Category: oHOTmu OR NOT?
Last article published: 24 August 2021
This is the 78th post under this label
Show: oHOTmu OR NOT?
Premise: Siskoid wrangles a cadre of women with very little to no knowledge of the Marvel Universe in OHOTMU OR NOT?, the craziest indexing show that will ultimately cover every entry in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition. Find out who's HOT and who's NOT!
Available: Fire and Water Network, Apple Podcasts, Spotify
Number of episodes to date: 74 (including an unnumbered Christmas minisode)
The first was about... Abomination, Absorbing Man, Adamantium, Aguila
How it all began
We have to go back to early 2015. At the time, I was deeply involved in the Legion of Super-Bloggers website where 1) there were no female voices and 2) the Irredeemable Shagg had started a tag called "Hot" that thus tended to be shots of hot female Legionnaires. My plan to remedy both involved a dinner with all-female friends at an Indian restaurant. I pitched this idea: Via text chat, I would submit each of the male Legionnaires (in order) and they would, through jokey and frank comments, decide if they were Hot or Not. The female Legionnaires would also get their turns, within their comic book boyfriend's entry. It meant a lot of transcription for me, but the bi-weekly feature took about a year to cycle through even the Substitute Legionnaires.
Meanwhile, I'd started to dabble with podcasting with Lonely Hearts, which was meant to be the reverse of this idea - boys reading and discussing romance comics originally meant for girls. Then that show was absorbed into the new Fire and Water Podcast Network, which needed new shows. Being done with the Legion stuff, but having had fun with it, I proposed to reverse the concept again, and have the Girls participate in a podcast version of what they'd done for the LSB blog. They agreed, with one change in the roster (we were doing it in person and Science Girl lived in a different city, so we corralled Amelie to take her place). My first pick would have been to keep using Who's Who (whence came the Legion pin-ups), but F&W already had a celebrated Who's Who show, so OHOTMU it was, in no small part because the word HOT was already in the acronym (but see The Future, below).
The Process
Unlike the Who's Who Podcast which breezes by, covering a whole issue at a time, oHOTmu OR NOT? needed each of 6 people to have their say (not counting your humble host), so I chopped up each episode in manageable chunks, averaging 4 entries to a show. That created a fun, bouncy structure, with relevant clips and needle drops in between entries. All the stuff we WEREN'T covering, I undertook to mention myself as "back matter" (the editorials, credits and appendices), and it wasn't long before I stopped doing the feedback section alone, keeping the Hot Squad around to react to listener comments (which became part of an ongoing discussion with listeners). When feedback started mentioning more recent continuity (these entries were 25 years out of date, after all), we came upon the idea of doing a bonus episode every two issues to look at some characters' looks since the 1980s, under names like "The Sangria Special". The alcohol involved in the first couple of these did the group no favors, but people were always thinking the Girls were drunk anyway. (Not the case, just naturally funny and rowdy, and tired on a Friday evening.)
More than any other show, oHOTmu drove me to get better equipment. My original microphone could not do 360 degrees, so we were all bunched up at the end of a table. Even with a better mike, there are still people further away, or looking at another person, or even relatively too close for their voice or breathing volume. During COVID, we've done the show remotely, but that brings its own sound issues. But even though this is technically my most difficult show to produce, it's really the easiest to get in the can. With 7 people around the table, you're sure to get good material (so long as people talking over one another is minimal) even if I habitually cut things that are either unclear, redundant, or fall flat (usually for cultural reasons, like my not thinking the general audience will understand a French-Canadian reference). And yet, it's the show I most enjoy editing.
Reception
There are essentially two basic reactions: You are humorless and can't stand the chaos, the loud fits of laughter, the silly digressions, and people who don't know anything about characters you, nerd, know everything about. Or you do, and you love all of that to bits. The other usual comment is that listeners can't tell the Girls apart. I think that's less a function of their voices being similar than it is having so many co-hosts and rarely naming them before they speak. Primer: Usually, Amelie is into the Gothic. Elyse likes the most toxic relationships. Isabel will ask for reminders on the details. Nath wants to wear anything vintage. Josée is repulsed by birds and the ocean. And Shotgun will SAY she hates blonds and gingers, but the facts don't bear it out. The other frequent comment is how interesting it is to see things through the eyes of comics outsiders, things we comic nerds take for granted suddenly take on another bent, whether positive or ridiculous. The show has the virtue of being about encyclopedic entries, and that's easy for people to comment on. Everyone has an opinion on such and such a character, or some trivia to add, it doesn't have to relate to what was said exactly. Fewer characters means fewer comments than the juggernaut that is Who's Who, but it does the job.
The Future
The most important "reception" for me, however, is that of the Girls themselves. This show only exists as long as they want to keep doing it. We recently hit the mid-point of the Book of the Living (not that we wouldn't do the Book of the Dead), and that took about 5 years. We joke about our being dead and buried before we can ever finish the project, but everyone has such a good time doing these (we hang out together in life anyway), there's never been talk of quitting on it. Amelie calls it her "happy place" (she's too sweet). The only change I might bring to it, as other shows podfade or end, is producing them more frequently. Not saying that would realistically happen, but I'd be willing if, say, we wanted to accelerate towards the Book of the Dead and beyond. But I've just taken a break on one show and cajoled the Girls into doing a short run of Who's Hot and Who's Not? on the same feed. Over 5-6 months, we'll cover the first issue of Who's Who in the same style, if not exactly the same format. So if DC Comics is more your thing, this may be the Hot or Not show for you - and you heard it here first, check for it... well, next week!
Did I answer all your questions? Let me know if you have others about the show.
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Mike W.