Ten Years of RFC Flashback: Episode 14

From early 2007, This is an edited version of Radio Free Charleston’s 14th episode, “Spider-man Shirt.” We still cannot find the original version of this show. If we did, we would restore the “Pentagram Flowerbox” cartoon, but we still wouldn’t present the show in an unedited form. I’ll tell you more about that in a moment.

As it is, this show includes a terrific vintage music video for Go Van Gogh’s “Shut Up, I Love You,” the most-requested song on the radio incarnation of RFC (that’s a cartoon version of Go Van Gogh at the right–it is not from the video in this show), and Joe Justice’s hilarious short film, “Marvel Jackass,” which is even finnier now, since the Marvel Cinematic Universe didn’t exist when this show was first done.

There’s also a LAX cartoon by Frank Panucci, which took the place of Pentagram Flowerbox. Despite all the edits, it’s still a very strong show. If you want the details on our controversy with Pentagram Flowebox, you can read about it here. Since that post, however, the Third Mind Incarnation has shuffled off this plane of existence, and on the way out, asked us to restore his cartoon to the show.

Originally this program contained a music video, directed by Rudy Panucci and Melanie Larch, for a song by a one-man group we would rather not name for legal reasons. We were very proud of the music video, but a little more than a year after this episode premiered we discoved that the musician we’d befriended, for whom we created this video was a thief, a drug-dealer, a sociopath and worst of all, possibly a plagarist.

In the immediate aftermath of being personally victimized by this person, I was contacted by a former friend of his who claimed that he had stolen their song and presented it as his own work. I contacted my now-former friend and houseguest with this information, and never got a response. I cannot unequivically say that he stole the song and said he wrote it himself, but I can’t in good conscious allow something that is probably plagarized to go out to the world with my name attached to it. When this episode was uploaded to MySpace, I chopped out all references to the group and eliminated the video.That’s why the host segments here seem so choppy.

If I can track down a copy of the original show, I plan to restore as much as possible, bleep the name of the offending person, and present the music video with his face blurred and the music replaced by a commentary track by Melanie and me talking about the experience. For now, this edited version will suffice. You can find heavily-edited production notes here, here and here.