Retroist
Since 2009, each episode of this enjoyable podcast has covered a new old curio. There are episodes about The A-Team, Tetris, Candid Camera, Zork, the McRib sandwich and the Atari Jaguar. Nostalgia podcasts have a habit of being goofy, half-remembered affairs, but Retroist host Garry Vander Voort presents each episode like a personal essay, folding in his own memories of the subjects with meticulous research. There should really be a Retroist TV show – but until that gets made, you can lose yourself for weeks in the podcast’s archives.
Remember the Game?
This is a podcast all about retro gaming. Since gaming is such a constantly evolving beast – and since entire libraries of games are lost with each new console iteration – Canadian standup Adam Blank is smart not to tie himself to a certain era. Some episodes revolve round early Mario titles, others are as recent as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City or the Rock Band series. Blank’s enthusiasm (positive and negative) for these games is unmistakable. If you were there at the time, this podcast is an absolute treat.
Missing Richard Simmons
For a while in 2017, Missing Richard Simmons was, well, unmissable. A Daily Show producer named Dan Taberski noticed that Simmons, a celebrity fitness instructor who had been a mainstay of American culture in the 1980s, had vanished from public view. Over the course of the podcast’s six-episode run, he sought to find out why. And while the show itself is grippingly told, it also raised wider issues that investigative podcasts in general are still reckoning with. Was this an invasion of privacy? What duty of care do podcasters have for their subjects? At what point do listeners start to become actively complicit? A fascinating, knotty listen.
The LOST Boys
You could pretty much pick any TV show out of the ether and you’d be guaranteed to find a podcast about it. However, there’s something about Lost that lends itself especially well to retrospective analysis. In The LOST Boys, Jack Shepherd and Jacob Stolworthy dissect the entire series episode by episode; Stolworthy is a fan with multiple rewatches under his belt, while Shepherd is seeing it all for the first time. They work together wonderfully, with Shepherd’s theories and criticisms puncturing Stolworthy’s fervent proselytising.
Super 90’s Bros
Super 90’s Bros, a podcast where two friends giddily reminisce about 90s culture, is about as far from scholarly as podcasting gets. Still, the sheer power of enthusiasm the hosts Brennon Poynor and Adam Pitzler have for some of these subjects makes this perhaps the most accessible of this bunch. It’s a cliche, but this is just like listening to your friends laugh and squabble about the half-forgotten things you all enjoyed as kids.
