I stumbled upon Jeff Milner’s Backward masking site and thought it a fun place to check out. New in HTML5!
Pat pretends to wear a straight jacket by reversing a lab coat.
We had a lot of fun at this gig. It started out as a simple student project, and snowballed into a live to tape show with a studio audience, a live band, and lots of American chop suey courtesy of my mom.
My favorite part of this show wasn’t the show… it was the stupid Bert and Ernie puppets we took with us. From the start, where Pat did a puppet show with unprintable captions through the car window towards a bunch of preteens on the highway, to the hallways and edit rooms during show prep, those damn puppets were everywhere, and funny as hell.
We brought a video camera with us to capture behind the scenes shots for BENT! our local access show. I’m thinking we can use them as bumpers or filler bits or something. But that raw footage ended up being funnier than the show – and the show was wasn’t too shabby either. Enjoy.
Extra: At the end, Scott Mercer is at the beach house attempting to eat my favorite concoction at the time – Rice, Bologna, scrambled eggs with a side of ketchup. Carb heaven for the cost conscious!
Greg Kretschmar – How to Be a Rock Star – 1991
It’s interesting how things start to build some days. I had pulled a little clip of Greg doing his ‘Rock Star’ skit.. something we just made up on the spot, like a lot of the stuff we did in front of a camera.. some were funny, a lot were lame, but some were worth working on to be full fledged bits. This one came organically… I started rolling, Greg, started talking. Throw in an open and close title, and print it, Mr. DeMille.
I sent a link to people who work with Greg, so they’d have a fun laugh looking at the old footage.
They ended up talking about it Thursday on the air, and posted the YouTube link on their website.
Within one hour, it got more hits than anything on the site for the last 3 months. It’s still growing. Enjoy.
One of the more satisfying bits we worked on was ‘Speculation Theater’ – the format was simple. Thespian Ronald Albacore introduced a ‘what if’ scenario, and we’re re-enact the scene with the original characters. Most of the funny came from the juxtaposition of the characters who would never usually be interacting together, or the historical context which sometimes made the skit use SAT words with multiple syllables. They were satisfying to do because of the multiple levels. They were a pain in the ass because we had to not only write them, they had to be true to the characters and history or they fell flat. That took a ton of research and time, so after 40 or so, we were exhausted. They also really had 3 parts Ron’s setup, the actual bit with multiple characters, and Ron’s discussion of the skit, and a throwaway line for the next episode, which sometimes morphed into a real episode. Because of the limitations, we actually only did one of these on video – for the BYD & Friends live show – and I think we tried intos and outros, but never managed to complete those segments for various reasons. I did master a Speculation Theater Cassette, which I’ll dig out for the masses to ponder later. But here is the one skit I have on hand. ‘What if Early Cavemen had Cable TV’? Enjoy.