50) Sanford and Son (Chris, Craig & Hardy Style)

I have organized a weekend visit to Houston in a couple of weeks with 2 friends that date back to elementary school. I see these guys frequently, so it is not a completely special occasion, though I am looking forward to it immensely. A couple of weeks ago I came up with a strange idea to take an old TV show and dub all the audio using cartoony voices for the purpose of posting the new episodes online. This would be similar to Mystery Science Theater 3000, but instead of making fun of the shows we would try to duplicate the acting and let the show make fun of itself. I suggested this to Chris and Craig. They thought the idea (and I) was strange, but they would attempt it as long as we could drink heavily while producing it.





The first show I chose was Mr. Ed, only because I want to do the voice of the horse and I think Chris would be great doing the voice of Wilbur. However, blockbuster online does not have any Mr. Ed seasons available. The second show I thought would fit this exercise was Sanford and Son. To my delight the second season was available, and eventually was sent to my house.


To execute this idea properly much work need be done on the front end, including: finding an episode with a good story, writing the script out, making a list of all the sound effects we would need to record on top of the dialogue, digitizing the episode into a computer that also has access to a good editing software package. After getting to Houston we would have to set up a computer with at least 2 microphones, and we would have to watch each scene of the episode several times before recording it. We would have to practice each scene, and hope that we would not be embarrassed by Chris's wife wondering what in the world we were doing. I started thinking about all the work going into this stupid project and called Craig, to make sure the end result was going to be worth the effort. He said, "I don't think so."















I must say, I totally agree. But the fact that I thought of this idea and started the front end work is funny to me, and I want to make sure it is cataloged somewhere so that I can look back at this near disaster and laugh.