January 5, 2015

EP. 59 — Best and Worst Fictional Places to Work

If you had to guess what the average Death Star employee was like, and you could only watch the ‘Star Wars’ movies, you’d assume it was filled with only two types of people: stormtroopers, and old British men in small hats. Where are the engineers, the janitors, the scientists, the cooks, and the thousands of other people required to maintain a station the size of a moon? And if these people exist, they surely must be paid well considering the risk of going to a workplace so frequently destroyed by rebels.

Countless evil organizations from LexCorp to Cobra to the Foot Clan must secretly be great employers to attract a never-ending supply of employees ready to do their bidding.

On this week’s live podcast from the Comikaze Expo, the cast and writers of After Hours (Jack O’Brien, Michael Swaim, Soren Bowie, Dan O’Brien, Katie Willert, and Cody Johnston) brainstorm and take audience suggestions for an upcoming episode of the show. The subject: great and/or terrible fictional workplaces.

Recent Episodes

January 26, 2020

Freedom sucks…and that is why we have to defend it. Because our democracy involves doing a lot of stuff that takes energy, takes time, and lacks that Michael Bay Quality that only a surprise missile launch can provide. So on this episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt and special guest Jason Pargin (who writes for Cracked as David Wong) are exploring the ways being afraid of everything (an easy action) can stop us from being free. Discover the decades-long tradition of some Americans wanting to give up everything in exchange for not needing to think, the centuries-long tradition of people inciting fake panics, and the reasonable ways you can help change things for the better.

Footnotes: https://www.cracked.com/podcast/why-fear-based-democracies-arenE28099t-free-with-jason-pargin/

January 19, 2020

How’s your local shopping mall doing? Have you checked on it lately? Swing by sometime, because its department store might’ve turned into a call center or a hospital or a go-kart track. On this episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt is joined by the one and only Kai Ryssdal (Marketplace, Make Me Smart) for a look at surprising, strange, and shocking stories from all over the U.S. economy. Discover an international pig flu, a 26-word statement that built the modern Internet, and more amazing ways cash is ruling everything around you. By the way, if you’re an American listener, you spent the past few years funding an astonishingly huge bailout. Surprise! Listen for details!

Footnotes: https://www.cracked.com/podcast/5-parts-u.s.-economy-that-are-stranger-than-you-think

January 12, 2020

Movies, TV, gaming: three things that are theoretically a waste of time. Oh sure, they deliver value in the art sense, and comfort in the goofing-off sense. But what if they’re more valuable than that? What if consuming shows and playing video games (accidentally) turns people into real-life heroes? On this episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt is joined by comedians/writers Caitlin Gill and Alex Watt for a look at the surprising number of times that exact thing happened. They’ll explore stories of regular people who saved a life thanks to skills gained randomly from cartoons, sitcoms, ‘World Of Warcraft’, and more silly entertainment.

Footnotes: https://www.cracked.com/podcast/9-times-pop-culture-accidentally-taught-people-to-save-lives/