rudytoplessa

This week’s RFC Flashback is a special episode for a couple of reasons. We feature fantastic music by an early line-up of InFormation and Seven Minutes Til Midnight, and we have a really cool piece of animation by Frank Panucci. But what makes this show so notable is that it is the only episode of Radio Free Charleston to be rejected and censored by The Charleston Gazette, and it is one of two shows in which your host, Rudy Panucci, does not wear a hat.

Those two matters, by the way, are unrelated. It’s not like the sight of my un-hatted head is so hideous as to border on obscene.

The problem content in this episode is a segment called “Cooking With The Atrocity,” a comedy cooking segment brought to us by the fine folks at IWA East Coast Wrestling and the 108 Dragons. The humor in the original piece was that it turned into a disaster, with much unexpurgated cursing along the way. In these early days, Radio Free Charleston was hosted on the Gazette servers and as such, we didn’t want to push the envelope too far for fear that it would be returned containing a pink slip.

So when I included “Cooking With The Atrocity” in the show, I bleeped the crap out of it. The odd thing was that the bleeping made the already hilarious bit even funnier. Unfortunately, my editor, Douglas Imbrogno, felt that too many remnants of cursing remained, so for the only time, I withdrew the show for further editing.

It turned out that adding even more bleeps made the bit even funnier, so it all worked out well in the end. Sadly, the official, heavily-bleeped version is one of my “missing” shows, so we are bringing you the original cut, which has a bit less bleeping of the words that lip-readers could have figured out anyway.

As for me not wearing a hat…people were asking, so I complied. I have no excuse for the silver shirt, though. You can read the original production notes HERE.