I Used To Be In An Internet Sketch Comedy Crew
The random thought train has just checked into station! This is your final warning.
I was reading up on the Mother 3 (Earthbound 2) fan translation over at Starmen.net when the “Radio PSI” link popped up. They have some kind of radio show that plays…well, I’m not sure what. I figured it would be music from the Mother series, or perhaps mixes? I have a “PSI Mix” from the Earthbound Soundtrack on my iPod which is an amalgamation of all the songs that aren’t long enough to have their own track. The file info (it’s a live streaming .ogg file) was for a hidden track from the Chrono Trigger soundtrack and even had Uematsu as the credited artist.
ANYWAYS - what I heard was just a guy talking. Live. At 8pm his time. Sounded like he was responding to questions live from a forum because he was pausing, answering something, or laughing, or sounding upset. I couldn’t stomach it for more than five minutes, mainly because I had no idea what was going on, like it would work as a video but without images to correspond to what was going on it became an excersize in the imagination that I don’t think I want to participate in.
When I was like…fifteen, or sixteen maybe, a couple of my friends and I registered “Smegpot.com” and used it as a “pre-blog-era-blog”. This was around ‘99 or 2000. Real Player was a suitable media system and Napster was the way to get music. We (with help from a guy doing a similar thing in Minnesotta) figured out how to stream audio files for seamless playback on searing 56k connections and proceeded to write (sometimes in ten minutes or less) sketch comedy bits. We recorded the segments over the span of an hour or so, took the best parts and mashed them into one “episode” and then uploaded. We had no set schedule, each episode was anywhere from one to ten minutes long, and usually contained sound effects and music stolen from the MP3 directory of Heroes of Might and Magic III.
Jokes would include anything from the deviant (and imaginary) sex life of Sean and Steve, two of the co-creators, to pop culture bits about Samuel L. Jackson, Keanu Reeves or whatever else was going on in this time period. We did Transformers bits where I played the roll of Starscream. Steve would always be Samuel L. Jackson, even at totally opportune moments. I don’t want to make it sound better than it was, but the first time I saw ‘Robot Chicken’ I thought, “Wow. It’s everything we wish we had done.” We did fake prank-calls and made them ultra high-tech by using a different phone line in the same house (pre-cell phones here, people) and recorded using one microphone for both the “caller” and the speakerphone to pick up the “Called”.
Freshman year (I remembered now!) we passed the site around amongst people at school and it kind of blew up for a little bit. I have a very fond memory of a parody we did on Nazis. Entitled (geniously, I might add) “The Nazi Song”, it was mostly written by special guest stars David Harvey, J.P. Lungaro, myself and Steve. The music comprised of singing and clapping in a sad attempt to recreate marching. The lyrics were funny, but ridiculously insensitive to anyone who has a connection to the holocaust (or anyone with German ancestry, for that matter). At one point, Steve substituted the word “Jews” with “Muthafuckas” in his Jackson voice, which caused half the singers to start laughing. We (of course) only did one take. The song was so catchy that one person I hadn’t met before told me (at school) that he failed one of his finals because he couldn’t get the song out of his head.
Another segment (that we reprised one or two times) was “Dr. Science”. Imagine a satirical situation with a pedophiliac Mr. Wizard type character, his young “assistant”, and topped it off with tentacle-rape sounds provided by ripping WAV files out of the Zerg campaign in Starcraft. ’nuff said.
What brings me back to all of this is that I don’t speak to Steve, Sean, Etchell, J.P. or Dave Harvey anymore. Harvey joined the Air Force and I only saw him about five times after that recording. No idea where he is now. The rest of us had a falling out and I don’t know where they are or what they are doing. I DO know that my life when they were in it was not exactly productive or positive. I used to laugh at kids who sat around and got high all day because they were wastes of space, but we (with NO drugs whatsoever) weren’t really different. We made fart jokes, insulted each other, everything around us, played video games, ate fast food every night, worked shitty minimum wage jobs and lived with our parents. It was fun, and I still enjoy some of these things in doses (Read: Video Games and Fart Jokes), but it was our entire life and I’m so glad to be beyond that. Not that I’m saying they aren’t, it’s just interesting to look back at weak points in your life and associate it with the people you were surrounded by.
Pretentious of the month award, that last paragraph. BOING.
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