This podcast is being brought to you by WXAV.com. WXAV, bringing the best artists to you. Hey, this is Pete. This is Brian.
And you're tuned into a WXAV exclusive podcast here. Thank you so much for downloading this episode. Brian, this is something you and I put together. It's near and dear to our hearts.
Yeah, this was a really interesting interview we did with a guy named Eric Molinsky. Yeah, he's the creator of this absolutely wonderful podcast called Imaginary Worlds that essentially just explores imagination. Yeah, and it's sort of imagination across all platforms. Like if you listen to his show, which I highly recommend that you do, it sort of integrates everything from movies to comic books to television shows to books to just all to mythology to all of these all over the place, this guy.
Yeah, he even does an episode about when a house is for sale or they're building a house. They do like an artist rendering of what the construction project would look like. He talks to people that develop those images. So I mean, he really is all over the place.
It's an awesome interview. Brian and I talked about just how he goes about creating new podcasts and how he does his research, things like that. Definitely a show if you're into imagination, science fiction, superheroes, especially. There's tons of stuff on Batman, Superman, Marvel universes, like the whole shebang, if you will.
And you can go to Eric Molinsky's official website for the podcast, which is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Brian, this is one of my favorite interviews I've ever done. This I had a lot of fun interviewing him. He had a lot of great things to say, particularly because it's a great show and he's an interesting guy.
We also learned at the end that he animated a show, Rocket Power. So for all the listeners out there who know that show, he had a partner. So there you go. So we're going to get into it.
It's a great 20 minute plus interview. And we hope you enjoy it. For more information, imaginaryworldspodcast.org. And as always, wxav.com.
First question for you, Eric, can you tell us what inspired you to create the podcast called imaginaryworlds? So I've been working in public radio since 2004. And I mean, right when podcasts first began, and nobody knew what the podcast was. And then I was listening to them when it was just, I think on the media from WN1C when the first show that was just a podcast, you could listen to.
And for me, moving to New York around my time, I needed to have to listen to on my iPod in the subway, where there's no reception. Because I was so used to being in LA and getting car radio reception. So I was a really early adopter to podcast. I mean, literally when they started, which I think was 2005.
And so I just listened to the way they developed. And then he showed 99% visible. It was the first show that I heard. It was purely exclusively a podcast show that really just took advantage of being a podcast where it was every other week.
And it was however long Roman wanted the episode to be, or however long he thought it should be, which for me was, I just thought, oh my god, that's amazing. Because in my field, I worked mostly for the show called Studio 360, which is an arts and culture show, at a WN1C in New York. And it's distributed nationally by PRI. And a long piece for me, a luxurious piece, would be eight minutes.
And even then, very often, I felt like the piece could have have been 15 and cutting it down to eight just felt brutal. And that's luxurious. I mean, when I did stuff like Marketplace or for the newsroom, that could be three to five minutes. And so when you produce a piece for show, it's very much part of that show.
And you don't just sort of get to do it on your own, and then just hand it in and say, here you go. I mean, the editors come in pretty early to listen to what you've got and give you a lot of advice. They'll rewrite stuff for you. They'll tell you what to cut.
Because ultimately, what you're doing is for them. You're part of that show. And you also want to produce something that sounds like that show as well. And so I just thought how great it would be to have my own podcast and figure out what my voice would sound like.
It was just me. And then it just took me a long time to figure out, what would that podcast be about? Because how would it be any different than Studio 360 where I'm already working? I'm not the host, but I'm working there and I'm doing pieces.
And it'd be a really, really long time. I mean, it was kind of the thing that just kind of put on the back burner for a while. And then one day I just realized that I had so many pent up stories that I would love to have done that nobody would ever do because they're just too geeky. That there's kind of a limit to how much of that stuff you could put.
Even Studio 360, where there's no other show I could do. We did an hour long thing about Superman. I've done a piece about the watch band. I did a piece about Wonder Woman.
Then I picked something about Batman. They're like, OK, I think we've had your fill air. Thank you very much. But you're not on the comic book piece.
And I didn't necessarily want to be. I mean, I love being able to do a story about opera or some book I had never read where I get to dive deep into something I didn't know about. It's almost a graduate school program to work in public radio. To be assigned a piece about molar and be like, well, I don't know how much of a molar.
Let me call up the world's greatest authority on molar who wrote this incredibly long multi-part biography, who lives in Switzerland. And then you say to me to magic was public radio. And they're like, oh, yeah, sure, I'll talk to you. But yeah, and so then I just made a list.
And I just thought, OK, so what are all the things I've always wanted to do that I just feel like no one would ever do this. And something that lists was like 20 episodes long. And it was like my first season pretty much. And that's when I remember thinking, oh my god, this could be it.
This could be my beat. Because nobody else is doing this. And then it took me a long time to just get up and get to do it. You know, just think, oh my god, I'm really putting myself out there.
I'm really going to do this. And looking back, can't believe it took me that long to just jump in there. But it's a big jump from, oh my god, I can do this too. I'm going to start doing this.
I just wanted to ask you, what draws you in terms of subject matter, or even a larger audience to fantasy, imagination, science fiction? Why that sort of topic? What gets you excited about that? I'm of that generation where I saw Star Wars in the theaters as a kid, which I noticed some people look at me like I might as well have said I was in the Civil War.
And actually, one of the features I put out I want to work on is what the world was like. The pop culture world was like before Star Wars landed like a meteor and just wiped out all these dinosaurs and left on this new pop culture life to flourish. And it becomes such an imprint on you as a kid. And then going into animation, it was kind of my first career.
It was kind of like a permission to keep geeking out and keep living in that fantasy world. And when I got into animation, it was kind of it surprised me how many people were way more into it than I was. And even among animators, I felt like I was not nowhere near as geeky. I couldn't even compete whatsoever.
And then I go to public radio, and I'm like the geekiest person they've ever met. Like they're just stunned. It's just a world. To be honest, it's been a guilty, especially when I started working in public radio, it turned into a guilty pleasure to some extent.
It was sort of like there's some stories that are your broccoli and some that are your ice cream sunday. And anything that had to do with fantasy or sci-fi was like my ice cream sunday that I got to dip into. I have a very active imagination. I first episode of the kid.
I used to kind of, quote, Luke out, because my parents called it. Right, hold Luke's guy, Walker doll, and just fall into my imagination. I even tried screenwriting for a while, and I couldn't quite make it work. But I tried for years.
That was going to be another thing I was going to do by the time I left animation, and I decided to go into radio. And so it's a tap into this whole side of me that that animation was tapping into, but not really quite tapping into. Maybe not working in animation, but at least being in an office where everybody in the office had action figures all over their cubicles. And you're kind of a loser if you didn't.
It's an any other thing that's a deeply personal thing, too. It's the thing that I care about the most. The place where my mind goes all the time. So I kind of want to jump on something that you said, because it is a personal reflection for you, because this is what you really enjoy.
When you're creating one of your podcasts, one of your audio stories, what are some of the approaches that you look at for finding a topic, or who you're going to interview, things like that? What are some of your approaches? Well, the first thing I usually just start me brain. It started with me just brainstorming things I was interested in.
And then I just kind of do a little search. And it's usually the other thing I should say is that there's also usually a question. That's kind of there's something that's bugging me about it, something that's just I can't put it away, because there's something that I can't quite resolve about it. And then I do a Google search, and I find whether other people feel the same way, or who else can I talk to about this?
And sometimes there's a moment of jackpot of, oh my god, lots of people are talking about this. And they have different opinions about it. Wow, this is someplace I could go. And then something that can't really find anything.
And those are episodes that I've got a whole long list of stuff that I think I'm interested in. But either I haven't put my thumb on what exactly it is that why I'm interested in it, or I can't find enough people that want to talk about it. But yeah, I sort of immediately quickly go to, is this something people are kind of talking about and debating and culture? And if they are, then I feel like that kind of gives me permission to kind of leap off and go there.
Are there any creators whose imaginations you find yourself drawn to most often? Are there any right now who you think are very exciting and exciting the public as well as exciting you? Well, I've been a huge jost-weeden fan since Buffy. I feel like I was one of the, it sounded like a braggy.
Like I was one of the early people to watch Buffy, but I definitely wasn't one of the early people to watch Buffy and just be running around telling everybody that's always absolutely brilliant. And then looking at me like I'm crazy. And I'm like, well, I watch the unit for a minute. I'm like, no, this is genius.
So I've always loved his work. I've just sort of gotten back. I mean, a lot of people I'm drawn to, I'm trying to interview. I got really back into comic books recently.
And that's one of the reason why interviews got Snyder as well. If I can just touch on something you mentioned with Scott Snyder, that's one of my favorite episodes that you did. And in it, you said that in high school, you were a huge Batman fan. Would you say that's one of your favorite fantasy worlds, or do you have another favorite kind of universe that you find yourself particularly drawn to?
It's funny, but I think about Star Wars was that it stopped evolving. Those characters stopped evolving. And a lot of people I went on into the prequels particularly. I always say every time they come on cable, I watch them because they remind me so much of Star Wars.
And at any moment, I'm expecting it to turn into Star Wars and yet it never does. I remember when I found out that they were going to go back to the original characters. There were some rumors that they were going to reboot them and people were horrified. And I thought, well, why not?
And again, that's the reason why I find myself drawn to Batman. Why? When I was drawn to Batman in the 80s, and just fell in love with that sort of the Renaissance or the Dark Knight world that Frank Malaria created, and all the people that were inspired by him, that that character had evolved so much in the last 30 years and been reincarnated so much that there were just so many different, like I love a loose cannon like that. But that means definitely the sort of imaginary world of Gotham that is probably closest to my heart.
And I'm still trying to struggle to figure out why. And I can't heart the wrong word, but it sort of like just taps a nerve in me that I just find endlessly fascinating. That yeah, that is probably the sort of imaginary world that is kind of my default that I tend to go to the most. Just while we're sort of tangentially on the topic, what do you think of the new resurgence of Star Wars, like all the spin-offs that are being planned, the new J.J.
Abrams film coming out in December? Abrams film, I feel like the sincerity with which he's gone back to the things that people loved about the original. Looking back puppets, I mean, on my second episode, I was reacting to the prequel thinking, talking about how we'll never have this golden native puppeteering on film again. But who knows?
He might be bringing it back that way, talking about the dirty future. The thing that I think he's coming out of a really smart way in terms of recognizing as a kid growing up what he loved about Star Wars, what was unique about Star Wars, and continuing that. So I think that J.J. Abrams films are going to probably, at least the first one is going to be great.
My concern in a way is that, and this is my concern when I first found out that Disney had taken Star Wars, is that they have a way of just beating things to death. And I feel like they'll do a great job at first, but my concern is 10 years from now, when they just think we haven't squeezed enough out of this. Can we do prequels on every character? Can we do spin-offs on every character?
My fear is that of Star Wars stuff, when they run out of what should be their natural run of things, 10 years from now. But then again, I'll be so old, those people, those old cranky people being, I thought it's not Wars, no they get it. So who knows? But I don't know what I saw on animation, what happened.
I feel like the way that that thinking at Disney just kind of soured hand-drawn animation, the way they got so attached to the formula of Little Mermaid and decided everything had to be like that, the way they just sort of had directed video sequels of every single solitary Disney film, I felt like they kind of trashed their own brand from over-expertory. And again, that was a while ago, I mean, the life of an executive and all their fruit fly. So I mean, it's a whole, you know, it's probably like three different regimes by that point, but it is a part of that company. And that's probably my only real concern about where they're going to go with this thing.
Going back to your podcast there, which is Imaginary Worlds, and you can check out the website imaginaryworldspodcast.org. You've had some really interesting topics. You've had an episode called In Defense of Captain Hook. You've had action figure land, which is actually one of my favorites.
And Heroines, where you talk, you study specifically about how female superheroes are viewed in the public's eye. Has there been a show that you've put together that has really surprised you with whether how passionate people have gotten about it or responses you've gotten, or just as you've done research, you're like, wow, I just did not know that. That's a good question. Let me look, you're all very good questions because they're throwing me for a loop.
And I need to think about the thing that surprised me. You know, I can't think that there's one particular subject that I got an interesting passionate response to. But I think what's interesting in a way is that people, people tend to be fans of one thing, but not another. And whether they're willing to jump along, you know, they may absolutely, you know, like when I go into zombies, a lot of people are not into zombies, like me reacted very negatively.
You know, I can't believe you made me listen to The Walking Dead at Horrible. You know, or when I did a non-arrated, but there were more pieces, mostly non-arrated, you know, and then before that I did a radiodrama piece. Just to kind of experiment, because I feel like if the show's called Imaginary World, I feel like I need to be imaginative with the way that I do it. You know, I need to sometimes bring you to an imaginary world.
It shouldn't be just a really cut and dry show. But it's interesting, people sort of, the shifts in the show and the tone in the subject matter sometimes really throws people for a loop. And some people are totally into it. And you know, wherever, right, you want to go on.
The one I did about the Time Travelers of Runwick Street, the sort of that ad campaign. Yeah, a lot of people were like, why are we talking about an ad campaign? I understand it's got fantasy elements, but you know, why, you know, there's a sense of, you know, I know, it's sometimes, sometimes it's interesting in terms of, you think of somebody being, you know, oh, you know, people say I'm a big geek, I'm a big nerd about this or that. But I think we all have our own limits to what it is that we're really interested in.
I think that's what it's probably the most, is that some people are very resistant to leaping from one subject to another or from one fantasy world to another. Yeah, especially with this stuff culture, it seems like sometimes change just, we don't like change, we like it, cut and dry and it's going like this. I've been warned, when I first started my podcast, I'm gonna say like, don't mess with your format. People want it tuned in every week to hear the same thing.
And I just, I will, but I'm gonna get bored. You know, if that's what I'm doing. I'm like, I said, especially the show is about imagination. You know, I have to be imaginative that I put it together.
I want to be more so in the future, but it does make me a little concerned. Yeah, I understand. I get a backlash every time I sort of play with a format a bit. Now, you mentioned something earlier that I kind of want to touch on real quick about podcasting, beginning in like 2004, 2005.
Would you say right now with the types of podcasts we have out there, you mentioned 99% of visible, you have Love and Radio, the kitchen sisters, Wiretap, would you say that we are currently in a quote unquote, golden age of podcasts? Yeah, I mean, to the point where I think some people are a little concerned whether we're gonna reach over saturation points. I mean, how many podcasts do, can there be out there where people just say, enough, I cannot listen to all these. And it's sort of a bit of an issue with television right now.
You know, they're just only so many shows people can watch. And once you watch them, you want to be into them. You want to binge them. So, but it's not just a golden age of podcasts for listeners.
It's been an, it's exploded the whole industry on the inside in terms of, you know, people, all these networks popping up and they hire people until they're poaching them from stations. So, you know, suddenly there's this talk, and this talk of war going on between talent and where they're gonna go and it's shaking things up incredibly on the inside. You know, people, producers and reporters who for a while were just kind of toiling in the fields and then all of a sudden they get a show and they become a big podcast star. And it's kind of wild.
It's got a little bit of kind of, almost like a gold rush I hate to say because no one's really making any money off this, but it kind of has that feel. You mentioned a concept that I kind of wanted to talk to you about. And you mentioned the oversaturation of podcasts. Some people would argue that we're living kind of in the going to like the superhero movie and the superhero hype.
Do you see that gold rush ending anytime soon? Nobody asked me of pop culture. There was a time when there's a great tech favorite cartoon that 50s with guys flipping channels on TV and every single channel they're western. It's, we're sort of in that.
I feel like where we always superheroes were westerns were in the mid to late 50s where people just can't get enough of them. But 10 years later, you know, do we interview David Milch once, a creative dad would who said that he said they died like a giant star that blows up, gets really bloated and then explodes. And I was like, can I really describe the western in the late 60s? Yeah, it will, it will, we're not there yet.
But I think by the time of whole, I mean, they've planned all these Marvel DC movies till early, I don't know, 2021, 2022, it's gonna, you know, eventually people will get sick of it. But it's so speaking to the zeitgeist right now. I think we were very much, you know, in the midst of it. You mentioned, you know, both the Marvel and DC universes.
I don't mean to, you know, touchy subject for a lot of people out there who are probably gonna listen. Is there one that you, well, I'm not gonna say favorite, but we'll say find yourself more excited about as time goes on. You know, it's funny in a way that I kind of find all fantasy universes interesting. Even though I'm not interested in, I'm really curious why people are interested in them.
So yeah, I'm not gonna be like, Marvel sucks, DC's awesome. You know, I find it funny cause I'm totally a DC person. Like those are my, those are my characters, you know, I love the Justice League. But I'm, it's been whatever I said to people who know me well, they're like, that's interesting cause you talk about Marvel all the time.
And I'm like, but it's so interesting what they're doing. And the way that it's playing off the comics and the, yeah, it's funny. I mean, I love DC, you know, but I'm, I was not crazy about Man of Steel. I'm a little bit nervous about where they're going with all this in terms of tone.
I think that Marvel has done an incredible job of making the movie feel like comic books and the way that when you watch, you can watch Age of Ultron for what it is, but at the same time, if you've seen all the other Marvel movies, there's so many Easter eggs there and there's so much of the way the storylines are all flowing into each other and the characters are flowing into each other. It feels so much like when you pick up a comic and you sort of just have a general awareness of where these characters are at the moment, even if you haven't read all their separate issues. And that could just kind of amazes me, and it almost seems effortless, the way they created this. And I remember when they announced after Iron Man that they were going to start doing an Avengers movie and then they'll be a Thor movie first.
I kept a American movie first, I just thought, oh my God, is that going to work? You know, how are you going to put these characters on the same film? So I think that what they've done is just kind of mind blowing. And the fact that, if I'm DC, it's for me, it's almost like the home team I'm rooting for.
I'm like, come on, touch up, you guys. Yeah, yeah, I'm working on that one. I'm more of a DC guy and Brian's more of a Marvel guy. And, you know, Man of Steel was a good movie.
Wasn't a great movie, it was okay. And you just really, especially with Batman and Superman together for the first time in Add-In Wonder Woman, you want it to be good, it has to be good, but you always have that little question mark in the back of your head. Yeah, especially because of all the issues I have of Man of Steel that I'm just like, okay, sex, I mean, I was very, I mean, like a lot of people, my immediate reaction to Ben Affleck was pretty negative. And I actually like Ben Affleck.
I mean, I've been rooting for him in terms of becoming a director and doing all these greedy, Boston crime stuff. And then, like, I thought you're terrible at Daredevil. I mean, but the fact that the film actually had to be postponed because he looked at the script and said, no, I'm not really, I don't really like that. I think he found the guy that wrote Argo to rewrite it.
He did. Yeah, that is encouraging to me. And the fact that he's now working with Jeff John too, and then he's gonna direct standalone, like I think he's got a great sensibility. So that is a bit of a relief there.
Moving on to the next question, because we've got a couple more for ya. You're right now, imaginary world is kind of on hiatus until September. Can you give us like a little bit of a preview of what's coming up in the second season? Oh, I've actually been working on my step that was gonna be on Dungeons & Dragons, which a lot of people have said to me, why aren't you doing something about that?
And I've talked about the fact that, you know, I've never been a huge fan of sort of the medieval fantasy world, but I'm curious about people who are and why that appeal to them. And I never played D&D as a kid, so as part of, and I keep reading about really creative people who are inspired by D&D. So I've actually been going all summer long to this Game Shop in Brooklyn and playing D&D on Wednesday nights to sort of learn how to play it. And I'm recording myself while doing it, and then also just finished interviewing a bunch of people about it.
People who, you know, like creative professionals about it. So I'm really psyched about that. And I'm working on an X-Files story, and then I can't really talk too much about it, but there's, there may be a series of sort of a multi-multi-part series of sort of episodes that all are kind of about the same thing, almost like a mini series. So that's kind of in the works.
And, you know, I will see more to come about that. You know, we've covered like a wide breadth of different mediums to express creativity and imagination, just in the conversation that we've had today. And you've done a lot more on your podcast. But is there, you know, what medium do you find, do you think is the most expressive or captivates your imagination the most frequently?
It's filmed because of digital effects. I mean, the way that you can make, you know, I mean, I feel like when I was growing up, I always felt like my imagination could do so much more with, you know, I'd read Daredevil, and I'd love to see, you know, the other Spider-Man, but there was no live action version of them where they could really, you know, Spider-Man could really be flying around the city the way that I imagined in my head. But now there is. I mean, that, the fluidity and also the sort of lack of limitations with CGI and what it's doing with movies is pretty amazing, but as a former animator, I'm also critical too.
And that sort of frustrates me when it looks cheesy, you know, when it's not done really well. And they sort of, when the people who make it are almost too impressed with what they're doing. And I'm just like, it looks bad to me now, and I'm telling you, 10 years from now, people are gonna look at that and think it looks like a video game. You know, it could be, that's the one thing I feel like a little frustrating because I just feel like the sort of ground, the realism could be, I hate to say realism or something, I'm not super hero, it's flying around cities, but I feel like it could be, it could be still so much more believable, and it's not for, not just for lack of tools.
Although I'm sure those will still get better. But also they're also overwhelmed as well. I mean, they'll have like so many effects shots in one of these films, they'll not have to farm them out to all these different, you know, shops, and so, you know, maybe the stuff that IOMD does is great, but that's only like 50% of the effects in that film, and there's always that one shot. I mean, my friend Charles, who worked on the Star Wars prequel, so I interviewed in the second episode, he talked about like how they were under such a crunch for a return of the set, that one shot where Anakin lands in the beginning, and Archery-Dude just flies out of the actual winged fire, and lands, and he's almost cartoony the way he does it, and Charles animated that shot, and he's just like, that bugs me, he's like, he's still like, why is it like, and I being like, that's not fucked, and he's just like, we were under so, we were under such a time crunch to get this thing out, and he's just like, God, he looks like he has no weight, you know, and that's now permanently part of the canon, so, you know, I think that's, so it's not just a question of like, did I, or did I, or did I, or did I, could have done a great job if you just would have done a such a time crunch?
Well, Eric, you know, thank you so much for joining us today, we got one final question for ya. We work at a college newspaper, college radio station, and we're wondering if you had any advice for any audio storyteller or any podcasts out there? The first thing I just did, I did a lot of listening, which I'm sure they're already doing, just to listen to it incredibly, there's just a wide variety of storytelling styled out there, and I think it's really important to be really well-versed in what they all are, so I mean, I think that a lot of, and after that, if you wanna get started to sort of, and I think this is true with any artistic endeavor, you sort of look at what's out there, you look at the variety of people who are doing things well, and then you kind of try on different hats, you know, what is it like if I do an interview that's sort of like this show, or what is it like if I just do, like an intense monologue with music, that's just like this show? And so, and I think that's true with every artist, you know, you look at the people that inspire you the most, and then you just start eating them, to be honest, I mean, that's what, in my hero artist being interviewed, they always say, yeah, if you look at the first stuff I did, you can tell that I loved this other artist, and everything I was doing was like my version of that, but that's what helped me find my voice, to some extent.
And, you know, it takes, and it's also one of those, also like every creative endeavor, you kind of just have to do it over and over again, and experiment for a while, and then you get better and better. You know, I used to, when I was younger, any artistic thing I wanted to do, I would sort of plan it obsessively, for a really, really long time before I did it, because I was afraid it would be mediocre, and you just kind of have to make it and allow it to be bad, and just give yourself a lot of time to play before you, because that's the only way you can discover what your voice is going to be. Awesome, well, Eric, thank you so much for joining us today. We really, really appreciate it.
Thanks, Aaron. Thank you for listening to this wxav.com podcast. Check out wxav.com for future podcasts. WXAV, The Escape from Ordinary Radio.