Come with me
And you’ll be
In a world where Franks and Beans posts updates
Take a look
And you’ll see
This is actually an update
What a day! A nice day to come back to this damn website and act like I’m not ignoring it. If it makes you feel any better, content-starved reader, I’ve also been ignoring my other website obligations over at teddyandtheyeti.blogspot.com. Go ahead, click the link! It’s the same as it’s been since October. This probably does not make you feel any better.
Let’s not let that get us down, though. Let’s talk about the psychedelic 47th episode of Franks and Beans, the barely named “Green”! Why is it called “Green”? That’s a mystery for another time, folks.
And that time is RIGHT NOW! You may be saying, “but time hasn’t passed at all!” To which I reply, the barely noticeable portion of existence that has moved inexorably forward counts as “another time”. Also, I just remembered that the title actually had two meanings, one obvious and the other…slightly less obvious.
This episode of Franks and Beans marks the very first appearance of the official Franks and Beans green screen! I am legitimately proud to have this item, even though I bought it from eBay and it’s basically just an oversized table cloth. But it’s one of the few props we own and we’ve put it to good use in both this and subsequent episodes. It currently sits in the Franks and Beans vault, folded neatly in an airtight container.
This episode also features a Larry who is very…green with envy (see what we did? That’s called depth). Why does he feel the pull of avarice?
Because of another Franks and Beans prop…a big pile of money. There is easily $500 here, enough to buy things like sound equipment or something, and most of it is thanks to Larry’s real and strange need to carry hundreds of dollars around on him at any given moment. That’s right – if you see Larry out in public, rob him and gain access to hundreds of new (to you) dollars. If you rob me…I will have less.
What follows next is an obvious take on the “angel on your shoulder” gag:
We honestly learned a lot about what we could and probably shouldn’t do with the green screen from this sequence here. Simply to fit on Larry’s shoulders, it might have been a good idea to shrink tiny Larry and tiny Jeff down a bit more, but at that point we started to lose character recognition. It’s also a good thing that Larry has since cut off his Samson-like locks, as his ponytail phases through our tiny doppelgängers more than once. Maybe next time we’ll use one of those tennis balls on a string or something.
Our goal for this episode was to devolve into weirder and weirder things as Larry’s fantasy went on, which started off with a lovely rendition of “Pure Imagination”, straight from the 1971 classic “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” as we explored the solar system (from a since-lost YouTube video) in the background.
Our green screen worked overtime as Larry and I flew in the background of the scene. We draped the screen over a stool and tried our best at planking, which I’m not even sure was a thing at the time we filmed it. Sharp-eyed viewers will notice a tiny cameo in this sequence from Mitch Mitchell, who I think stopped over to take some pictures of baked beans or something. He shows up again in a few episodes.
The final freak-out sequence concludes with multiple versions of Jeff, all singing the same note, and wouldn’t that be something? But alas, it was not to be, as one by one, as clones all straining to share the same life force, they started to fall.
This brings us to our big conclusion, in which we discover that Larry has a terrible medical condition that should probably be termed seizures, but for some reason I call a stroke. In either case, we’re making fun of a serious condition, and I for one couldn’t be happier with the payoff. All of the genuinely weird things that happen all come to a head in one tragic incident.
Our “NO!” ending continues what I feel is a very ambitious episode as Larry, apparently, has been transported to a world where people only speak by foghorn. The double foghorn at the end (which really sells the ending) is actually just another version of the “same note” joke that multiple Jeff performed earlier in the episode. I don’t know why repeating the same sound on top of the original does something for me, but it does.
Well, we’ve got one more episode to go in our illustrious second season. How long until we get to season three? Um…2015. Let’s go with that.
Franks and Beans 