"Mr. Invincible #20 - Road Rash" was, without question, the most complicated Mr. Invincible spot we ever produced.
"Mr. Invincible" was the focus of a series of public service announcements that were aired on Newstalk 780 KOH in Reno, Nevada; Sean McDevitt and Phil Galbraith wrote, produced and performed these traffic safety spots from 1997-2000.
To begin with, we were being dragged into the digital era, kicking and screaming -indeed, we had always taken a lot of pride in the fact that our spots were pieced together using reel-to-reel tape machines and cart decks; dumping our work into a computer was something that we were afraid was going to rob the spots of their spontaneity and warmth. (This was the summer of 1998.) However, it was becoming increasingly clear that some of our ideas were getting too expansive to be able to pull them off exactly as we wanted; in fact, in reading about George Lucas and how he was trying to rely on (at the time) cutting-edge computer technology for his cinematic storytelling, we decided to try something that would enable us to push into audial frontiers we hadn't yet explored.
I think Phil was a bit confused at first, because we recorded virtually line separately, while my mind raced as to exactly how this was going to work. We knew that essentially we were going to make a movie trailer spoof, using all the cliches from every overwrought, badly-written preview, utilizing a pukey announcer (you know, the guy who always thinks he's God's gift to the microphone, growling and generally sounding as though he's about to throw up a lung). We were also excited by the possibility of putting Mr. Invincible into some of our favorite movies, although the circumstances for each were downright silly. (In order, the movies that Mr. Invincible was injected into: The Terminator, Forrest Gump, Star Wars, Titanic, Field of Dreams and Taxi Driver.)
We enlisted the help of Mike Buchanan, who at the time was the Production Director at Citadel Reno; he provided the voice of our movie trailer announcer, and it was he who (under my direction) assembled our spot into the digital software, which was called Session Eight. To this day I cannot thank him enough, considering how hard he worked on it when he already had so much on his plate.
A final word about this spot: it still remains highly amusing to me, and yet at the same time I'm fully aware that if you didn't know who Mr. Invincible was while listening to it, you'd swear that you were suffering a fever dream.
This was also the first time that "McBraith Entertainment" was ever mentioned in any context, an obvious mixture of our last names.
Photos from: http://www.google.com, http:///www/flickr.com
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