Stephen King Archives Vol. 10: The Pop of King: 2003-2004
Added 2023-06-22 14:41:34 +0000 UTCConstant Listeners, there is an archives to the Derry Private Library. Thanks to our Losers' Club historian Bryant Burnette, we have unearthed an entire vault of Stephen King material. From unpublished short stories to long-forgotten interviews, dusty manuscripts to alternate versions of your favorite tales, there is much to discuss...
Stephen King and Entertainment Weekly go back a long ways. The pair's relationship began with a handful of grouchy letters to the editor in which King excoriated the magazine's film critics. Kin's barbed words, however, only motivated the outlet to recruit the author — after he reviewed a Harry Potter book for them, the editors asked him if he'd want to like his own monthly column. In July of 2003, the Pop of King, a full page of King's pop cultural musings, debuted.
The Losers' Club was initially going to discuss the column in one fell swoop in their Patreon-exclusive Archives series, but after reading through the first year and change, they discovered there's too much brilliance, too many bad takes, and too much pure bile to not spread this out a bit.
In this episode, Randall Colburn, Jenn Adams, and Dan Caffrey travel back to 2003 and 2004, using King's comically acerbic reviews, recommendations, and takedowns to discuss how that era of culture resonates two decades on.
Topics include horror (obviously), poptimism, The Passion of the Christ, baby boomers, gradeflation, movie quotes, death, pet peeves, and Mystic River (the man would not stop with Mystic fuckin' River). And this is just the beginning.
Read the accompanying works here.
