It’s hard to say exactly when Dead Air Time hit its stride. I think it’s safe to say that it was about the time the explosions started. There’s a saying in the movie industry that goes “B.S.U.”. One of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay’s fallbacks, it stands for “Blow Shit Up”. In other words, when you ain’t sure where the story’s going, a heaping helping of pyrotechnics will kick things back on track. Consider it the cinematic equivalent of Raymond Chandler’s man with a gun coming into the room. If I’d have heard that saying back then, it probably would have become our watchword, because we had the principle down pat.
First came the traffic reports. Sometime during the first show, Pete said out of the blue, “And now it’s time for our traffic report.” I was sitting in the engineer’s booth, across from him. He looked at me expectantly through the glass. I did the only thing I could do.
I started beating my hands on the counter.
“So, how’s the traffic look out there, Chopper Bob?” Pete asked, grinning like a madman. Actually, when he grinned, he always grinned like a madman. As I’ve said before, it made him look something like an escaped mental patient.
Still thumping my hands on the counter, I called out in my best loud-and-annoying traffic reporter voice, “Well, it looks like traffic’s backed up for miles on Hillman Highway. As I round the hill, there’s a car blocking the road by Carriger.”
As you can gather, a small college doesn’t produce a lot of traffic.
Of course, you can’t have a traffic report with a happy ending. That’s written somewhere. I don’t know where, but it’s bloody well written somewhere. So naturally, a student had a surface-to-air missile in the trunk of his car, and Chopper Bob bit the big one. Those were times when people were less sensitive about terrorism, so we could do things like that.
The next week, we decided to have sound effects for the traffic report. I believe he was named Chopper Chip, but it doesn’t matter since he too shuffled off to that big traffic reporter’s lounge in the sky. In preparing for the death of Chopper Chip, we struck comedy gold along the way.
Since I was the only one among us who knew how to program a VCR or how to operate a pay toilet without electrocuting myself, I’d become Dead Air Time’s more-or-less official sound technician. Back then I’d mix our sound effects on my computer, then record them to cassette to play back at the station. This meant that the tape had to be precisely cued up and paused and unpaused at just the right times.
Remember, folks, this was 1997. None of us could afford a laptop with a sound card, and even a CD burner was out of the question. I wish I had half the gear I do now back in the Dead Air Time days. I’d have given my left kidney or one other body part to be named later for an MP3 player (which no one had ever heard of back then). Even the radio station didn’t have a computer in the booth.
The most important sound effect we created came to be known as Patented Death. It was an awful Sam Kinnison scream mixed with an explosion. It was wonderfully cheesy. It was originally intended as the sound of our traffic reporters dying. Eventually, it became our audio shorthand for anybody dying. It reminds me of Power Rangers; whenever one of the monsters dies, it always just sort of falls over, then explodes. On Dead Air Time, nobody just died; they always blew up.
Despite the technological shortcomings, the explosions continued from tape, augmented by a couple of sound effects CDs we picked up at the mall in Bristol. The third week, a character we wouldn’t forget ambled into our lives. It was Chopper Dan. Dead Air Time wouldn’t be the same.
Like all of the other traffic reporters, I did the voice for Chopper Dan. Chopper Dan was planned as a one-shot character like all of our traffic reporters. He was a fat redneck sort who constantly talked with his mouth full. Chopper Dan died when he tried to take the traffic helicopter through a drive-through to get pork barbecue.
Death can’t stop the likes of Chopper Dan, though. The next week, after our next traffic reporter (whose name I forget, but he wasn’t that memorable anyway) died, Chopper Dan called us on the phone from the Great Beyond. He was incensed that we’d replaced him, you see.
I’m not sure what made me decide to do that. Maybe it was just another way of milking Chopper Dan’s redneckness for more laughs. Maybe it was because we could make jokes about him hanging out with Elvis in the Great Beyond. Or maybe it was just that damn gravelly voice that tore my throat up every time I did it.
It wouldn’t be the last time we heard from Chopper Dan, of course. As much as I hate to admit it, the character grew on me, even though I suspect the rest of the crew got annoyed with him/me/it. At first, Chopper Dan only called to comment on our constantly expiring chain of traffic reporters. Eventually he started to call from the Great Beyond just to harass us, making fun of Phil for being a Yankee or of Pete because his forehead was growing.
Chopper Dan even somehow came back to life, because he was flying around in our traffic helicopter again, and actually died a couple more times. He didn’t actually do our traffic reports, though. We had others willing to put their lives on the line for that. Naturally, none of them survived.
Chopper Dan, however, keeps returning from the grave. When doing some of the character art for Chainsaw Buffet, I ended up using his likeness as the basis for the Busboy. Or maybe it’s the Dishwasher or something. We haven’t decided yet.
Anyway, back to the Dead Air Time days of yore. Back then, we experimented with what we had. It was a lot of sound effects, voices, and just generally spontaneous weirdness. Somewhere along the way, we picked up sound effects of several car crashes. Thus was born another of Pete’s brainchildren: The International Jeep-Flipping Championships.
One thing to realize about Pete is that he’s a very creative person. I’m not sure he sees the world in quite the same way as other folks. The Jeep-Flipping Championships descended from Pete’s car, a Geo Tracker that his friends referred to as a “cheap flipping Jeep-like vehicle”. Note that this is much funnier when said in your worst “Hi, I’m an Arab terrorist!” accent.
At its heart, the Jeep-Flipping Championship skit wasn’t much more than an excuse to string as many engine, explosion and car crash sounds together as possible. It was really a great skit, but it’s one of those that is much funnier hearing than being described.
But needless to say, our philosophy went something like, “The more explosions, the better�. It would come in handy when it came time to deal with Kolocutus.
The Chef was born 856 years ago on a small planet orbiting a star in the Argolis cluster. It was prophesied that the arrival of a child with a birthmark shaped like a tentacle would herald the planet's destruction. When the future Chef was born with just such a birthmark, panic ensued (this would not be the last time the Chef inspired such emotion). The child, tentacle and all, was loaded into a rocket-powered garbage scow and launched into space. Unfortunately, the rocket's exhaust ignited one of the spectators' flatulence, resulting in a massive explosion that detonated the planet's core, destroying the world and killing everyone on it.
When the would-be Chef awoke from his torpor, he looked around at the new world he found himself on. His first words were, “Hey, this place sucks." Disguising himself as one of the planet's dominant species of semi-domesticated ape, the being who would become known as the Chef wandered the Earth until he ended up in its most disreputable slum - Paris, France.
Taking a job as a can-can dancer, the young Chef made a living that way until one day one of the cooks at a local bistro fell ill with food poisoning (oh, bitter irony). In a desperate move, the bistro's owner rushed into one of the local dance halls, searching for a replacement. He grabbed the ugliest can-can dancer he could find, and found himself instead with an enterprising (if strange) young man who now decided, based on this random encounter, to only answer to the name “Chef".
His success as a French chef was immediate (but considering that this is a country where frogs and snails are considered delicacies, this may or may not be a significant achievement). Not only was the Chef's food delicious, it also kept down the local homeless population. He rose to the heights of stardom in French cuisine, and started a holy war against the United Kingdom to end the reign of terror British food had inflicted on its citizens.
When the Crimean War broke out around France, the Chef assisted Nikola Tesla and Galileo in perfecting the scanning electron microscope, which was crucial in driving back the oncoming Communist hordes. It would later be said that without the Chef, the war would have been lost. He was personally awarded a Purple Heart by the King of France.
After that, the Chef traveled to America, home of such dubious culinary delights as McDonald's Quarter Pounder With Cheese. He immediately adopted the Third World nation as his new home, seeing it as his job to protect and enlighten it. When the Vietnam War began, he immediately volunteered and served in the Army of the Potomac under Robert E. Lee and General Patton. During the war, the Chef killed dozens of Nazis, most of them with his bare hands.
Marching home from war across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, stark-naked and freezing, the Chef wound up on the shores of Mexico. He spent several years there, drinking tequila with Pancho Villa and James Dean. He put his culinary skills to the test when he invented the 5,000-calorie Breakfast Chili Burrito With Orange Sauce (which is today still a favorite in some parts of Sonora).
Eventually, the Chef returned to his adopted home of America, where he met a slimy, well-coiffed weasel who was starting up a new kind of buffet - one dedicated to providing the highest-quality unmentionable appetizers to the online community. The Chef dedicated himself to spreading the word of his famous Lard Sandwich (two large patties of fried lard, in between two slices of toasted buttered lard, with bacon and cheese), as well as occasionally writing about his opinions on less-important topics than food.
Every word of this is true, if only in the sense that every word of this exists in the English language.
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