Walter Reflects!

Walter Reflects
on Lancelot Airways


	Good morning, party people, get your groove on... This skit is really special to me for a number of reasons, I had started..I think I actually wrote the beginning of this skit a long long time ago, and then kind of forgot about it. And I don't know if I had even liked the skit, earlier...I kind of needed a second opinion, someone to push me along. And that's sort of a problem that I have, with writing skits actually, and that's that I often write the beginnings of skits, but I can't really complete them without another person helping me out...so in this case it was, well obviously Mopitus Adjessant pushing me along, and also Mr. W. Upton Downs came over one day, and we just stumbled upon this, and happened to put the end of it together. So we sort of co-wrote it...and co-acted, as well. The idea of this skit was just to go over the safety procedures and what to do after you've landed...from putting on the life jacket...riding on the life raft, and standard safety information videos never seem to go beyond that point, well I wanted to go beyond that and say, you know, "this is how to make a shelter, and this is how to look for land, and make a spyglass out of someone's glasses, and start a fire from, you know, seaweed and birchbark or something." But when I started writing this skit, I had kind of an Adjessant-style about me, and just in writing the intro part, I had so many more ideas that had come to me, that the intro part seemed to get longer than the original script. So then at that point I just left the script, and I abandoned it, this is what we scrounged up later. And Mopitus actually liked all of the material in the beginning of the skit -- even before the 'local tribe of cannibals' -- so in sort of keeping this long intro, Mr. Downs and I decided that we should have sort of a preface to the safety information video and have the captain come on... All of the inflight sounds were taken from in a flight. There have been portions of my life where I've carried around a mini-disc player and a microphone with me essentially everywhere I went. So that happened to be one of those times..I was on a flight, coming back from Italy, and I was able to record one of those legendary beeps that comes on, and a little bit of the landing gear coming down, and the engines roaring. I think it was like a little prop plane I was on, maybe. 'Shattered engine parts' is one of my favorite lines. And then the captain speaking voice effect was actually over a cordless phone that has a special intercom mode. And this song, ahh, yes, I love this song. This is an idea I had when I was in the band Dr. Radical, and I kind of showed them the idea, just trying to play it on an organ. And they didn't really get it, and they were kind of like, "I suppose it's a good idea in context," you know, just humoring me, and I was kind of bummed about that. Because it's definitely a multi-instrument song I couldn't really sit down and play by myself. So then I went and worked on Fasttracker2, which is just a simple tracking program, making music. And I put it together really quickly, just with the cheesy instruments I had, and it really just...ahh, it tickles me pink the way it came out. I can't get enough. I really love this skit...this has a really special place in my heart. For a lot of reasons. One of which is just the magic of working with W. Upton Downs. His writing is amazing, his acting is truly magic. I just love the way he puts characters together, and the way ideas just sort of come out of him sometimes. And he's really unassuming, because he never says "oh, I've got this great idea," and he never really oversells anything. He just kind of does it the best he can. And it's just amazing. I think he gets tbob.net's MVP Award for this..uh..this trimester. Yeah. Both Mopy and I really like the line that Mr. Downs actually improv'd, I think: the "ahhh, goddam it," of the captain speaking and then the landing gear coming down. I think Mr. Downs both wrote and acted flawlessly for the line "so, where are you flying to today?" Which I still can't get enough of.