Hey welcome back to Nerdist Camp — the podcast where we get as nerdy as you possibly can without busting a blood vessel.

I’m your camp captain, Andi, and this week I’m huddling around the proverbial campfire with Kris Grainger, right before it gets doused by a tidal wave, buried by lava, or sucked up into a category five twister — that’s right: we’re talking disaster movies.

From the 1970s golden age — and by “golden,” I mean “everyone is screaming in bell bottoms” — we’ll relive classics like Airport 1970 (the one that started it all), The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and Earthquake.

Then we fast-forward to the 1990s, when disaster movies came back louder, dumber, and somehow sweatier: Volcano gave us Tommy Lee Jones fighting lava, Twister gave us flying cows, Dante’s Peak gave us Grandma boiling in a lake.

And we’ve got to talk about the spoof that managed to both parody and perfect the disaster genre… Airplane! It’s the film that reminded us that the most important thing in a crisis is to stay calm, and most importantly, ‘don’t call me Shirley.’

Why do we love watching things go catastrophically, explosively, absurdly wrong? Is it the spectacle? The heroic last-second saves? Or just that weird part of the human brain that thinks, ‘You know what would make this airplane ride better? An engine fire and a nun with a guitar.’

So grab your emergency supplies — a flashlight, bottled water, and your most mel-o-dramatic inner monologue — and join us for this episode of Nerdist Camp.

Links to things we waffled about:

Top 30 70s Disaster Films

The Big Bus

Engineers revive 'dead' thrusters on Voyager spacecraft 24 billion kilometres from Earth

Crime Next Door podcast

Stereolab’s new album

Cal the Stourbridge artist

Morcheeba, Escape The Chaos

Murderbot

Long Way Home

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