Épisodes

  • The Truth is RIGHT HERE: X-Files with Chelsea Stardust

    The Truth is RIGHT HERE: X-Files with Chelsea Stardust
    May 18 2026
    The X-Files is, technically, a show about two FBI agents investigating extraterrestrial activity, government conspiracy, and the unexplained — which is why it's mildly hilarious that filmmaker Chelsea Stardust's curated onramp for Mandy contains, by Mandy's own count, exactly zero alien episodes. What it does contain: a man who hibernates in a nest every thirty years and squeezes through air ducts; a parasitic humanoid Flukeman swimming around the sewer system (related, somehow, to Chernobyl); a gentle psychic played by Peter Boyle who can see exactly how everyone is going to die; an inbred Pennsylvania family hiding their quadruple-amputee mother under the bed; and Bryan Cranston's head, which will explode unless he keeps driving west. Mandy was, against every instinct she possesses, completely charmed.What emerges across the conversation is a love letter to a show whose secret weapon turns out not to be the monsters at all. It's the writing (Vince Gilligan, pre-Breaking Bad, was already writing Vince Gilligan episodes). It's the sparing use of special effects, which means the few times you actually see the Flukeman, you really see him. It's a theme song Mark Snow created by smashing his forearm onto a keyboard in frustration, which is the most rock-and-roll origin story in television scoring. And it's the Mulder-Scully dynamic, which Chelsea makes a passionate case is the actual core of the entire enterprise — the relationships first, the body horror second, the Cigarette Smoking Man a distant third.By the end, Mandy has watched five episodes, formed strong opinions about Scully's footwear ergonomics, identified Roseanne's Dan Conner's best friend Chuck in a guest spot decades later, and developed genuine sympathy for a sewer-dwelling parasite. Chelsea has confessed that she's never gotten to talk about The X-Files on a podcast before, which feels like a crime against nerd culture and is hereby corrected.GUEST SPOTLIGHTChelsea Stardust is a writer, director, and producer with a deep bench of horror credentials. She made her directorial debut with the sci-fi thriller All That We Destroy (Hulu, part of Blumhouse's Into the Dark series); directed the horror-comedy Satanic Panic (written by novelist Grady Hendrix, available on VOD); and most recently co-directed Grind, a horror anthology about the gig economy that premiered at SXSW 2026. She co-hosts the horror movie podcast Sitting in the Dark with Tommy Metz III on TruStory FM, runs the Losers Book Club in Los Angeles, and is generally the kind of person who treats nerdiness as a vocation. Find her on Instagram at @chelseastardust and her book club at @losersbookclubla.Chelsea Stardust on InstagramSitting in the Dark podcast (TruStory FM)Losers Book Club LA on InstagramChelsea’s FilmsAll That We Destroy (2019)Satanic Panic (2019)Grind (2026)The X-Files Episodes Discussed“Pilot” (Season 1, Episode 1)“Squeeze” (Season 1, Episode 3)“The Host” (Season 2, Episode 2)“Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” (Season 3, Episode 4)“Home” (Season 4, Episode 2)“Drive” (Season 6, Episode 2)“Monday” (Season 6, Episode 14)People MentionedGrady Hendrix — novelist; wrote Satanic PanicDave Grusin — composer of The Firm scoreTommy Metz III on Instagram — Sitting in the Dark co-hostReferenced BooksThe Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady HendrixIt (Stephen King novel) — referenced for thematic parallels with “Squeeze”Referenced Films & SeriesScanners (1981) — Cronenberg; cited for the “Drive” cold openSpeed (1994) — the spiritual cousin to “Drive”The Goonies (1985) — Mandy’s prior episode referenceThe Firm (1993) — for Mandy’s Dave Grusin score referenceIt (1990 miniseries) — Tim Curry as PennywiseDisclosure Day (2026) — the Spielberg UFO film Chelsea referencedPast Make Me a Nerd EpisodesIt’s Our Time Down Here: A Goonies Comfort Rewatch with Krissy Lenz — series hub (specific episode page)Make Me a NerdMake Me a Nerd membershipMandy Kaplan on Instagram@mandymiscast on TikTok---Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.
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    1 h et 9 min
  • Watch Me Fly… Serenity with Krissy Lenz

    Watch Me Fly… Serenity with Krissy Lenz
    May 11 2026
    Here is a fact about Firefly, which is to say the beloved Joss Whedon space western that aired on Fox in 2002: the network, in its infinite wisdom, decided to air the two-hour pilot — the one designed to introduce you to the entire world, its characters, and the general vibe of a Western in space — not first, but somewhere in the middle. This is approximately like hosting a dinner party and opening with dessert, except the dessert is also on fire, and also you've invited the guests' most confused relatives. The show was cancelled. The fans — who call themselves Browncoats, because of course they do — responded not with acceptance but with a multi-year grassroots campaign that eventually produced a movie (Serenity, 2005), a documentary about the making of said movie (Done the Impossible), and a fan-organized party circuit called Shindigs that still runs today. This week, returning champion Krissy Lenz walks Mandy through all of it.The movie itself, Mandy discovers, is tonally bewildering in the best way — part heist, part Star Wars homage, part horror film, part comedy, with Chiwetel Ejiofor showing up as the most civilized, polite, and unnervingly calm assassin in the 'Verse. ("He believes in this better world that even he's not welcome in," Krissy notes, which is, frankly, the kind of villain thesis statement most movies wish they could pull off.) Summer Glau is doing ballet-grade choreography in combat boots and a slip dress. Alan Tudyk is delightful, briefly, and then — for contractual reasons Krissy helpfully explains — permanently unavailable. And Nathan Fillion, the internet's favorite convention dad, spends the climax in a physical fight that looks suspiciously like the end of every Star Wars movie you've ever seen.Along the way, the conversation takes its requisite detours: how to separate the art from the artist when the artist is Joss Whedon and the allegations are what they are; the rehabilitation economy around Louis CK; whether Mal is charmingly brusque or just, on closer 45-year-old inspection, kind of a dick; and the enduring question of whether Joel McHale should be allowed to play anyone other than Joel McHale. By the end, Mandy has agreed to watch the series, consider attending a Shindig, and do a future episode on Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog — which is, by any reasonable metric, a successful recruitment.Find Krissy
    • The Most Excellent 80s Movies Podcast
    • Gank That Drank
    • Neighborhood Comedy Theater (Mesa, AZ)
    Connect with the ShowFollow Mandy on Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavensMake Me a Nerd runs on curious people. If that's you, the inner circle is at makemeanerd.com/join — it's where the show goes deeper between episodes, and where Mandy's most embarrassingly enthusiastic fans have found their people.
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    52 min
  • No Time To Play… Ender’s Game with Erica Cochran

    No Time To Play… Ender’s Game with Erica Cochran
    May 4 2026
    Mandy Kaplan has been handed a Hugo-winning, Nebula-winning, Mormon-authored military sci-fi classic about a six-year-old being psychologically tortured into committing accidental alien genocide, and reader, she has THOUGHTS. This week, her son Casey's high school chemistry teacher — the proud Trojan, theater company founder, and science-and-theater double-nerd Erica Cochran — walks Mandy through Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel Ender's Game, a book that predicted the internet, iPads, online political discourse, and rogue AI with such unsettling accuracy that you kind of want to check if Card also has next week's lottery numbers.Before they even open the book, there's The Orson Scott Card Problem to address — namely, that he is an anti-gay-rights activist who appears to have written a scene in which his six-year-old protagonist convinces a naked bully to also get naked before their fistfight. Mandy has some thoughts about this. Erica has some thoughts about this. Everyone has some thoughts about this. They proceed with their "art vs. artist" disclaimer firmly in place, with Mandy reserving the right to get in a few jabs. She gets in several.What unfolds is a joyful, slightly unhinged, deeply thoughtful conversation about a book Mandy read every word of and still couldn't quite follow ("I got a lot of beeps and boops"), while Erica — who has reread the series multiple times and done "a lot of therapy" — sees the full emotional architecture underneath. They dig into why so many of these dystopias center on children (the innocence, the smallness, the inability to consent), why Ender is Valentine with the capacity to be Peter, why the government commissions a third child from a family whose parents are, diplomatically speaking, not geniuses, and whether the book's climactic religion-founding is a defense of the Book of Mormon or a sly admission that anyone can make up a religion. Also discussed: Scientology's youth promotion track, the 2013 movie (Erica: "two thumbs down"), the inexplicable prevalence of the insult "fart-eater," and the fact that Petra is doing her absolute best and does not deserve Mandy's Gen-X scolding.By the end, Mandy is converted — not to loving the book, exactly, but to seeing what she missed in it. Which is, honestly, the whole point of this podcast.Connect with the ShowFollow Mandy on Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavensMake Me a Nerd runs on curious people. If that's you, the inner circle is at makemeanerd.com/join — it's where the show goes deeper between episodes, and where Mandy's most embarrassingly enthusiastic fans have found their people.
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    1 h et 1 min
  • One For The Kids: Battle Royale with Jimmy Aquino

    One For The Kids: Battle Royale with Jimmy Aquino
    Apr 27 2026
    Mandy Kaplan has thoughts about 42 Japanese ninth-graders being forced to murder each other on a deserted island, and honestly, who among us doesn't? This week, Jimmy Aquino returns to Make Me a Nerd for his fourth-or-fifth appearance (he's lost count, we've lost count, the green jacket situation remains unresolved) to drag Mandy through 2000's Battle Royale — a film he insists inspired The Hunger Games, and which Suzanne Collins insists she has absolutely never heard of, nope, never, why do you ask.What follows is a spirited investigation into whether a Japanese dystopian thriller about government-sanctioned child-on-child violence can be considered a cultural touchstone (yes), whether Mandy watching the English dub instead of the original Japanese constitutes a personal betrayal of Jimmy (also yes), and whether the evil teacher's Tony Soprano velour tracksuit is the single most baffling costume choice in cinema history (unclear, but a strong contender). Along the way: a five-year-old shoves her would-be molester down a stairwell, Chigusa stabs a guy in the junk, Mitsuko emerges as the Regina George of Murder Island, and Mandy discovers she would survive a battle royale by hiding in the bushes like she hovers near the kitchen door at a catered event — which is, frankly, a strategy.Also discussed: Bram Stoker's Dracula (Jimmy loves it, the public apparently did not, Mandy is caught in the crossfire), Dane Cook's alleged joke-stealing from Louis C.K., the exact linguistic convention for Japanese first and last names (pending verification), and whether a dystopia needs to be in the future or just generally, you know, bad. Mandy concludes she would die begging and crying. Jimmy concludes he would "Mitsuko the crap out of it." Both are probably right.Links & Mentions
    • Jimmy Aquino — Comic News Insider: comicnewsinsider.com | Instagram: @JimmyAquino | Bluesky
    • Mandy Kaplan — Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavens (both with K's)
    • Support the show — makemeanerd.com/join for ad-free episodes, early access, and Mandy's eternal gratitude

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    1 h
  • Moon Prism Power, Make Me a Gorgeous Podcaster: Sailor Moon with Jonny Lee Jr.

    Moon Prism Power, Make Me a Gorgeous Podcaster: Sailor Moon with Jonny Lee Jr.
    Apr 20 2026
    Sailor Moon was a cartoon made for five-year-old Japanese girls. It aired in America at 6 AM, required an eight-year-old Jonny Lee Jr. to set his alarm for 5:30 every morning — before DVR, before streaming, before any child should be conscious — and quietly became one of the most important pieces of queer representation an entire generation had access to. So, naturally, Mandy had never seen it.Jonny's back to fix that. Mandy was assigned 14 essential episodes and negotiated down to eight, but arrives with strong opinions anyway — about Tuxedo Mask ("He's so hot"), her talking-cat wish fulfillment, and the transformation sequences that feel like auditions for a Broadway musical. (There have been over 40 Sailor Moon musicals in Japan. Neither Mandy nor most of the listening audience will have been prepared for that sentence.) Along the way, they dig into why the American dub turned a gay male villain into a woman, how male directors wrote boy-craziness into the anime that didn't exist in the original manga, and the Snow White connection behind those enormous anime eyes.And so we have a conversation about why gay men gravitate toward stories about powerful women, what it meant to find yourself in a kids' show when there was almost nowhere else to look, and how a series marketed to kindergartners smuggled in real themes about identity and transformation.Guest Spotlight
    Jonny Lee Jr. is a lifelong anime devotee and one of Make Me a Nerd's original guests, returning this time to make the case for the show he's loved since he was eight years old and jet-lagged in Taipei. His enthusiasm for Sailor Moon is the kind that reorganizes a kid's sleep schedule and never fully lets go.
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    54 min
  • From Basement Nerds to Amazon Prime: The Improbable (and Inevitable) Rise of Vox Machina with Hem Brewster

    From Basement Nerds to Amazon Prime: The Improbable (and Inevitable) Rise of Vox Machina with Hem Brewster
    Apr 13 2026
    What do you get when you take eight adult friends — all professional voice actors — who've been playing a home D&D game for years and decide, on a lark, to put it on Twitch? You get Critical Role, a phenomenon now in its fourth campaign, spanning roughly a decade of streaming and somewhere between "a lot" and "an almost unhinged number" of hours of content. Hem Brewster, lead producer at Blighthouse Studio and a Critical Role early adopter, joins Mandy all the way from Iceland to break down The Legend of Vox Machina — the Amazon Prime animated series that took that basement game, ran a Kickstarter asking for a couple hundred thousand dollars, received millions in days, and then somehow turned it into a 100%/94% Rotten Tomatoes-rated show that works equally well for lifelong nerds and people who just showed up for the fart jokes. (Both are valid. The fart jokes are good.)Hem walks Mandy through the full Critical Role ecosystem — campaigns, modules, homebrew, the difference between a GM who knows every rule and a GM who's right for your table — and explains why Vox Machina nails something most adaptations fumble: you never need to know what a spell is called to understand what it does, because the show just shows you the giant hand. They also dig into the three episodes Hem chose for Mandy: the pilot's shotgun-approach introduction (Lord of the Rings fake-out, musical number, immediate R-rating — all of it in episode one), the glorious chaos of episode seven's triceratops incident, and the season finale's earned emotional heaviness. Plus: Sam Riegel himself answers two questions, Mandy learns what a class is, and Grog is confirmed a beautiful being.If you've been nerd-curious but felt like D&D was a door you couldn't open — well, Grog has thoughts on that. Specifically that not everything is a trap. Specifically that it very much was a trap. The point stands: this is the episode that makes the door feel a lot less locked.GUEST SPOTLIGHTHem Brewster is the lead producer at Blighthouse Studio, a collective of creators from across the US and beyond making escapist audio and actual-play content. Their shows include:
    • The Lucky Die — a D&D actual play, with Hem as game master
    • The Sprouting — a Call of Cthulhu eldritch horror actual play
    • Plus additional fantasy shows and talk shows under the Blighthouse umbrella
    Find everything at blighthouse.studio, including work from Blighthouse friends and collaborators outside the main umbrella.Connect with the ShowFollow Mandy on Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavensMake Me a Nerd runs on curious people. If that's you, the inner circle is at makemeanerd.com/join — it's where the show goes deeper between episodes, and where Mandy's most embarrassingly enthusiastic fans have found their people.
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    53 min
  • Movie Friends Michelle Rubinstein and Seth Vargas on the Strange Legacy of Ed Wood

    Movie Friends Michelle Rubinstein and Seth Vargas on the Strange Legacy of Ed Wood
    Apr 6 2026
    Here is a fun fact about the worst movie ever made: it was declared the worst movie ever made by people who hadn’t seen it. In 1980, the Medved brothers published The Golden Turkey Awards, a book crowning Plan 9 from Outer Space as cinema’s all-time nadir — a designation selected, in part, by a 16-year-old. The book was a hit. The label stuck. And for decades, that’s how Ed Wood got remembered: not as someone who made movies, but as a cautionary tale about making them badly.The thing is, when you actually sit down and watch Plan 9 — with its styrofoam UFOs, its shower-curtain cockpit, its graveyard that looks like a particularly ambitious mini golf course, and its dialogue (“Well he’s been murdered, and somebody’s responsible”) — something unexpected happens. You have a great time. You laugh. You get chills. You start asking questions. Which is, arguably, more than most movies manage.Mandy watched Plan 9 from Outer Space for the first time, then immediately watched Tim Burton’s 1994 love letter Ed Wood back to back, and showed up to this conversation practically sparking. Her guides are Michelle Rubinstein and Seth Vargas of the Movie Friends podcast, and together they trace the whole improbable arc: from Ed Wood’s shoestring productions (shot in single takes, cast with whoever was around, funded by a landlord who did not make his money back) to the Medved book, to Tim Burton using his post-Batman cultural cachet to make one of the most gorgeous black-and-white films of the nineties.Michelle derails the episode in the best possible way with a one-minute TED talk on Vampira — real name Maila Nurmi, Emmy nominee, friend of James Dean, and practitioner of a papaya-based waist-shrinking technique that Mandy immediately wants to try. Seth, who has been an Ed Wood evangelist since his teenage years working in a magic store, makes the argument that Ed Wood’s films aren’t bad so much as alive — confounding, curious, and genuinely impossible to ignore. Seventy-five years later, he’s right.Guest SpotlightMichelle Rubinstein and Seth Vargas are the hosts of Movie Friends, a podcast built on the idea that film discussion doesn’t have to be gatekeepy or exhausting — it can just be two people who genuinely love movies talking about them like friends. Together they’ve developed a three-tier rating system — schmoovie, movie, or film — that tells you everything you need to know about their sensibility. Find them anywhere you get your podcasts.Links & NotesMovie Friends podcastTotal Betty Podcast NetworkReferenced in This EpisodePlan 9 from Outer Space (1957, dir. Ed Wood)Ed Wood (1994, dir. Tim Burton)Glen or Glenda (1953, dir. Ed Wood)The Golden Turkey Awards by the Medved brothers (1980)Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992, Ed Wood biography)Vampira / Maila NurmiCriswellBela LugosiMartin Landau (Best Supporting Actor, Ed Wood)The Bride! with Mandy Kaplan (Mandy’s guest episode on Movie Friends)Spaceballs (1987, dir. Mel Brooks)The GodfatherYuri on Ice with Zehra Fazal (Make Me A Nerd)You Must Remember This (podcast)Christine JorgensenConnect with the ShowFollow Mandy on Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavensMake Me a Nerd runs on curious people. If that's you, the inner circle is at makemeanerd.com/join — it's where the show goes deeper between episodes, and where Mandy's most embarrassingly enthusiastic fans have found their people. ---Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.
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    56 min
  • Nate McWhortor Makes Mandy a Future Folk Fan

    Nate McWhortor Makes Mandy a Future Folk Fan
    Mar 30 2026
    Somewhere between O Brother Where Art Thou and the Lumineers' stomp-and-clap era, a folk comedy duo from the East Village made a movie about two aliens who abandon a mission to destroy Earth because one of them heard music in a Costco and simply could not get over it. The film cost approximately nothing, shot on the streets of Brooklyn with real bystanders as involuntary extras, features Dee Snider of Twisted Sister as a bar owner for reasons no one can fully explain, and won Fantastic Fest in Austin. It is called The History of Future Folk, and it is delightful in a way that Mandy, who went in skeptical, was completely unprepared for.This week, Nate McWhortor ... Phoenix improviser, minor league baseball veteran, hair metal radio devotee, and self-described "glue guy" ... brings the movie to Mandy's attention, and also brings a drinking game. They drink for every mention of the planet Hondo, every visible budget cut (there are many), and every Dee Snider scene (there are enough). What they find underneath all of that is a genuinely beautiful piece of folk music, a surprisingly unpredictable plot, and a love letter to New York that doesn't have enough extras to fill its own bar scenes. If you've never heard of Future Folk, you're about to understand why some people feel like this movie was made specifically for them.Nate McWhortor is a Phoenix-based improviser at the Neighborhood Comedy Theater and co-host of Gank That Drank, the Supernatural rewatch podcast where every episode comes with a drinking game. A sports nerd turned theater kid turned 16-year improv veteran, Nate is exactly the kind of guest who shows up with a drinking game, an Arizona tourism angle, and a genuine passion for a 2012 cult film that the algorithm sent him and he never forgot. Gank That Drink is currently heading into its final season of Supernatural — which means now is the time to get in on it. Find Nate and Krissy Lenz at the Neighborhood Comedy Theater at nctphoenix.com.Links & Notes
    • The History of Future Folk (2012) — available on YouTube; reportedly back on Netflix
    • Future Folk — the band


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    57 min