What should three guys, all with a love of comics, movies, videogames and television do? Make a podcast of course.
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The Bearded Geeks is a podcast created in Launceston, and is the brainchild of Brent Jago.
Jago describes the podcast as “recorded pub talk” and said they discuss all things “geeky”, including a regular review of the latest movies.
Bobby Baxter and Patrick Brown join Jago for the weekly podcast, which has been running for three months.
And it all streams out from a small back room in Jago’s unit.
Walking in it is clear this is a serious fan, with some impressive memorabilia lining the walls of each room on the way to the “Beard cave”, where the boys create The Bearded Geeks.
Three silver microphones hang suspended on black stands, and a Fight Club poster and a framed comic jump hang on the white walls.
Avengers coasters sit on a small black table next to three chairs and a shelf of action figures and transformers overlook a desk on which a rough plan for the next episode is sketched out on a white lined pad.
Jago said the podcast is a place where himself, Baxter and Brown can come together and just be themselves, talking about the things they love.
“These are the conversations we have down at the pub, or if we hang out, and we just decided to record it and put it on the internet and we’re pretty lucky that a lot of people dig it,” he said.
The concept for the podcast grew from Jago trying to find his creative niche after leaving college, and he hopes it will one day be his sole income source.
Currently he works five days and the podcast is like his “second job”
“Albeit one I enjoy more than the other,” he joked.
Jago said the podcast has gone a lot better than they expected – they even receive fan mail.
“We don’t get a lot, but we have recurring listeners that get on and send us some really cool stuff,” he said, adding that it is incredibly rewarding.
“After the first episode we got our first piece of fan mail … We had this 10-year-old kid from Devonport, he did a piece of fan art and sent it to us on Instagram and that was so cool – we never expected that to happen, let alone this soon.”
The 10-year-old fan is called Sam, and he listens every week.
Looking back even 20 years ago and “Geek” was thrown across school playgrounds as an insult, but Jago said culture has since changed.
The rise of the comic movie, video games and the internet has changed the view towards fans that might once have been typecast as geeks – these things have moved into the realm of “cool”.
“I’ve said this on the show before, when I was in primary school and high school I got bullied because I read comics and I was into Spiderman and all that sort of stuff,” Jago said.
“People used to come up to me and point a finger at me and say, ‘Comic book reader’, just because I was different and into something [they weren’t].
“Those same people when three or four years later the first spider man movie came out, and they're all, ‘I love Spiderman so much, he’s so cool’.
“In the last 10 or 15 years I think we’ve made a lot of headway with cinema and a lot of these movies that are out now especially superhero films and the Star Trek films.”
Jago said the podcast is another voice in the world that lets people like Sam know it’s okay to be themselves, and like what they wish.
Not that we’re intentionally trying to pave the way for anyone, but we’re another voice that's out there that kids can stumble upon and go, ‘You know it is okay to be into this sort of thing'.
- Brent Jago
“Not that we’re intentionally trying to pave the way for anyone, but we’re another voice that's out there that kids can stumble upon and go, ‘You know it is okay to be into this sort of thing’,” he said.
But above all, Jago, Brown and Baxter just have a ball.
“I love doing this, it’s fun, it’s fun doing the research,” Jago said.
He said the podcast also aims to contribute to a developing pop culture in Tasmania, which has historically been less strong than on the mainland of Australia.
And in case you were wondering, Jago’s favourite movie is The Thing.
“I watched it and, I don’t know it’s something that just resonated with me, that film is just perfect in every way,” he said.
To follow The Bearded Geeks podcast visit www.facebook.com/beardedgeekspod.