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HOW SPACECAST CAME TO BE
AND HOW IT ALMOST MATTERED.
I was working in a small advertising agency about ten years ago. We were an alleged boutique shop that had spun away
from a larger agency, in order to do fancy, high-end work. You know, the ‘cool’ projects, not the Sears-branded
landfill that we had all been heretofore (thentofore?) churning out. Well, the work never materialized. But we did log some
quality time sitting in our nice West Loop loft space, deciding where to go for lunch, adjusting our new IKEA furniture, making
coffee, playing catch and noodling around on state of the art Macs while we waited for the work that never came, and then
left early for the day.
When I first discovered the speech feature of a Mac computer (certainly by accident),
a light bulb went off in my head immediately, and a treasure trove of potential comedy ideas came rushing at me so fast I
could barely stand up. You can just type something and the machine will speak it? How wonderfully irresponsible! Doesn’t
Apple realize that people are going to make their computers start speaking like longshoremen? Is this awesome to anybody
else but me?
The computer’s “voice” (labeled as “Bruce: High Quality” in the menu)
had such an appealing quality to it. There was a certain well-meaning, naive doltishness to the Bruce voice/character that
I immediately felt like I was his friend and protector. Yet, like a churlish older brother, I began forcing him to say an
array of idiotic, often crude things. The equivalent of grabbing his hand and making him hit himself. Whether it was an insult,
the foulest blue streak of cuss words ever strung together, a bizarre non sequitur, the words to a Styx song or the most simple
and innocent declaration of love, everything that came out of Bruce High Quality’s mouth was hilarious, in a moronic,
deadpan way. I found this feature especially effective for making prank phone calls, or, better yet, leaving messages on people’s
answering machines. It really was a comedy milestone for me. (Thanks, Apple.) But, as I say, there was literally no work for
us to do, and you can only hit ‘refresh’ on your inbox so many times.
Years ago, I had seen Albert
Brooks on The Tonight Show, performing a ventriloquist routine with a Speak-and-Spell, a child’s toy that says each
individual letter of the alphabet with the push of a corresponding button. He’d ask the Speak-and-Spell (tricked out
with some arms and legs from a Mr. Potato Head set, so it looked like a halfhearted doll) some questions and it would give
its answers. “S” for “Yes”, or “O” “K” for “okay” “L”
for “Al” (how the machine referred to Albert), etc. I don’t remember all of the jokes, other than Albert
asking the toy what he had gotten from his girlfriend, and the Speak-and-Spell said “V.D.” I felt in my own way
that forcing an innocent computer to say imbecilic things was perhaps a humble descendant of this routine by my comedy hero
Albert Brooks.
I soon discovered that the computer couldn’t pronounce everything correctly, so the use of
clever phonetic spelling was sometimes required. Also, in my most far-reaching moments, I would phonetically type long passages
for the computer to read, in what amounted to the most bizarre, third-rate English cockney accent I’ve ever heard. It
was actually better than Dick Van Dyke’s attempt at one in “Mary Poppins” however. I was convinced that
I was pushing this feature to its limits and forging a new form of comedy.
Years later, when MySpace first appeared
on the Internet and offered artists an opportunity to upload songs for others to listen to or download, I added a rotating
assortment of previously released songs, home demos, weird little sketches of songs or unlistenable GarageBand experiments.
I don’t remember how or when or why I thought of the idea of doing a miniature broadcast within the tiny confines of
the MySpace audio player, but it sounded like a fun way to present material from my deep archive of home recordings. And why
I decided to have a co-host consisting of the Apple Speech feature, I don’t know, but it seemed somewhat inspired. Thus
was born Cyber-Carl, my SpaceCast partner.
You’ll hear in the initial episode that I threaten to play some
home demos at some point. It was obvious almost immediately that that was never going to happen, partly based on the size
constraints of the MySpace player, and partly because of Cyber-Carl’s unhurried delivery.
I did four episodes
of SpaceCast altogether, and they were tremendous, though labor-intensive fun for me. For some reason, I thought they might
become an Internet sensation and lead to sudden popularity or even (my real hope) paying work as a writer of comedy for robots.
But none of that has happened yet. Instead, these programs sit in the pile of all my other lovingly handcrafted, shockingly
original comedy projects that are just not suitable for mass consumption, for whatever reasons.
Presented here
for the first time, are all four episodes of SpaceCast, in their original, uncut form (again, MySpace had such severe constraints
on its uploads that I had to cut all these episodes in half and install them in two parts), available for download. I really
think there’s some funny stuff on here; maybe some of you will, too. Enjoy! (Especially you people who hire up-and-coming
comedy writers who work mainly in the field of robots.)
Dag Juhlin
dagjj62@yahoo.com
Your guide
to SpaceCast:
Episode One: Getting to know Cyber Carl; Carl does an engaging assortment of celebrity impressions.
Episode Two: It’s ‘man versus machine’ as Carl gets somewhat uppity and warns of a forthcoming uprising
in his fierce, pointed new rap single, “Robot Revolution”.
Episode Three: Cyber Carl has become a bona
fide Internet sensation, and this has lead to a series of freelance voiceover gigs for him. He plays us his demo reel, which
features a totally awesome commercial.
Episode Four: Carl has written a one-robot play about the life of Mark Twain
called “Riverboat, Riverboat” and performed it at a local pre-school. We hear a long passage of a scene involving
cigars made out of manure, mid-day drinking and a possible floating corpse sighting.
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