Show #2 --- "The Palindrome Episode"
Peppers
AARON: This skit is about a guy who tried to sell our friend Jeff Lockhart gyros with peppers on them in the summer of 2000. The guy insisted that his peppers were extremely hot and Jeff could not handle them. Jeff kept telling the guy that "hot is good" and "he liked them hot," but the guy kept on insisting that he couldn't handle them. Then he started trying to talk him out of getting peppers. It was really weird, because in the end, he just said he wouldn't give Jeff the 'really hot' peppers, just the 'not so hot' ones. It was like the guy would have been ashamed not to give Jeff his hottest peppers. Anyway, we did this impression of him all summer and his voice transformed from what it really was into what Jerry's voice is now. His real voice isn't anything like that...and he's a really nice guy. FUN FACT: It was Cody's idea to name the character "Jerry." I don't know where he got it from though.
ANDY: 'You can't handle the peppers.' I think it's funny that we never see Jerry's face. A lot of people still don't know who plays Jerry. I had someone ask me if it was John Meyers. FUN FACT: The real Jerry gave Aaron's wallet back to him when he forgot it in the store one day. What a guy.
DUSTIN: I have not had the fortune of meeting the real Jerry, but I did buy some 23-year-old almonds at his store once.
Batman vs. El Gropo
ANDY: I don't know. We wanted to do a backwards skit. We borrowed the weird mask and Batman outfit and just made it up as we went along in the Union. We did one take where Dustin hit his head really bad on the floor when he fell. He yelled "keep going!" but John Meyers messed up (it's not easy acting backwards) so it was all a waste.
AARON: I look like I have rickets. Man, we could have made this so impressive if we had put as much time into the whole thing as we did the first shot (which is the most elaborate and difficult thing we've done to date, in my opinion). We got lazy at the end, but oh well. We are lazy.
DUSTIN: I think it's really impressive anyway. I remember going to the edit suite right after shooting the footage. We ran the footage backwards through the computer and laughed our heads off...of course my head was already twice its normal size from the bump that resulted from the floor whack.
Dusting McDonough
DUSTIN: Yeah, this is just a sequel to Sans Jans. I really have no idea why I decided to wear the Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts...it was extremely cold out there.
Friends
ANDY: AKA the handicap beating skit. We got this idea in the Goodwill parking lot when Aaron and I accidently parked in a handicap spot.
AARON: We happened to buy the bat that we used in the skit the same day we thought of it. We bought Spivey's lunchbox at Goodwill (from "Nine to Five"), as well as the yellow hard hat used in "No Sleep Plan Part IV" (Episode 3), the pants-less hippo from Part III, and the dress I wore in "Deliberate Fly Check Guy." Goodwill loved us that day. We spent like $14.
DUSTIN: I was inside thawing out my legs from "Dusting McDonough" when this skit was shot. Honestly, I'm not sure I laughed that much at it until the sound effects were added for the hits.
Conversation with Ol' Freezy in d Minor
AARON: This is based on something that I saw on 1800 Seconds that was entitled "Family Dinner." I had a dream the night that episode of 1800 was taped that was a lot like Family Dinner, except someone talked like a robot and was always in a freeze frame. I really wanted to do something similar, at a dinner table, but we turned it into a conversation on Dustin's couch. Cody and Dustin had a real conversation and we just kind of taped it, and later made Cody a freeze frame and added strange responses in a robot voice. It was a riot making the robot quotes, as well as the freeze frame shots. I have no idea why we referenced Bill Cosby so much in this skit --- or for the whole episode for that matter --- I don't know if anyone knows why.
DUSTIN: We had a few more robot responses in this originally, but had to cut them because of time restrictions. The hand punching Cody's face in one freeze frame is Aaron's.
The News
ANDY: The stupid graphics are in there because we trimmed out about 3 minutes worth of stuff and the graphics cover up the edits. We should have made them funnier. Cody wrote this one.. and the original concept was a lot funnier than how we actually pulled it off. Dueling newscasters fighting for the more dramatic story.
AARON: We would have made this skit much funnier if we had set it up in less than the two hours it took for us to set it up, and if I could have used the teleprompter better. We really screwed up a good idea that Cody had, and that's probably why he has his own show now. He hates us.
DUSTIN: Check out the jacket I'm wearing...yep. It's Spivey's. Actually it's mine, but Aaron just likes to wear my clothes...especially in the show.
Probe Droid Guy
ANDY: This dates back to the summer of 2000. Aaron does a dead-on probe droid impression, so we had an idea about a guy who constantly gets bugged to do the impression. People couldn't care less about his well-being, and just use him for his impression. Random people he doesn't even know start calling him for the impression.
AARON: Dan Mundt had a little model of a probe droid at his house when we were shooting "Escape Velocity." I just played with it one day and made the sound. Then we did it the rest of the summer with walkie-talkies. That's when the idea was born. FUN FACT: Some of the music used in this skit is from the television series "Room 222" (1976). John Williams did the theme song for that show, and he also did the music for "Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back," in which the probe droid makes his first appearance. We planned that as an interesting subtlety. Yeah right. It's a coincidence.
DUSTIN: Four Cheese Doritos are yummy. I hadn't thought about the show "Picture Pages" for years until Aaron came up with the idea to have Isaac say we were watching it. God, I loved that show.
Deliberate Fly Check
AARON: Isaac pitched this idea right at the end of production of the first show. We were going to try and get it onto show 1, but we ran out of time, so we did it for the second show. We didn't know how to end the skit, because we shot it really inefficiently and we were tired and lazy again. Isaac had a longer script written than what we actually did, and we cut it up and made it a lot shorter because of time restraints again. It turned out all right, because I get to punch Cody at the end. That ending was just kind of out of nowhere, but it works (in the same sense that anything else we've ever done has ever 'worked'). FUN FACT: This was directed by Dustin McDonough. Andy was two floors below in Hamilton Hall, editing show #2. I was dressed like a woman and being worthless. We left Dustin on his own. Sorry Dustin.
DUSTIN: I suck.
Ten Characters of Life
ANDY: This skit's origins are again from the summer of 2000. Siskow, Jeff Lockhart, and I were talking about doing a stand-alone "foreign film" with a lot of black and white images that make no sense, preferrably in some weird language. Well, when we decided to do Oxy several months later, we decided to do this idea as a skit. I met Kate Gouverniouk in grad school and I thought she would be perfect for narrating our little story in Russian. She was awesome to work with. She told some story about her meeting a strange guy on the subway and him trying to read her future. I went out and shot the footage to go along with her narration a couple days later, and told Cody and Aaron to sort of re-enact her story. It was REALLY cold out that day, so Cody was a real trooper to wear just a sheet. We only had Dustin for about 15 minutes before he had to catch the bus, so we shot up by the library. We got a lot of weird looks from people walking by, with Dustin in a shirt and tie and wearing a cowboy hat. Anyway, the sun was in our favor that day, so we got some cool looking shots. To make a long story short, I entered it in a couple film festivals. I won second place for features at the ISU Film Festival ($200 if I remember correctly!) and won First place in the "student" category at the Iowa Motion Picture Associate Awards! Hmm.. makes me wonder what we could do if we actually put some thought and effort into our skits.
AARON: Yeah, we shot the skit in about an hour. Andy won the award and some people that worked really hard on some IPTV project in Africa played second fiddle. I think the judges probably thought it was some really deep and meaningful artsie-type film. It wasn't. It was us being us. Although, if you want to get deep, Cody is dressed in white (representing good), I am dressed in black (representing evil). That's about as deep as it gets. We wanted to make it look like it was real meaningful though, so I think we (by we, I mean Andy) did a great job. FUN FACT: Dustin actually worked up a tear in this skit (I think). What acting.
DUSTIN: I have only been able to work up tears for acting a few times in my life, and this was one of them. This is another time that it was really cold and I didn't have a coat on, but it wasn't nearly as bad for me as it was for Cody....
T2 Spivey says "Buckle Up"
AARON: This is kind of weird, we stopped the tape on the Media-100 editing system at the exact point where some of our raw footage overlapped some of our other raw footage. At that point, there was this silver bar that cut off all but my head. I thought it looked like when T-1000 comes out of the checker-tile floor in "T2: Judgement Day," and just his head comes out and he's looking at the security guard at the vending machine. We downloaded the T2 music and put it on, and it was pretty funny. Or maybe it wasn't and we were just tired.
Billings & Spivey part two
ANDY: The Billings and Spivey office building (aka Hamilton Hall) has a very limited amount of settings. Billings' office, Spiveys' office, some hallways, and of course, the copy room. I was trying to think of something funny to happen in there that Spivey would do. Photocopying his face sounded about right.
AARON: The lighting is all messed up in this skit, but not very many people would notice something like that. We're picky though. Otherwise, it's a pretty funny skit and we did it in a "Fight Club" style (inadvertantly). In this skit, we are introduced to the fact that Billings has a steady diet of office supplies. Again with the state motto.
DUSTIN: My hands were extremely dry when we shot this skit. (I think there's something in the fabric of the pockets of the pants of the suit I wear when we do B&S that makes that happen.) They were even swelling up. So I rubbed my hands on the frost in the freezer of the tiny refridgerator in that room to try and get some moisture on them. I had to wipe my hands off then, so I used a napkin, crumpled it up, and threw it in Billings' coffee cup. When we were rehearsing, I faked taking a drink from the coffee cup and the napking fell out. We thought it was kind of funny, so we added it to the skit. (If anybody who works at Hamilton Hall and keeps things in the freezer in the copy room reads this...I'm sorry.)
End Credits
ANDY: This was John Meyers' idea. We found this crazy Japanese song on Napster and it was John's idea to have this song as an opening to his 354 evening show with seizure-enducing flashing images. Well, he never used it on his show so we decided to do it for Oxy. Sometimes the flashing black and white spiral doesn't show up well on TV at home. Probably a good thing.
AARON: Shot in front of a chroma wall. We acted like goofballs and Andy did the rest in post-production. The song still makes me laugh.
DUSTIN: I'm waiting for the first lawsuit from someone who tells us they had a seizure watching this.
All content copyright oxymorons 2001.