Director's Notes - Episode 95

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

I grew up watching a lot of late night TV. I was around for the tail end of the Johnny Carson era, so for a while that was it. Just 3 network channels and PBS. Whatever you got, that was it.

I sat through a lot of Dallas and Murder She Wrote and Hill Street Blues and Magnum PI and local news. Sometimes we watched Mork and Mindy or The Greatest American Hero or Designing Women, but mostly my family liked crime dramas. 

And The Tonight Show was comedy, so I would sit through all those other shows just to get to the funny. 

Like most kids, I preferred the monologue and the post-monologue bit where he did Carnac or some other sketch routine. The guests I was so-so on - a lot of celebrities who starred in those boring shows I just had to sit through just to get to the Tonight Show. I had little interest in seeing them again.

Sometimes there would be a comedian on, like Jerry Seinfeld or Joan Rivers, but if not, my favorite guest was always Jack Hanna or Joan Embery, because they brought animals.

There are the basic tropes of animal handlers on a late night talk show: tarantula on the shirt collar, monkey making a mess, duck biting a finger, bear cub taking a poop. (I don't know if the last one happened, but I have imagined it happening, so just go with me here.)

For a couple of years now, I've wanted to have a Joan Embery type on Night Vale, and when we met Felicia Day last year and discovered she was a fan of our show, I knew I needed to finally write this episode. 

Of course, animals are not what they seem in Night Vale, so it was a great opportunity to play around with visual descriptions that don't quite match up with reality: cattle with wings, chickens with many legs and which can be mistaken for raccoons, literate spiders, etc.

This episode was also terrible timing because Joseph had to finish audio-editing this thing the week before leaving on a month-long Night Vale tour in Europe, and I wrote a bunch of sound effects into it. If you've listened to all 94 previous episodes, you know we don't really deal with sound effects very often.

He did a great job, and the best part was Felicia actually performing the sound effects in the recording (they're written in the script as stage directions). So if you listen to the whole thing, there's a real special clip after the credits.

- Jeffrey Cranor
October 1, 2016