The Black Dog and the wonders of Podcasting

So, I've been submitting feedback to an excellent Podcast over the past few weeks and I thought it might be a good idea to upload some of this feedback on here going forward for peeps who may or may not be interested in my thoughts but don't have the ability or the time to listen to the podcasts in full. I'd hope it will maybe inspire you to have a listen because it's simply brilliant.... I only have three followers in here but apparently this thing gets read by other people from my Facebook friends list whenever I link in to my blogs from there so..... You know.

Anyway about this Podcast, a review, if you will.....

I work in an office, where it can be argued that there is a huge black hole when it comes to geekdom and as such I find myself craving some geek like interaction. So, once upon a time I started listening to Kevin Smith's Smodcast, the idea being that it was funny, I liked Kevin's relaxed style and his amazing interactions with his friends always tended to make for entertaining listening, it all lost its edge though when all his usual guests departed and set up their own podcasts. The fun of hearing these guests in my opinion was hearing the with Kevin.

So, I went mooching around online and discovered that the world of Podcasting was greatly more extensive than I had first realised. At this point in time I was hugely into Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and decided that I wanted to listen to some guys talking about it and relating some anecdotes about their online experiences. I discovered Joint ops Monthly, a fantastic podcast and hugely entertaining, but with only a few episodes it soon dried up and 8 hour days at work soon chew up Podcast archives pretty quickly. Noticing that Joint-ops was part of a syndicate called the Legion of Tangent I was soon burning through episodes of Television Zombies, Creeping with Armstrong and my new personal favourite.

This Podcast is the brain child of Lee Medcalf and his long time friend Darren Barnard, together they are The Black Dog Podcast. A truly entertaining pair of gents who love to trundle happily over bygone movie era's few others dare to tackle. Their indomitable Rose Tinted Specs is a no holds barred look at some of cinemas finest moments, without the cloudy hue of nerd foam so often present in other such podcasts, they tackle the question of whether or not these films still are classics.

Their look at Terminator 2 is probably one of their finest achievements, they convince hardened old school T2 fans such as myself (at the time) that whilst it was a great movie, time has not been kind, not in reference to Special effects etc. but in content, story, plot exposition, the list goes on and it would be rude to talk more about this particular episode and spoil it for potential listeners - Believe me it's riveting, as are all their episodes to be honest.

The moment when I knew I wanted to offer my two penneth about the films they were discussing, was when these podcasting moguls decided that they were going to debut a new feature: Shit Covered Goggles, a retrospective look at oft labelled "terrible" films and give them another chance. Their first instalment was a triumph although it very nearly scarred me for life, when, it was nearly argued that Armageddon was actually a film that deserved to exist, fortunately Lee went a bit 'mad dictator' and civil order was restored.


More fun than watching Mustard gas being thrown into the Big Brother House and a live televised assassination of the presenter's - Black dog never fails to keep geeks like me and hopefully you, entertained. Their regular feedbacker's include friends and fellow noobs such as myself, all united by their love (or hatred) for the week's specified film, If I had one complaint it's that there's not more. With Shitty Superhero's (the name is pretty self explanatory) and their take on the relevant news, it shapes up at nearly 2 hours long on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less but time length aside there's rarely a dull moment.

With Jingles from the Illustrious Darron Diamond accompanied by the mighty Spinny (the hubcap)  - (The world really needs hear the Shit Covered Goggles theme jingle, it's the stuff of legend) - The Blackdog podcast will hopefully continue for a good long while and pick up an appropriately large audience along the way, god knows the effort they go to is substantial, thus should be their audience numbers. Not that there audience isn't large now,  don't get me wrong i'm not selling them short, I just feel they should be heard by a larger audience, because they do pretty much represent the common man when it comes to Geeks and Nerds over the age of 25.

This Podcast has restored my confidence to write and review again and has also shown me that there's a world (not too far away) where people from both sides of the pond get an opportunity to have their voices heard. Geekplanetonline is a great website and should really be checked out by all who are interested in the ways of Sci-Fi Geekdom, Movie geekdom and just Geekdom in general.

So please take a look and if you get the chance listen to the Podcasts then do so without hesitation, also check out the Legion of Tangent.


So kick back,get some beers in and enjoy a night of unbridled movie passion... FTW!