Live on Tape (Show #31)
“ARNIE TREK: ARNIE’S BRAIN PT. 1”
Airdate: April 9th 1988
(23:27)
SYNOPSIS – When Guy attempts to read the evening news, he is interrupted by a frantic Arnie who has an “emergency” grip of the week. Arnie announce that he has figured out a solution to rid himself of all the garbage that his neighbors have been piling in his yard… he’ll raffle it off by selling lottery tickets! And call the whole thing Lotto Garbage. Unfortunately, he financed the whole thing with Guy Newswarthy’s money. Guy panics, but before Arnie can give him all the details, the studio goes dark! During the blackout, Arnie’s brain is stolen by two mysterious individuals. When the lights come back on, Arnie is confused, as usual. Dr. Leonard McWelby shows up and assess the situation, “We have to get that brain back!” So, the cast takes off aboard the USS Arnieprise in search of Arnie’s brain.
“Captain! We can’t take much more of this! The matter, matter, anti-matter, matter pods are overloading! The dylithium crystals are degeneratin’! The transporter will take at least two weeks to fix in spacedock! Captain! We just can’t do it!”
- Scotty, giving a “thumbs up” report to the captain on the state of things.
“LIVE ON TAPE FIRSTS – First show to use our “new and improved” outer space effects… chroma-key… and it don’t get any better than that in TV! This was also the first appearance of Bowdy Lowdermilk, our token character who was supposedly from Kewanee!
SKITS AND BITS
•The co-dependant café – Where love meets and jealousy beats any innocent bystander to a bloody pulp.
•Between the Lines – Guy barely gets to report on the Surgeon General’s testing of new safe-sex clothes before he’s interrupted by Arnie.
•Arnie’s Gripe of the Week #8 – special “emergency” gripe to announce Arnie’s new Lotto Garbage.
•Finals of the 2nd Annual Portuguese Turtle Toss – Lord Hasting Smythe III, Roki Yokotura, and Bowdy Loudermilk compete in this aerial amphibian event… hope you’re hungry.
•Lotto Garbage Commercial #1 – Arnie takes us back to a time where sword, sorcery, and slop were worth a king’s ransom. Watch where you step.
•The Fascinating World of People #4 (Swedish Surfers’ School of Driving) – You thought they were gone, but no! Fjord and Johan have returned to show us all how to handle ourselves on the roads while scoping the fabulous babes with the “large egg omelets!”--- oh God, forgive me for this fresh Hell that I wrought.
NOTES AND “LIVE ON TAPE” FACTS
- Finally! Live on Tape has really come together (man, I say this about every 3rd episode). After a slump, and several spotty episodes, this show is where it works really well. A couple of the skits run long (like The Swedish Surfers) but the rest of it works. From here on out Live on Tape had achieved it’s identity… or at least most of it.
- The thing that BUGS me every time I see this episode--- and the pt. 2 that follows-- is WHY did I NOT do a William Shatner impression?! I mean, hey, we’re spoofing Star Trek--- it’s so obvious, how could I have NOT done it! Ugh—it never dawned on me until after the fact. It’s stuff like this that drives me crazy--- and makes me a lousy captain.
- The Co-Dependent Café skit ended up being a bit of a disappointment. On paper it worked really nicely, I was proud of it as a skit. Unfortunately there was never any time for rehearsal--- just “here’s the script, let’s shoot!”—and so the performances suffer. There’s also audio problems… I think we did this in two takes… besides there’s only so much soup in the pants and pie in the face a person can take.
- I was really pleased with the spaceship effects in this show, even as cheesy as they are. Since I was extremely limited by the production equipment—this was before non-linear editing. KLJB’s editing systems at the time weren’t even computerized, so it was all done by hand and hoping it all worked out. I was constantly trying new things to see what I could get out of the equipment. While the stuff is really cheesy, I was able to really push the limits of what I had available to me--- and it was getting better all the time. I began to get asked by the engineers and the other production people how I achieved a lot of the effects. I was even asked to help out with a commercial shoot at the station and show one of the commercial producers how I did my explosion effect. A commercial client specifically asked to have an explosion like that in their commercial--- they’d seen it on the show and wanted the same thing in their spot (The exploding pancakes effect from show #17). So I stepped in a helped. The client was very happy with the results, and so was the station’s salesperson, so much so that after the shoot she gave me a thank-you note and a six-pack of Rolling Rock beer. Yeah!
- The Lotto Garbage spot came out great. It was a spoof on an Iowa State Lottery commercial with a knight in a fantasy world The knight cut open a tree stump and out poured gold and jewels… we used garbage for ours.
- Yes, the Swedish Surfers make another appearance. John Horvath was none-too-pleased either--- he hated those characters, but otherwise John liked the show. Personally, I always liked Fjord and Johan--- what’s not to like? C’mon!
- If you look carefully at the credits for this show, John is listed as “Janos” Horvath. Janos is Hungarian for “John” and John’s Hungarian… his actual name is Janos—I had just learned this. He just goes by “John” because it’s easier. From here on out, he appears as “Janos” in all the credits.
- For some unexplained reason, I have Brandon Lovested (Dr. Alan Chadwick, Gareth Van Oester, Gus Bimmel) listed in the credits… he appears nowhere within this episode… I musta’ been drunk on Rolling Rock when I typed in the credits.
CREDITS
Costumes Provided By: Circa ‘21 and the Show Business
Thanks to:
Bowlmor Lanes
2952 Brady St.
Davenport, IA
Producer - Thomas Hart
Directors – Denise Hollmer, Thomas Hart
Writer - Thomas Hart
Friday the 13th Parts 87 & 93 written by: James Seward
PLAYERS
Don Abbott
Greg Baldwin
Jim Cox
Greg Crook
Scot Hawotte
Jennifer Hanson
Thomas Hart
Janos Horvath
Scott Hoyt
Brandon Lovested
Merlin Nelson Jr.
Video-Tape Editor – Thomas Hart
Studio Camera Operators – Steve Elliott, Abdul Raheim, Kori Skinner
Audio – Don Bargmann Jr.
Prompter – Jeff “Swanee” Swanson
Arniprise Effects by: ACCIDENT! Believe me, it was a complete and total accident that those effects were ever finished…
©Copyright 1988, 2006 Thomas Hart
OUT TAKE #12
E.J., with Spock ears on, shakes his head back and forth very quickly while making a high-pitched blabber sound…