In 2006, the worst fan fiction ever written was released. We still haven't figured out who actually wrote it. My Immortal is a bizarre, intensely terrible fan fiction published on the internet from 2006 to 2007. It features a Hot Topic-clad, suicidal, goth, My Chemical Romance-loving female vampire protagonist who goes to Hogwarts and has romances as well as conflicts with the cast of Harry Potter - except all goth'd and Hot Topic'd out themselves. It's a truly hypnotically awful piece of writin...
Dec 16, 2020•1 hr 19 min
The strange story about the time we accidentally went viral for a hoax about Adam Sandler singing the entire Hamilton musical. In 2017, we recorded a weird inside joke bit where an impressionist, Matt Harbert, meticulously re-recorded the entire smash Broadway musical, Hamilton, in his Adam Sandler impression. We posted it online and nobody listened for years. Then, in 2020, out of nowhere, after we'd long forgotten about it, it became a huge viral hit on Tik Tok and Spotify. This is the anatomy...
Dec 09, 2020•1 hr 53 min
Mortal Kombat caused a chain reaction of parental fear in the 90s, so congress tried to ban video games. Video games fought back. In the early 90s, home video game consoles exploded in popularity. But with the newfound success came attention from concerned parents who didn't like seeing their kids exploding each others' heads in the violent fighting game, Mortal Kombat. This lead to a massively important congressional hearing in 1993 that would decide the fate of video games forever. This hearin...
Dec 02, 2020•1 hr 37 min
She is the most well-known Saint of the modern era, but her true legacy is full of cruelty, torture, and death. Throughout the 1950s - 1990s, Mother Teresa rose to prominence as one of the most well-known and celebrated humanitarians in history. She ran hundreds of hospitals and clinics to help rehabilitate the poverty and disease-stricken poor out of the kindness of her heart, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and was officially granted Saint status by the Catholic Church. We literally use her...
Nov 25, 2020•1 hr 3 min
Supposed footage of Bigfoot ruined these two men's lives, ended their friendship, and ushered in a new era of misinformation. In 1967, Bob Gimlin and Roger Patterson captured the legendary footage of Bigfoot walking through the woods in Northern California. You've seen the video, but did you know the full story behind it? The fact that Roger Patterson used the video to transform himself into a traveling conspiracy theory circus ringleader, or that it ruined the two men's friendship, or that near...
Nov 18, 2020•1 hr 29 min
"Illuminati" is a trading card game from 1994...that predicted the September 11th terror attacks? In the early 80s, Steve Jackson Games released a game called Illuminati. And then in the early 90s they came out with an expanded trading card game version of it to capitalize off of the popularity of Magic: The Gathering. It was a fun game about conspiracy theories that developed a cult following. But, years later, people started noticing that it was predicting major world event after major world e...
Nov 11, 2020•1 hr 30 min
Utopia. Dystopia. These are the two options we thought we had. But there's a third, and we're living in it. Andrew and Dave, your intrepid hosts, have been chipping away at a theory for basically the entire existence of Deep Cuts. It's all about how the year 2020 has revealed that we are living in neither a utopian or dystopian society, but rather a third and more surreal option. A concept that we've coined to describe the world we're currently live in where satire isn't any more absurd than wha...
Nov 04, 2020•1 hr 26 min
Join Dave, Andrew, and Hillsmer on a very special Halloween episode of Deep Cuts. Additional incidental music credits: The Deadboy Detectives 01001000 01100001 01101001 01101100 00100000 01010011 01110000 01100001 01100011 01100101 00100000 01010011 01100001 01110100 01100001 01101110 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Oct 31, 2020•40 min
One day his penis just fell off. But doctors had an experimental new way to grow it back... 4 years ago, Malcolm MacDonald developed a rare blood infection. His outer extremities turned black - including his penis. However, unlike the rest of his limbs, one day Malcolm got out of bed and his penis fell off on the floor. He went through a period of shame, depression, and low confidence. That was until some doctors came to him with an experimental idea for how to restore his manhood. And it involv...
Oct 28, 2020•1 hr
A weird, somewhat disturbing interview with the leader of the Flat Earth Movement, Mark Sargent. A few years ago, an idea started catching on that was exclusively perpetuated by social media algorithms on platforms like YouTube and Facebook. The idea was not a new one - in fact it was 100s of years old. It was the idea that our world is, in fact, not round but flat. More specifically, it's a flat disk covered by an impenetrable dome that was built by some kind of ancient celestial being that is ...
Oct 23, 2020•1 hr 46 min
They think the Earth is flat. Their looney beliefs are more dangerous to society than they seem. A few years ago, an idea started catching on that was exclusively perpetuated by social media algorithms on platforms like YouTube and Facebook. The idea was not a new one - in fact it was 100s of years old. It was the idea that our world is, in fact, not round but flat. More specifically, it's a flat disk covered by an impenetrable dome that was built by some kind of ancient celestial being that is ...
Oct 21, 2020•2 hr 16 min
One filmmaker got men who committed a genocide to play themselves in a movie about the genocide. In the mid-60s, a fascist regime in Indonesia enlisted several paramilitary militias and two-bit gangsters to murder millions of innocent people labeled as communists. The event was re-written in their history books as heroic, and all the men responsible for the genocide are still in charge and walking free. Nobody knew the truth about what really happened until documentary filmmaker, Joshua Oppenhei...
Oct 14, 2020•2 hr 21 min
Lisa Frank and her husband used all that money to throw cocaine parties and abuse their employees. All throughout the 90s, Lisa Frank products were the huge back to school craze of the decade. Girls everywhere wore their brightly-colored backpacks, stored paper in their vibrantly-rendered folders, and wrote their homework onto kitty-and-puppy-adorned notebooks with dolphin-and-tiger-emblazoned pencils. They couldn't get enough of Lisa Frank. However, behind the scenes in an office building in Tu...
Oct 07, 2020•1 hr 12 min
He used to be a hero, but now he exploits the abuse of children for views and money. In the 80s and 90s, he was a hard-hitting journalist, tackling some incredibly important stories that shed light on issues like slave labor, the crack cocaine epidemic, and child trafficking. In the early 2000s he was host of the insanely popular TV show, To Catch a Predator. For a while, Chris Hansen was a legitimate celebrity, probably the most famous of any reporter, and beloved by all as a literal hero doing...
Sep 30, 2020•2 hr 4 min
He used to be a hero, but now he exploits the abuse of children for views and money. In the 80s and 90s, he was a hard-hitting journalist, tackling some incredibly important stories that shed light on issues like slave labor, the crack cocaine epidemic, and child trafficking. In the early 2000s he was host of the insanely popular TV show, To Catch a Predator. For a while, Chris Hansen was a legitimate celebrity, probably the most famous of any reporter, and beloved by all as a literal hero doing...
Sep 23, 2020•1 hr 55 min
He used to be a hero, but now he exploits the abuse of children for views and money. In the 80s and 90s, he was a hard-hitting journalist, tackling some incredibly important stories that shed light on issues like slave labor, the crack cocaine epidemic, and child trafficking. In the early 2000s he was host of the insanely popular TV show, To Catch a Predator. For a while, Chris Hansen was a legitimate celebrity, probably the most famous of any reporter, and beloved by all as a literal hero doing...
Sep 16, 2020•1 hr 19 min
A single photo this former Disney Star posted on porn app, OnlyFans, might have destroyed an industry. When former Disney Channel star, Bella Thorne, decided to break the Internet with a bold new experiment in which she would join the massively popular paid content service OnlyFans - largely used by online adult stars and sex workers - and then make a movie about it, what eventually was supposed to be her attempt at shedding light on the industry and de-stigmatizing it, actually led to a situati...
Sep 09, 2020•1 hr 53 min
For years he's been profiting off of the trauma of a teenage boy's murder. In 2012, George Zimmerman saw 17-year-old Trayvon Martin walking through his semi-gated community and became suspicious. The teenager had decided to walk to a nearby convenience store for a snack, but Zimmerman felt like something was just not right. He pursued the boy, and eventually got into an altercation with him that ended with the death of Martin. A lengthy court case ensued, and Zimmerman was eventually acquitted o...
Sep 02, 2020•1 hr 47 min
It was a financial and critical flop, but it secretly changed the way movies are made. In 2008, the Wachowskis released a weird, experimental live action adaptation of the 1960s anime classic, Speed Racer. The movie starred Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, John Goodman, and Susan Sarandon, and was not well-received by critics, audiences, and totally flopped at the box office. It has a small continent of fans (including us of course), but ultimately became a forgotten footnote - lost to time. Howev...
Aug 26, 2020•1 hr 16 min
Did Stan Lee & Steve Ditko create Spider-Man? Or was the idea stolen from a Halloween costume? In the Silver Age of comics in the 1960s and 70s, things were an existential mess from a creator perspective - especially at Marvel comics. There were no artist or writer unions, characters were often created in bull pen-type situations where authorship was given to the company at large instead of the actual people doing the creating. And, in a system where creator-ship was not properly recorded, a...
Aug 19, 2020•1 hr 29 min
He made a 4 hour movie where he played over 100 characters by himself, but he ended up homeless. In 1994, Laz Rojas desperately wanted to break into the entertainment industry as an actor, writer, and director. He had written literally hundreds of scripts, but couldn't get anybody to pay attention to them. So he shot a 4 hour film that was a collection of random scenes from all of the various scripts he had written. The only thing is - he didn't have any friends or collaborators to make it with....
Aug 12, 2020•2 hr 18 min
Two Scottish guys fooled the world into thinking they were American rappers for almost a decade. In the early 2000s, Billy Boyd and Gavin Bain were college students and best friends. They also loved hip hop and wanted to do something more with their lives than live a small-town Scottish existence. They formed a rap group and got good. However, after various auditions they quickly learned that, no matter how good they were, nobody would ever take two Scottish rappers seriously. So...they fabricat...
Aug 05, 2020•1 hr 50 min
A cult started by a blind Japanese man went on to become a deadly terrorist organization. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Shoko Asahara was rising in the ranks as one of the most powerful cult leaders in history. He had over ten thousand followers, and slowly over the course of several years would launch several deadly terrorist attacks against the country of Japan - a few of which are the worst attack that Japan has ever experienced. They did all of this while producing anime recruitment vid...
Jul 29, 2020•1 hr 31 min
12 years ago she lost control of her life. Is it for mental health reasons, or something far more evil? In 2008, after a very public mental health scare in which pop star Britney Spears shaved her head and had several violent outbursts, her father, Jamie Spears, was granted a permanent conservatorship over her. Conservatorships are usually reserved for the mentally unwell or handicapped, or the old and infirm, and make it so you are not legally allowed to make your own decisions, vote, drive a c...
Jul 22, 2020•2 hr 52 min
They were three young girls held prisoner by their father and forced to become a rock band because of a prophecy. They ended up becoming a huge cult hit, beloved by many - including Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain who lists their album as his third favorite of all time - and one of the most influential indie bands of all time. They were musical geniuses in the category of "outsider music." They also hated playing music, never wanted to be a band, and were held prisoner as teenagers by their father ...
Jul 15, 2020•2 hr 46 min
Actor Jared Leto has slowly been growing a cult-like following for the last several years. What's his endgame? You know him from his films throughout the 90s, 2000s, leading up to today, as well as from his band 30 Seconds to Mars. Did you also know that, for the last several years, he's invited thousands of people to a large gathering that happens on a remote Island in some exotic area of the world? They started out as basically music festivals, but slowly they have morphed into something diffe...
Jul 08, 2020•2 hr 46 min
He's the brother that director Christopher Nolan doesn't want to talk about. Because he's a murderer. You are familiar with the massively successful British filmmaker, Christopher Nolan, who has directed films like the Dark Knight, Inception, the Prestige, and the Tenet. You might also be familiar with his brother, Jonah Nolan, who co-created HBO's Westworld. But did you know that there's a third Nolan brother? Why have you never heard of him? Well, likely somebody paid a lot of money to make su...
Jul 01, 2020•58 min
He was a one-hit wonder rocker who loved to party, but nobody noticed he was a complete hoax. In the late 90s/early 2000s, Andrew W.K. exploded out of nowhere with the anthemic, epic party anthem "Party Hard" complete with a stylish music video depicting him thrashing onstage in front of a giant mural of his bloodied face. After that, he became a novelty fringe element of pop culture - occasionally popping up to sing about or talk about partying. Ultimately we all kind of forgot about him. Howev...
Jun 24, 2020•4 hr 1 min
He was a real life costumed hero dedicated to stopping crime, but in the end his story was a supervillain origin. Phoenix Jones was a real life costumed superhero that operated out of Seattle, Washington for several years. Every night, seven days a week, he patrolled the streets of Seattle at night with his crew of fellow costumed heroes and a camera person. Anywhere he could find crime being committed - robbery, theft, drug deals, assaults - he would put himself in harm's way, chase and apprehe...
Jun 17, 2020•1 hr 44 min
He was the world's greatest private eye who was also a double amputee. He also lied about his entire life. In part 1 of our three-part "Kayfabe Trilogy", we explore the crazy life and astonishing lies of Jay J Armes - a man from El Paso, Texas who lost both of his hands in a horrible accident as a child, and went on to become a globe-trotting private detective responsible for solving thousands of crimes - including rescuing Marlon Brando's son from kidnappers - starring in television and film, a...
Jun 10, 2020•1 hr 44 min
