Return of the Duo
March 1997
Spring Break Mission - Chris had finally had enough. He had spent the last six years on artistic pursuits(probably more than that considering that we had been working together for the last six years) and still he had nothing to show for it. This was going to finally be the year where something would actually happen. If he couldn't get a band together, so what? He'd just get a drum machine and go it alone
As far as the show was concerned a little asskicking would be in order. We would finally get together on a more serious basis and get the show going again. This would mean that I would have to put the camera I got from the pawn shop into a repair shop to get the synchro edit feature fixed. He required me to put it in at the end of my spring break so that we could use the week to shoot some things for the show.
Monday, March 17: Mr. Pibb/Snuggle Muffins/Move You Free/Church of Irrelevancy - The first day we got back together we shot a sketch idea I had come up with as a direct result of the Death Takes a Train Ride sketch. I noticed that we had a couple sketches that dealt with Chris Dr. Pepper habit. Chris is such a loyal Dr. Pepper drinker that he shuns all of the Dr.Pepper imitators, like Mr. Pibb for instance. To him not only are those drinks inferior, but they are virtually at the bottom of his list of stuff that he would drink. So it was from this that I got the idea to see what would happen if I tried to pull a fast one on him and switch his beloved Dr.Pepper with that of Mr.Pibb.
The scene was shot with mostly static shots, but I did plan a few moving shots and I begged Kim to execute them before she went to work. She was very reluctant to do it although it wouldn't require for her to actually appear on camera. She would just have to operate the thing. This worried us considerably because if she didn't want to be associated with the show even on a technical level what about the Roommate From Hell sketch that we hadn't finished yet? What about the finished They Cute sketch from Show 1?
Once we had the Mr.Pibb sketch done we really didn't have a whole lot of ideas of where to go next. We walked outside into the apartment complex and an idea came to Chris, only he wasn't going to tell me what it was. He just told me to start recording and whatever happens I should just go with it. And this was the genesis of the "It's Okay Snuggle Muffins!" sketch. I had absoutely no idea of what Chris was going to do before he did it, so when he attacked me(the camera) I was taken completely by surprise. If it had been planned I would have wanted to do it again just to try to make sure that the annoying date/time display didn't pop up again.
Chris also had seen the "Move You For Free" sign on the apartment complex next to Kim's earlier in the previous week and so he came up with the little quickie idea where he's standing next to the sign and I move him to a different position. He tries to pay me, but I refuse the money.
He then saw a orange safety cone in the grass in the park across the street from Kim's apartment and so he decided to do a Snuggle Muffin reprise. As you can probably already tell we were really scraping at the bottom of the barrel for material at this point.
We walked around the park and then Chris decided to do his Church of Irrelevancy soap box thing. It was actually something he had written a while back and since we were trying to find something, anything, to do he decided to go with that.
All in all it wasn't too bad of a day. Even though just about everything we shot that day was filler, it still put us back on a creative track. Most of the stuff might have been simple, but as Chris likes to point out from time to time that when we're actually working on the show, we manage to generate other ideas from doing it. Not only that, but some of the stuff I actually kind of like anyway.
Country Fresh/Hair Tie Revisited - The Sniffles(sniff!) Country Fresh air freshener was something we had come up with back in '93. It is a parody of all the real "country fresh" scented products out on the market. Because when you think about it. What is country fresh? When you work on a farm you deal with fertilizers and smelly animals. Why would you want that in your house? Anyway it took us that long to finally get it off of the page and into a finished form. This was how we started our second day of the spring break work schedule.
Chris had brought his guitar with him and from the sketch we had just done. He improvised a song using the theme of manure. More great filler.
Also on this night, we finally finished the Hair Tie Drama. The two years of putting it off until we came up with an ending would be over. We would be forced to come up with an ending right then and there. I had some ideas, but I had never fully developed them because a big problem of ours is that we never finish what we start. We'll put off finishing something until the next day only to want to work on something else when the next day rolls around.
One of the big things we would have to contend with in the sketch was the fact that when we started the sketch I had long hair, but now I had short hair. Luckily it played well into the theme of the sketch in the first place about how much of a nuisance having long hair can be when you can't pull it back.
Putting the Camera Into the Shop(trying to at least) - My spring break was at an end and so before I went to work at Wal-Mart for the weekend I went to Circuit City to drop the camera off. Of course they wouldn't take it because they have a policy about not servicing equipment that is at least ten years old, and my camera had just had a birthday. They told me that I would most likely have to go through the manufacturer(Panasonic).
I called up the Panasonic hotline and they told me that the nearest Panasonic repair center was in some town in Illinois. I was very discouraged. I didn't have a lot of time to go hunting up other repair shops that might take my piece of equipment.
April 1997
The Gods Are on Our Side - Chris still harped on me a bit about still trying to find a repair shop for the camera, but I could tell that some of the hope might have died in him as well. I had just about given up on it. I didn't want to go through the trouble and expense of sending my camera all the way to Podunk, Illinois and then having to wait an eternity for them to get to it and finally sending it back, providing it never got lost in the mail.
One of my and Chris' goals is to shoot a feature length 16mm film. I was hunting around trying to find a suitable 16mm camera. I had e-mailed the Krasnogorsk company trying to find out how I can order one of their cameras and they never got back with me. Their web page sure as hell didn't have any information. So I decided that I would hunt through every pawn shop and camera shop until I found a camera. I could have killed myself for not having snagged a camera that I had seen at a camera shop in Denton that they were wanting $350 for. When I went back it was already gone.
So I went to a pawn shop not very far from where Kim worked. I didn't see any film cameras, but I took a look at the video cameras, and that's when I saw it. I felt like Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction when he sees that samurai sword. I could imagine the edited sequence of my reaction and then the cutaway to the slow zoom in shot to the Panasonic S-VHS full size camcorder that was just like the ones that we had used in the beginning film styles class. I asked the guy how much it was. And he told me $299.99.
This was unbelievable. It cost just as much as the other piece of shit that I had bought and the fact that it recorded in Super VHS already made it a better machine. And if the synchro edit jack worked, then it would just be phenomenal. Normally I would hesitate when spending even that much money, but I knew that I could not let that camera fall into someone else's hands. Besides I had saved up enough money from having worked at Wal-Mart for the last 10 months.
I was so excited for the rest of the weekend. I couldn't wait to hook it up to the VCR to see if it would edit. If it didn't work the guy at the pawn shop said that if it didn't I could bring it back within 30 days to get it repaired, but luckily I didn't have to take him up on his offer. We now had the means to continue on our course with the show.
May 1997
The Final, Absolute Completion of Episode One - By this time I had moved out of the dorms and had gotten an apartment with my dorm roommate, Chris Switzer. I did it so that I would have a place to live when I took summer school. This was the first summer that I had seriously planned to take classes, because if I didn't then I wouldn't be able to graduate in December.
One of the first nights I spent in my new apartment, Chris came with me and we put together Show 1. Actually our intention was to rescore the music for the chase scene since the music for the Sony version didn't fit with the public access version. Before we started to go through that arduous process somebody came up with the brilliant idea that since I now had a S-VHS camcorder with a working edit jack and since the master copies of both Show 1 and the Chase Scene were on S-VHS, I could mix and match scenes from both versions onto the final edit of the show that I would turn into public access.
This meant that we wouldn't have to record another note of music. We would start off with the Public Access beginning since it is about the only thing that is drastically different and then continue with the Sony bits of us running, which wasn't different, but had the music that we wanted. It saved a lot of time and headaches and we could concentrate more on putting the echo into the mailbox scene, which wasn't very easy, but we did get it done nonetheless.
Show 2 Edit/Dueling Cameras - The following night after Chris had left Denton I returned to Fort Worth with Show 1 completed. He told me to bring the VCR because we were going to start on Show 2 and he absolutely had to be with me to edit the opening of the show.
Earlier that day, while I had been sleeping very soundly, Chris was deep into a sleep deprivation session. He had also borrowed his friend Matt's camera and shot a couple moderator sequences. He had to be with me because he knew that I would not know how to edit the footage together as he would have wanted it edited together. And he was right.
When the whole opening moderator sequence for Show 2 was complete, I wasn't sure to think if Chris was either a genius or if I should be afraid of him because of the level of insanity put forth in that segment. I mean I've known the guy for 7 years now and I was wondering if this guy wasn't some weird being who at the end of the day retreats to some netherworld where madness reigns.
Even as I looked at him sitting on his dad's couch(he still hadn't gotten another place since he moved out of his efficiency earlier in the year), laughing at my reaction and to the piece unveiling itself onscreen, I had to wonder if the person in the room with me and the demon on the tv were one and the same.
Chris had another idea for a sketch and once the sun came up we took both my camera and Matt's camera outside of the his dad's apartment complex. The whole concept was to have two people whose perspectives are seen only from a camera affixed to their eye and have them meet and fight. In my shot you can see Chris with his camera and in Chris' shot you can see me with my camera and those two shots are the only footage shot of that sequence.
Friday, May 23: The Public Access Show Finally Makes it to Public Access - The tapes for the June showing on public access were due on the Friday of the third week of May. On that day, Chris and I went downtown together to turn the tape in. I felt very weird actually going to the cable office with a show to put on. This was finally it, everything we had been talking about doing and working toward for the last four years. It seemed like it would never happen and here it was finally happening. Since we had done so well not having a show on why quit with that good streak? I genuinely had butterflies in my stomach.
June 1997
Wednesday, June 4: Sniffles(sniff!) Makes it's Public Access Debut - Of course we didn't know about it at the time since there was no advance word sent to us about what particular time slot it would get. Chris had to go down to the cable office at the end of the week to find out. I heard about it on the Friday of that same week. We had the 6:00 p.m. time slot. Now we knew when it was on. The question was had anybody seen it?