Director's Notes – Episode 131 – Brought To You By Kellogg's

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Thank you so much for joining us here on Patreon. We are one of the few truly independent podcasts left. We have no investors, no large companies involved. The same group of weird theater folks that started this journey are the ones continuing it now, and we make most of our income from donations.

Given that, we resisted a long time moving to Patreon, since touching our long time donation system was a very scary prospect. That said, it’s a necessary one. Patreon is just far more transparent and user friendly, both for us and, more importantly, for all of you donors.

We have an ambitious year planned. Last year we experimented a bit with longer story arcs, which was a lot of fun and let us do stuff that just wasn’t possible within single episodes. This year will probably see a bit of that, but also feels like the year we finally get to mess around with some of the truly out there ideas we’ve had percolating. There is something coming in September that, if we pull it off, will be, we believe, a genuine first for podcasting. 

But I am here to tell you about Brought To You By Kellogg’s. Many episodes start with a single phrase or a single game. What if I built a story around the words “wheat & wheat by-products”? What if I did an episode that only played in the right ear? In this case, I was curious if I could write an entire episode that was one continuous word from our sponsors segment.

This leads to another challenge for myself, which is just making every segment interesting and unique while still pointing back to a central theme. Always a fun challenge. How many times can you make Kellogg’s jokes without repeating yourself? I wanted to find out.

Going into the episode, the main thing I had in my head was the post-weather segment. I wasn’t even sure the content, I just knew that I wanted the episode to culminate in a lengthy monologue presenting the history of the universe from the point of view of Kellogg’s. Given that, it made sense to me to start the monologue with direct quotations from both Genesis and the Rig Veda (the Jewish Publication Society and Ralph Griffith translations respectively). These two ancient poems about how the world might have begun harmonized quite well. It appears there is something basic in humans that make us associate creation with the images of darkness and deep water. 

The rest of the monologue was more or less an improvised run around a theme, one of the more fun kinds of rough drafts a writer gets to do. Beholden to no plot or no character, I was free to take detours, toss images into the mix without quite knowing yet what I would do with them, and quote ancient religious texts. This is also material, of course, that Cecil the actor handles exceptionally well. He is a classically trained actor, so giving him classical text puts him squarely in his element.

A note about the weather, which was the debut of a new single by a great musician and a great person, Danny Schmidt. He just launched a Kickstarter for the album that this single will be on, and you should definitely go check it out here.

As I write this, we are wrapping up editing on our new live show script, which I am very happy with. It is a show about spies and about secrets, and builds to a theatrical moment that is unlike anything we’ve tried with an audience before. But we’ve learned how wonderful Night Vale audiences are, and we are confident that you will go with us on this journey.

We’re doing a run of smaller work-shop shows in the Hudson River Valley, and then at the Edinburgh Fringe, and then at the Bell House, before launching our tour in September. We’ll see you all there.

- Joseph Fink
August 2, 2018