Anime did not cross into Western culture in one clean movement. It arrived in fragments, through edited TV dubs, bootleg tapes, playground obsessions, fansubs, late-night downloads, and eventually legal streaming platforms.

In this episode of Geekstorians, Dave picks up where Season One’s ‘The Anime Underground’ left off, following anime’s journey from cult import to global mainstream force.

We begin at the 2003 Academy Awards, where Spirited Away won Best Animated Feature without sanding itself down for Hollywood. From there, we rewind to the late 90s, when Dragon Ball Z exploded on Toonami and taught a generation of viewers to expect serialised storytelling, consequences, cliffhangers, and men screaming in fields until the landscape reconsidered its options.

Then came Pokémon, a franchise that became so massive, so quickly, that many Western children did not even think of it as anime. It was just Saturday morning television, playground trading, Game Boy link cables, and the dangerous social power of a shiny Charizard.

The episode also looks at Studio Ghibli’s very different crossing: a studio that refused to compromise, resisted Western editing, and eventually saw Spirited Away become the first Japanese film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

Finally, we move into the digital era, where fansubs, piracy, simulcasts, and Crunchyroll transformed anime distribution. What began as a fan-built workaround became part of the legal streaming infrastructure. The underground became the industry.

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Video games didn’t just become bigger than film, music and TV. They became places people went, watched, gathered, spent money, and built memories inside.

In this episode of Geekstorians, Dave from Geektown looks at how gaming quietly became the largest entertainment industry on Earth, and why nobody really announced it.

The story begins in April 2020, when millions of people attended Travis Scott’s Astronomical concert inside Fortnite. To some, it looked like a clever pandemic workaround. But for players, this was not a sudden novelty. Fortnite had already become a venue, a stage, a social space, and a place where culture could happen.

From there, we trace the rise of the pixel economy: the fragmented numbers that made gaming’s scale strangely hard to see, the smartphone turning play into an everyday habit, the rise of streaming and esports, and the transformation of games from products into persistent worlds.

Because somewhere along the way, games stopped being things you played and became places you went.

This week’s episode explores how gaming became bigger than film, music and television without a single cultural handover moment, why mobile gaming changed everything, how streaming turned games into something people watched as well as played, why esports made gaming visible at arena scale, and how Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox changed the idea of what a game could be.

For more from Geektown, including TV, film and gaming news, reviews, interviews, and Geektown Radio, head to Geektown.co.uk.

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In this episode of Geekstorians, Dave looks at the strange five-year window when geek culture stopped being something fans used to find each other, and became something companies used to find them.

Beginning in 2007, the episode follows the moment geek identity moved from comic shops, conventions, video rental shelves and school computer labs into the mainstream marketplace. The iPhone made technology aspirational. Comic-Con became an industry stage. Iron Man and The Dark Knight helped turn superheroes into serious blockbuster business. The Big Bang Theory brought geek references into prime-time sitcom culture. And by 2012, “geek chic” had reached the high street, where thick-framed glasses, superhero bags, science jokes and slogan T-shirts were being sold back to the people who had once used those signals to recognise each other.

But visibility is not the same as understanding.

The Geek Shall Inherit is about what happens when a subculture wins the room, and then discovers the room has buyers, brand managers, market research, and a rack of novelty T-shirts near the tills.

For more on this and plenty of other geeky things, head to Geektown.co.uk. And if you haven’t already, check out Geektown Radio, our weekly podcast covering the latest in TV, film, and gaming news.

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Season Three of Geekstorians begins with the moment geek culture stopped knocking on the door and started owning the building.

In this episode, Dave looks at the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, from Marvel’s desperate rights situation and the gamble of Iron Man, to Kevin Feige’s phase-planned architecture, the genre trick that kept the films from feeling like a production line, and the extraordinary test of asking audiences to follow a talking raccoon and a sentient tree into space.

Then we follow the machine to its greatest achievement: Infinity War and Endgame. Two films that asked audiences to trust more than a decade of storytelling, and somehow delivered an ending that felt earned.

But what happens after the perfect ending?

This episode also looks at the post-Endgame problem, Disney+, Phase Four, the Kang issue, and Marvel’s attempt to rebuild around Doctor Doom, Robert Downey Jr., the Russo Brothers, the Fantastic Four, and the next great convergence point.

Because the MCU’s real superpower was never just spectacle.

It was trust.

And once you build the house everybody else moves into, the architect has to keep building.

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This week on Geekstorians, we bring Season 2 to a close with ‘Nothing Went To Plan’.

Across the season, we’ve looked at films that nearly vanished, companies that collapsed under their own weight, shows that survived cancellation, fandoms that refused to let go, and the strange ways failure can become an origin story.

In this shorter reflective finale, Dave steps back from the individual stories to ask what they all have in common. Why do so many geek culture landmarks seem to emerge from bad decisions, broken systems, institutional indifference, and accidents that really should have ended everything?

From Pixar’s near-catastrophic Toy Story 2 deletion to Atari’s buried cartridges, Doctor Who’s wilderness years, Star Trek’s letter-writing fans, Deadpool’s leaked test footage, Rocky Horror’s midnight screenings, and the virtual chaos of World of Warcraft’s Corrupted Blood incident, this episode connects the dots across the season.

Because the thing institutions keep missing is not the product, the franchise, or the IP.

It’s the people.

Geek culture survives because fans, creators, archivists, technicians, and obsessives keep showing up when the official story says there is nothing left to see. And more often than not, they are right.

This is the Season 2 finale.

This is ‘Nothing Went To Plan’.

For more geek culture, TV, film and gaming coverage, head to Geektown.co.uk, and check out Geektown Radio wherever you get your podcasts.

Alternative shorter show notes version:

In the Season 2 finale of Geekstorians, Dave steps back from the disasters, collapses, cancellations and near-misses we’ve explored this season to ask what they all have in common.

From Toy Story 2’s near-deletion and Atari’s desert landfill to Doctor Who’s wilderness years, Star Trek’s fan campaigns, Deadpool’s leaked test footage, Rocky Horror’s midnight screenings and World of Warcraft’s accidental plague, this reflective coda connects the season’s central thesis:

Geek culture does not survive because everything goes smoothly.

It survives because people refuse to let it disappear.

This is ‘Nothing Went To Plan’.

For more geek culture, TV, film and gaming coverage, head to Geektown.co.uk, and check out Geektown Radio wherever you get your podcasts.

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This week on Geekstorians, Dave from Geektown looks at three films that did not behave the way Hollywood expected.

‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ arrived as a box office failure before midnight audiences turned it into a ritual. ‘Blade Runner’ opened to confusion, studio interference and mixed reactions before becoming one of science fiction’s most debated landmarks. And ‘The Big Lebowski’ drifted into cinemas as a modest Coen Brothers oddity before fans turned The Dude into something far bigger, stranger, and, somehow, semi-spiritual.

This is not a story about films that were secretly massive hits all along. It is about what happens when something strange, difficult or badly timed finds the people who need it later. Through late-night screenings, VHS, cable, DVD, festivals, quotes, costumes and arguments that refuse to die, these films became more than movies. They became communities.

Season Two of Geekstorians has been about things that did not go to plan. This episode asks what happens when failure is not the end of the story, but the beginning of the cult.

Presented by Dave from Geektown.

For more on TV, film, gaming and geek culture, head to Geektown.co.uk, and check out Geektown Radio for the latest entertainment news, reviews and UK air dates.

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This week on Geekstorians, we’re boldly going into one of the strangest survival stories in geek culture: Star Trek, the franchise that has been cancelled, revived, mismanaged, overextended, rebooted, and pushed through nearly every major shift in modern entertainment.

Born in 1966, cancelled in 1969, and kept alive by fans who refused to accept that decision, Star Trek became something far bigger than a struggling network sci-fi show. It became a constituency. A culture. A future people wanted to believe in.

Dave traces the franchise from NBC’s infamous letter-writing campaign and the death-slot third season, through Lucille Ball’s unexpected role in getting the original series made, the rise of conventions and syndication, the expensive chaos of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and the leaner, sharper rescue mission of The Wrath of Khan.

Then it’s into The Next Generation, first-run syndication, Roddenberry’s complicated legacy, the rocky early years, the franchise boom of Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise, the Kelvin timeline films, and the streaming era of Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy and Strange New Worlds.

Because Star Trek doesn’t survive because it is well run.

It survives because the idea underneath it is too good to kill.

Geekstorians is the Webby-nominated documentary-style podcast from Geektown, exploring the strange, messy, brilliant history of geek culture.

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This week on Geekstorians, we’re looking at the leak that punched a hole through Hollywood’s gates.

For years, Fox had Deadpool sitting in development limbo. Ryan Reynolds wanted to make the film properly. Director Tim Miller had test footage. The fans knew exactly what they wanted. The studio, however, remained unconvinced.

Then, in July 2014, fifty-two seconds of Deadpool test footage appeared online.

It wasn’t a trailer. It wasn’t part of a polished marketing campaign. It wasn’t even supposed to be public. But once the footage hit the internet, the reaction was immediate, loud, and impossible for Fox to ignore.

In this episode, Dave traces the long road to Deadpool, from Hollywood’s old gatekeeping model and the internet’s war with studio control, through the disastrous version of Wade Wilson in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, to the leaked footage that helped turn an unlikely R-rated superhero comedy into a box-office monster.

Along the way, we look at how the success of Deadpool changed the conversation around R-rated comic book films, helped open the door for projects like Logan and Joker, and proved that audiences were no longer just waiting outside the studio gates. Sometimes, they could force the gates open.

This is the story of Ryan Reynolds, Tim Miller, Fox, fandom, the internet, and a red-suited menace who refused to stay in development hell.

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