Tue, 6 February 2007
Racine, WI-- the place I grew up and where I am currently living-- used to be a pretty amazing center of industry. CASE tractors, In-Sink-Erator, Johnson's Wax, Horlick's Malted Milk, and Western Publishing (to name a few) all made their start here. During my senior year in High School, a representative from Western contacted our theater teacher and said they were looking for a group of kids to try out and be voices for a new board game they were putting together. Being a drama dork (among other things), I tried out and got accepted as part of the crew. We had to drive up to Milwaukee to a professional recording studio, and spent the afternoon reading goofy situations from a script-- situations dealing with a guy calling a girl on the phone, and either getting lucky or striking out. The game? A little thing called GIRL TALK DATE LINE. In the game, you had to move around the board and take two character tiles (a guy and a girl), match them together and jam them into a tiny portable speaker box thingy you'd have hooked up to your cassette deck. The tape would then play one of the conversations mentioned above. If you got a "good" one, you were successful. If you got shot down... well, better luck next time. I got paid a few hundred dollars for my efforts, I remember... all of which went towards paying my bills for the senior prom. I never really knew what kind of impact this game had, or whether it was popular or whatever, but apparently it won 6th place in the 1991 Deutscher Spiele Preis. After doing the game, I briefly considered trying to work in the voice acting arena, but like a lot of things when you're 18, it got swept under the rug. Ah... what MIGHT have been. EDIT: You can download an MP3 of the "loser" calls here. That's me, on the first call... And also on the "call me when you decide to go Italian!" one.
Category:general
-- posted at: 1:31pm EDT
Comments[21]
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Nomi, you DID say that \'Curb\' has more time to work with. I apologize for missing that. Good call on \'Larry Sanders.\' That probably WAS the first \"cringe-com,\" and for some reason, the banter/tension between Michael and Pam reminds me of that between Larry and Paula (minus the sexual harassment, of course). But my memory\'s foggy on that, so I may it wrong.
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Cring-com. Yeah. Cringfest-o-rama. But, Ian, wasn\'t I saying the same thing about Curb having more freedom with time? Did you watch The Larry Sanders Show? I\'ve only seen bits of it, but wasn\'t it the first (American, anyway) sort of \"fake real\" cringy TV comdedy show? Speaking of him, on youtube I found an interview that Ricky Gervais did with Gary Shandling. It appears to be straight, not a set up -- Ricky Gervais meeting for the first time and interviewing one of his idols. Speaking of cringy -- ohmygod. Parts of it are almost unbearably awkward. Shandling is kind of an ass to Gervais on and off and it\'s just .. . well, kind of awful to watch, but fascinating the way those things are. I have no idea what it was for or anything, and I don\'t know for SURE that it was what it appeared, but it\'s so real and so long that it\'s hard to imagine it was a bit. Ricky Gervais spends half the time laughing this horribly awkward uncomfortable laugh.
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Matt -- Funny you should mention \"George Costanza.\" (His supposedly Italian name always kills me when every actor in his TV family is so obviously -- famously -- Jewish.) I just watched season five of Curb Your Enthusiasm on DVD, which, compared to standard DVD releases, has only the barest of extras, but which were enough to tell me the following personally satisfying information. Maybe this is known to some, but I only tonight learned that the great Larry David does not only not release deleted scenes, but would be happy to see them destroyed so that no one else could get their hands on them. Bloopers I think he\'s a little more flexible about, as there were a few mixed into the interview montage. But he feels that the shows are the shows, that he spent hours and hours carefully editing them and whittling them down, and the stuff he cut was cut for a good reason. I\'m sure there are many people who understandably would love to look at those cut scenes. But I feel vindicated! Well, no, that sounds like I was charged with some crime or something . . . I\'ll just walk around confidently saying that no \"real\" artist would release deleted scenes, no one with standards, no one with artistic integrity . . . Heehee. It\'s not quite fair, of course, to compare his show to The Office as far as all this. He had almost complete freedom, both with material and time. Still, though, I wonder how much debate there is behind The Office scenes about what gets released as a deleted scene and what doesn\'t. And I wonder who really gets to decide. Don\'t anyone misunderstand me; some of MY favorite moments are also from those cut scenes. The one that comes to mind at the moment is: \"Jim. I\'m Jim. My name is Jim.\" It\'s a Delma, for sure. (Delma: my brother\'s word for dilemma, one of his many word recreations, this one an homage to our high school secretary named Delma, who was, indeed, a dilemma.)
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Nomi, the only thing I would argue is that \'Curb Your Enthusiasm\' might have a little more wiggle room, since they don\'t have to worry about commercials and tightly fitting into time slots. Sometimes, HBO dramas, for instance, run quite a bit less than an hour (45 mins. or so), while other times, they\'re packed full. So Larry David and Co. might not be faced with quite the same decisions. However, I love the comparison, since \'Curb\' is the only other American \"cringe-com\" that comes to mind, besides \'The Office.\'
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Ohmygod. How did I make it through my teens without this game??? Not well, I tell you. Isn\'t it funny how no names are used but everybody knows who\'s calling? Everything about this is hilarious. But I want to hear the \"winners\'\" calls. The endless losers are kind of depressing. And Matt, you were so mean both times! Those poor girls.
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oh my god--i totally used to have that game! i think it\'s somewhere in my parent\'s basement. if they didn\'t have so much crap, i might actually have looked for it. it\'s probably next to my old \"mousetrap\", \"mall madness\", and \"ask xandar\" games. so, you played all the a-holes on the date line...huh... :-)
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Oh snap, I thought your voice sounded familiar! You know, the Girl Talk Date Line cassette has been featured on WFMU\'s Beware of the Blog a couple of years ago, and the best part is they edited together only the losers so you can ejoy the fun of being shot down over and over again: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/06/girl_talk_feel_.html \"Call me when you decide to go Itallian!\"
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He\'s totally the bowtie-sunglasses guy. I remember seeing this game... so there\'s some impact for you. Up on a shelf in my classroom, the previous teacher left me Mall Madness. He was an elderly man and its quite an enigma... why did he possess such a thing... and why didn\'t he take it with him?
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Ha! This is hilarious. Matt, it\'s clear to me that with your obvious acting skill and talent, you could have effortlessly moved between the nerd and the hunk as needed. Hey, and unless you\'re talking about ballet or something, it\'s NEVER too late. My sister-in-law just recently studied voice over in order to have a better shot at making good money at it and she\'s an elderly 40-years-old.
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