It was interesting. The biggest problem was the audio levels. The new riffs were considerably louder than the old riffs, which were louder than the movie. Turning it up loud enough to hear the movie dialogue meant the new riffs were
really loud.
I'm hoping they can fix it and upload the whole thing in some persistent form later.
There was also an aftershow on Facebook. Per my "what's the deal with GPC?" question: that's what she's called now. Some people pointed out to Joel that Romani consider "gypsy" to be an ethnic slur, so he changed her name. The new, smaller puppet is so they can do more with her; she riffed the movie alongside Tom, Crow, and Emily this time, and maybe we can expect to see her in the theater regularly when/if the show comes back.
I also worked out that the reason they chose to riff over an existing episode must be movie rights -- they could riff over an episode they already had streaming rights to, on short notice; no need to get the rights to stream and riff some other movie (or other version of one of the movies they've already done). They could have gone with something in the public domain, but that would still mean finding a movie and vetting it for quality and content (and maybe cutting it for runtime). The short was clearly PD, but there's a difference between preparing a short (and a very short short at that) and a feature.
Emily, Conor, Nate, and Yvonne did a fine job. It's hard to get a sense of them as performers under these circumstances, but I'd be interested in watching them again if they decide to do more of these.
I'm not so hot that they've introduced
another Pearl Forrester clone, having heard Mary Jo Pehl express her discomfort with the idea on
Bill Corbett's podcast.
