Season 2 of Geekstorians continues with the corporate disaster that accidentally redrew modern pop culture.

In ‘The Fire Sale Blueprint’, Dave looks at how Marvel’s bankruptcy in the 1990s led to one of the strangest and most important chain reactions in film history. As the company collapsed under debt, many of its biggest characters were licensed or sold off in deals that looked sensible at the time and faintly insane in hindsight.

Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four and others ended up in other studios’ hands. What Marvel was left with looked, at the time, like the second-string cupboard. Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Black Panther, The Avengers. Characters with history, but not the kind of obvious Hollywood heat attached to Spider-Man or the X-Men.

That bad hand turned out to be the hand that changed everything.

This episode follows the path from Ronald Perelman’s debt-loaded takeover of Marvel, through the bankruptcy fight involving Carl Icahn, Isaac Perlmutter and Avi Arad, to the strange reality in which the company’s most famous heroes became someone else’s blockbuster and the leftovers became the foundation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

It is also the story of how Blade, X-Men and Spider-Man proved the value of Marvel characters on screen, while Kevin Feige, Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. helped turn the characters nobody wanted into the centre of the biggest shared universe in film history.

If the earlier episodes in Season 2 were about collapse and survival, this one is about something slightly stranger: how a financial disaster became a design document.

Geekstorians is a documentary-style podcast from Dave Elliott of Geektown, exploring the hidden history of geek culture, fandom, film, television, comics and gaming.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season 2 of Geekstorians continues with one of the strangest survival stories in geek culture.

In ‘The Wilderness Years’, Dave looks at what happened after Doctor Who disappeared from television in 1989. No big finale. No proper ending. Just a show the BBC quietly stopped making, and an audience that refused to accept that as the end of the story.

This episode follows the long years when Doctor Who survived off screen through novels, audio dramas, conventions, magazines and the sort of organised fan determination Britain tends to produce whenever an institution behaves like it has misplaced its own brain.

It is also the story of how the people keeping Doctor Who alive during those years turned out to be the people who would eventually bring it back. Writers such as Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss and Paul Cornell all emerge from the wider culture that kept the show going while the BBC was looking the other way.

From the BBC’s attempts to sideline the series, to the 1996 TV movie, to Big Finish giving the Doctor a life beyond the screen, this is an episode about what happens when a show stops being just a programme and becomes something its audience is not prepared to lose.

If the first two episodes of Season 2 were about collapse and near-disaster, this one is about survival through absence. About what lives on when the official version disappears.

Geekstorians is a documentary-style podcast from Dave Elliott of Geektown, exploring the hidden history of geek culture, fandom, film, television, comics and gaming.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season 2 of Geekstorians continues with a story about collapse.

In ‘When Giants Fall’, Dave looks at three companies that once seemed unstoppable — Atari, Sega, and Blockbuster — and how each of them, in very different ways, lost their grip on the future.

From Atari’s collapse after the video game crash of the early 1980s, to Sega’s spectacular inability to get out of its own way during the console wars, to Blockbuster staring straight at the future and somehow deciding it probably wasn’t important, this is an episode about what happens when success turns into inertia.

It is also a story about what comes after.

Because these collapses did not just leave wreckage behind. They reshaped the industries around them. Atari’s fall cleared the way for Nintendo. Sega lost the hardware war but survived as a games company. And Blockbuster became the monument everyone points to when talking about businesses that had every chance to adapt and somehow talked themselves out of it.

If last week’s episode was about a film nearly vanishing, this one is about something bigger: the moment giants stop noticing the ground moving underneath them.

Geekstorians is a documentary-style podcast from Dave Elliott of Geektown, exploring the hidden history of geek culture, fandom, film, television, comics and gaming.

If you’d like to support Geekstorians in the Webby People’s Voice Awards, you can vote here:

https://wbby.co/57464N

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Season 2 of Geekstorians begins with one of the great near-disasters in modern geek history.

This episode tells the story of how Toy Story 2 nearly disappeared during production, not because of a studio fight or some dramatic Hollywood scandal, but because of a routine command, a failing backup system, and the sort of technical catastrophe that still makes creative people wince.

But this is not just a story about Pixar nearly losing a film.

It is also the perfect starting point for a season about how geek culture survives when everything goes wrong. The glitches, collapses, bad calls, money problems and moments of blind panic behind the films, games and franchises that now feel untouchable.

If Season 1 was about how fandom built itself, Season 2 is about how geek culture kept going when it should probably have fallen apart.

If you'd like to support Geekstorians in the Webby People’s Voice Awards, you can vote here:

https://wbby.co/57464N

Geekstorians is a documentary-style podcast from Dave Elliott of Geektown, exploring the hidden history of geek culture, fandom, film, television, comics and gaming.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What do ‘Adventure’, the Konami Code, Pixar’s A113, hidden DVD extras, ‘The Beast’, ‘I Love Bees’ and Marvel post-credit scenes all have in common?

They are all part of the long, strange history of the Easter egg.

In this special Easter episode of ‘Geekstorians’, Dave digs into how hidden messages, secret rooms, buried jokes and coded nods evolved from acts of quiet rebellion into a full-blown language between creators and audiences.

The story begins with Warren Robinett’s famous hidden room in ‘Adventure’ on the Atari 2600, before moving through the rise of the Konami Code, Microsoft’s increasingly odd software secrets, Pixar’s long-running A113 tradition, the golden age of hidden DVD extras, and the giant Alternate Reality Games that turned the hunt itself into the story.

It also looks at how modern blockbuster culture transformed Easter egg hunting into an industry of its own, with fans racing to spot, decode and catalogue every hidden reference packed into films, games and TV shows.

At heart, though, this is a story about something much simpler: somebody put something there, and somebody else found it.

The episode also arrives just ahead of ‘Geekstorians’ Season 2, which is coming very soon.

Geekstorians is the documentary-style podcast from Geektown, exploring the hidden histories, creative accidents and industrial chaos that shaped geek culture.

You can find more on Geekstorians, plus all the latest TV, film and gaming news, at Geektown.co.uk

Also, a quick but important plug, Geekstorians is currently nominated for a Webby Award in the Podcasts – History category, and voting for the People’s Voice Award closes on Thursday, 16th April.

Vote for Geekstorians here:

https://wbby.co/57464N

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Language doesn’t just describe culture.

Sometimes, it creates it.

In the Season One finale of Geekstorians, Dave explores the hidden history of geek language — how fans invented their own slang, references, in-jokes, and shorthand, and how that language quietly shaped modern geek culture and the internet itself.

From handwritten letters in the back pages of early science-fiction magazines, to fanzines, conventions, badges, and costumes… from Monty Python quotes and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to arcade slang, tabletop role-playing games, online gaming, text-message shorthand, memes, and chat rooms. This episode traces how fandom learned to communicate long before social media existed.

Along the way, we explore how shared language helped fandom survive moral panics, cancelled shows, shifting technology, and changing formats, not through manifestos or rules, but through jokes, references, and community shorthand.

Geek culture didn’t just grow around stories.

It grew around conversations.

This episode marks the end of Season One of Geekstorians. All ten episodes, plus the Christmas special, are now available.

If you’ve enjoyed the series, please consider rating, reviewing, or subscribing. It really helps the show find new listeners. You can also share your thoughts on Season One over at Geektown.co.uk or on social media.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Toys were never just toys.

In this episode of Geekstorians, Dave traces the rise of the Plastic Empire — the moment when action figures, model kits, bricks, and collectibles stopped being side products and started becoming entire universes.

From the Star Wars Early Bird box that accidentally rewrote the rules of merchandising, to the 1980s cartoon-toy industrial complex, moral panics, and the birth of gender-segmented aisles, this is the story of how plastic shaped imagination, identity, and fandom itself.

Along the way, we explore LEGO’s uneasy relationship with licensed worlds, Gunpla’s transformation of fandom into craftsmanship, Warhammer’s hobbyist ecosystems, the rise of collector culture and shrine shelves, the collapse of toy superstores like Toys “R” Us, and how blind bags, loot-box logic, and digital skins quietly gamified collecting.

Finally, we look at the strangest evolution yet — a future where fans no longer wait for companies to make their toys at all, but design and print their own.

Because the Plastic Empire didn’t disappear.

It decentralised.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you’re subscribed or following Geekstorians wherever you listen, so you don’t miss future deep dives into the hidden history of geek culture.

You can find every episode at https://www.geektown.co.uk, along with Geektown Radio, our weekly show covering the latest TV, film, and gaming news.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anime is everywhere now. Streaming platforms, cinema screens, fashion, music, TikTok, gaming. But it didn’t arrive in the West through studios, marketing campaigns, or corporate strategy.

It arrived through fans.

In this bumper-length episode of Geekstorians, Dave uncovers the real, messy, rebellious story of how anime travelled from post-war Japan to British living rooms and American college basements. It’s a journey that begins with lone animators and wartime propaganda films, explodes into giant-robot fever, and eventually spreads across the globe through mail networks, tape-trading rings, fan-subtitling groups, Channel 4’s late-night experiments, the chaos of SMTV: Live… and one film that hit like a cinematic meteor: Akira.

This is the tale of the people who carried anime by hand, copying tapes at 3am, mailing fanzines in brown envelopes, hosting screenings in overheated hotel rooms, building early websites on dial-up, and refusing to let shows like Gundam, Yamato and Macross slip into obscurity.

It’s the hidden history of how a scattered, passionate, wildly inventive fandom reshaped global pop culture, long before the industry realised the world was watching.

If you enjoy the episode, don’t forget to follow, rate, and share Geekstorians. It genuinely helps the series grow and reach more listeners. And for more geek culture deep-dives, visit Geektown.co.uk. lBpEafq5XiZIpS64QLST

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