Easter Eggs and Footnotes, Episodes 1-3

Skee-Ball Racket, #1

1. Gil and Rosen are named after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

2. “I don’t think that’s what that means.” Some variation of this comes up in almost every episode.

3. Why does the narrator have a telephone-filtered voice even when he’s talking in a scene with his son Billy? Because I wanted some way to make the narrator sound different from Falk, even though they both use my normal speaking voice. Then when I wrote the father & son ads, I decided to have the narrator continue as the father. It seemed weird and a little funny to maintain his telephone-filtered sound.


The Whole Story, #2

1. Would a vigilante who admittedly uses a pseudonym be allowed to testify in court? Wouldn’t they demand his real name? Sure, but then how else would I stage this gimmick where people keep getting their long stories shortened by musical interludes?

2. Falk’s informant, The Shoe Shine Man, is presumably the grown-up version of Underdog’s secret identity, Shoeshine Boy.

3. As far as I know, there’s no full joke that ends with the punchline, “That’s not petroleum jelly, that’s rubber cement.” You drop this line and imply it’s a punchline, allowing listeners to imagine what the setup of the joke could have been. I heard it from a guy in school.


Not So Heroic, #3

1. This 1980s tv commercial for Massengill was the inspiration for the mother and daughter NRMA ad in this episode. I started writing them as “Mother” and “Daughter” in the script, then shortened it to M and D, finally naming them Melba and Denise.

2. Among the pistols listed with stats in the core rulebook of the James Bond 007 role-playing game (1983), my favorite was the Heckler & Koch VP70Z, because you could switch from semi-automatic (one bullet with each pull of the trigger) to “three-round bursts” with each pull of the trigger. Seemed versatile, plus it holds a lot of rounds compared to some others. More recently I watched some videos from the H&K company which explained that only the VP70M (Military) version could fire three round bursts or use a detachable shoulder-stock.  

3. Continuity error: Denise says she has four H&K pistols at home early in the conversation. After writing that bit, I looked up Michigan state laws, which say that minors can’t own or possess handguns, although they can use them for hunting or target shooting under narrow circumstances. I had Denise bring up the law later in the conversation so she could argue with her mother, but I didn’t go back to straighten out the earlier statement that she had at least four pistols at home because it seemed funny. Ooops.

4. “My tuchus.” I tempered Melba’s swearing in the hopes of maintaining a “clean” language status on Apple Podcasts and having a slightly bigger audience. They don’t consider “badass” explicit, do they? Ooops again.

5. “The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” - Melba paraphrasing William Gibson.
 
6. First appearance of Sgt. Lester “Abe” Abolysche. His first name comes from Lestrade. Can’t remember what was going through my mind when I gave him that last name.

7. There really is insurance for people who fantasize about being George Zimmerman or Bernard Goetz, but who don’t want to get charged with murder when their claim of self-defense is as shaky as a one-legged stool. I don’t think there’s a company called “Polonial Kenn” though. That might be the first spoonerism in the series. As of 2012, that kind of insurance was really offered to members of that other national rifle organization.

8. I wrote this episode to pass the Bechdel Test (female characters talking with each other about something other than men). I know the voice cast is all-male, but the only person I know who will perform voices for free as often as I want and at my convenience is me.