PalaceHolder 06/8/2022 (Wed) 21:44:19 #83016807
In 2000, the summer before my junior year in high school, I spent a lot of time wandering around my town's indoor mall alone. I always was hoping I would run into one of my friends, but I was the only one who lived close enough to walk there, and nobody I knew had a car yet, so the few times I saw them they would usually be shopping with their parents. The mall staff got to recognize me, and I got so bored that I would offer to help do stuff like putting up posters for free.
One day at the mall, I walked past this random guy sitting in one of the booths that usually sold sunglasses or keychains, but there wasn't any sign or merchandise or anything, and he stood up and asked me if I would like to be part of a television focus group. I knew about this sort of thing from that one Simpsons episode with Poochy, but I had never met anyone who had been part of one, so I was pretty excited. He just looked like a regular bald, slightly overweight business guy in a grey suit, but he was really enthusiastic and friendly, and he tried to shake my hand as soon as I approached him. He gave me a flyer with a room number and a time for the group. This was the only time I ever had to find a specific room in the mall by the address, so I had to ask an employee I knew for help, and even then it took like an hour to figure out.
PalaceHolder 06/8/2022 (Wed) 21:51:04 #96383944
The room was next to the staff offices, which were down a long windowless hallway on the upper floor next to some massive store I never went to, like a Babies R Us, so I had never really even gotten close to it before this. I got there probably half an hour early, and the same guy from the booth was at a desk waiting there. Next to the desk, leaning up against a wall was a massive 9-foot-tall cardboard cutout of a cartoon character I would later learn was Jimmy Neutron (probably, in retrospect, promotional materials for the upcoming film). I got sort of excited, because 3D computer animation was a pretty big deal back then and I thought maybe that was what I'd be watching. The guy running the focus group shook my hand again, and gave me a survey to fill out ahead of time. The rest of the room looked sort of like a classroom, with a bunch of desks facing a projector screen, and there was already about a dozen people at the desks filling out their surveys, so I sat down near the middle.
Most of the survey was just demographic stuff, like how old I was, my religion, and my income (I wrote down "zero"), but it also asked about my viewing habits. For some reason I lied and said that my favourite movie was A Bug's Life, because I guess I thought they'd rank my opinion higher if we were watching computer animation. They also asked how often I watched Nickelodeon, which was not at all (my family didn't have cable) and how many episodes I had seen of The Angry Beavers, and I lied on both of those too. I had never even heard of that show, but I got the point that it was probably a kids show, and at that point I started to realize how weird it was that I was the youngest person in the room. Nobody else in the group even looked like they were under 30.
I finished the survey and handed it to the guy at the desk, and he gave me some blank paper to take notes on. I just waited at my desk for another half hour until everyone else had arrived and finished their surveys, and then the guy stood up in front of the screen and introduced himself as Sammy, then explained how the group would work. He would play two ten-minute episodes of The Angry Beavers, with a time clock running in the corner, and we should write down any impressions with the timestamp to bring up in a discussion afterward. Before beginning, he gave this huge grin, and raised his eyebrows really high, and told us to pretend these were the first episode of The Angry Beavers we had ever seen. Then he turned off the lights, and I immediately realized that it was way too dark in the room to write, even with the projector on, so I just watched the episodes without taking any notes.
WallabeeWilly 06/8/2022 (Wed) 21:57:16 #13365467
LMAO I know the simspons ep you're talking about and I always wondered if anyone actually did stuff like that irl
guess now we know
PalaceHolder 06/8/2022 (Wed) 21:59:33 #73352070
The first episode was called The Declaration of Independ-Ants. The plot was that the two beavers, Daggett and Norbert, didn't want to clean up their own place, so they hire cleaners out of the phone book. The cleaners turn out to be "ants", which were depicted as just little faceless, limbless black apostrophe shapes who communicated by holding up cartoon signs. The ants loved working, and after they cleaned up the place, they demanded more work, and when the two beavers struggled for a few seconds to think of anything, they started trashing the place so that they could clean it up again. Probably half of the episode was taken up by a sequence of one ant smashing an object and then another one sweeping up the pieces, accompanied by a lot of slide whistle noises. To get rid of the ants, the beavers opened the phone book again and hired an anteater, who stuck his huge head through the window and scared the ants all away. The episode ended with the beavers happily relaxing on top of the messy pile in their house.
I was pretty disappointed at the start that this was just regular animation, but as the episode went on I couldn't believe how unfunny it was. The writing and pacing was really awkward, and the two characters didn't have any sign of individual personalities. The only thing that was a little funny was the fact that they flipped furiously through the phonebook to find an exterminator, and somehow landed on the very first page, listing "aardvark", but I honestly couldn't tell if this was a joke with really bad timing, or if it was totally unintentional. It also bothered me a lot a few seconds later when the exterminator turned out to be a giant anteater, not an aardvark, but I was a weird kid who knew a lot about animals. The strangest thing about this episode, though, was that I could tell from the timestamp right on the screen that it wasn't even five minutes long.
PalaceHolder 06/8/2022 (Wed) 22:06:14 #50003088
The next episode was called Bad Berries, and it began with this sequence of three red berries falling off a branch and floating down a river, floating through all this toxic waste and getting rained on by a weird green cloud, until a puff of smoke comes off of them in the shape of a skull. When they got rained on, there was a thunder sound effect, and I realized that the episode had been silent up to that point, with no music or running water sounds or anything. Eventually, the berries float through a gap in the beaver dam house, and the Dagget (the brown beaver) sees them. This whole part of the episode was so drawn out that it was nearly as long as the entire last episode.
Dagget says "I love free food!" and picks up two of the berries, throwing them into his mouth. I expected him to make some weird face, maybe turn green and cough up smoke, but he just stood there for a second after swallowing them without reacting, and then there was a hard cut to a sort of X-ray view of the inside of his body, with all of his organs having smiling cartoon faces. All at once, they start screaming in these Mickey Mouse voices, their eyes bugging out, and their eyes and mouths sort of flickered and then turned pink. This pink liquid started to fill up Dagget's body from the feet up, and at this point the animation started getting really bad. The "liquid" was basically just a translucent pink filter with a wavy line at the top that slowly rose, and the cartoon organs each seemed to just be switching between two screaming frames per second. This whole sequence went on for a full minute, with the only sound being the squeaky screaming noises.
Once the liquid reached the top of his head, there was another hard cut back to the beavers' room, only now Dagget was swollen and purple, and there were drops of pink liquid running down his face like cartoon tears or drool. He had the same animation style as the organs, just flipping between two poses, but he was also slowly getting bigger. The room was flooded with the pink liquid. This happened for another minute, now in total silence, until Norbert (the yellow beaver) walked in with a door squeaking and slamming sound effect. He just rolled his eyes and said "Not this again". Then he saw the last leftover berry and wordlessly tosses it into his mouth with a loud chomping sound effect, and the same sequence with the X-ray view happened again. It might have been literally the exact same, except the silhouette matched the yellow beaver instead, and when it ended it cut back to both of the beavers swollen up next to each other.
Finally, it showed the outside of the dam, where the girl beaver is looking at the pink liquid spreading through the water, and she says "Well this will take a while to clean up." The camera slowly zooms out, and we see that the liquid is gradually filling the whole river, and in the background the two brothers, still with the same cheap animation, have swollen up to be as big as buildings, and are still growing. Cut to the credits, still with no music, and the video ended at exactly twenty minutes.
BadJames1999 06/8/2022 (Wed) 22:10:36 #72547965
🤨
PalaceHolder 06/8/2022 (Wed) 22:19:20 #20892805
Sammy turned on the lights again, leaving the last frame of credits projected, and just looked at us smiling with his hands clasped together for a couple seconds, then asked us for our thoughts. A couple other people raised their hands, but all of them were talking about parts they thought was funny. They all mentioned it by the specific time stamp instead of describing the moment, so I didn't know what they were actually talking about, but since all the examples were in the first four minutes, I could tell they all were from the ant episode. Sammy didn't really respond to any of it, he just waited and pointed to the next person.
There was eventually a moment where nobody else seemed to have anything to say, and I felt uncomfortable with the silence, so I raised my hand and said that I thought Bad Berries was sort of gross. Sammy got a really serious look on his face, and he said (and I remember the exact sentence) "No, it isn't 'gross', it's 'surprising', and that's where comedy comes from." I was a little shocked that he would just directly contradict someone in the focus group, and sort of embarrassed, and then a few other watchers joined in to say that they thought that one was hilarious (not with any specific times, though). I stayed quiet after that, and pretty soon nobody else was saying anything, so Sammy just clapped his hands together and thanked us for our input, then told us that when we left we could collect a free keychain and a $20 gift certificate to Borders Book Store. I was actually pretty happy about that, but by the time I got there all the gift certificates were gone, so all I got was a keychain shaped like a Rugrats character's face.
That was the last time I ever got a chance to be in a focus group, and probably the last time I would have agreed to, until years later when I did some research and found out how irregular that whole incident was. Around that same time, I finally decided to get some episodes of Angry Beavers on DVD from the library, and I was surprised to find that it was mostly actually funny, well-animated and well-produced. Neither of the two episodes I first saw were on the disks, and apparently neither of them ever aired on TV, so I guess in spite of Sammy's enthusiasm, someone along the line was smart enough not to let them see the light of day.
MemoryCardEater4 06/8/2022 (Wed) 22:20:03 #69057479
what.jpg
What
6_Teh_Hero_Of_All_Time_9 06/8/2022 (Wed) 22:20:49 #31479546
its fucked that you didn't get the $20