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Succotash

Succotash, the Comedy Soundcast Soundcast, was launched 12 years ago (April, 2011) with the idea of promoting comedy soundcasts in what was then a marketplace still trying to find its way. By featuring short clips of shows being produced by funny folks both known and unknown, we like to feel that we maybe had a little tiny, eeny weeny, itsy bitsy bit to do with helping to ignite the torch of soundcasts across the globe! (But then we've always had a rather high opinion of ourselves...)

Original show host and executive producer Marc Hershon, along with co-host Tyson Saner, booth announcer Bill Heywatt, engineer/producer Joe Paulino, musical director Scott Carvey, and booth assistant Kenny Durgis have been keeping the flame alive o'er these many years.

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  2. Succotash Clips Epi163: Makin' It Unfinal

Feb 14, 2018

Yes, believe it or now, and for the last time – really, this time, it’s me. Marc Hershon. Departing host but still remaining executive producer of Succotash, the Comedy Soundcast Soundcast.

First of all, I lied to you last episode when I said THAT was the final episode.

Because after I dropped that installment I heard from a number of our friends-of-the-show, mainly soundcasters who have been so supportive and helpful over the seven years that the show has been on that I felt I truly hadn’t thanked enough people when last I signed off.  Also, between Epi162 and now, we’ve found a way to keep Succotash going! In classic show business fashion, I’m just going to tease you with that for now and it will NOT be revealed in this blog post! 

You'll just have to listen to the episode to find out, as I do have a lengthy chat with my replacement toward the very end of the episode. 

The initial impetus to do an UNFINAL episode was that our resident political comedian and social commentator Will Durst had sent me a last Burst O’ Durst installment which arrived after we’d dropped Epi162. And then I discovered we also had a last Boozin’ with Bill segment with our announcer Bill Heywatt that had somehow slipped through the cracks.  Based on those things, I figured I would do one last round of soundcast clips just featuring shows from some of our most vocal supporters on social media. Which gives us quite a lineup! 

Big giant thanks, by the way, to our Associate Producer, Tyson Saner, for helping me to harvest the absolute bumper crop of clips we’re featuring this show. You’re going to hear from The Anti Social Show, Casa Mirth, the Chillpak Hollywood Hour, Comedy Film Nerds, Ear Goggles, Film Threat, Illusionoid, Quick Question, Story Worthy, and Strange Times.

And this Unfinal episode is sponsored by our friends at Henderson’s Pants and teir spanking new Down UnderPants. (Including an endorsement from Jason "Jabs" McNamara, all the way from Canberra, Australia.)

THE CLIPS

Chillpak Hollywood Hour
First out of the barrel are a couple of gents I have referred to often as being members of “podcast royalty” and that is Dean Haglund and Phil Leirness of the Chillpak Hollywood Hour. Early on these guys were very supportive of the show and generous with their time and, over the years, we’ve become good friends. Their show is now in it’s 11th year and these guys not only have careers on their own from each other but they’ve made movies together as well, including a great dark comedy thriller called The Lady Killers. It will be screening in about a week in San Jose, California. One night only, on February 21st, at Club 3B.

Strange Times
Succotash has, on occasion, been a kind of conduit thorugh which people from one show have found out about and, eventually, connected with other shows. A case in point was Jabs, heard this show, making contact with Davian Dent in England who, at the time, had a very unique show called The Bitter Sound. Davian and Jabs put their heads together – a half a world apart from each other, mind you, and created a soundcast mini-series call The Kundalini Files, a kind of detective spoof. They also pulled in some other soundcasters on that one – other fine folks we have featured over the years here on the show. Here's a snippet from a recent episode of Davian’s other long-running show, Strange Times, featuring Davian, Samantha Pett and Kat Sorens. All three have been very friendly to our show and one of these days I’ve got to somehow meet these people and down some brews with them until we all pass out.

Story Worthy
Another ardent supporter of this show has been a woman with a terrific show of her own, and that’s Christine Blackburn, co-host of the Story Worthy Podcast, along with Hannis Phinney. I’ve run into her almost every year at the Los Angeles Podcast Festival and she’s always been a great promoter and cheerleader. Some years she’s even dragged various comedians and soundcasters into the Podfest’s Podcast Lab and insisted that they sit down and do an interview with me. Story Worthy is a great storytelling show, with some great guests, and recently they had on comedian Johnno Wilson, who related a harrowing tale.

Film Threat
Another good friend to this show and who I have ended up hanging out with whenever I run into him out in the world is Chris Gore. When Succotash first started he was running PodCRASH, where his gimmick was to appear on other soundcasters shows, then play THOSE episodes as his own. In a way it was the ultimate cross-promotion. Once upon a time he had been the editor and publisher of Film Threat magazine, a great “alt” movie magazine and Chris has returned to that property, only now in website and soundcast form. Here’s a clip from his recent “Time’s Up At Sundance” epi from January with guests Natalia Winkleman and Jon Bernstein…

Casa Mirth
The Casa Mirth soundcast features the team-up of Dr. Norman Trousers and River Gambezi. Norman’s been a presence around here pretty much since we began Succotash and he’s part of the infamous Podcast Mafia that got started years ago with myself somehow ending up as the titular Podfather. (Although I believe that moniker was started by Eric Furniss of The FOONcast.) Trousers and Gambezi run a very sporadically-appearing show and, for the past four holiday seasons, they have produced these wild mashup Christmas productions. They’re scripted and then the boys draft fellow soundcasters from all over the world to voice the parts. I’m honored to have been included in these crazy shows and this past December Casa Mirth featured their own take on It’s A Wonderful Life, the Jimmy Stewart classic. I was asked to be the Narrator, which I pulled off rather nicely, I think.

Illusionoid
 We head up to Toronto to hear from the cast of Illusionoid. Love these guys, who I got to interview fairly early into when we started. Paul Bates, Lee Smart, and Nug Nahrgang – the best name in soundcasting – were in San Francisco for the annual Improv Festival here and we got a chance to hang out. And being a longtime improvisor, I really took to their style of an improvised sci-fi anthonolgy series, based around the gimmick of mankind’s creation bent on the destruction of humans. We feature a glimpse at a transmission from the last episode of their 9th season last November.

Ear Goggles
Jeremy, Aaron, and Stacy don’t soundcast all that often but they still drop an episode every now and then. I used to run into Jeremy and Stacy at the LA Podfest for the first few years but they stopped coming down from Seattle. We're featuring a ready-made clip I found on their homesite – one of their “bonus clips” from a show last year where Stacy plays with some toys, as she puts it. (If you go to their site, you can browse through their archives all the way back to 2005, which is when they started out as The Sibling Rivalry podcast.)

Comedy Film Nerds
A couple of other longtime soundcasters who have been very nice to me are Chris Mancini and Graham Elwood, the hosts of the Comedy Film Nerds soundcast. They are also two of the organizers of the Los Angeles Podcast Festival and have never been anything but welcoming, accommodating, and kind to me. It probably helped that I contributed to the Kickstarter campaign that paid for the first LA Podfest but, since then, they have invited me to moderate panels and be a guest on other panels. Here’s a clip from their episode 403 from last month, with guest Jon Reep.

Quick Question
I wanted to be sure to toss in a soundcast farewell to Travis Clark and Jonathan Sadowski, hosts of the Quick Question soundcast. When I first mentioned I was going to step away from Succotash, Travis messaged me to ask if it was his turn to “talk me off the ledge”, as he put it. That’s because a few years ago, he and his wife Brandi were considering hanging up Tiny Odd Conversations, the show they did together and I convinced them to hang in there as they had only hit their Epi50. And they did, for quite awhile. Eventually, Brandi got herself a new job that kept her crazy-busy and TOCpod eventually drained away.  But then the Clarks got a new neighbor, Jonathan, and Travis discovered they had a lot in common. Mostly talking, judging from the amount of palavering that goes on during episodes of Quick Question. I had them on a few months ago from a chat we had at the LA Podfest.

The Anti Social Show
For our last clip of this Unfinal Succotash episode, we turn to a couple of the most ardent supporters of the show who started their own soundcast last year. Our very own Tyson Saner teamed up with one of our most supportive listeners, Hunter Block, and created The Anti Social Show. For the first 10 episodes, they were only on SoundCloud but now they’re on iTunes and other fine distribution points around the interwebs. This clip, harvested by Tyson himself, is from their Epi41, one of the first installments of 2018, entitled “Obscured By Sound”.

And that is going to do it for Succotash under my command. We’ll be announcing when the first new episode of of the show is dropping, as soon as we figure out what we need to do to put all of the controls into the new host's hands. I will likely drop in from time to time, and I’m in the process of putting a whole new soundcast into production.

I want to thank you for listening to this Unfinal episode of the show. For those of you who have been listening for a while, I can’t thank you enough for your support. And whether that describes you or you’re relatively new to the show, please subscribe and keep listening as show continues. I’m excited to see where our new host takes the show.

Now, for the last time as your host, it’s my pleasure to ask you to please pass the Succotash.

Goodbye.

— Marc Hershon