The End of the Weekly Stuff Podcast

After 500 episodes, new adventures await!

In case you haven’t heard - and if you haven’t, don’t feel bad, we made the announcement nearly five hours into a seven-hour podcast - The Weekly Stuff Podcast is no more.

As explained in our super-sized 500th episode, Sean Chapman and I have chosen to take the opportunity afforded by a nice big round-number milestone to retire The Weekly Stuff Podcast. We are doing this both so we can continue to focus on the passion project that is our seasonal anime podcast, Japanimation Station, but also so that the things we still love about The Weekly Stuff may be reborn in a new package that’s more manageable for us to produce in the months and years to come.

The TL;DR is this: The Weekly Stuff Podcast is dead. Japanimation Station is alive and kicking. And later this year, we will be launching a new, monthly podcast that will house the kinds of discussions you (hopefully) loved on The Weekly Stuff, but in a tighter, more focused, better-produced package.

Sean and I explain our motivations for this in episode 500, so if you haven’t listened to the segment where we make the announcement, I encourage you to do so. The basic gist of it is that producing two ongoing podcasts at the same time is really, really hard, especially when we’re doing this for free and have full-time jobs and other adult responsibilities. Keeping The Weekly Stuff weekly (which it really hasn’t been for a few months now) and producing Japanimation Station (which is a more labor-intensive show on every dimension) was proving increasingly difficult for us behind the scenes, and as a result, The Weekly Stuff Podcast wasn’t the show we wanted it to be anymore. Something had to give, and with the 500th episode approaching, now seemed like the perfect time to say goodbye to The Weekly Stuff and start rethinking our approach.

So that’s what we’ve done. We put a ton of extra effort into episodes 499 and 500 to make them the biggest and best episodes The Weekly Stuff has ever seen, including getting original music from our in-house composer Thomas Lack, like that amazing farewell song he delivered for episode 500, the standalone video of which is linked below. We did two big final top 10 lists - Our Top 10 Anime Openings and, appropriately for the Weekly Stuff finale, Top 10 Endings - talked about Doctor Who, and reminisced on the life of the show. And both episodes are ludicrously, stupidly, inappropriately long. We wouldn’t have it any other way. I think we sent The Weekly Stuff off into the sunset on our terms, and I’m really proud of those last two episodes.

Now, Sean and I are focusing on finishing the current season of Japanimation Station, our year-long Kyoto Vacation that’s seen us reviewing the works of Kyoto Animation. And in the meantime, we are going back to the drawing board to create a new, monthly show to replace The Weekly Stuff. It won’t be exactly the same. We want it to be a little bit like an ‘audio magazine,’ with regular segments and some fun new variety. We never substantially re-tooled The Weekly Stuff during its lifetime, and now that we’re taking a little bit of time off, we’re going to work hard to find a new format that, while more infrequent, should hopefully make for an even better show, and one we can consistently deliver alongside Japanimation Station.

Certain things are still up in the air. We haven’t named the new show yet, though we have some ideas (no, it will not be called The Monthly Stuff). We are thinking it will launch in September or October, but if it needs more time in the oven, we’ll let you know.

Hopefully anyone who’s enjoyed The Weekly Stuff will continue to follow us in the future. Stay subscribed to the show on YouTube or your podcast app of choice, because we will probably be converting those feeds into the new show when it arrives. And if you haven’t yet subscribed here to my Substack - currently called The Weekly Stuff Wordcast, but also possibly looking for a new name - please be sure to do so! It’s completely free, and it will keep you up to date on anything I write or any podcasts (or other projects) Sean and I make. It’s the best way to stay connected. Here’s the link:

That’s all for now! As I said on episode 500, The Weekly Stuff Podcast was an extremely significant part of our lives. It began when we were 19 and lasted through our entire 20s, now into our early 30s. It’s a document of the two of us growing up, finding our critical voices, and of our gradual spiral into anime-obsessed madness.

And now it is dead, so that something even better may rise in its place. To quote The Lion King, it’s the circle of life, and it moves us all.

See you on the other side.

Support us at Ko-fi ☕️ https://ko-fi.com/weeklystuff

Read the book 200 Reviews by Jonathan R. Lack in Paperback or on Kindle – https://a.co/d/bLx53vK

Subscribe to JAPANIMATION STATION, our sister series about the wide, wacky world of anime: https://www.youtube.com/c/japanimationstation