 Welcome to another episode of the web show featuring two tiny hounds that have separation anxiety. We're fully dogged up buddy and Meg. It is a 90s kind of themed show, well 90s and 80s themed show but I'm especially excited because I absolutely love the 90s and just a bit and our and my next guest on the web show Ben Giroux is responsible for that amazing song that you saw in the intro. So let's stop. Handbrake. Before we go there you must remember to stay to the end because we are going to be announcing the winner of this fantastic amazing Back to the Future Bob Gale Compendium. You may remember we had Bob on the show, it was absolutely incredible chatting to him about one of my favourite movies of all time, Back to the Future and this book there was the chance to win it and it is an absolute essential addition to any Back to the Future heads library so stay to the end of the show and don't fast forward either we know your game. And then be kind, rewind because then you can be reminded that quick plug on lifeaftermovies.com of course we sell the Blue Rays and DVD Life After Flash and Life After Navigator. We now sell these flash crew patches on the website and don't forget we have signed Joey Cramer Life After the Navigator Blue Rays. Now the extra £40 that costs to get the signed one goes 100% directly to Joey so support Joey, support the film, lifeaftermovies.com but let's get into the interview, Ben Giroux. I can't begin to say how many times I have seen a The Back to the 90s video and now I've discovered Back to the 80s video. The creator, writer, director along with Jensen Reed, Ben Giroux is on the web show with me I'm so excited. Ben how are you? You know what I don't even know how to answer that question anymore a year into a global pandemic but I'm alive I'm good I'm still inside after a year of quarantine I'm doing good. I will go back to the 80s so you were born in 84 which we know from your Back to the 80s video, very clever. What was your childhood like? A very sort of colorful eccentric quirky childhood because my parents I grew up in Phoenix Arizona and my parents owned a comic book store for almost 40 years so I grew up around Superman and Batman and a very sort of colorful environment and then in addition to that a very funny environment you know I grew up watching old three Stooges clips with my dad my sister and I grew up watching Nickelodeon animated shows I'm now a voice actor with Nick animation so life has totally come full circle but I feel like a lot of the pop culture that defined the 90s really was paramount to my childhood experience and I think that sort of began my love for the concept of nostalgia. Nostalgia to me gives me this feeling of warmth and it's so familiar because it's it's there's something really simple and nice about thinking about our childhood especially in the 90s where nobody had iPhones yet you know we weren't sort of overcome by technology so much that you know it got in the way so yeah life in Phoenix Arizona growing up was was colorful and fun and quirky as the son of two owners of a comic bookstore. Your acting reel is impressive from years before I believe you actually started to make your own content. Did you want to be in entertainment from a very early age? Oh sure I mean you know you and I before we even started talking with the recording we're talking about growing up in the VHS generation and so even in high school even as early as junior or high I can think back to trying to create my own films and my own you know little clips with my friends a lot tougher editing on VHS back in the day and little mini DV cameras rather than everybody walking around with movie cameras in their pockets now. But yeah I always wanted to be an actor first and foremost. I went to film school here in Los Angeles University of Southern California also studied theater and I was quite lucky I booked my first television show which was a Fairleigh Brothers pilot on Fox as I was graduating college in 2007 that sort of segued into the show Psych on the USA Network and then I consistently just started working as an actor and one of the things that I found was Hollywood and the entertainment industry wants to pigeonhole you and put you in a contained box. For me I'm a short guy I'm 5'2 so I was booking a lot of short specific roles you know at a certain point you just buy yourself your own Christmas elf tights when you keep working as a Christmas elf. So I was playing a lot of height specific stuff and while it was fun it wasn't a hundred percent satisfying because I knew I was capable of so much more. So as my acting career was was continuing to to thrive really I was very lucky to be consistently working in television. I realized I wanted to start making my own stuff and one of the things that I had always wanted to do is a Busta Rhymes kind of braggadocious music video about being a short guy called Little Dude Anthem and I do a lot of voiceover. This is years ago I was at my my voiceover agency and I was talking to one of the booth engineers there talking to him about this idea this short guy rap and he said well you know we represent a hip-hop artist here at the agency and I said oh that's great so he connected us and that's where I met my buddy Jensen. Jensen is a phenomenal hip-hop artist a great musician and I think his biggest talent is as a songwriter and so Jensen and I are both pretty anal retentive guys that are very detail oriented so if we're gonna tackle a project we don't want to just sort of half-ass it we want it we want to make sure that it's the biggest best thing we can possibly do. So I do a lot of theater with so you think you can dance act dancers and American Idol singers at least before the pandemic and so I called upon my friend Tamira Gray who was in season one of American Idol bunch of dancers from so you think you can dance we really just brought it for this production. Made this music video called Little Dude Anthem it went viral I thought it was a great sort of example of a cool song cool beat great song writing but also really funny and a great way for us to sort of showcase our production prowess. We thought it was just gonna be a one-off and Jensen and I realized like hey like this is a great combination of our talents so I'm a director too so I've been directing all of our music videos so we said hey what else appeals to us that we would want to collaborate on and we both instinctually said nostalgia. For me nostalgia defines so much of the work that I want to be creating and so we made Back to the 90s. For two years to conceptualize the video I knew you know we were paying for it out of our own pockets we didn't get any branding or sponsorships at that point so really had to put a lot of money and time in to make it even feasible because the idea was the original idea was how can we showcase as many genres of 90s music in one video as possible make the song good and catchy and as many visuals from the 90s as possible representing those genres and it became clear we needed to settle on a Backstreet Boys style chorus because while it all it sounds good it's also really fun it's really it's over-the-top funny with the you know the choreography and everything it's pretty silly. The way it's kind of worked with all of our songs not just Back to the 90s is Jensen and I will write the initial pass together. He'll sort of focus on the musicality of it I'll focus on the jokes and and you know sort of where we can kind of find the humor in the lyrics. We had together written a version of the chorus which was okay it wasn't great and we were like you know we really need to bring in a pop singer-songwriter that can really capture the Backstreet Boys style in a way that we really couldn't that's when we brought in our buddy Jared Lee who he's written for Jason Derulo he just wrote one of the most recent new kids on the blocks tracks Jared's awesome and I think one of the one of the things that's been so exciting for me just being in Los Angeles is you know our network of such talented human beings that we get to collaborate with it seems seems to be endless sometimes and Jared you know it took I remember sitting in the room he came up with that initial melody within 10 seconds and we were like that's it and then we started to sort of conceptualize what the funny lyrics would be we we loved the idea of what's another word that would rhyme with a and so it was fun and and you know the song came together pretty quickly after that our buddy a songwriter his sort of stage name is dirty Hollywood it's an awesome guitarist he's a hell of a songwriter and even better human being he wrote the grunge Nirvana style chorus for us dirty's actually in that portion as the guitarist in that section in the video he also helped write the main melody of back to the 80s which we later did and you know we're continuing to collaborate like I'm doing a Nickelodeon show right now that dirty just helped write a song for us for so I really am big on when people sort of help us out with our projects our passion projects sort of paying it forward and making sure that we continue to collaborate on bigger and better things that hopefully put some better money in their pockets like I said to you before we started recording the chorus of back to the 90s just in a heartbeat sums up it's such a visceral experience to watch it because it sums up exactly how I feel about nostalgia in the 90s doing back to the 80s was that just as challenging for you because that's a huge production significantly more challenging one of the things that I've always loved about my team I have a production company called small red cape we are sort of the the entity that tries to create all of these things every time we want to one up it you know I don't want to just sort of replicate something especially you know back to the 90s got a hundred million views we charted at number 11 on billboard we joined the backstreet boys in Las Vegas I mean so much crazy stuff happened from that project that when you're doing a sequel that everyone's asking for it's like well okay how do we how do we go bigger knowing that we're probably not gonna hit a hundred million views again but a lot of people are gonna see it so you know back to the 90s was our first attempt at like okay how do we show as many visuals as possible in the shortest amount of time and then the task for back to the 80s was okay well let's do that same approach except let's literally cut to a different visual on every reference on every line and I did not want to do it green screen aside from a couple of things that absolutely had to be green screen like our top gun moment every single set is practically built we in the 80s took about a year to write the song there were a lot more sort of instruments and musicians and things involved in the actual production of the track but once we got to shooting it we shot back to the 80s you know I'll say this by comparison back to the 90s was shot over two consecutive days in 2016 we started shooting back to the 80s in 2018 and finished like 2019 I think I'm right about that took about a year to shoot over seven or eight different production dates the biggest of which was our chorus section which was a high school prom we wouldn't be able to do this now in the way the state of the world is but we packed about 250 people into a high school gym and through a rock concert 80s prom and it was awesome because the entire crowd was composed of our closest friends our family we got you know two giant confetti cannons it was nuts and we shot that last so after a year of work it was a real feeling of accomplishment to figure out how to puzzle piece this thing together I can remember back to our first back to the 80s shoot we got I think we did like 25 setups or something it was insane over like two days and we thought we had accomplished so much and I remember laying it out on the edit timeline after the shoot and it was like seven percent of the song if we had so much more to go so we were both excited and super disheartened that like we had we had a lot to do you had a lot of recurring recurring actors didn't you in it as well in both yeah it's a great point to bring up like our friend Lindsay Taylor who's an incredible choreographer was our Britney Spears she was also our Madonna and back to the 80s you know dirty certainly is in back to the 80s as well he's in the sort of tears for fears bridge he's also our guitarist in the 80s prom the girl who played Tanya Harding for us she was our Shelley along in back to the 80s so you'll see if you watch both videos back to back you'll notice a lot of the same people we just wanted to throw in as many kind of little Easter egg tie-ins as we could and then our plan is to do back to the 2000s as our next sort of major thing we just got thrown off track by you know the destruction of civilization and a giant worldwide pandemic that little small fact I did see your Easter egg playing at the end of back to the 80s at the very end of the credit the very long credits because such a huge team I mean you did cram so much in and I imagine it was a really exciting process to be kind of sitting there at the beginning going what do we want to include but did you just find yourself snowballing idea after idea and there was so many things that you wanted to include did you have to call them or did you kind of wake up at 3 a.m. 6 months later going oh shoulda woulda we're super diligent about our brainstorming process so we did this for both back to the 90s and back to the 80s brainstormed huge lists categories of pop culture so we would separate it by OK what's some of the animation we want represented you know back to the 90s the claymation of celebrity deathmatch was like top of the list for us Doug was top of the list for us you know what kind of obviously music styles we want represented in the song what kind of TV shows do we want to tackle what kind of toys what kind of merchandise what kind of clothing what kind of wardrobe so we'll go through and create huge just lists just spitballing researching online thinking back to our own childhoods had to do a little bit more research for back to the 80s because we were babies and back to the in the 80s so once we get done with that list we start trying to sort of gibberish our way through what it would sound like to a very basic beat and then it starts to to really take shape but in answer to your question we probably chose 20% from each of those lists so like we actually wrote before we wrote back to the 80s we wrote a second back to the 90s that's like a green day kind of vibe with all of the stuff we cut out matrix Titanic I mean there's so much stuff we did not include but the problem was it felt like the same beat and we didn't want to just do the same thing again so it'll probably die on the cutting room floor but maybe at some point we'll do another kind of 90s ask project because it's always going to be relevant to us please do first of all this is a two-part question you mentioned the backstreet boys that was a great video where AJ surprised you incredibly jealous how was it being with them in Vegas and part two of the question is who is someone from the 90s from a TV show band artist that you haven't met that you would really love to? Oh that's a really good question so first of all the backstreet boys thing was was really great they were really cool to you know just kind of help promote us they were at the time doing their Vegas residency so our momentum certainly also was helping to promote that so it was a really sort of symbiotic thing it was great like going to Vegas and and sort of hanging with them felt like just a great endorsement of the success of the project I also give them a lot of credit for leaning into the humor of it because that you know we're ultimately parodying them in a in a funny way but kind of making fun in a fun you know in a nice way so they were they were really cool at just sort of embracing that you know all those sort of endorsements we got them you know we had so many people tweeting us and contacting us and sharing the video from the 90s you know I remember distinctly on my Twitter timeline that first week we went viral Smash Mouth tweeted me and said you forgot about us and I just thought okay this is like top top moment for me where Smash Mouth is annoyed that I didn't reference them in my video so those kinds of endorsements Backstreet Boys included was just a really great way to sort of legitimize things and helped us significantly as we looked to leverage the success from that project into other avenues so for me I was able to leverage it into a lot of directing work in commercials additional music videos I'm directing a music video for a 90s artist right now that is a direct piece of the success a direct offshoot of some of the momentum we were able to create after Back to the 90s so things like that were really helpful getting endorsements from big 90s personalities and bands and pop culture icons was was really gratifying and really humbling to be honest with you about that they really liked the thing we put together and I will say back to the 90s has set up almost all of my you know professional success thereafter I'm doing a voicing an animated series right now for a major network that comes out in September and one of the reasons I got the role I think is because they needed someone who could sort of sing and be funny all together there's some real musicality to the show so I attribute a lot of my subsequent success professional success to Back to the 90s and sort of personal success it just feels really good to bring a bunch of people around a topic that the whole family can enjoy and that holds a really special place in our hearts I will also tell you and I'm happy to say this publicly is we shot back to the 90s four days after Trump won in 2016 and there was a really shitty feeling on on set initially of just like oh boy the whole world feels like it's gonna fall apart little did we know it would but there was this real feeling of of sort of happiness and excitement on set to kind of harken back to a simple or better time on set and it really sort of like helped us everybody on set kind of you know head in a more positive direction after that back to the 80s as well so looking forward to getting back to those better times now that that demented human being is out of office we were all waiting we were all waiting for it and someone that you haven't met that you would oh right right so someone I haven't met from the 90s that I would like to collaborate with so so many different people I think would be awesome but I think my sister my little sister would give me huge street cred if we were able to involve John Stamos and something because she's had a crush on him since childhood I actually I was doing a play one time with a stage manager who was doing a another play with him and she got a little message from him to my sister and she thought she thought it was the coolest thing so if I actually was able to collaborate with John Stamos on something at some point a music video a film something commercial I think my sister would give me some some pretty awesome props why do you think Nostalgia is really big for one of a better word at the moment people seem to be really celebrating and embracing the 80s and 90s why do you think that is you know I think it's sort of twofold one as we get older you and I are on the same age we start to reflect more fondly on things we may have taken for granted growing up the simplicity of youth not having to think about taxes and mortgages and relationships and you know success I mean you know our biggest problems were like oh boy I gotta you know make it home in time after school so I can heat up my hot pockets or whatever so I think the simplicity of childhood becomes more and more appealing as we age and I think we're in an interesting age in our 30s to sort of reflect back on you know a time where the world was simpler not just our lives but the world was simpler you know the economy was pretty good in the 90s we could fly without having to take our shoes off I think the world has progressively gotten more and more complicated as we've gotten older and I am sure our parents felt the same thing and so that's one side of it I also think that the 90s in particular and the 80s too were full of colors and wacky styles and eccentricities that we may look back on the 2020s and feel the same way you know kids today but I think that there is a real appetite for the wackiness of the styles of all sorts of pop culture for those decades I also think the other thing that sort of factors into it a little subconsciously is that it was the last bastion of a non-tech life it was the last time you had to memorize someone's phone number it was the last time you had to you know find out how to get somewhere without you know immediately having it available in your car so I think we maybe took for granted the the stuff we had to do to like work a little bit harder in life to get something that we just take for granted that's very easy now so yeah to me it's like that last moment in time before technology kind of took over in a very different way so I think all of those things combined make the 90s especially but the 80s as well really appealing time period that is finding its way back in style I mean you think about sort of high-waisted genes for women now are sort of coming back you know flannel like you're wearing like you know I think that there's things are start to feel sort of cyclical and pop culture especially when it it harkens back to a simpler time very well said and I couldn't agree more you mentioned your mystery 90s artist that you're doing the music video for and back to the 2000s are you working on anything else that you can share and is your focus going to be kind of a nostalgia-based content at the moment yeah so you know I've been very thankful to have a very diversified entertainment career especially in a pandemic when you know I was doing three shows before this all went down and they all sort of went their separate ways because you know the industry shut down for a while so right now I'm voicing a new animated series I can tell you it's with Nickelodeon comes out later in the year very excited about it it's a very like Nick animation and I think all animation in general is starting to sort of get back to some of the edgier content that was commonplace in the 90s so what we're working on has a lot of that kind of ren and stimpy edge a lot of that kind of adult humor that was found in some of those old school Nickelodeon cartoons like Rocco's modern life and hey Arnold Doug certainly so it's been really cool working with Nickelodeon throughout the pandemic very excited for the show to premiere I'll be able to talk a lot more about what exactly that is later on and yeah working on a music video right now with an iconic 90s artist which I'm very excited about because hopefully we can continue to leverage that into working with more and more 90s personalities which I just personally love and it's fun that anytime I can combine music good music and comedy and nostalgia all into the same thing I'm a happy guy so yeah lots of voiceover lots of directing work and then things are slowly starting to creep back here in Los Angeles so I look forward to returning back to set too I do a I do a live action Nickelodeon show where I play a villain on it it's a superhero show so those are kind of the main things right now but I'm looking forward to getting back to some more passion projects I think one of the things that I really try to focus on in the pandemic is the only way I could really truly keep my crew safe with Small Red Cape is to not put them on set and so now that things are starting to creep back to some sense of some sort of normalcy it's feeling safer to kind of get back on a set we just shot a music video for another artist about a month ago you know we were all basically wearing hazmat suits but the feeling of relief to be back on a set on a soundstage being all around each other again was immensely gratifying and one that I am hopeful will continue to do into the foreseeable future so yeah it's kind of what I'm currently working on I'm so excited to see your music video and everything else that you bring out I am such a fan I really appreciate you taking the time today I can't wait to see what more you do so thank you so much for joining me I'm honored thank you so much for your support and for being a fan of the 90s right along with me great Scott we have a winner announcement of this amazing Bob Gayle book first of all if you want to buy the book if you're not lucky enough to win you want to buy it I'll put a link below of where you can get it but the winner now this I thought was quite fitting because most with the question to win was if you could go back in time where would you go pretty much everyone answered back to the 80s which is pretty fitting considering Ben is on the show and he did the back to the 80s video and also we're nostalgia so there was a good chance of that stop's not as good anymore as it used to be it's going to happen um so the winner there were a lot to pick from and it was really hard to choose retro reels retro reels what did they say now retro reels said first of all he loves how Bob Gayle protected the franchise from being exploited such as other franchises has been but he said if you could go back to time he will go back to the 80s but he would watch the movies for the first time again and remember the experience of being amazed when they originally saw them he'd have to also be the same age though because there is part of if you went back now as the age you are those movies might not be as special although oh I doubt it there was some absolute beaut in the 80s so the reason I liked that someone said Henry the eighth which I thought was pretty cool but most people were like I'll go back to be in the movie and that was quite a common answer so I liked that this was to actually go back and experience them and have that magic again so well done retro reels email me at info-lifeaftermovies.com and this book is yours and also how cool were those back to the 80s and back to the 90s videos I mean we watched them and Lisa was so excited to to do the interview because they were so well done I mean they could have been done so badly but you could tell it was somebody who really cared and you obviously the 90s one I'm a little bit older than you so that was struck a chord and the 80s one really struck a chord with me but well done then they were fantastic Ash liked the bit the most in the 80s video where they did the poolside scene with the red bikini oh yes we loved a bit of that in the 80s the old red bikini shot anyway until the next web show we don't know when it is so make sure you subscribe so you get told when it is have a fabulous week and enjoy the 80s and 90s videos