Wok With Marshall was the first episode of The Marshall and Buck Show, which was - to my knowledge anyway - the internet's first puppet web series. The series was built around two characters I originally created for my Bear Town project, Marshall and Buck. Each episode featured Marshall and Buck engaging in some kind of activity like cooking, acting, or putting on a magic show that would go horribly awry. Four episodes of the show were sporadically produced between 1997 and 2000, starting with Wok With Marshall which was shot in 1997, but didn't premiere online until March 10, 2000.

Unfortunately, because I don't own any of the master tapes from the series it hasn't been available online for a long time, but I did recently find a high quality dub of Wok With Marshall so I thought I would share it here. It's a little rough, but keep in mind that we did make it over ten years ago.

The puppeteers in the video are the brilliant Shawn Hazelton (Marshall), myself (Buck) and Kim Mahony and Pauline Antonopoulos, who performed the Happy Meal puppets and Betsy, Marshall and Buck's cow. The video was directed by Brenda Tan, who's also credited as the writer although I seem to remember that half of this was ad-libbed on set.

Labels: video vault

Here's some more blast-from-the past video...The World's Angriest Puppets (TWAP!) began as an attempt to film a Bear Town TV pilot as a special year-end project when I was studying Radio/Television broadcasting in college. As I think I've explained here before, myself and the classmates who worked on this grossly underestimated the amount of time and resources that were required to pull off such an ambitious project. When we realized that we weren't going to finish the video in time to get a grade and pass the course I panicked and decided to take most of the footage we had shot along with shots from other puppet videos I had been working on and randomly splice it all together to make an "experimental film".

I completely cop to the fact I was just desperate to pass my course with this, but I do remember being heavily influenced by Jim Henson's Timepiece at the time and I tried to give the video a similar sort of stream-of-consciousness feel. The name "The World's Angriest Puppets" was a random one that I think just adds to the (somewhat intentional) unevenness of "TWAP". I look back at this video now as kind of failed experiment. It may not make a lot sense when you see it here, but it was the beginnings of Bear Town.

One problem with this video is that it has some uncleared music in it. I've always wanted to include this as an extra on a Bear Town DVD eventually, but that would require going back and editing out the uncleared material. There's also a couple sections in this that drag a bit so I think it might be fun to pull a George Lucas and go back and make a few changes. Nothing major, just tighten up some of the editing, redo the titles and reframe a couple shots where the puppeteers' heads show.

Until then, enjoy The World's Angriest Puppets original and uncut.

Labels: video vault

I was going through an old hard drive I store a lot of Bear Town-related material on and came across these outtakes from the first two episodes of the 2004 web series. Most of the funny in this is courtesy of Hank, performed by the very talented (and funny!) Chris Grom.

Labels: outtakes, video vault