Episodes Witch, Please

In this Material Concerns episode, we debrief Halloween and an Okay, Hear Me Out segment quickly gets into a conversation abut boundaries and control. If you want more, head to Patreon.com/ohwitchplease for Part II! It begins with a quick convo about Harry Potter (if you believe it!) before moving into Consumer Retorts and Make It Make Sense! Tune in to hear Coach get scolded for not voting before taking a nap.And don't forget, if you join for as little as $54/year, you'll get ad-free episodes, bloopers, a backlog of content and part two of all Material Concerns episodes! Go to patreon.com/ohwitchplease now to join a tier that works for your budget!***Music Credits:“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Happy SWEET NOVEMBER! In this episode, we're talking about LOAD-BEARING MAN Keanu Reeves. What do we mean when we say load-bearing? You'll have to listen to the episode to find out! Tune in for a conversation about Reeves' extensive and varied catalogue of (at least) 76 films! You'll learn all about Marcelle's admiration for this celebrity whose star image is colored by the public's sense of his "goodness." We talk feminism, masculinities, and Tanya Horeck's brilliant essay, “‘Too Good for This World:’ Keanu Reeves, God of the Internet." Happy listening!Works CitedHoreck, Tanya. 2022. “‘Too Good for This World:’ Keanu Reeves, God of the Internet.” Celebrity Studies vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 143–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2063395. “Keanu Reeves.” Wikipedia. 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keanu_Reeves. Middlemost, Renée and Sarah Thomas. 2022. “Introduction to the Special Issue: Keanu Reeves as Palimpsest.” Celebrity Studies vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 137–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.20

We recorded this Material Concerns on Halloween and BOY DOES IT SHOW! Enjoy a chaotic convo about costumes, dragons and Game of Thrones. Let us know what you think about the new segment in the comments!!Head to Patreon.com/ohwitchplease to listen to Part II! For as little as $54/year, you'll get ad-free episodes, bloopers, a backlog of content and part two of all Material Concerns episodes! Go to patreon.com/ohwitchplease now to join a tier that works for your budget!***Music Credits:“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're throwing it back to the 1996 cult classic film The Craft just in time for Halloween! We begin with a conversation about Hannah and Marcelle's teenage witch phases (of course they both had them), before digging into the filmic landscape of the 90s. Hannah argues that The Craft's interest in girlhood and power was a catalyst that paved the way for pop culture to come, like Buffy and Charmed and Practical Magic. Hannah then draws on Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford’s “Genealogies and Generations: The Politics and Praxis of Third Wave Feminism" and Jessica Rosenberg and Gitana Garofalo’s “Riot Grrrl: Revolutions from Within" to help understand the resonance of film. If you too went through a witch phase, or indeed are still a practicing witch, then this episode is for you!***Works CitedBastién, Angelica Jade. “The Profound, Enduring Legacy of The Craft.” Vulture 27 October 2017. https://www.vulture.com/2017/10/the-craft-its-enduring-legacy.html. Gillis, Stacy, and Rebecca Munford. “Genealogies and Gene

Another Material Concerns, another long check in! Followed by Creature Report and Mailbag Sampler (Spreadsheet Sampler??).Head to Patreon.com/ohwitchplease to listen to Part II! For as little as $54/year, you'll get ad-free episodes, bloopers, a backlog of content and part two of all Material Concerns episodes! Go to patreon.com/ohwitchplease now to join a tier that works for your budget!***Music Credits:“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

~ This episode contains some spoilers about The X Files ~This week we dive into beloved television series, The X Files (1993-2002), with Leigh Dyrda! Leigh (she/her) is an academic whose research interests include EcoGothic, a field that probes the eerie overlap of ecocriticism and Gothic. We figured Leigh would be a perfect guest to dig into this show about alien-human hybrids, monsters that defy taxonomical definition, and cancers courtesy of government microchips.In our first segment, Marcelle explains the show was distinctly of its time. She considers its popularity in relation to the backdrop of Clinton era politics, post-Watergate government distrust, television viewing practices of the 90s and the early days of the internet. She then leads Leigh and Hannah through some theory. Drawing on Charles Soukup's 2002 article, Television Viewing as Vicarious Resistance: The X-Files and Conspiracy Discourse, Marcelle examines the way the show's mytharc and monster-of-the week narratives allowed audiences to

Another Materail Concerns episode — this time with a cold open! Because why not? In this episode, we begin with a check in, jump into Oops All Oops and end with a new segment — Patreon Party! It's a ball!Head to Patreon.com/ohwitchplease to listen to Part II featuring Okay, Hear Me Out and Coach makes Marcelle and Hannah do some improv! For as little as $54/year, you'll get ad-free episodes, bloopers, a backlog of content and part two of all Material Concerns episodes! Go to patreon.com/ohwitchplease now to join a tier that works for your budget!***Music Credits:“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sometimes an episode is such a longtime coming that the enthusiasm from our hosts is palpable! Such is the case with this episode about The Simpsons, a TV show that pervaded Marcelle's childhood due in part to...you guessed it... syndication! In this episode, Marcelle reminds the audience how television worked before streaming and the nature of syndication. Together, she and Hannah think through the influence of The Simpsons' first 300 episodes between 1997 and 2003 (Marcelle's teen years). They explore the attractive quality of the sitcom as a genre, the reproducibility of Bart Simpson (and others) as an icon, and the show's criticism of and self-aware complicity in capitalism and consumerism. This episode is for The Simpsons NERDS and casual viewers alike. Happy listening.***To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. We'll be back next week with a Material Concerns episode, but until then, go check out all the other co

We check in for 20 minutes and for that, we're sorry! We follow our check-in with a quick Apocalypse Toolkit and then leave the rest of the segments (Creature Report, How the Sausage is Getting Made, and Voice Memo Dispatch) to Part II over on Patreon! Head to Patreon.com/ohwitchplease to listen! For as little as $54/year, you'll get ad-free episodes, bloopers, a backlog of content and part two of all Material Concerns episodes! Go to patreon.com/ohwitchplease now to join a tier that works for your budget!***Music Credits:“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we're talking about beloved computer game, The Sims, with special guest Ruth Ormiston. Ruth (they/them) is a book designer and cultural worker with an MA in English Literature from the University of Victoria (where they specialized in late-nineteenth-century children’s publishing) and a Master of Publishing from Simon Fraser University. And they're a fan of The Sims.Released 25 years ago, the game has seen many updates and dozens of expansion packs, all while retaining a grip on children and adults alike who flock to it for escapism, world-building, chaos, and play. In our conversation, Hannah contextualizes its reception in the early aughts and helps us understand its enduring success across a diverse audience through a look at Jack Halberstam's work, The Queer Art of Failure. Together, Ruth, Marcelle and Hannah consider the pleasure of the open-endednesThe Sims provides, while still being a designed game that has particular ideas about the world coded into it. As you can imagine, the c

Another Material Concerns featuring Consumer Retorts and Oops All Oops! And some light panic from the team. We're fineeeeee!Head to Patreon.com/ohwitchplease to listen to Part II. For as little as $54/year, you'll get ad-free episodes, bloopers, a backlog of content and part two of all Material Concerns episodes! Go to patreon.com/ohwitchplease now to join a tier that works for your budget!***Music Credits:“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan Peele's Get Out is a masterpiece both firmly planted in the rich tradition of horror and at the forefront of the growing genre of new Black horror. As auditors of the zeitgeist, we simply had to talk about the splash it made in 2017 and the conversation around its legacy since. In this episode we consider what made the narrative so impactful and we take a closer look at its reception by white audiences and critics who were particularly interested in claiming Peele's work as an example of "Black Excellence." Marcelle and Hannah parse the complexity of the term and pull on Cheryl Thompson's work to understand how "Black Excellence became the veil that shielded people from seeing how our systems and institutions are still rooted in White supremacist notions of ‘success’." To better understand the film itself, Marcelle then draws on “Horrifying Whiteness and Jordan Peele’s Get Out" written by Julia Mollenthiel — an artcile that defines a theoretical lens to help us think about the growing genre of new

This week on Material Concerns Hannah, Marcelle and Coach start with a sweet little check in, including Hannah's ideal way to start the day, a Pitt update from Marcelle, and some very exciting creative news from Coach. Then Coach leads a "Left on the Table" segment that turns into an impromptu Coach's Corner. And to finish off part one, the trio each gets a minute for their "Okay, Hear Me Out" segment, in which cases are made for: being nude around your friends, reading books written or set in the place you live, and that graphic novels should not be pulled from shelves in Alberta. Head to Patreon.com/ohwitchplease to listen to Part II. For as little as $54/year, you'll get ad-free episodes, bloopers, a backlog of content and part two of all Material Concerns episodes! Go to patreon.com/ohwitchplease now to join a tier that works for your budget!***Music Credits:“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bong

We're finally talking about Hamilton! It's been ten years since the show premiered on Broadway and that's just enough time to have some perspective on its lasting impact. For this episode, we had to bring on previous guest and brilliant academic, Shira Lurie (who joined us on Witch, Please for Book 7, Ep. 2). As an expert in American History, Shira helps Hannah and Marcelle explore "Hamilton" as a reflection of the Obama era's rhetorical progressivism and political centrism. They discuss how the show leans on the myth of the American Dream and Hannah places the show in the hagiographic tradition of biography. If you love the musical or hate the musical, not to worry! We promise, this episode is for fans and critics alike.To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. We'll be back next week with a Material Concerns episode, but until then, go check out all the other content we have on our Patreon at Patreon.com/ohwitchplease

Hannah, Marcelle and Coach are back together for a Material Concerns episode featuring Consumer Retorts and Creature Report! They talk The Pitt, heat waves. sloths, queer t-shirts, homemade ice cream, Labubus, being a good friend, and the power of eating carrots for the first time. Happy listening!Head to Patreon.com/ohwitchplease to listen to Part II. For as little as $54/year, you'll get ad-free episodes, bloopers, a backlog of content and part two of all Material Concerns episodes! Go to patreon.com/ohwitchplease now to join a tier that works for your budget!***Music Credits:“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're back from our summer break with an episode about The Hunger Games. Heads up that this episode connects the fictional world of Panem to real-world issues of representation and human rights, drawing parallels between the text and the genocide in Gaza. In this conversation, Hannah and Marcelle dig into representations of violence, resistance movements, and the normalization of child death. They then explore how Suzanne Collins' dystopian series engages with the concept of "grievability" and they consider The Hunger Games' immersive marketing campaigns that cemented the work as a mainstream cultural phenomenon. To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. We'll be back next week with a Material Concerns episode, but until then, go check out all the other content we have on our Patreon at Patreon.com/ohwitchplease! Patreon is how we produce the show and pay our team! Thanks again to all of you who have already made the le

We have a treat for you today with a drop-in episode from Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study. Culture Study is a podcast about the culture that surrounds you. This episode featuring Hannah and Marcelle is all about Royal Family gossip, colonialism, and empires in decline! Together, Anne, Hannah and Marcelle consider how royal fascination manifests differently depending on where you live, how you were raised, and identification (or lack thereof) with “your” generation of monarch.You can find Culture Study wherever you get your podcasts and at culturestudypod.substack.com.Head to Patreon.com/ohwitchplease to become a supporter of the show. On Patreon you’ll get so many ad-free bonus episodes you will stop missing us completely. It costs as little as $5 USD a month to support the show but it is the difference between us paying Coach or not. Don’t you want to pay Coach? Don’t you want to listen to more episodes? Again head to patreon.com/ohwitchplease or wait until next week for a new episode! Hosted on Acast. S

We’re still on our Summer Break during this hot and beautiful month of July. But don’t fret, we’re dropping episodes every Tuesday that we’re gone! Today’s episode comes from Gender War Games, the podcast from Cristen Conger and Unladylike Media. Hannah and Marcelle were joined by Cristen on Material Girls for an episode about Avril Lavigne’s Clone “Melissa” and social surveillance. But today's drop-in is from Cristen's show Gender War Games. In the episode, Hannah, Marcelle and Cristen talk about how white womanhood is activated—politically, culturally, algorithmically—to reinforce systems of power. From tradwife aesthetics to terf rhetoric, strategic essentialism to state violence, they aim to makes sense of how white femininity gets mobilized. Cristen is brilliant and we think you’ll absolutely love this episode and her work if you aren’t already familiar with it. Enjoy!We’ll be back next week with another drop-in episode. If you’re missing us - hey we miss you too - and also you can always, always, head t

If you’ve been following Witch Please Productions since the early days, then you know our roots go back to Harry Potter with our show Witch, Please. Hannah and Marcelle wrapped up seven seasons of the reboot in 2023 but they occasionally hop onto Harry Potter and the Sacred Text to talk about the book series, again. Today, we’re dropping in an episode from that show about Book 4, Chapter 22. In the conversation, Marcelle and Hannah chat with the charming and brilliant Matt Potts about dress robes, Fred and Angelina, and the joy and horror of school dances. Every episode of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text focuses on a theme and a central question. In this episode we ask: when is ceremony just a formality, and when does it signal a genuine transformation? For more Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, find the show everywhere you get your podcasts or head to www.harrypottersacredtext.com. If you want to visit or rediscover our show Witch, Please, you can find all our episodes in this feed by scrolling back! O

As we continue our July break, we are dropping into your feed with an episode of Gender Playground! If you don't yet know, Gender Playground is a show about the joys of gender-affirming care for kids — and it's hosted by Marcelle. We love this show and we’re currently releasing new episodes every Thursday. Today we’re dropping in the first episode of season two featuring Hannah McGregor. If you like this episode, please subscribe to Gender Playground wherever you get your podcasts to get new episodes sent straight to you audio player. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.