Last July, Eugene and I were mourning the end of Season 2 and trying to come up with a way to survive the third season. We also wanted some kind of gift for our readers and other TOS fans, many of whom have had to choke down Season 3 for over forty years. We tossed around a bunch of ideas, but we kept coming back to one: why not just make fun of the damn things?
“Spock’s Brain” seemed an obvious target and we got to work. Turns out these things are hard. In addition to the technical challenges of recording that kind of precise podcast, there’s always the realization that you’re not as funny as you think you are. The real tragedy was that we had to watch “Spock’s Brain” countless times. (Literally. We lost count.)
This took a lot of time and mental energy over the course of the last six months. We hope it was worth it! We are very proud to present to you our first Laugh Trek: “Spock’s Brain.”
I kind of can’t wait to watch this again :)
Finally got a chance to set watch this one, and I enjoyed the heck out of it. Syncing it properly took a couple tries, though.
I hope you do another one. I’d recommend Piece of the Action. The GF and I always have fun with that one.
It’s an interesting exercise to just listen to the mp3 and try to figure out where exactly in the episode you guys are.
Well … interesting for some of us, anyway.
Your rewatches couldn’t get me to suffer through any of season 3, but this audio track did.
I don’t know if you should be proud or ashamed.
@4 JohnSteed7
It’s easier when the snark is coming simultaneously, rather than having to wait for it.
Thanks, guys! I’m glad you enjoyed it. I’m pretty sure Torie is set on doing “Plato’s Stepchildren” next. It’s like she’s trying to punish us on purpose.
@2 ChurchHatesTucker
If you have any suggestions on making it easier to sync, or can tell us what made it so tricky for you, that would help us finetune it for the next one.
@3 NomadUK
I had enough of that kind of “fun” while putting the audio together…
@4 JohnSteed7
I’m going to go with “proud.”
@6 Eugene
The trick is that it has to be pretty tightly synced, since a lot of the jokes are almost on top of the dialog. What you have now is a beep that is almost a second long, and is almost all sustain. Simply reversing that (with the understanding that the *end* of the beep is the sync point) would make it much easier to sync.
@ 2 ChurchHatesTucker
Thank you so much! Can I ask what you were syncing it with? We tested it on the DVD and CBS.com, but weren’t sure if the Blu-Ray had different timing…
@ 3 NomadUK
What, no DVDs at hand? :)
Some of them should be pretty obvious. The REALLY fun game is guessing who came up with which jokes. :D
@ 6 Eugene
I know I said that, but considering how many times we had to watch “Spock’s Brain” I’m beginning to question my commitment to Sparkle Motion.
@8 Torie We used the original DVD and hit ‘play’ from the episode menu when the first beep sounded.
Torie@8: I do my damnedest, but there is a limit to the sheer quantity of slacking I can achieve at work.
@9 ChurchHatesTucker
Ah. It works best if you hit PLAY and then pause it as soon as the episode starts (while it’s still on black), then unpause when you hear the chime. The menu animations and delay in loading the episode account for the discrepancy in timing. Sorry if that wasn’t clearer! Maybe in future tracks we can set one chime for playing it from the DVD and another for the first frame of black (ie. web streaming), but then as Torie mentioned, we don’t know about the timing for Blu-Ray discs.