It's so easy to get drunk on nostalgia, but what happens the next day? Nostalgia Hangover is a podcast about shining the cold light of the present on the things that meant something to us in the past. A guest picks out a book, movie, album, anything that they remember vividly from their past and…
Part 4 concludes the Nostalgia Hangover Season Finale with a long discussion about the two endings of Neon Genesis Evangelion: first, the final two episodes of the television show which provoked a major fan backlash (that included death threats sent to the creator of the series), and second, the movie that was made to ‘fix’…
This didn’t quite fit into any of the other episodes so it got spun off as a bonus. In this episode. We discuss the character of Kaworu, who appears in only a single episode yet has a phenomenal fan following and popularity (the “Boba Fett” of Evangelion). He is an enigmatic love interest for Shinji,…
Part 3 is a deep dive discussion on the character of Asuka, who stands in perfectly as a microcosm of the series as a whole. Asuka originally appears in episode 8 and is introduced as a shrewish cliché with a lot of problematic elements. But by the end of the series, she is one of…
In part 2, Usman and Noah cover episodes 8-24, the bulk of the series, and go into more depth about how the tone and content of the show fluctuates over the course of its run. Starting with episode 8 Evangelion veers away from its more serious elements involving war/trauma/depression into a sillier and more cliché…
Nostalgia Hangover Season Finale: Neon Genesis Evangelion Part 1: Life During Wartime Neon Genesis Evangelion is an iconic Japanese animated series (now on Netflix!) that uses a common anime premise (teenagers piloting giant robots that fight monsters) to tell a story about depression, loneliness, PTSD, parental estrangement, teenaged angst, and life during wartime (content warning…
Michael comes on the show to talk about the Star War. Specifically, two live-action made-for-tv Ewok movies. Did you know that two original live-action Star Wars movies were made in the mid-80’s after Return of the Jedi? Noah didn’t! We discuss these lesser-known pieces of Star Wars media and how they compare to both the…
Ben talks about Monster Zero, a Godzilla movie his mother created a bootleg copy of from a VHS tape borrowed from a grocery store video rental chain. He watched it over and over again as a child, and from this humble beginning came a lifelong affection for Godzilla and other kaiju. Monster Zero features most…
This weeks’ guest Classy Cassie saw The Fast and the Furious in theaters with her parents when she was about eight. What’s more remarkable is that Cassie and her parents went on to see every Fast and Furious movie together in theaters since, marking that afternoon in the year 2000 as the beginning of a…
Julie Andrews stars in Thoroughly Modern Millie, a 1967 musical that features catchy songs, fun dance numbers, delightful performances, and egregious racism. The movie is about Millie, a ‘modern’ woman of 1922, trying to make her way in the Big City. While Millie’s attempts to find love is the main focus of the movie, the…
Ben “Not the Playwright” Johnson ordered an old Berenstain Bears book on Amazon last month and wanted to talk about it. The Berenstain Bears and the Bad Dream, like every other book in the series, tells a simple, wholesome story for children that imparts an equally simple, wholesome moral or message. And that’s it. What…
The Pirates of Dark Water is a 1990 cartoon Elizabeth has no direct memory of watching. What she does remember vividly, though, is playing make-believe around the idea of “The Pirates of Dark Water” in elementary school. After the rewatch, Elizabeth delights in recounting the first five episodes of The Pirates of Dark Water in…
Katherine From Sweden returns to revisit a childhood favorite, Harriet the Spy. The book is about an 11-year-old girl, the titular Harriet, who lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan circa 1964. Harriet wants to know everything there is to know about anything, and obsessively writes down the things she observes in a series…
Babyface Conor chooses to revisit The Adventures of Pete and Pete, a live-action Nickelodeon Show about the surreal suburban adventures of two brothers, both named Pete. The show aired in the early 1990’s before Conor was born, so we start by discussing how one can be nostalgic about something they didn’t live through. We then…
Noah and Elizabeth head on down to South Park and revisit its very first season from 1997. South Park has been continuously produced to the present day by its original creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The 23rd Season premieres this Wednesday. The show’s legacy is. . .complicated. Trey Parker and Matt Stone made (and…
Everyone loves Star Trek: The Next Generation. But with over a hundred episodes spanning 7 seasons, there’s just too much to choose from. So for this discussion, Noah and Elizabeth each picked an episode they remembered vividly from their childhoods. We shortly discover that the two chosen episodes, “Masks” and “Genesis”, are two of the…
Katherine From Sweden revisits The Dark is Rising, a 1973 children’s fantasy classic by Susan Cooper. The book combines beautiful prose, English folklore, dull fetchquest plotting, and an overpowering sense of fatalism. The unique result of this is not quite like anything else in children’s literature. Our discussion touches on not only Katherine’s experience reading…
Near-Doctor Brigit walks us through her childhood favorite, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Easily the most divisive film of the series, Brigit walks us through its pile of contradictions and what it meant to her as a child. At once it is: *A live-action cartoon *A fantasy metaphor for relationships with abusive parents…
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