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Out of Print and Unavailable
BOTL Radio Seasons 1-3 (2005-’07)
This series was the main thing I was known for on early YouTube, and my main focus for a couple years – but it was ultimately pretty short-lived, and none of it really left a lasting effect on my work – as we all got older, we wanted to explore a lot of other themes and ways of making art that were really different from this project, and we didn’t want people to associate our work with this era anymore.
When I got rid of the old Band Of The Land Films YouTube channel in 2008, we had well over 100 videos on there, all of which were short films I had worked on as a writer, director, and editor, and many of which I also co-starred in – and most of them were from BOTL Radio, because that was our big thing for awhile! These were also the most-viewed, by far, because this series had some diehard fans.
BOTL Radio, short for Band Of The Land Radio, actually started out as a series of “behind the scenes” videos documenting the making of Road to Fame and whatever else we were up to at the time – but after a few episodes of this, we got really into the idea of mixing in many different segments and short films into each episode – and BOTL Radio quickly became a series of roughly 22 minute videos that we made every week, each episode being about 10 different short films put together in a particular sequence that told a whole story from start to finish.
Each of the short films also stood on its own, and many of them were part of their own series-within-a-series – some of the classics were Great Brain (a comedy series about an eccentric tyrant whose brain is a giant deflated exercise ball that lives on top of their head), Undercover Beth (a series where Beth from The Band Of The Land plays an undercover cop whose identity is hidden and revealed by an iconic pair of sunglasses), and Keeper (a series about a mysterious man who always appears as a silhouette surrounded by red tinted lamps and mostly speaks in code – he also appears in other segments that aren’t part of his show, which then serve to explain bits of what’s happening within his own show).
As part of the 2nd season of BOTL Radio, we made a new version of our sci-fi/horror project Road to Fame, along with a new series called Magic Markers that had a similar, darker feel to it – we struggled a lot with how to incorporate these more serious tones into BOTL Radio with how it had become something that was built around this specific, absurd style of comedy.
In the 3rd season, this became even more of a struggle, as we found ourselves less and less inspired to do anything truly funny, and more and more inspired to do something more serious – there were a few bits, like The All-American Wonder Bob and The Digestion Show, which we put days into writing, filming, and editing, before realizing these were just so terrible that we had to get rid of them entirely. We had a good run, but the 3rd season ended up being the final season of BOTL Radio, quickly giving way to two new projects that picked up right where it left off: BOTL Total and BOTL Lite.
One of the most interesting things we did in BOTL Radio was a recurring segment called The Vault – we made this segment by taking a lot of different clips from earlier, unfinished projects of ours and editing them in an often disturbing and trippy way with a variety of visual effects and experimental sound design.
The way this segment came up in each episode of BOTL Radio, it was intended to make the viewer wonder if the show itself had been hacked or somehow taken over by a malevolent entity – because it was so strange and so different from the rest of the show. For the finale of the 2nd season, we did a special episode in which The Vault does, in fact, try to take over the entire show, acting as both a computer virus that interrupts various segments and as a kind of demonic entity that possesses people involved with the production of the show, leading to outbreaks of physical violence in the studio and ending in a “cliffhanger” that was only partially resolved in the premiere of the 3rd season – with some aspects of what happened remaining unresolved, even at the end of the entire show.
The main thing about BOTL Radio, though, was that we created a lot of different characters and storylines that people really seemed to enjoy tuning into and keeping up with back then – I remember there was a guy who made videos of himself talking about how much he loved our show, and attempting to draw the characters he felt were the most iconic, his favorite being Great Brain – some of our fans were folks who randomly found us online, and others were people who knew about us through our music or other projects.
Ultimately, this series was a big accomplishment for me in my early teens, and the other folks involved all equally did incredible work on it – I’m pretty amazed with what we were able to do with basically no budget, very few people, and not even that much time. But I’m glad we shelved these series and moved on to other things in our teens, because this simply wouldn’t have been sustainable or fun after awhile.
I don’t know if any of our fans from back then still have any of the episodes downloaded – I personally don’t have any of the files myself. But I do have plenty of good memories around this project, and I’m glad it’s something we did.
from Out of Print and Unavailable Filmography (with Band Of The Land Films)
BOTL Lite Season 1 (2007-’08)
BOTL Total Season 1 (2007-’08)
BOTL Radio Seasons 1-3 (2005-’07)
Road to Fame Season 1 (2005-’06)
The Baseball Effect* (2005)
The Baseball Effect* (2005)
Skits and The Baseball Effect (2004)
(or, go to the beginning for the full list of out-of-print and unavailable projects)
* In total, we made 3 different short films called The Baseball Effect. 2 of them were made in the year 2005, but they are not the same movie – they just happen to have the same exact title and were made and released in the same exact year.