Calvin's Time Capsule

I saw this image at one of my fav sites -this isn't happiness - and it instantly took me back to a time when I was a teen and me and my friends would make our own radio programs. It was a cross between a morning zoo crew and 'SNL'. We would play jokes, do bits and commentary between the playing of the most popular 45s of the day and sprinkle it with stuff off comedy records (Cheech and Chong, Bill Cosby and Steve Martin were very popular) and clips from popular comedy shows on TV like SNL, Happy Days and M.A.S.H. We never sought permission to use any of that copyrighted material since we were just entertaining ourselves and didn't know we had to.

I need to check in my tickle trunk to see if I still have any of the old shows. They were about an hour in length but took us about 3 hrs to produce using my dad's reel to reel player and a cheap mixing board and mic from Radio Shack. We would record stuff all week and then do our 'show' on the weekend after getting some good audio off 'Monty Python's Flying Circus', The 'Midnight Special' and 'SNL'. During the week we would play it for kids in the lunch classroom. We were proud of the fact that we were selective about what we thought was funny and never did the same joke or played the same hit song twice. Quality control, especially in our fake commercials and sound effects was taken very seriously. Even our bloopers reel at the end had to be 'gag worthy'.

I remember we had a local TV station on the base that had a black and white camera that would just go back and forth across a bulletin board. People would put up messages advertising events or things to sell. Eventually someone got the bright idea to add a clock and the audio from records to liven up this cheap ass operation. Twice we got asked (okay we used our connections and BEGGED) for our show to be 'aired' and so impressed the guy in charge with the quality of our work. This was only because no one called the 'station' to complain.

Thinking back now I could have been a big thing in the entertainment business if I had pursued it. But this blog is in its own way kinda the same thing I was doing back then - sharing the stuff I thought was interesting or cool or funny. As cool as my blog is right now (so where are all my awards people - there HAS to be placed to nominate people for those out there somewhere), I wonder how cool it COULD be with a whole team of like minded comedy geniuses like I worked with back then. So Randy and Jeff and Doug and Danny, this ones for you.