Live on Tape (Show #29)
“THE ARNIE ZONE”
Airdate: February 27th, 1988
(23:55)
SYNOPSIS - Arnie unlocks his mind to a world of imagination, only to experience his darkest fears, forever lost in... the Arnie Zone!
“I told you to stop it with the prancy, prancy business! Now what’s this with your voice? You sound like you’ve been sucking sponges!”
- Hermann Peterfelt, Uncle Joey’s director
SKITS AND BITS
•The Patent Office - This is where a wary inventor gets a sound understanding of the current patent laws.
•Between the Lines - Guy and Arnie cover amazing stories like Dan Rather visiting potato farmers, Pee Wee Herman turning down a bid for public office and Pavoratti’s Asian love-child. Talk about NEWS!
•Dangerman #1 - He’s amazing he’s astounding, he’s even won the Mallo-Cup Medal of Courage Award! This time he’s going to smite his most dangerous foe... the public restroom! Watch out for the sink, it’s sticky.
•Arnie’s Grip of the Week #7 - Ooo, he’s really steamed about those electronic scanners in the grocery store that fail to read the bar-codes! Fortunately he doesn’t get to grip very much since Guy is about to take Arnie to a better place. (Insert dramatic music here)
•Office Chair Ballet - The corporate offices of Schwab and Honebinder deliver an amazing performance directly from their chairs! Watch out for rug burns.
•Uncle Joey #5 (Nosey’s Trip to the Clinic) - Joey has to battle with his effeminate, yet forceful director who’s out to change Joey’s image. Once Joey regains control of the show he shares an insightful little tale of Nosey’s trip to the clinic. Snip! Snip!
•Dangerman #2 - He’s back and more dangerous than ever. The man of Danger mocks the fates as he pushes a microwave oven to its limits!
NOTES AND “LIVE ON TAPE” FACTS
- This episode, while being fairly disjointed, is pretty solid. Most of the skits work on some level (but run a bit long-- oh, there’s a surprise).
- When I was producing (editing) the patent office film for the Patent Office skit I was in a bind. It was late at night and the only other folks at the station were a couple of the guys in master control. It didn’t take much coaxing to get Craig and John into the spirit of things and have them make silly sounds for me.
- I really like the core storyline to this show of Arnie falling into the twilight zone. I think it all worked pretty well, especially the initial Guy confusing Arnie at the newsdesk stuff. If you look closely at Guy when he’s popping back and forth you can see his version of a Buster Keaton impression (my brother’s the one who pointed this out). I am still amazed at how well the Rod Serling impression came across... it’s kind of scary.
- Unfortunately this show is not complete. There was another segment with Arnie in the “Zone” that I didn’t have time to put in the show. There was a closing segment with a tiny Arnie running around on the newsdesk, trying to avoid getting smashed by Guy. In the end Guy mistakes Arnie for a bug and smashes him flat. The reason the scene was cut was I didn’t have enough room (time) in the show. I chose to use the second Dangerman segment instead--- eh, flip a coin I guess. I would have liked to see the Arnie-zone stuff completed.
At the time I was editing each episode onto one master tape that would then go directly to air, this was in order to save generations and loss of quality. It wasn’t until later, when I had one of the machines at the station eat my air tape just before air, that I started editing the show’s segments onto edit reels. This gave me a much better feel for the timing of the show and allowed me to cut and choose skits more carefully.
- Office Chair Ballet was quite an achievement really. The skit may not be the greatest, but it is definitely a success. The idea for the skit came from my on-again, off-again girlfriend Jennifer Hanson. We were both in an independent film called “The Yuppie”. During one of the shoots in an office building, she and some of the other actors got to messing around with the rolling office chairs and she came up with the idea of “chair dancing”. And so I worked it into a skit for the show. Now the amazing part of this piece is that I had to edit it shot for shot BACKWARDS in order to get the dancing to time out at the end with the music. I had no idea how it was going to turn out until I was finished... (it was an all night edit job.) When we taped the chair ballet there was no music for the performers to dance to, I just counted out a beat and hoped that it would all work. Fortunately it did. You will notice, however that a couple of the performers seem less than enthused to be part of this ballet- maybe real music during the shooting would have helped.
- This Uncle Joey is an all-time favorite of most fans of the show. John Horvath, who performed Nosey never read his scripts prior to taping. The first time we went through this he was shocked to discover that Nosey got neutered. John was not happy to find out that Nosey was now an “it”. The intro stuff with the director runs too long, but Don did a fabulous job--- almost too fabulous.
- This was Don Abbott’s fourth show. He was doing great and was now a player in the cast. The one thing that happened with Don throughout the remaining run of Live on Tape was that he became worse and worse at reading a teleprompter. I don’t know why, he sort of began to regress as the shows went on, but he did develop his own style of misreading that became part of his performance-- and it plays out nicely in the final episode (#56) of the series.
CREDITS
Costumes Provided By: Circa ‘21 and the Show Business
Producer - Thomas Hart
Directors - Greg Baldwin, Thomas Hart
Writer - Thomas Hart
Chair Ballet concept by - Jennifer Hanson
PLAYERS
Don Abbott
John Bain
Greg Crook
Monica Fisher
Tina Fredrickson
Jennifer Hanson
Thomas Hart
John Horvath
Mark McLaughlin
Craig Mills
Merlin Nelson Jr.
Don White
Video-Tape Editor - Thomas Hart
Studio Camera Operators - Abdul Raheim, Kori Skinner
Audio - Steve Elliott
Prompter - Don Abbott, Sue Passe
“Don’t get up! I haven’t excused you yet!”
©Copyright 1988, 2006 Thomas Hart
OUT TAKE #10 (from Office Chair Ballet)
Jennifer is pulled away from her desk by an off screen Don White. The chair doesn’t roll right and she falls over laughing. That’s comedy!