The Brain From Planet Anus
When I was an undergrad at the State University of New York, New Paltz, I was a proud member of an audio theater troupe called The Magnificent Glass Pelican. Started in 1991, the Pelican still broadcasts a show every Wednesday night from 7:30 to 8:00 p.m. (EST) on WFNP 88.5 FM college radio.
The Pelican mainly does sketch comedy (ranging from neo-realistic and semi-autobiographical to satirical and extremely surrealistic), and has long been produced and performed by an an ever-shifting group of talented actors, writers and musicians. However, a few founding members who still live in New Paltz have been doing the show for upwards of 20 years now.
During my era (the early-mid 90s), we mainly performed live, on the air, every week from the campus radio station. We would generally write our scripts, either individually or in small groups, the night before or the day of the show. At the studio, writers would assign roles to actors, then we would sit around a table and read each script through once for rehearsal before acting it out over the airwaves.
I now possess only one old cassette tape with some of the Pelican pieces I wrote. I finally decided to digitize it, so here is one of those skits (probably circa 1993). While this really has nothing to do with animals (aside from the Pelican in the group's name), I hope you'll find it somewhat amusing anyway. The sound quality and production values are pretty lo-fi, but that actually seems to add some semblance of crackly authenticity to this parody of 1950s-era sci-fi B-movie trailers.
Listen to "The Brain From Planet Anus" (length: 3 minutes, 27 seconds)
Read along with script (helps given low audio quality and high language density)
Acting Credits:
- Announcer: John Burdick
- Heinz Fetish / Dr. Wilhelm R. Zeitgeist: James Mayer
- Moxie: Liz Burdick
- Psychiatrist: Mark Aldrich
- Eddie Pike and "The Brain": Yours Truly
The Pelican mainly does sketch comedy (ranging from neo-realistic and semi-autobiographical to satirical and extremely surrealistic), and has long been produced and performed by an an ever-shifting group of talented actors, writers and musicians. However, a few founding members who still live in New Paltz have been doing the show for upwards of 20 years now.
During my era (the early-mid 90s), we mainly performed live, on the air, every week from the campus radio station. We would generally write our scripts, either individually or in small groups, the night before or the day of the show. At the studio, writers would assign roles to actors, then we would sit around a table and read each script through once for rehearsal before acting it out over the airwaves.
I now possess only one old cassette tape with some of the Pelican pieces I wrote. I finally decided to digitize it, so here is one of those skits (probably circa 1993). While this really has nothing to do with animals (aside from the Pelican in the group's name), I hope you'll find it somewhat amusing anyway. The sound quality and production values are pretty lo-fi, but that actually seems to add some semblance of crackly authenticity to this parody of 1950s-era sci-fi B-movie trailers.
Listen to "The Brain From Planet Anus" (length: 3 minutes, 27 seconds)
Read along with script (helps given low audio quality and high language density)
Acting Credits:
- Announcer: John Burdick
- Heinz Fetish / Dr. Wilhelm R. Zeitgeist: James Mayer
- Moxie: Liz Burdick
- Psychiatrist: Mark Aldrich
- Eddie Pike and "The Brain": Yours Truly