Pop Culture



Spaceman Jax – Ahead of its time?

  The classic 1960s characters from animation and comics dealt with some of the same issues we do today. It’s no surprise that a show set in the future might look familiar today some fifty years later. Spaceman Jax and the Galactic Adventures was set in the Star Year 6354...

The Menacing Mantagons

  What good is having a couple thousand Ultra-turbo-zap guns if no one knows about it? Does Spaceman Jax think he can reform the Mantagons? He certainly doesn’t seem to understand that they are only in it for the weaponry and the power. Jax tries to reason with them, but...

Behind the Late Night Desk

You know a talk show means serious business if they put the host behind a desk. Talk shows use their sets to communicate subtle hints about their content. The soft armchair of a daytime show like Oprah tells you that it’s going to be intimate and confessional. The stools of...

Parenting Tips from Spaceman Jax?

He may cause more trouble than a Ploridian Lunar Beast, but his heart is in the right place. As Father’s Day approaches, we’ve been thinking about how some of our favorite fictional characters fare as parents and surprisingly, one of the most inept bumblers ever to cross the galaxy –...

Brought to You by Sugar

  Advertising and packaging in the 1960s was enough to give you a tooth ache. It is truly amazing how much advertising messages have changed over the last fifty years. Today, advertisers are careful to distance their products from any ingredients that are seen as a health taboo. This means...

007: The Spy Who Serenaded Me

James Bond knows hand-to-hand combat, defensive driving at high speeds, and how to pick a great song. The 007 films are a genre all of their own, and although each film varies across the 50 years of the franchise, you always know what you’ll find within the genre. There are...

Robots in Spaceman Jax

Are we training our own robot replacements? Good – they can have the jobs. It’s funny that Spaceman Jax still has a job, since it’s clear that a robot could do a better job – heck, a Ploridian Lunar beast couldn’t do a worse job than Spaceman Jax. And yet,...

Vengeance in the Star Trek Universe

As the Klingons say, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” J.J. Abrams’s new Star Trek franchise is cornering the market on revenge. From the first film of the reboot focusing on Nero’s patient wait to avenge his planet Romulus, to the recent re-imaging of Khan’s revenge against the Federation’s...

The Mantagons vs. Modern Society

The Mantagons may be the strongest armed fleet in Spaceman Jax’s galaxy, but how would they fare against the selfie? The Mantagons were the best bad guys on the 1960s animated TV show Spaceman Jax and the Galactic Adventures. Though skinny little octopus-like aliens, they had the strongest army in...

Animal Crackers, since 1902

  Sometimes, you need to think inside the box. The way food is presented to you can really affect the way you think it tastes. Shows like Bizarre Foods certainly bear this out. This is why food producers spend a lot of time and money on the packaging for their...

Catchphrases catching fire

Beam me up, Scotty. Play it again, Sam…How can it not be in the film if we know the catchphrase so well? Pop culture is full of famous catchphrases, and our conversations around the office here at Curio & Co. are littered with movie quotes and old advertising slogans. We...

What makes a TV personality?

  There are plenty of people famous for rather dubious talents on television, with “nice guy” perhaps the most dubious. With the recent news that Stephen Colbert will be taking over when David Letterman retires next year, we’ve been thinking a lot about the backgrounds of TV celebrities. Although he...