Mr. Invincible #18: Ice Cream

My memories are pretty clear, when it comes to "Mr. Invincible #18 - Ice Cream". This one's a bit frustrating to me, frankly: the performance of the opening segment is not as strong as it should have been- however, the last 22 seconds of this spot never fail to break me up because it's just one goofy, well-executed moment after another.

In turns of the writing, I'm not sure how we came up with the idea of Mr. Invincible delivering ice cream; I think it may have may been just a part of the overall idea we had of him being a irresponsible ne'er-do-well, drifting from one job to another. I do recall that the production behind this spot was, to put it in female canine terms, a bitch: I had the hardest time compressing the ice cream truck music into just the right "tinny" sort of sound, while keeping our voices separate and normal-sounding. (And this was back in the good old days of reel-to-reel tapes and cart machines, mind you; we were sort of dragged, kicking and screaming, into the digital era eventually.)

Somewhere, under masses of everything, I still have a reel of tape with all of the outtakes of this spot: I think those outtakes prove that we were laughing so hard at the whole ridiculous premise that the one we finally settled on (take #8, I believe) was a bit forced; I kind of wish we'd continued to try to capture the silly mood that the opening portion of the spot should have had. Anyway, it's still a funny spot.

"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.


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Category:

Comedy

Tags:

• Mr.
• Invincible
• Sean
• McDevitt
• Phil
• Galbraith
• Reno
• Nevada
• Newstalk
• 780
• KOH