FANDOM TANDEM

The Fandom Tandem podcast is cursed. What a great way to get listeners excited about a brand-new podcast, right? As far as curses go, it’s mild at best, but still, during the years-long (!) development, it started to seem like this little idea for a little show hosted by two friends would never come to fruition.

That’s a lot of stress for a pop culture fan podcast. Stress, though, or more specifically, a dwindling lack of free time to devote to recording this particular podcast, served to be a sort of catalyst to really get it going. Topical timeliness was slipping further and further from our side as the weeks went by. The curse is truly a hulking chunk of anxiety that results in second-guessing and erroneous flubs. Little things like typos and what not, but still, the fear is there. So much anguish over what is supposed to be a labor of love.

The origin story here is, in a word, failure. Failures, plural, to be precise. Failure is perhaps too strong of a word as they really did end up being valuable learning experiences that produced something good later but previous attempts at releasing different podcasts didn’t set the world on fire and they needed a lot of work. Ultimately, these two other shows my podcast partner Jeremy and I made were beneficial in that we knew we enjoyed making these things and talking about these subjects, but we just didn’t understand podcasting. The prior attempts were all kind of one show that evolved into another show and truth be told Fandom Tandem is very much the third incarnation of the same podcast.

Throughout the course of making podcasts, we learned technical aspects of capturing sound, visual presentation on websites and social media, as well as the editing and distribution of the actual content. The love of the process grew and over time we learned to enjoy the development, the actual doing more than the expectations of what the final product may bring. In other words, if we thought these would make us famous, we’d be very depressed folks right now. The biggest lessons we learned from trying out new ideas and new ways to make podcasts were mostly about ourselves. We recognized how much time we had to dedicate to recording and promoting. We gained a better understanding of how much of ourselves we could devote to this passion project.

As you listen to the first season of Fandom Tandem you’ll be sure to hear differences in sound quality and overall production quality. Never let it be said that we claimed to be professionals, but we still aimed to put out the best possible product we could. The show is by fans, for fans. Settling on releasing the shows in a season at a time was a monumental change because it granted us so much freedom. Not having to do a weekly show was so freeing yet we did have to be careful about how much we dated ourselves when discussing certain topics. The aforementioned original attempts at podcasting also revealed a lot about ourselves to ourselves in that we didn’t want to be so limited in what we could talk about based on the show’s concept. Fandom Tandem explores a diverse range of topics such as movies, gaming, TV, food, comic books – the only real rule was to keep all the genre stuff within the realm of nerd culture. After all, two nerds host the show and we get pretty deep into geekdom.

Evolving schedules and ideas, different equipment and outlooks, and a better understanding of podcasting in general all led to finally being able to release the series premiere after months and months of development. Oh, and that curse I referred to do didn’t let the very first full episode go – I accidentally uploaded the wrong audio track so initially the world got properly introduced to a very bland and abrupt opening. No frills or music. That got corrected quickly but the raw version is still on YouTube for the time being.

I hope anyone who takes the time to listen enjoys it and maybe take a little bit of time to think, man, these guys spent, like, a long time on this. For better or for worse, we did, and enjoyed every minute of it!

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