Remember when Eddie Murphy did Buckwheat on Saturday Night Live, or when Mike Myers and Dana Carvey did Wayne and Garth? Or that one song on the radio that gets you flying down the highway and the mojo working like a caffeine injection? You loved it, right?
That is to say, you loved it until you didn’t.
The slippery slope when a team has a knockout, runaway hit of a character is going back to it too much. Yes, people loved seeing Buckwheat or hearing that song until they got too much of it. It got played out. Overexposed might be a better word.
Certainly Lorne Michaels and the gang at SNL know what happens when they lay it on too thick, and yes, his remedy seems to be to go make a movie with those characters. Did you think the “Night at the Roxbury” boys were charming? Yeah, well, wait around and catch the movie sometime on cable.
It’s doubtful we will be making a movie starring Dan Roche as the renowned Philadelphia public address artiste, Dan Baker. But we could. The bit is that good. Listeners to our podcast—yes, all of them—have written in asking for more Dan Roche doing the Dan Baker impression. See, our listeners are old-school like that… they write in.
We climbed on that slippery slope anyway and Dan trotted out his gift for mimicry. Here, take a listen:
Here comes the part you don’t want to read… don’t expect Dan doing Dan every time out. That’s the best thing we have so we don’t want to kill it before we have to. See, we’re thinking long term here at The Podcast of Awesomeness and in the meantime, the boys back in R&D are busy coming up with new ideas that we can beat up until they crumble apart like a piñata.
And then we can all dive on top of the sweet, nutritious candy.