AND WHAT ABOUT THE 90'S OFFICER?

PHIL AUSTIN: "Down Under Danger" is a Nick Danger adventure. The only person in The Firesign Theatre that's in it, is me. I wrote it as well. The producer, who's name is Michael Packer, cast all the other parts from actors in Grand Rapids, MI, and then we recorded it by me recording in Los Angeles, and them recording it in Grand Rapids somewhere. The final results I haven't actually heard, he's put it together. I don't know if it's been broadcast but I do know it's being offered for sale somehow in The Firesign Theatre fan network. It came out real nicely, it's an odd piece, and it's very different from The Firesign Theatre's Nick Danger, because of course the women are played by real women, and it's therefore different in style, and I think real interesting. It was finished in '94. It was actually done over '93 and '94.

When Michael Packer was asking about "Pulp Radio" and the whole idea of pulp radio just sort of began to intrigue me, even though I couldn't get into re-writing that sort of trash he was asking me to make into radio versions. The project suffered from the fact that it didn't have any good writing in it. It was a show about bad writing, so who cares at a certain point, you know. The guy that he had, who was the overall host of it, was so incensed at my piece, that he actually wouldn't introduce it. Michael was supposed to have on at the front of every show, this guy who had written the original book called "Pulp Radio", I forget his name, was supposed to do an introduction. The reason that on "Down Under Danger" that I do this long fake introduction, is that the guy refused to be on the tape. He was so upset with "Down Under Danger", he thought it was not funny, and we weren't supposed to be funny anyway, and he wanted to take his trashy writing very seriously, I suspect to make himself look good. And I think that's why those kind of people do those kind of projects.

Nick Danger is a guy who exists on the radio, very much, except for "Down Under Danger" where he's more like "The 3 Faces Of Al", the way I'm writing him and therefore the way I'm playing him. What he's become interested in at that point, what that character's become interested in, is the way he talks. It's not so much that he's on the radio, but that he has a sort of literary self consciousness about himself that develops.