Season 8, Ep. 7: Futurestates (Part 1 with Greg Pak)

Throughout this season of Saturday School, we've been exploring the history of Asian American sci-fi films. So far, we've mostly focused on indie films from the 1980s to 2000s that overcame limited budgets and technologies to show what creative genre storytelling about Asian Americans could look like. Where was it leading? What would be possible if there was some organized funding around these stories? In 2010, the public TV and web series FutureStates, spearheaded by Karim Ahmad, commissioned filmmakers to create short films that imagined today's social issues in tomorrow's America. We're going to spend the next 3 episodes on FutureStates, starting with an interview with director Greg Pak, who was one of many Asian American directors who were asked to participate in the series. Greg Pak writes comics for both Marvel and DC - everything from the Hulk, Hercules, Darth Vader, Batman, Superman to Amadeus Cho. But because we are Saturday School, we spend all of our time talking to him about "Robot Stories" - which we started this season with! - and his FutureStates shorts. "Mister Green" stars Tim Kang as a government official who has failed to prevent the worst case scenarios of climate change. "Happy Fun Room" stars Cindy Cheung as a traumatized kids' show host trying (unsuccessfully) to warn the children of dangerous robot uprisings outside.

You can listen to Season 8, Ep. 7: Futurestates (Part 1 with Greg Pak) online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Season 8, Ep. 7: Futurestates (Part 1 with Greg Pak) is an episode from Saturday School Podcast by Saturday School Podcast.

This episode is 42:09 long.

This episode was published on Jul 4, 2022.

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