This Week in Podcasts

This Week In Podcasts is a round-up feature in which the Inverse staff picks their favorite podcasts of the week. Scope these choices below, y’all.

Andrew Burmon: How Did This Get Made: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Secret of the Ooze HDTGM, a show on which Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas dissect shitty movies, has developed a loyal following among movie nerds because it’s routinely hilarious and because movie nerds are uncomfortable with sustained silence. I was particularly taken with the latest episode because of a brilliant bit of trivia brought up by a member of the show’s audience (it’s recorded live). One actor has IMDB acting credits for Secret of the Ooze, Super Mario Bros., Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla, Deep Blue Sea, Anaconda, and Spawn — six of the best terrible movies ever made. This thespian is named Frank Welker, and he played the Anaconda in Anaconda and Godzilla in Godzilla. Now you know.

Eric Francisco: The Indoor Kids: A Conversation with Cliff Bleszinski “Microsoft should have had their tongue firmly planted up Epic’s butt for many, many years, because Epic sold many, many Xboxes.” Very few American game designers craft a known personality outside their career, but when they do they’re a cross between auteur directors and MTV vee-jays. Former Epic designer Cliff Bleszinski is one of them. The lead designer of the blockbuster “Gears of War” series, Cliff is now on his own and he doesn’t pull any punches. Talking with Kumail, he’s very informative with the psychological design of shooter games (“Hitting verbs” in thirty seconds, he describes) and the environment of multiplayer games on consoles and PC. He also spits venom about the pitfalls that come with massive success. With Comic-Con looming, they talk about the ever-growing geek culture, making us wonder if perhaps there isn’t a bubble that will burst at all.

Peter Rugg: I have a low tolerance for ‘twee’ so I didn’t expect to last long when a friend recommended Gimlet’s new podcast, The Mystery Show. I was wrong. If you’re not familiar, the show follows host Starlee Kine’s amateur detective work in pursuit of those mundane riddles everyone has, something small and troublesome, little a popcorn kernel stuck between your teeth. The few stories Kine posted are, usually, less about the answers to the mysteries than the journey - even customer service reps get poignant about their lives when Kine leads the conversation. But, if you want to test if the show is right for you and want some real sleuthing, I’d recommend the Belt Buckle episode. A client comes to Kine with a fantastic custom-made belt buckle found in the street years ago and asks her for help with the seemingly impossible task of finding the owner and returning it. To say more would be a cruelty.

Winston Cook-Wilson: I’m not horribly creative with podcasts — tend to stick with my “brand” and listen to music-related ones. My favorite, however, is Stay Hatin’, a rap podcast coming out of Oakland. It’s hosted by Serg Ornelas (“SergDun”), one of the original writers at So Many Shrimp (where our very own DTurner wrote for a while), and his pal Soft Money. Other writers, bloggers, and rappers regularly guest. The show is a great place to find out about incredible underground street rap you won’t come across unless you regularly and systematically sift through DatPiff and Live Mixtapes. The most recent episode features Michelle from Audible Treats, a PR company that handles a lot of up-and-coming hip hop acts. They discuss the machinery of helping hip hop acts take off, how musical tastemaking works on the Internet today (versus the Wild West days of non-monetized Blogspots and message boards) and Bill Maher’s theme music. More importantly, they play a string of solid, fun new rap songs (mostly Bay Area, Chicago-area and Southern stuff), stuff you won’t find covered any of the major rap-friendly web outlets. I liked this new Glizzy Gang track a lot.

Hannah Margaret Allen: Disclaimer: Although this comes from the folks at Food52, you don’t have to be a foodie to enjoy this podcast. Listening to Burnt Toast is like sitting around your kitchen table with friends that share your predilection for making scrambled eggs for dinner. The roundtable discussion in “Episode 9: My New Eggs for Dinner” answers reader questions and features Food52 co-founders, Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, and Food52 managing editor, Kenzi Wilbur. They delve into all things kitchen and food related. My personal favorite is their commiseration of feeling guilty for the graveyard of condiments wasting away in the back of the fridge, which I realize sounds potentially uninteresting. But trust me, it’s super enjoyable.

Corban Goble: Because I want my portion of this column to be bangin’, I listened to a ton of podcasts this week. I discovered, and then eventually listened to the shit out of, Gilmore Guys — for God’s sake, the first one I listened to featured an interview with the woman who played Matt Saracen’s grandma in Friday Night Lights. I listened to Hollywood Handbook’s live table read of a fake screenplay called “Teen Pope 2.” It, too, was dope.