Rewatch Podcasts

The problem of connecting to a media piece for me is that a lot of the time I have to draw on my own experiences to give that media context. I have to partake in a lot of media to build up a corpus of how the media around me should be, and I’ll always have that slightly weird, wonky upbringing about what in that media resonates with me.

I think my current gold standard for Rewatch media is The Magnum Rewatch Podcast, by Loading Ready Run. The Greatest Podcast In The History Of Our Sport is a somewhat related but not perfectly connected piece of media. What happens in these two pieces is two people to whom the media has some meaningful resonance, share the experience of that media. They become storytellers, taking the media and telling you what in that media echoes importantly to them, and share it.

In the Magnum Rewatch, this is a pair of filmmakers, who have interest in edits and comedy, and who have a much more modern perspective on media, passing their opinions on Magnum PI. They point out plot holes and nice edits and they describe the narratives, boiling them down and doing fact checking/background information on how the show got made. I really enjoy that, but part of what makes me enjoy that is these two people talking about the continuity and characterisation of the people they care about

This is similarly true about The Greatest Podcast – it’s a pair of people who really understand how the media works, talking about it, rather than in a single large piece of continuity, they pull it apart and examine the threads in time. Each stage includes adding context, with some episodes building towards a larger context, and some episodes being more one-off things.

This is why I think you – yes you – should do a rewatch podcast.

I don’t like Undertale. I love talking to my friend who loves Undertale about Undertale. I love sitting around and listening to her as she explains what she saw in the characters, the things in the series she really liked. I liked her talking about what, in the universe, worked for her and what didn’t, because of her perspective and experience. And that was fun and I enjoyed doing it.

There are services like MixCloud, which will host your podcast for you. There’s Audacity, which you can record and edit your podcast with. And there’s this .dll here, where you can export your media to mp3.

If you have a thing you love, a series you know some stuff about – why not sit down, and record, in a few pieces, chunks of audio of you – and maybe a friend? – talking about the thing you like? You can rewatch it, re-experience this thing you love, and in so doing, talk to people who get to know you and get to know what you care about in this piece, as they understand the thing you care about.

There’s another reason to try this: It’s a project with a lifespan. If you want to do this, it can be an episode, or three or four episodes. You can pick a short show, or maybe even just a movie! You can talk about things in a series you love that don’t make sense. You can talk about how you like the relationships in that show. You can talk about how a videogame made you feel. And then, when you’ve done it, you can say, at the end I did a thing.