinking beers in my living room. True. So this clip is from one of our earliest shows, October 2010, to be exact. I'm not a big horror movie fan. I hear you. I am a scary movie fan to a degree, but definitely not a grizzly horror. I mean, has that changed much?

You're still into... I was going to say, that feels like that's still somewhat true. You have definitely done a fair bit of work. Have you bet on Linda's journey recently? Come on now. So I think what happened is, you know, a friend of mine recently quoted his wife to me saying, you reach a certain age and your life either gets substantially bigger or substantially smaller. And so it's important to remain open to changing your mind about things and all that stuff.

Because this is what I used to say. I used to say, I like a scary movie, but I don't like things that are real gory or bloody. But then I would be like, well, but I like die hard. And that's like very bloody. And then like I saw John Wick and I was like, well, I like John Wick. And that's extremely brutal. So what exactly is going on? And I started to, sometimes because of this show, I started to see horror movies that I otherwise probably would not have seen.

What I have learned is that this was not really true. It's not true that I'm not a horror movie person. It's that there are specific subparts of horror that I don't want anything to do with. But I've gotten more and more discerning about what those things are. And it took me a while to refine this until I was saying what I really mean. I don't like incredibly bleak horror where the monsters win. So, like, there is a subgenre of, like, home invasion horror where gradually just everybody gets killed. That kind of thing.

Just I don't want that. But being more open to this idea and, of course, spending a lot of time around not only you guys, but also a lot of our panelists. Jordan Cruciola. I would specifically shout out Jordan Cruciola. Yes, yes. has really gotten me to think, you know, more deeply about this kind of thing. And now I consider myself to be a horror movie person in many cases. Just sub-pieces of it are not my speed.

But as we tape this, I've done two horror movies this week. And so it's like I do it now. It's all good. So, yeah, I have outgrown this take, I am happy to say. Or at least I have narrowed it down a lot. Because, like, yeah, gory, no. but y'all know how much I loved Fight or Flight, and that's an incredibly bloody movie.

That is an incredibly bloody movie. So, you know. Would you say that what you've experienced isn't necessarily like I love gory movies so much as like, I've learned to embrace violence? Yes, exactly. No, it's, I mean, I have narrowed the lane that I consider not mine. That's what I would say. Welcome to the dark side, Linda.

It is nice over here. That counts as growth. Absolutely. I mean, there was a time, Linda, went, you know, for considerable run of this show, where kind of by default, I became the host who talked about Evil Dead Rise. Yeah. I've kind of been on a little bit of a similar journey, especially, I think, in part, just kind of tapping into Jordan Cruciala's incredible enthusiasm for horror.

Yeah. And your daughter. And my daughter as well. Dad, have you ever seen a movie called The Human Centipede? Oh, God. I agree. I know you did do that. And as you can imagine, this is part of my long-term plan to replace you.

But, you know. I'm leaning more and more into rom-coms. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. There you go. We're just doing a body switch, freaky Friday stuff. The freakiest Friday. Cool, cool, cool. All right.

Thank you, Linda Holmes. Well, it looks like I'm up next. Okay. I'm going to go a slightly different direction with my clip, which is from August of 2010, where we're kind of talking about cultural figures who have maybe fallen out of favor with the public. Has the public also turned on Jack Black? Yes.

Who you could argue. I think very possibly. You could argue that Jack Black does the same schick. I think if you saw a trailer right now with Jack Black, it's very possible that you would see, maybe not as extreme a reaction, but certainly a lot of people who would suddenly be like, oh, no, never mind. I'm out. Well, you got in the background, you got Jesse Eisenberg as the thinking man's Michael Sarah.

I'm sort of waiting in the wings. I don't think of anybody like that for Jack Black. Actually, I'm going to nominate Zach Galifianakis. for real. That's a good point. That's an excellent point. If Galfinacus does a string of just obnoxious, annoying movies, I could see the audience turning on that guy. Oh, yeah. I mean, is Zach Galfinacus the new Robin Williams? Well, certainly not yet. Certainly not yet. Is he tomorrow's Robin Williams? It's a good question. We'll just have to wait and see. What a time. All right. Go tiptoeing through that minefield for us, what you, Stephen.

Well, and I feel like we should clarify we were talking about the phenomenon of audiences kind of turning on people that they had previously enjoyed. I think one of the people we were talking about was M. Knight-Sharmelon. Yes. And the experience of going to the movies and seeing the trailer for an M-Night-Shaw-M-N-N-M-N movie. And when the name M-Night-Shaw-Lan came up,

the audience laughed. And so we were kind of talking at the time about figures who have reached an audience saturation point where the audience is sick of their crap. I decided, well, I think that's where audiences are with Jack Black. And that was based on the extremely chilly critical and commercial reception to the 2009 movie Year 1. Oh, boy.

That was Jack Black and Michael Sarah. Saw it. Hated it. And so many people hated it. And it's so interesting in terms of like what makes this such a bad take, I think, is this idea that the career arc of a movie actor is a simple bell curve where you become more and more popular until people start to get sick of you and then you become less and less popular.

And that's really not what happened. You know, it's sort of an overly simple take. Jack Black was kind of at that a little bit of a low ebb in his career, not only with your one. You know, like he was in like that Gulliver's Travels movie. You know, Gulliver's Travels? That Gulliver's Travels movie, Gulliver's Travels. But like it seemed like people were tiring of him. But the fact of the matter is, actors tend to get a lot of swings at the pinata.

If they're lucky. If they're lucky. And Jack Black was certainly in a position. to just kind of keep grinding out movies to the point we're at now where Jack Black is kind of one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood. He was in the Minecraft movie this year that made hundreds of millions of dollars. So like the audiences, maybe they needed a little break from Jack Black, but it's very interesting to kind of look at that take as a snapshot of history of like everybody's tired of Jack Black when in fact, you know, Jack Black made a bad movie or two.

Yeah. And then Bernie, the Richard Linklater movie, came out not too long. after that. Which he's very good at. Sometimes people do get oversaturated on certain performers, and it takes time for them to kind of dig themselves out of that hole, some more than others. And I also think, like, to some extent, your observation wasn't unfounded, Stephen. It's just, it was an of the moment take. And, of course, now we see he's doing perfectly fine, great even, perhaps more than he was

back then. Yeah. Well, and I think also, like, if you go back to a lot of people for, first noticed him in high fidelity with John Kusack. And I think if you look at high fidelity and you look at him in high fidelity, you don't necessarily look at that and think, I see a long 40 or 50 year career of doing that. You know what I mean? And so I think it took other things.

It took him doing like School of Rock, which has a little bit more of a fully rounded person, doing the holiday, the rom-com. Doing a lot of voice actor. Yeah. Doing a lot of voice acting, doing Bernie. doing all this kind of stuff to kind of get past what the initial kind of thing seemed to be. Right. But this is still a phenomenon. I mean, we still get glutted on certain performers. I would argue that we are living in kind of the immediate aftermath of a James Corden glut.

And he used to be in everything. You look around. I don't see him anywhere. I worry. And I sincerely worry that Pedro Pascal. Yeah. Sure. I'm wondering that too. We are reaching a saturation point. Well, you're already getting the jokes about how he's in everything, which are often the precursor to the complaints that he's in everything. Well, and like so many cultural phenomena, you can't discount the awesome power of coincidence. These people probably made this glut of films over the course of a number of years, and then because of a variety of factors, they all kind of came out at the same time,

where you suddenly find yourself juggling for James Corden projects, and then he's gone for five years. It's not even necessarily part of James Corden saying, I need to go away for a while. It's just that all those films happen to come out at the same time. Right. And I would also note, by the way, in passing, that one of the people that Glenn mentioned during that conversation was Jesse Eisenberg. And I think the same thing in some ways happened with Jesse Eisenberg, which is he started doing some different kinds of things, which helped kind of get over that hump of people being like, I've seen this guy, I've seen what this guy does. And now you get him in stuff like a real pain and, you know, those kind of.

kinds of things that are not quite doing the social network thing that I think for a while was the whole kind of picture of him. And Zach Gallafenakis is in the Lilo and Stitch remake. Yes, he was. Good for Zach Galfinacus. All right. Well, that was not my hottest take. Aisha Harris. Now, Aisha, you started appearing on Pop Culture Happy Hour in 2016. You became a full-time Pop Culture Happy Hour host in 2020, we thought we would split the difference and play a clip from April of 2018. Maybe I'm being hyperbolic here, but I feel like to some extent it is, there is no precedent for Beyonce and how much she continues to just keep getting better and better this late in her career and still stay relevant. Obviously, there have been other artists before her who, you know,

still turned out great performances in their later careers still did like she's 36 yeah but she's been she's been around for 20 years now no i know i know it's true but she's first album came out in 97 i think so she's been around for 20 years it's true she has now it's almost 30 i don't see a hot take there i see a pretty cold take i'm glad to know we're marking seven years of giving iisha a hard time about being young and us being old. I don't know if this is so much a hot take as it's just a very on-brand for me take. I agree that Beyonce

kept getting better. Renaissance might be her. Like if I were to put Homecoming, so to be clear, we were talking about Homecoming, amazing Coachella performance that had to get, originally had to be postponed

because she got pregnant and then she turned it out and it's one of the greatest things that were committed to video. So she did that. She did Renaissance. I will say, Capi Carter,

Really? Calvary Carter is probably one of my least favorite things that Beyonce has ever done as a whole. There's some bops, but I don't think it's firing all cylinders. But Act 3 is coming as of this moment. There are rumors it could be a rock album. I stand by this take. I still think she has surpassed most pop stars in her ability to absolutely continue to sort of, if not completely reinvent herself, at least reimagine.

and like she still seems to care. She hasn't checked out. And I think it's so easy for that to happen and so easy for especially women, unfortunately, to quote unquote age out of being a pop star. Madonna has successfully done it, but so few others have been able to do that. And Beyonce, I'm still always looking forward to what she's doing, even if Cowanee Carter was not my thing. I do think it's interesting that you bring up the example of Madonna as somebody who has done it successfully. Because I do feel like Madonna did hit a point where she stopped trying to one up herself.

Yes. Like, she managed to continue churning out records that were successful, but it wasn't necessarily like upping the ante on the stuff that came before. And I do think Beyonce, you know, did kind of reach a point where, like, how do you get bigger than homecoming? How do you get bigger than, like, bringing in all these marching bands from HBCUs and doing this career retrospective that is this incredibly dynamic. live performance. Like now she seems to be in kind of her genre exercise phase. Yeah. And in some ways, it does still feel like she's able to one up herself.

She did win album of the year at the Grammys this year. But like, there is this question of when do you stop trying to one up yourself? Because there does come a point at which it's basically impossible. Yeah. Yeah. I also think, you know, Beyonce is not the type of person who would ever not try to want a person. She's just like, she's just winning. to try hard for that. And she owes it. She also seems to be a person who's very tolerant of the experience of

being spectacularly famous, which not everybody is. Some people, I think, genuinely tire of a certain level of attention after a certain period of time. And you see a little bit of pulling back from them. And she seems to have a very high tolerance for being one of the most famous people in the world, one of the most scrutinized people in the world. She seems to have found a way to kind of, I mean, I think she achieves a lot of privacy for the amount of, you know, fame that she has. A billion dollars will get you that kind of privacy. Exactly.

That's what I mean is I think she's figured out a way to leverage her money into a life that is manageable for her that prevents her from being like, I can't do this anymore, which for some people, I think, is when. one of the reasons why they may eventually pull back a little bit. Yeah, so let's see, Linda, your clip showed you evolving, I would say, in your tastes. Stephen, you were wrong, but that's just a kind of, as you say, it's kind of a dice roll because it's a snapshot of a time, right? And I issue on brand, but I think you'd agree that your take has nuanced because of time and because of the different stuff that she's put out. and so that's interesting.

I wonder if any of these takes... I wonder if Glenn, you're setting up some sort of segue to your claim. I wonder if any of these takes are going to prove to be absolutely right then and now. All right, I'm not going to argue that building a costume with your parents is not a great memory, but all y'all are not seeing this from the kids' perspective. You're seeing this for the scrim of adulthood and look at all these wonderful memories that we're not building. This may be true for other costumes, but for a superhero costume, It is not about dressing as Iron Man.

It is about being Iron Man. And every inch, every nanosecond, you get away from that perfect ideal is a little death. So what needs to happen is for it to be... What has to happen is you have to get as close as possible. So, when I'm six years old, I go to my mom and I say, Batman, I'm going to be a batman this year. And she says to me, well, we'll take your brother's old gray sweatpants and his gray sweatshirt and will magic mark or a bat on your chair. chest. I said, we'll do what now? Excuse me? Here's the thing. I am still right. I still would not have seated the ground that I did at the top of that clip where I said, oh, building a

costumes with your parents is a great memory. I don't believe that now. I didn't believe that then. Sorry, what was the context? So the topic here was Halloween and Halloween costumes. And Glenn took the position that if your kid wants to be Iron Man, you just go to CVS and you buy him the little thing that has like the plastic cape and the little plastic mask with the thing because... No, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what I was talking about. Because there was a Target ad at the time that showed a mom making an Iron Man costume for her kid out of like, you know, little push lights and all kinds of things that she had bought. And she put together homemade Iron Man costume.

And I took the position that the homemade Iron Man costume was more... Made with love. Soulful. Meaningful and soulful. Well, Glenn took the position that the chat GPT of Halloween costumes was the way to go in order to satisfy your child. Okay. Ayesha, what you missed there before that clip, there was a conversation where all three of my fellow hosts were just, doy-eyed is the right word. They were all, I'm going to say it, bum-fuzzled, bum-fuzzled, I say, by the scrim of nostalgia, where they were just talking about, oh, and when I see a little person up to my door and it's clear that it was homemade.

it's made with love, and that's wrong then. It's wrong now. That story about Batman was true. And because I rejected my mom's offer, probably not kindly, we went to Woolworth and we bought what Linda's talking about, which is a Ben Cooper Batman costume. Now, if you're too young to remember, Ben Cooper costumes were basically vinyl smocks. They were terrible. And the masks had a little slit where your mouth was and you couldn't help up with your tongue

against it. And on the chest, the word Batman on the mask, had the word Batman. They had the word Batman, which is not how he rolls. But it was so much closer to the target, closer to the bone than its sweatshirt. I would be able to look in the mirror, and my imagination would be able to bridge the gap between what I saw in the mirror and Batman. And today it's, I'm even more right now because maybe not at a CBS, maybe not at a spirit Halloween store that used to be a radio shack. But online, there is a thriving, cosplay, cottage industry. Etsy.

Etsy's big for that. They get it down. They are exacting. And again, I think I grew up in the wrong time. I mean, I envy these kids today. Although those costumes are like a hundred times more expensive than they were back then. Commit to the bit, I said. My mother made me a Florence Nightingale costume with a blue dress and an apron with a red cross on it. My mother made me a fairy costume. And my mother made my dress for the bicentennial in 1976 when I was a little teeny thing. She made my little thing with the puffy sleeves and the little hat, the little like white puffy hat. hat. So listen. I feel like we need to share these photos. I want to see these photos.

But Linda, if you wanted to go as Iron Man, she couldn't source the Kevlar. You know, there's no place she could get that kind of stuff. Yeah. My family split the difference. We didn't, well, my parents were not making me costumes and we did not have Spirit Halloween or Woolworth. But Party City was where we got all of our costumes. I agree with your take, Glenn. I'm with you. If I had been on that episode, which I was not, I would have absolutely been. on your side. I'm sorry. I'm not dewy-eyed about this. Exactly. They don't have Florence Nightingale costumes at party sick.

They did have nurse costumes, for sure. Not a generic nurse, Aesia. I was Florence Nightingale. I don't think Florence Guttengale is copyrighted. I don't think they have to say, War nurse. I was Florence Nightingale TM.

I'm sure, Glenn, you would agree. You were right then. You're right now. Uh-huh. There we go. Yes. You're here. And you right now. Right there. How about that? All right. Well, we want to know your early pop culture happy hour memories we want to know your early hot takes find us at facebook.com slash pccch that brings us to the end of our show iisha harris linda holmes glen welland thanks so much for

being here thank you happy anniversary see you in 15 more years hopefully he insulted my mother but that's okay and just a reminder that signing up for pop culture happy hour plus is a great way to support our show and public radio and you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor are free, so please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash happy hour or visit the link in our show notes. This episode was produced by Liz Metzker and Mike Katzif and edited by our showrunner Jessica Reedy. Hello, come in provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Stephen Thompson and we will see you all next time. Glenn was right down to me right there.