Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
May 3rd, 2010

Posted by Matt

The video is up! You can view it here.

I wasn’t actually present for this particular video shoot, so I asked Paul to provide some insight with regards to his inspiration and the video at large. His comments are posted below:

I had the idea of a video showing what happens when you don’t organize your military stereotypes properly percolating around in my brain for a while, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it without showing the various squads. With at least 3 people in each squad and 5 or 6 different stereotypes, actually demonstrating all the problems would require way too many actors to be practical. I have always been a big fan of the “explaining how this silly world works to the confused straight man” structure of sketch (see: Le Cafe, Paper Boy, Economic Stimulus, The LHC, etc), so I realized that the idea would work just as well in the format of a junior officer being reprimanded by his superiors. In some wys it actually works better as the characters can talk about stuff that would be very hard for us to show. I feel that the two officers in this video are somehow related to the two from Emergency Situation, obviously they are not the same guys, but I think they are probably in the same army.

I think it got the point across, but our costuming and set dressing for the captains and the office probably wasn’t entirely believable. I was a pretty big fan of the life perserver on the wall of the navy captain’s office, though. It showed that he deals with ocean stuff, see?