Back before podcasts were filled with commercials for MeUndies and boxes filled with mysterious bullshit, your Shindig Radio pals Graham C. Schofield, Mikey Rotella and myself had a different kind of radio show,…filled with a different kind of dumb commercials.
That show was called Realive Radio, and this evening marks the 10 year anniversary of their not so Halloween Special.
To honor this occasion, we’ve created a playlist here featuring a special edition of that episode, re-cut to include all the original sound clips as originally recorded and spliced into Duke’s live phone recording for the maximum audio quality allowed by our shitty equipment.
We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we enjoyed making it, and have enjoyed remembering it these last 10 years. If you’d care to know more about Realive Radio, the overly verbose story of how it came to be can be found below this playlist.
Thanks for listening, and Happy Halloween. Punch yeah!
Is it Re-Alive or Real Live?
The Brief True Story of a Real Fake Show
Back in 2008, Mikey Rotella and myself were writing for a fledgling horror website called Horrornews.net. We penned a few horror reviews, a couple articles and I had a daily column highlighting videos from around the web.
Soon, we were asked by the owners of the site if we would like to cohost a new kind of internet radio show they wanted to start called a “podcast.” Naturally, we agreed.
Whomever was supposed to “produce” this program dropped out in the 11th hour and I jumped in to man the ship, so to speak. With that, I came became familiar with a platform called Blog Talk Radio.
Essentially, hosts and guests would call an assigned number at a scheduled time and the service would connect the calls together a record the session. It would then process and post the result on its servers, and like that, you had a podcast ready for streaming.
The backend of this platform, where the admin could manage all the incoming calls, also had a rudimentary sound board, where you could upload your own sound clips to play during the show. I assume this would be used for bumper music and prerecorded interviews and such.
Naturally, as any of you Shindig Radio listeners may have guessed, I had other ideas.
I quickly tapped my buddy Graham C. Schofield to record sound clips of an announcer type character introducing us and making fun of Mikey. I uploaded these sounds on the sly and played them during the program and we all had a good laugh.
Our tenure as the cohost of Horrornews.net’s Podcast From Hell, however, was relatively short lived. I believe we only recorded 4 episodes over a span of a few months. It had something to do with us being goofballs and not caring about recent and upcoming horror movies. Also, Mikey told a physic lady named Mama Lisa her name sounded like a pizzeria and that upset our other cohost. Didn’t upset Mama Lisa mind you, just our cohost. But the damage was done.
However, I was strangely intrigued by this soundboard style call-in Radio platform. So much untapped potential. One could call in and interact with big chunks of prerecorded material and put on an entire stage-play-style radio program and the site would take care of the rest. And like that Realive Radio was born.
Mikey, Graham and myself set about recording different characters and bits that would be mixed with fake commercials and movie trailers and radio buffoonery. I would call-in and play these sound clips and it would give the appearance that you were listening to a real radio show, or as much as you could give that impression through a recorded phone call.
As you might imagine, it was fairly labor intensive, and we only produced 4 episodes of the program over the course of 2 years. But it was a fun and creative time we all really enjoyed.
10 years ago today, on October 25th, 2009, we released a “Halloween” episode of Realive Radio. The running gag was, that since it was recorded well before October and had nothing to do with Halloween, our announcer named G-Spot was desperately attempting to inject some Halloween cheer into the proceedings, with minimal success.
For its 10 anniversary, I thought since it’s kind of a Halloween special, I’d make this episode available to fans of Halloween Shindig and Shindig Radio, so they might hear 10 year younger versions of their podcast pals hamming it up.
As stated above, we hope that you enjoy this old relic of podcast infancy and that, much like G-Spot intended, it fills your Halloween with spooky delight.
Halloween Shindig Presents: Realive Radio Ep. 2: It’s Totally Not At All A Halloween Show.
