Opening the vault of comedy from SF Porductions
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Sf Productions Podcast Network
Wrapping It Up Well, I'm sure I have more SF ephemera to go over, but frankly, I'm running out of decent audio clips to play. So, this will be the last entry for this blog. So, what's next? As I noted before, I want to "get the band back together" for a regular podcast, if I can ever figure out how to get Skype to play well with Garageband. Also, I…
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SF Ephemera - Part 2 Let's go over some of the groups our team gravitated to in high school. When we last met electronically, I mentioned the word "Semanon". While it sounds like a cult of some kind, it was just the backstage crew for the high school theater. The school made the mistake of buying very high end equipment for the new auditorium, and …
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SF Ephemera - Part 1 On previous blogs, I promised I would return to extraneous points, so here we are... In Episode 5, I mentioned that SF wasn't the only production company in town. Must have been something in the water. I'm sure I'll get some of this material wrong, as I was a bystander. If the parties involved read this, let me know what I scre…
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions - Part 17 OK, let's wrap things up. The SF team began to break up in the late 80's, and it became harder and harder to "get the band back together". It's natural for this to happen--people have lives after all. I had found a creative outlet in public access cable TV in Columbus, OH. I was involved in two comedy…
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions - Part 16 We now move into the late 80's, and a bit of a hiatus for SF as people went off into the world to get actual jobs, get married, get more degrees (I'm looking at you, Beth), etc. In 1988, Mike and I created a 10th anniversary set (just a set of clips, kind of like what I'm doing here) and the "Is It Lo…
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions - Part 15 During college breaks, I would try to visit SF members at their schools. Bill was attending University of Cincinnati, and I went to see him a few times. He was hanging around with a girl named Janet, and they were becoming quite the couple. One night, Bill and I were driving around, and he said "how d…
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions - Part 14 We now move into 1984. This was the year of the Los Angeles Summer Olympics, so I decided our major goal for the year was a video parody of the games. Mike was involved in electronic music classes in college, so we used that as an excuse to create a new theme for the games. We spent a concentrated per…
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions--Part 13 1983, the "Summer of SF", rolls on... There was a local theater in town--I use the term loosely, as it was housed in a former pet store, with an audience of 40. If you sat in the front row, you were in danger of getting trampled by actors downstage. Anyway, I had been involved with the theater for a fe…
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions--Part 12 SF finished 1982 with another political special (Confusion '82), and by this point we apparently decided that Reagan had won the 1980 race, since we spent some time either praising or bashing him. There were some small pre-written bits, which became painfully obvious as the production went on. We ended…
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions--Part 11 1982 was a tumultuous year for SF--we graduated from high school, several members joined the team, and we all moved toward our college years. The last point was a particular concern for me. Sure, it would it be difficult to get the team together to do more tapes, but the main issue was Eric's move to A…
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions--Part 10 There's a lot to cover here, so take a seat. We had the inevitable 25th anniversary extravaganza (being the 25th tape), which of course was a clip show. It also includes the only audio evidence of one short-term member of the team. Steve Hall was a British exchange student, and with dreams of Monty Pyt…
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions--Part 9 As a palate cleanser post-BOTR, we went back to the old Fall TV preview bit for the next tape--the less said about this the better. Moving on... If you've been listening intently so far (which I highly discourage), you may have noticed that any female voices have been coming from guys doing falsetto. We…
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions--Part 8 Well, we got into episode 5 of Bored of the Rings, and it was clear we were getting burned out--we had been slogging away at this for 9 months. So, we wanted to wrap things up with a double episode, but would have ended up with a very short episode 6. What to do in order to stretch things out? I am an u…
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions--Part 7 Background music was always helpful when we made the SF tapes--it helped us get into whatever silliness was required, and it covered up dead spots when we couldn't think of something to say. I didn't have a lot of music of my own, so sometimes I would raid my brother's record collection. Early Kraftwerk…
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions--Part 6 Let's talk about Bored of the Rings. Anyone who's read Tolkien's work or sat through the films knows this is a huge concept to take on. However, Eric and I foolishly felt it could be done, and he turned the books into a set of talking points he used as the narrator. It took eight months and six tapes at…
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions--Part 5 I've always been fascinated by the hoopla surrounding Presidential election coverage at the news networks. All the unnecessary gadgetry--it's like the IT dept got a blank check. So, when SF covered the 1980 election, we introduced the "NBS Election Computer", aka various handheld electronic games of the…
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions--Part 4 Moving from 1979 into 1980--Eric and I both enjoyed Star Trek, and so the first movie was a big event. Our parody (Star Trip) included special effects--like holding down extra buttons on the recorder so we sounded like we were on helium. I've always been a fan of the Olympics--the only sports stuff I'm …
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions--Part 3 We're now in 1979, as the history of SF Productions rolls on. I was a voracious TV watcher--listen to the "Vast Wasteland" podcast for evidence of this. So, the announcement of the Fall TV schedule was a big event to me--I was always on the lookout for the TV Guide Fall Preview issue at the checkout. (I…
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions--Part 2 When I last blogged, it was 1978 (not when I last blogged, but that's when we are in the story), and I was just about to see if Eric Fenton was the right person to make strange noises with me into my tape recorder. I had received an Atari 2600 as a Christmas present, and something told me that it would …
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A Brief (?) History of SF Productions--Part 1 For most of my life, I've been involved with a semi-real production company known as SF Productions--I even used it to name my website. I figured it was time to document as much as I can remember about it before dementia kicks in. I'm sure I will have items out of order, and some thoughts might be compl…
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