The 50,000 Watt Blowtorch of the Great Southwest: The History of WBAP (open access)

The 50,000 Watt Blowtorch of the Great Southwest: The History of WBAP

This paper looks at the history of WBAP while examining how programming has changed from 1922-2014 and how WBAPs audience helped shape programming at the station. This paper reveals four formatting changes throughout the stations history and provides in-depth statistical analysis of how WBAPs audience changed during the stations 90 plus years of existence.
Date: December 2016
Creator: Dixon, Chad M
System: The UNT Digital Library

"Creature from the Unconscious"

Creature from the Unconscious is a reflexive genre hybrid film that follows the process of the director's journey of navigating the process of self-acceptance and self-love in the wake of trauma.
Date: December 2023
Creator: Powell, Madison Keely
System: The UNT Digital Library
Female Friendship Films: A Post-Feminist Examination of Representations of Women in the Fashion Industry (open access)

Female Friendship Films: A Post-Feminist Examination of Representations of Women in the Fashion Industry

This thesis focuses on three fashion industry themed female friendship films: Pret-a-Porter/Ready to Wear (1994) by Robert Altman, The Devil Wears Prada (2006) by David Frankel, and The September Issue (2009) by R.J. Cutler. Female interpersonal relationships are complex – women often work to motivate, encourage and transform one another but can just as easily use tactics like intimidation, manipulation, and exploitation in order to save their own jobs and reputations. Through the lens of post-feminist theory, this thesis examines significant female interpersonal relationships in each film to illustrate how femininity is constructed and driven by consumer culture in the fashion industry themed films.
Date: December 2015
Creator: Geloğullari, Gülin
System: The UNT Digital Library
Furyous Female Just-Warriors of Post-Apocalypse and Dystopia (open access)

Furyous Female Just-Warriors of Post-Apocalypse and Dystopia

The intention of this thesis is to identify and analyze the precise shift from an exploitative archetype to an empowered representation of women warriors, to identify the arena in which male and female characters are given equal agency in the context of war, and finally explore the key characteristics that make up an empowered female hero. This thesis also addresses the sociocultural nature of the warrior woman archetype as it pertains to the current role of women in the military. The films analyzed in this thesis are all post 9/11 films; a fact that links them culturally to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In recent years, numerous milestones have been reached for women in the armed services, especially for those women in combat positions. For the first time in American history women are being recognized for their active role as soldiers in combat. Therefore, it is valid to consider the correlation between seeing women as military professionals, fighting alongside male soldiers in these films, and the cultural impact of female combat soldiers. This aspect of the thesis also imbues the female just-warrior archetype with a legitimate history, mythology, and current cultural reference; which is essential to the visibility of …
Date: December 2017
Creator: Lynch, Shaylynn
System: The UNT Digital Library
"The Gordita's Guide to Body Positivity" (open access)

"The Gordita's Guide to Body Positivity"

"The Gordita's Guide to Body Positivity" is an autobiographical documentary reflecting on society's expectations of the female body image and how it affects Latinx women. Through personal recollections, media content, and archival material, the film explores beauty expectations, body discrimination, and body positivity. The document analyzes the documentary styles such as autoethnography and narration incorporated into the film and provides historical and theoretical context to body image in the Latinx culture and how the media has affected body image, beauty ideals, and eating disorders. In addition, the pre-production, production, and post-production process is detailed.
Date: December 2023
Creator: Calderon, Jessica Andrea
System: The UNT Digital Library

"Joe on the Bus"

Joe Phillips, born in London to two American psychologists, worked for almost a decade as a solo motorcycle response unit in London before making the life-altering decision to change his path. Joe sold all of his belongings and purchased a traditional Red Routemaster double-decker bus to live and travel on in the United States. After the year-long bus journey, Joe chose to stay in the United States and purchased 22 acres of land in Coldspring, Texas where he is building his eco-paradise.
Date: December 2022
Creator: McChane, Lia Mackenzie
System: The UNT Digital Library
"The Just For Fun Talent Show" (open access)

"The Just For Fun Talent Show"

Three individuals prepare themselves to perform unique talents on a live stage, proving to themselves and others that they are far more capable than they imagined.
Date: December 2023
Creator: Bratcher, Jordan
System: The UNT Digital Library
Mineola (open access)

Mineola

Mineola is a poetic, observational, immersive documentary centered in the town of Mineola, Texas. The film provides an intimate, first person perspective of different locations in the town as well as underlying subversive beliefs and traditions. The film’s authoritative perspective guides the viewer not only in a direction of observation but personal connection to nostalgia of small communities.
Date: December 2015
Creator: Cater, Lauren
System: The UNT Digital Library
Musicals and the Margins: African-Americans, Women, and Queerness in the 21st Century American Musical (open access)

Musicals and the Margins: African-Americans, Women, and Queerness in the 21st Century American Musical

This thesis provides an overview of the various ways in which select marginalized identities are represented within the twenty-first century American musical film. The first intention of this thesis is to identify, define, and organize the different subgenres that appear within the twenty-first century iterations of the musical film. The second, and principal, intention of this thesis is to explore contemporary representations of African-Americans, women, and queerness throughout the defined subgenres. Within this thesis, key films are analyzed from within each subgenre to understand these textual representations.
Date: December 2018
Creator: Wellborn, Brecken
System: The UNT Digital Library
On the Fence (open access)

On the Fence

Living the vast majority of my life in an area that celebrates diversity but thrives because of illegal cross-border activities (undocumented workers, drug imports) at times the distance between the United States and Mexico is in fact as thin as the width of a fence. Though it is typical for a filmmaker to hope to present a unique take on a subject, given how I have seen the topics of immigration and the perspective of the purpose of homeland security portray, I am confident that there is an opportunity to show these issues in a more personal, less aggressive light with the use of first person accounts instead of a dependence on the most violent aspects of these topics. The main subject will give character to this agency by blurring the lines of his life as an agent and as a citizen.
Date: December 2014
Creator: Medrano, Estevan
System: The UNT Digital Library
Texas Paranormalists (open access)

Texas Paranormalists

Texas Pararnormalists mixes participatory and observational styles in an effort to portray a small community of paranormal practitioners who live and work in and around North Texas. These practitioners include psychics, ghost investigators, and other enthusiasts and seekers of the spirit world. Through the documentation of their combined perspectives, Texas Paranormalists renders a portrait of a community of outsiders with a shared belief system and an unshakeable passion for reaching out into the unknown.
Date: December 2015
Creator: Goodman, David
System: The UNT Digital Library
"Thank You" Parts I and II (open access)

"Thank You" Parts I and II

"Thank You" Parts I and II is an experiment that attempts to break new ground in the field of anthropological cinema through the reflexive methodology and experience of myself. My establishment of a new theoretical film approach called meta-anthrochaomediacy and its evolution into radical autoethnographic mediation is explored throughout this thesis. I exercised my theory by producing and documenting a reflexive experience built on fostering emotional bonds and social relationships that provided interactivity and choice within an environment as a process of mediation for anthropological study. Part I features a physical installation I designed that exercised the transmission of memories shared with my familial table. Twelve individuals voluntarily experienced this process across 4 sessions in a single day where they interacted with the table, each other, and the memories of places that the table has lived in. The installation was primarily recorded with a 360 camera and subsequently established as qualitative data, as per my theoretical process, to be edited into a film object. Part II is a 58-minute multi-split-screen film that features my theoretical process in action as it expresses the crafting of emerging-in-real-time short term cultures through layers of reflexivity. I edited this film to test my theory …
Date: December 2023
Creator: Hensley, Dylan
System: The UNT Digital Library
What's on Tap, Texas? Homebrew to Craft Brew (open access)

What's on Tap, Texas? Homebrew to Craft Brew

"What's on Tap, Texas?" is an exploration of the interrelated worlds of the home brewer and the craft brewer in Texas.
Date: December 2016
Creator: Dobson, Mark D.
System: The UNT Digital Library