Last week, Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree was awarded the Association for Mormon Letters Podcast Award for 2023. You can hear the announcement as part of the livestreamed awards ceremony or read the citation on Facebook. Obviously, we're really excited and deeply honored by the recognition from the Mormon literature community.
We've been a bit off the radar because Carl broke his knee and also moved his family to Utah, but this award has given us some steam to get back on the horse. Look for more new episodes to come starting in the second half of August. In fact, if you're in the Provo area on August 9th, we're going to be attending the BYU library's screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey and recording a short episode about it. We'd love to say hello and get your thoughts on the film!
In recognition of the award, we thought we would put together a post with some of our best episodes as a place to get started with the podcast. (We meant to get this up right after the awards, but summer happens.) Anyway, we highly recommend each of these episodes. You don't have to watch the film before listening to the episode, as long as you don't mind spoilers. In fact, we think it could be useful to listen to the episode first as a way of enhancing your watching experience.
Most Played
We opened our podcast with an episode on Disney's 2021 family musical, Encanto. And we actually mostly don't talk about Bruno. Listen for our thoughts about the portrayal of families in film, psychology and trauma, and whether this film has too much expressive individualism.
Can the message of a work triumph over poor artistic execution and a lack of understanding of genre? Jim Bennett and Joseph Addington join us to discuss this less-than-successful film version of the classic musical, which is itself an adaptation of Victor Hugo's classic work. Jim tells us about the pull this musical has on the Utah theater community and Joseph shares his love of the novel's classic spiritual journey. In the end, we find a few things to love about the film version in spite of its much-criticized live singing style.
Dungeons and Dragons is a popular hobby among Latter-day Saints, so we rounded up some dungeon masters for this episode. Shannon Oler and Parker Sappington join us to discuss D&D: Honor Among Thieves, the new movie starring Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez. This fantasy adventure comedy has us asking how similar are paladin oaths to temple covenants. We also talk about how D&D can be used to build empathy and community among people. And of course, the chubby dragon makes an appearance!
Carl's Recommendations
A faith crisis can be a difficult experience to talk about with your family or friends, especially if they haven't experienced one. Using Chris Wei's essay from Mormonism and the Movies, we use popular movies to describe three approaches to a faith crisis and weigh the positive and negative aspects of each.
After two seasons of being snuck into almost every episode, CS Lewis finally takes center stage as we discuss the 2021 film The Most Reluctant Convert. Find out what we enjoyed about Lewis's conversion story and how his arguments connect to a Latter-day Saint worldview.
Hi Barbie! It's time for our discussion of all things pink and all things ... Ken? Meagan Kohler and Suzanne Tanner join us to talk about feminism and the feminine, matriarchy and patriarchy, and individualism versus relationships.
Liz's Recommendations
In this episode, we dive into everyone's favorite show starring Jesus, The Chosen. With guests Dallin Crump and poet Merrijane Rice, we give a Latter-day Saint perspective on the multi-season New Testament adaptation phenomenon. What does Drew Barrymore's Cinderella adaptation Ever After have to do with The Chosen? What scenes were the most moving to us as Latter-day Saints? What's it like to produce creative work based on scripture? And how do Mormons feel about the evangelical controversy about LDS doctrine supposedly sneaking into the show?
Surprisingly few movies exist about the revolutionary period of American history, but a huge exception is the musical phenomenon known as Hamilton. We discuss the various receptions of the musical, both in the Obama era when it premiered and in 2020 when the Disney+ recording was released. We also look at the significance of the constitutional era of American history for Latter-day Saints and how that impacts our reception of the musical. Can we learn anything about how to treat difficulties in our own history from the musical?
Rounding out our first season is our discussion of Amazon's Rings of Power series. We do some buy-or-sell discussion on the various plotlines that are crammed into this eight-episode, billion-dollar series: Galadriel, the Southlanders, Elrond and Durin, and more. We talk about some of the ways that the series fails to capture the pre-modern worldview that's characteristic of Tolkien's writing and how the series (perhaps accidentally) aligns Sauron with a more LDS conception of Satan.
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