Weekend Reads (August 30): “Andor,” “Sesame Street,” “KPop Demon Hunters,” Prince
Recommended weekend reading material for August 30, 2025.
Every week, I compile a list of articles in order to give subscribers like you something interesting and thought-provoking to read over the weekend.
In a recent podcast episode, Andor creator Tony Gilroy and several of the show’s writers discussed their approach to the show’s second and final season. (Which was great, by the way.)
“When you know that these people are fighting a moral battle — and they are, in their minds and in reality — there is a great chance that they won’t live to see the victory,” says Dan Gilroy, an Emmy nominee this year in the drama writing category for the Andor episode “Welcome to the Rebellion.” “So what are you paralleling? What are you echoing? You’re echoing one of the greatest speeches of all time: Martin Luther King’s Lincoln Memorial speech. ‘I have a dream.’”
Related: One of the most haunting moments in Andor’s second season was discovering the fate of Mon Mothma’s feckless husband. “[I]f we also enjoyed his status and privilege, would we really be so quick to throw that all away for a life of hardship, struggle, and near-certain death?”
In addition to being a beloved aspect of many peoples’ childhoods, mine own included, Sesame Street was a showcase for indie and underground animation.
What if indie animation had a massive, guaranteed audience? What if independents got paid, consistently, to animate in whatever style they wanted? And what if these things were open to any promising artist — including someone without a big name?
It comes off like the intro to a questionable sales pitch. In reality, it was the world Sesame Street created decades ago, in its golden age.
“If you want to catch up on the latest independent animation, your best bet is to tune your television to either Sesame Street or MTV,” wrote author Mo Willems in 1997. “For the past 29 years, Sesame Street has been the repository of some of the most inventive animated shorts in America.”
One of Sesame Street’s classic animated shorts was Jim Simon’s I Can Remember (Bread, Milk, Butter).
It’s official: KPop Demon Hunters is Netflix’s most-watched movie of all time, beating out 2021’s Red Notice.
The love for KPop Demon Hunters doesn’t seem to be slowing down either. Billboard announced this week that the movie’s soundtrack is the first to have four songs simultaneously in the Top 10, and I can’t even imagine the level of cosplay and Halloween costumes we’ll see based on the movie.
Direct-to-video anime titles, often called OVAs, were instrumental to the anime’s popularity here in the States, and Zimmerit collects some of their favorite OVA titles from the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s.
Direct-to-video anime was a format that really helped set anime apart. The original video animation format allowed unusual ideas to flourish, creators to experiment, and offered up the perfect mix of length and shock value to help jump start the anime licensing industry in the English-speaking world. OVAs (or OAVs, if you’re of a particular age) offered a new way to commercialize anime and make money off an older subset of anime fandom following the implosion of the early ’80s gunpla boom.
The format was derided early on as being without much actual value; video shelves held plenty of middling manga adaptions, unnecessary sequels, uninspired originals, and outright, low-budget pornography. But the format had its gems. After kicking around for a year or two, by 1985 the format was starting to show its strengths and establish itself as a format for interesting stories.
OVAs like Black Magic M-66, Gunbuster, M.D. Geist, and Zillion: Burning Night were my introduction to the world of anime. If I were to list some of my favorite OVAs, though, then that would include Iria: Zeiram the Animation and Macross Plus. But Zimmerit’s list gives me several new titles that I want to track down.
Prince was a musical icon, no doubt about it, but Scott Tobias reflects on The Purple One’s cinematic efforts.
[I]t’s worth looking back at Prince’s efforts to become a movie star throughout a creatively fruitful six-year stretch, because it’s a fascinating window into his ambition, his creative eccentricities, and, frankly, his failures in trying to conquer a medium that challenged and often stymied him. The difference between Prince the stage performer and Prince the actor could be reduced to an explanation as simple as Fanny Brice’s famous quote about Esther Williams, the championship swimmer turned MGM attraction: “Wet, she’s a star. Dry, she ain’t.” But because Prince exerted so much control over his movies, beyond just his appearance and his admittedly limited range, the comparison doesn’t seem apt. Someone this eccentric and larger-than-life could never be a run-of-the-mill dud.
A new Toxic Avenger movie starring Peter Dinklage, Jacob Tremblay, Kevin Bacon, and Elijah Wood is arriving in theaters this week, and instead of the usual promos and marketing push, the film’s distributor is erasing millions in medical debt.
When director Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger storms into theaters this weekend, he won’t just be melting faces on screen — he’ll also be melting medical debt in real life.
In the fresh new take on Troma’s cult classic, arriving in theaters August 29, Toxie has his life upended by unexpected medical debt. It’s for that reason that we’re working with Undue Medical Debt to quite literally erase medical debt for real people here in the real world.
At least $5 million in medical debt gets erased no matter what. And for every million bucks the movie makes at the box office, another million in debt will go up in toxic smoke.
I love everything about this, which is clearly the year’s best movie marketing.
In light of James Dobson’s death, Kevin T. Porter revisits Adventures in Odyssey, a Christian radio drama for kids that was produced by Dobson’s Focus on the Family organizations.
That a Christian children’s radio series from nearly forty years ago “doesn’t hold up” is no shock. What’s troubling for those of us who grew up with AiO is the accuracy with which it reflects the organization that created it—and the man behind it. Dobson was the author of a specific breed of abuse only Christian children will know. And for a time, Whit was a steady voice of comfort for those same kids. He was for me. But a closer look reveals these figures were never so separate, just different shades of the same toxic rot masquerading as true Christianity.
As always, nostalgia is a double-edged sword.
Nobody wants kids exposed to illicit, dangerous, and explicit content online. Unfortunately, many of the efforts to protect kids — however well-intentioned they might be — just make things worse. Case in point: Bluesky recently had to block all Mississippi users due to the state’s “broken” age verification law.
So if your teenager wants to use Bluesky (or any other digital service), you might need to mail in a signed form, hop on a video call with the company, or hand over your government ID to verify you’re really their parent — all so they can post about their favorite bands or follow local news. What if the kid is estranged from their parents? What if their parents disagree over whether or not their child can use the site? How do you verify that it’s actually a legal guardian? The law is effectively silent on all that.
There’s a lot more that’s problematic in the law as well. Even if the parent gives permission, a site is still required to block kids from accessing anything deemed harmful… but also shouldn’t stop the kid from searching for harmful information. It basically demands the impossible.
Once again, those who seek to legislate the internet don’t seem to understand how the internet actually works.
Related: If you’re feeling particularly nerdy, Kuba Suder has posted a lengthy deep-dive into how Bluesky’s AT Protocol works behind the scenes. Via TLDR Web Dev.
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