Imaginary Worlds The Battle to Make Star Wars
Movies that change cinema often come from outsiders – whether it’s Orson Welles making Citizen Kane or George Lucas making Star Wars a.k.a. Episode IV: A New Hope. The excellent…
8-Bit to Orchestras: Video Game Music Scores
Creating a musical score for interactive video games is like trying to hit a moving target. Luckily, Hans Zimmer’s studio Bleeding Fingers has developed some clever strategies. I talk with…
Dreaming of Coney Island’s Dreamland
Coney Island still has the classic amusements you’d expect today like roller coasters, water slides, and carnival games. But over a century ago, it looked more like a proto–Disney World,…
The Bright Legacy of Dark Shadows
Next year marks the 60th anniversary of Dark Shadows. The gothic soap opera wasn’t originally intended to include a vampire, but when creator Dan Curtis introduced the character of Barnabas…
Imaginary Worlds Podcast: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Douglas Adams
When Arvind Ethan David was a student, he decided to adapt the Douglas Adams novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency into a play. Arvind didn’t imagine that Adams would show…
Imaginary Worlds: Body Horror Gets Under My Skin
We all have that one thing we just can’t watch. For me, it’s body horror -- the kind of horror where grotesque and disturbing things happen to someone’s body, like…
Pokémon and The Art of Dubbing Anime
This week’s episode comes from our Patreon podcast Between Imaginary Worlds. It’s a more casual chat show that appears between ad-free episodes of Imaginary Worlds for listeners who support the…
Narrating Audiobooks From Other Worlds
The field of audiobooks has exploded since the introduction of mp3 players, and it continues to expand. But it takes a unique set of skills to voice audiobooks in sci-fi…
How Nintendo Leveled Up
Over the past 40 years, Shigeru Miyamoto has been inventing the modern video game one pixel at a time. From Donkey Kong to Super Mario Bros to The Legend of…
African Sci-Fi Looks to a Future Climate
When the writer Nnedi Okorafor coined the term Africanfuturism, she wanted to distinguish sci-fi written about Africa from Afrofuturism, which is focuses on the experiences of Black people in the…