Make Me A Nerd with Mandy Kaplan

TruStory FM

Hey folks. Mandy Kaplan here. I’d like to share a bit about my intentions and mission for MMAN if you’ll indulge me. You will? Huzzah!

Look, I am a lot of things. I’m a writer, actress, mother, and lover of musicals and cats, but NOT Cats, The Musical. Give me a little bit of credit, would ya? So...throughout my life, I’ve been surrounded (and intrigued) by all things nerd. A sister who plays D&D, a Star Wars-obsessed husband, friends who love anime, comic books, video games, and...well, you get the picture. Somehow, I have always held it all at arm's length. Not to get too deep, but maybe I never thought I was smart enough to follow it. Or maybe I have control issues and have never been able to embrace fantastical things like dragons and time travel. Until now!

So, with an open mind and heart, I am ready to join this massive (and beautifully inclusive) club and GEEK THE #%$ OUT! It’s time for all my wonderfully strange friends to baptize me into NERD-DOM. Please join me on this journey. Who knows? Maybe you’ll discover or remember a side of yourself along the way. Or at least make fun of me as I try!

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20 episodes
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Avg 52 min
English

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#119
Monday · 43 min
Stargate with Jonny Lee Jr. • Ancient Aliens, but More Fun
Until this week, Mandy Kaplan did not know the word "Stargate" existed. Not the 1994 movie, not the ten seasons of television that followed, not the conventions full of people who can spell Goa'uld on the first try. (She has also never seen an...
- Transcript
#118
October 12 · 46 min
The Rocky Horror Picture Show with Matthew Fox
The whole premise of Make Me a Nerd is that Mandy has never seen the thing. Matthew Fox arrives to honor the late Tim Curry with a movie he has attended dozens of times and, by their own count, watched all the way to the ending exactly twice (the back...
- Transcript
#117
October 5 · 40 min
Werecats and Beignets: Scooby Doo on Zombie Island with Journie Ma-Johnson
In 1998, Hanna-Barbera handed a direct-to-video Scooby-Doo movie to a crew of veterans and then, by all accounts, forgot to supervise them. The crew used that freedom to do the one thing thirty years of Scooby-Doo had solemnly promised would never...
- Transcript
#116
September 28 · 45 min
Super Sentai: The Spandex Empire Behind Power Rangers with Omari Miller
Mandy spent her son's Mighty Morphin years with one nagging question: why are the Power Rangers wearing their helmets in every single fight? She never asked anyone. This week Omari Miller, actor, singer, and possibly the most caffeinated man in Los...
- Transcript
#115
September 21 · 56 min
What If There Were Too Many Dogs? The Andy Griffith Show with Breaking Mayberry
Marty Schneider and Dan Ludwig, hosts of the podcast Breaking Mayberry, explain that they once built two rating scales for The Andy Griffith Show: an Andy-meter for how good the episode is, and a Barney-meter for how much psychic damage it did to...
- Transcript
#114
September 14 · 45 min
Fackam Hall with Justine Huxley
The British period drama is a genre built on restraint. Longing glances across drawing rooms. Inheritance law. A great many people declining, for six or seven seasons, to say the one thing they most want to say. Fackham Hall surveys this rich and...
- Transcript
#113
September 7 · 49 min
The Smell Test: Parasite with Sherry Mandujano
Three times in the theater. Twenty-odd more at home. Six years of having thoughts about Parasite, and roughly four minutes total in which anyone has let her share them. This week Sherry Mandujano gets an hour.Mandy had never seen it. She takes notes...
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#112
August 31 · 56 min
Formula 1 with Pete Wright: Everybody Wants Kimi
Mandy Kaplan came to this with three episodes of Drive to Survive and one other piece of racing knowledge, which is that she can recite Talladega Nights from memory. Ninety seconds into the first episode a teenager gets dropped off at school by his...
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#111
August 24 · 50 min
Pushing Daisies with Jessica Jimenez: Mandy Would Like a Cheese Box
Mandy has a real, non-joking anxiety about death. You'd think that's the sort of thing a person would mention to a friend before that friend assigns her a series about a man who reanimates corpses for sixty seconds at a stretch to ask them who did it....
- Transcript
#110
August 17 · 52 min
We Bleed the Red of Hollywood Video: The Last Blockbuster with Jason Yeung
Jason Yeung spent more than a decade working in video stores — not Blockbuster, mind you, but Hollywood Video, a distinction he holds with the unwavering intensity of a man asked to sing a rival team's fight song. (Mandy asks. It does not go well for...
- Transcript
#109
August 10 · 48 min
Twelve Percent and Worth It: Sphere with Kynan Dias
Every so often a guest arrives having chosen not the safe pick, not the crowd-pleaser, but the one movie they have been quietly waiting years for somebody to ask them about. Kynan Dias picked Sphere. It's a 1998 Barry Levinson picture starring Dustin...
- Transcript
#108
August 3 · 51 min
Neverland Has Xenomorphs Now: Alien Earth with Rick London
Rick London came for Alien: Earth — Noah Hawley's reportedly quarter-billion-dollar fever dream about corporations, immortality, and dying children installed in adult bodies — and he came prepared to defend every last drop of the show's frankly...
- Transcript
#107
July 27 · 59 min
A Desire for More Cows: Arrival with Justin Jaeger
The instant a movie is pitched to Mandy as "aliens come to Earth," she has already changed the channel, mentally relocated to a spa, and started a calmer life. So naturally, this week she sat down with Arrival, a film she spent years confusing with...
- Transcript
#106
July 20 · 57 min
When the Music Is Happenating: The Grateful Dead with Jeffrey Nicholas Brown
The Grateful Dead's own biographer opens their official four-hour documentary by admitting it's really hard to love this band if you're not already a fan — which is a bold marketing strategy, like a restaurant with a sign reading "you probably won't...
- Transcript
#105
July 13 · 56 min
A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother: Psycho, Deconstructed with Jesse Fister
Mandy has never seen Psycho. She has, however, seen Hot in Cleveland, which — it turns out — quotes Psycho constantly, meaning Mandy has been unknowingly absorbing the cultural shrapnel of a movie she'd never actually watched. It's the kind of...
- Transcript
#104
July 6 · 1 hr 1 min
My So Called Life with Sloan Just
There exists a specific cohort of women who, if you say the words "do you remember My So-Called Life," will respond — instantly, involuntarily, with the faraway look of someone recalling a first love — "Jordan Catalano." They cannot help it. This is a...
- Transcript
#103
June 29 · 59 min
Dr. Horrible’s Sing a Long Blog with Krissy Lenz & Kyle Olson
This week we have a three-act superhero musical, shot on a borrowed studio lot during a labor strike, financed by one guy's personal credit card, in which approximately none of the songs are allowed to finish. Weird as it may be, it all clicks into...
- Transcript
#102
June 22 · 54 min
Batman Pulled a Gun: Batman Beyond with Jason Yeung
Batman: he does not use guns. This is practically the whole point of him — a man so committed to a single rule that he built an entire personality, a cave, and a frankly concerning number of themed vehicles around it. So when Batman Beyond opens its...
- Transcript
#101
June 15 · 1 hr
Leave the Gun, Take the Nerd: The Godfather with Seth Vargas
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who have seen The Godfather, and those who have built an entire personality around not having seen it (a group that, until this week, proudly included our own Mandy Kaplan — a grown woman fully...
- Transcript
#100
June 8 · 59 min
Prince with Kyle Olson and Pete Wright
Here’s a fun fact about Prince Rogers Nelson: that wasn’t a stage name. Prince was his actual, legal, on-the-birth-certificate first name. Once you accept that a man named Prince grew up to become the artist known as Prince, you’re already most of the...
- Transcript

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