Manga is one of the biggest storytelling mediums on the planet, and Mandy has been successfully avoiding it her whole life — until now. World-renowned expert Helen McCarthy hands her three wildly different titles, explains why a pirate cartoon is secretly a manual for surviving childhood, and makes a convincing case that the comics your mom threw out were probably worth something.
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Mona Chatterjee returns for a Make Me A Nerd first: the show’s first-ever book-to-movie follow-up, tackling the 2012 film adaptation of The Hunger Games. Mandy and Mona debate what the movie nails, what it loses, and why a story called The Hunger Games somehow forgot to include the food.
Mandy and Mona dissect Suzanne Collins’ dystopian masterpiece The Hunger Games, exploring everything from Katniss’s questionable trust issues to the perfume potential of arena sweat. They tackle the big questions: Why don’t we get a peacekeepers’ reality show and how did a book about children murdering each other become required middle school reading?
Mandy Kaplan and Krissy Lenz revisit The Goonies as emotional medicine: messy, loud, wildly sincere, and somehow still perfectly engineered for joy. Along the way they unpack pirate aesthetics, missing octopuses, Corey Feldman weirdness, and why Brand is the underrated MVP of childhood adventure.
Mandy Kaplan tackles Smallville, the superhero origin story that swaps capes for corridor drama. John Mundy joins her to unpack meteor-fueled mayhem and why teenage uncertainty might be the best way to make Superman interesting.