Roll20 Voice & Raised on Radio

Okay, okay, stay with me for a minute. It'll make sense. I hope. 

I had an epiphany about my Roll20 DMing lately, and one of the problems I seemed to have conquered. That is, the adapting to voice only after decades of having a table full of folk looking at me. 

I decided to skip using camera for the most part because I might find it distracting. In a different way than actually be in front of people physically. I just knew from various Zoom meetings for work or whatnot that seeing each other was not necessary.  

Adapting to having a narrative happen with just my voice had some challenges. For one it turns out I like to gesticulate and make hand gestures and such when I am describing things in a game. So I have a hard time of breaking that habit when nobody can see me. And I've had to change a lot of my process to adapt myself to being descriptive without using my body at all. Sometimes in the last couple of campaigns on Roll20 I would think "why would anybody do it this way?" 

But I somewhat recently realized I loved doing it in this format so much so that I pretty much consider myself retired from face-to-face DnD. For a lot of reasons, but in large part I think because I remembered the power of radio DJs. And how memorable the ones I grew up with in Southern California are still for me to this day. And why. 

The first DJ I can remember from when I was a little kid was LA staple The Real Don Steele. 93 KHJ was the most listened to station, and though nobody knew what he looked like, for locals, he was a bigger celebrity than anybody in the movies. That's the power of local radio. You feel like you know them. 

One of my favorite Tarantino films is Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and one of the reasons I love it is the soundtrack is a tribute to Don Steele in a way his location work was a tribute the LA I inhabited as a child. He's practically a side character, as Brad Pitt drives down Burbank Blvd with Don Steele introducing songs and commercials. It sort of blew my mind. At one point a commercial for a shampoo or something called "Heaven Sent" plays on the radio, and I flashed back to infancy. I immediately remembered the commercial with the catchy tune. I got chills hearing it. As a kid when the TV wasn't on, the radio was on, and I must have heard the commercial a hundred times before I could tie my shoes. It was a powerful nostalgia feeling. I had to be only like 5 or 6 at the oldest when that commercial was a thing. 

And that is the power of the voice of radio. What is another power? Well, you get such an image of your mind of your favorite DJ, you get blown out of the water when you see they look nothing like you imagined.

I swear to God I always though
Don Steele was a black guy. 

It seems that every 10 years or so you get new DJ's. In the 80's we loved World Famous KROQ, and we always imagined the radio station being like a circus or something, where Devo or Elvis Costello might just be hanging out in the hallway. Richard Blade, Poor Man, Swedish Eagle, Rodney Bingenheimer, and others just seemed be magic. 

Mark and Brian were huge in LA in the late 80's and into the 90's. I'm kind of ashamed of being such a fan. They were such dorks. I remember me and a buddy going before work to some stunt at the Culver City station they were doing live. Getting lifted by a crane and dipped in fudge, and we all got M&Ms to throw at them. It was like a wild rock scene. All these hot young secretaries and retail clerks where there too, screaming like Springsteen had showed up. These guys were huge but looking back I don't think they were that funny. By the late 90's I was like "boooring..and they are just ripping off Stern." But man, the magic of radio. Of just hearing the voices. And they talked about things I Loved that they grew up on. Batman, Gilligan's Island, The Munster's.

The fucking mullets were not
all that magical. 

OK, the point is as soon as I started thinking about the power in a radio voice, the mystery of it, I saw the advantage of it in a D&D campaign using just voice. You start getting comfortable with it and do things with it. To be more articulate and descriptive. No flailing hands needed. Though, uh, I still gesticulate. No need to eliminate it really, as long as your voice is conveying what is needed. 

The mystery of radio is the mystery of a faceless voice. And I feel I am starting to harness that mystery. The DM is an omnipotent presence. Eliminate the body and I feel you can tap into that in a way you cannot when the group can see you sucking down the beers while wearing a Rick and Morty T shirt. 

As an aside, another great thing for me is the mute button. I have a tendency to interject a lot when players are talking among each other in character. So that button is a great way to censor myself. 

Gilbert Gottfried - a bigger loss than you think

My second RIP post in a matter of weeks, but what the hell. This is important for me, and the two people who read this blog. 

Gilbert Gottfried died this week. People know the raspy voiced New York actor/comedian from a million little things, but most of the world would know him as the voice of the parrot in Alladin and appearances in both Problem Child film. But his unique, chalkboard delivery has gotten him work in lots of cartoons, and many oddball live action roles, such as Abraham Lincoln in A Million Ways to Die in the West, and many 90's sitcoms. As far as cartoons, my favorite was Mxyzptlk in the 90's animated Superman series.

And the definitive pronunciation of a name I 
had struggled with all my life "mixy spit lick"

Gil's no-holds-barred humor got him in a lot of hot water. His family claims his early 90's appearance at The Oscars where he rattled off several Pee Wee Herman jerking-off references resulted in a partial blacklisting in Hollywood, where only directors and writers who were steadfast fans tended to give him character actor work. 

In the 90's he made many appearances on The Howard Stern Show, where "Woke" had yet to exist. There was a multiple appearance segment where Gilbert donned a Dracula costume, and went down to the bustling Manhattan streets to ask passersby questions about the OJ Simpson case ("do you think OJ has a black heart? As black as the darkest caves of Transylvania?"). Pretty nutty. 

"Do you believe Chris Darden 
shtooped Marcia Clark?"

And doing a Dracula voice had already been part of his act for many years. See, GG was a fan of old movies. Especially horror movies of the 30's through 50's. But not just Horror. Abbot and Costello, Three Stooges, all the Universal stuff. I remember long ago reading about how Gilbert would do stand up at colleges, and nobody would know any of his ancient references or voices. Only when doing something like a Mickey Mouse joke would he get laughs. 

But if you are a certain age, say well over 40, you may well have grown up where one of the few local off channels showed old movies in the afternoon, and sometimes all day on the weekend. All the Universal horrors, Dead End Kids, Bogey, Stalag 17. King Kong, Godzilla, and here and there some old Hammer horror films. And you probably had a weekend horror host, such as Elvira and various local "ghoulish" personalities, like in LA we had "Seymour" a mustachioed Gomez Adams wanna be in a cape and fedora. These had the real treats. 

This is what Gilbert grew up on in New York, where the force was strong with old movie marathons apparently. So this was a large part of his stand up. And this love of the old and often obscure led to him starting the podcast that is the subject of this post: Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast. 

Along with co-host, writer and fellow old film buff Frank Santopadre, they discussed old films, actors, and conducted many interviews, with Frank keeping the agent of Chaos Gil on the straight path. They worked hard to bring on old guests who were in the last years of life, to preserve their memories and words. Staggering old actors (it was mostly women in their 90's who still lived) from Frankenstein films or old musicals would come in and share tales of sad old Hollywood while Gilbert cracked wise and howled with laughter. Discussions about moments in time that would never be spoken of again where the order of the day. Deep, deep dives. 

And raunchy stories were some of Gilbert's favorites. He was an old Hollywood gossip machine. He would ask old celebrities if they knew about Cesar Romero's fetish for having orange wedges tossed at his naked ass, or about how Tony Curtis was in a limo in the 70's, saw Walter Matthau walking down a New York street, and rolled down his window to Brag about having just slept with Yvonne Dicarlo of the Munsters. 

More modern comedians would often come on to tell their own tales of Sad old Hollywood fandom, such as Patton Oswalt, or voice actor Billy West (Stern Show, Futurama, Ren and Stimpy) who much like Gil was influenced by old celluloid, being well known for impersonations of Grandpa Al Lewis of the Munsters, or Larry of the Three Stooges (basis for Stimpy). 

There are other great podcasts about old film, such as another fave of mine You Must Remember This. But the amount of stories, and heavily sought after interviews with the barely living, that made the podcast special. A treasure, in a way. 

And that is as much a tragedy maybe as the loss of the man. His work, though sometimes crass, cast a light on the forgotten but not all gone. How many tales still hanging in there will not be told? 

The podcast will probably be retooled by Santopadre. I'd like to see it be rotating hosts; Billy West, Patton, Seth MacFarlane. Any old movie fan with a sense of humor may not replace Gil, but they can carry on his important work. Important to a fan of, I'll say it again, Sad old Hollywood. 

that well again...

But for now, go take a look at the archives. I think much older ones are behind a paywall, but that might change. Give some props to Frank and dearly departed Gilbert if you grew up on stuff that was already decades old. Goodbye Gil, I hope you are an angel with a dirty face (old movie reference, 'natch).

Cheers.