Well, history has been made. And I'm exhausted.I don't think I've ever put as much effort into a single project. The day after CageMatch 50, I just collapsed and did jack diddly for the entire day. But on to the report!
On Saturday, February 9th, we had our FIFTIETH CageMatch show. The show started on April 1, 2006 when Scott Jennings invited me to join him as cohost of a show that would pit two comedy teams against each other in a wrestling-themed event. In the early days we (somehow) managed to do a show every week, but that got ramped down to every other week eventually. Now, more than two years later, CageMatch hit the fiftieth episode milestone. Scott's moved on now to huge new projects, but I have to thank him for letting me join his show and eventually produce the program, as well as making it so much fun for me to be a part of. When he created his perverted, disgusting character, he said he needed a perverted name, and asked if he could use "Hobgood". The rest is history.
And speaking of history, you can check out a fun little video I made to open the CageMatch Fiftieth Show Extravaganza right here. It features a look back at the people and events of CageMatch from the early days to the present, and is fun to see all put together like that. The promo video for the show proper is here. On Saturday, I had a huge 24"x36" poster in the lobby to add a bit of special flavour to the event. You can see a thumbnail of it above, or check out the whole thing here. When I arrived at the theater, there was a fabulous huge sign/sculpture/display made from wood and chainlink fencing on an easel on the loading dock. We had quite a time accusing this person and that person of making it--turns out my mom had made it for me and secretly set it up earlier that day! That was a fabulous surprise.
Anyway, the show went great. We had a sellout crowd, and even had to set up extra seating to accommodate folks. Bill Henderson started the show as CageMatch President Jack Tunney, reading a very short proclamation that he still managed to stretch out into a complete drama. After the videos played, I got a very nice reaction when I mounted the stage. Then Remi Treuer as Evil Billionaire Troy Sterling came out to a nice chorus of boos. One of the highlights of the night was the debut of Mrs. Troy Sterling as portrayed by Callie Peck. God, she was fabulous. She really worked hard to put together an amazing costume and makeup, and had the over-mothering henpecky Jewish wife character down pat. She was just fantastic. I'll have to do a supplementary post with pictures of her and Troy.
The show proper was pretty amazing. Panthro brought it as only they can, coming down to the stage with a twenty-person choir to back them up for their opening number. Flavor Shot came right back and put on an amazingly hot professional show of mp3-inspired comedy. At the end of the show I got to break character and thank a lot of people, including Siegel-Prov for being such a fun team to work with (Dan Siegel was in attendance, which was cool), and Ralph "I'm Jon's Father" Karpinos (who was also there) for pushing me to do improv in the first place. Then we traipsed off to Zog's to hang out, which I thought was really cool, as that's the bar we used to hang out in in the old days, and it just has such a nicer atmosphere than Milltown or Speakeasy.
So that was fun...fifty shows. I'm quite proud of the fact that we gave eighty-one different people an opportunity to perform on stage, and hosted forty-three different teams. And that doesn't count the special show we did for DSIF7, or the 3x3 Tournament, or the Dual Duel, or the completely fictional world tour. We'll be back with a show on February 27 after DSIF8, and then I'm going to take a break for a month or so to work on a couple of other projects, like the trailer for Rape Stove, the Lego animation Le Batman, and a music video for Jackson's "Cigarettes On The Ground". Stay tuned for more fun.
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By the way, I have no idea what "The Milestone of Evolution" is supposed to mean. I was just typing random stuff onto the poster as I was testing fonts, and for some reason that phrase really amused me with its pretentiousness, so I kept it.
Oh, and some people asked me if they could get a copy of the poster. I'm going to have some more printed at the end of the week. If you want one, just let me know. They're $40 from Zazzle. (Or you can order your own from them, just use the biggest poster image from the link above.)
PPS: More details about creation of the videos are available on my other blog, which documents the creative stuff I've done in 2008, A Wretched Hive.
This was the greatest night of our lives sir.
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