This week we have an early episode of Radio Free Charleston, originally posted in September, 2006, which is notable because this is the first time it’s ever been posted here in PopCult since we briefly had it embedded in a post in 2009 (I’ll be restoring that post soon).
There is no reason for this other than an oversight on my part.
See, over ten years ago, I began remastering old episodes of the RFC video show and uploading them to YouTube because MySpace, where I had an RFC Archives page, was becoming more and more unreliable. So I re-rendered the shows and uploaded a bunch of them to YouTube, and then started posting them in the weekly feature that you’re reading now.
Last week I started presenting the shows in chronological order again, posting the first five episodes, and in the process I made a surprising discovery: I’d never gotten around to posting our sixth episode here, even though it’s been on YouTube for a decade.
Somehow, it got lost in the sauce, and we skipped over it. Making matters worse, this was a very early show, from before we had the ability to permanently embed the show in the blog. The original production notes have a now-dead link to the page at the Charleston Gazette that briefly held the video, but that was wiped from the servers a long, long time ago.
Unless you’re one of the couple dozen folks or so who have stumbled onto the YouTube clip in the last decade, you haven’t been able to see this episode of the show for over fourteen years. This is not one of the four “lost” episodes, but due to my faulty memory, it’s making its first appearance as “The RFC Flashback.”
This is the sixth episode of Radio Free Charleston, originally posted at Gazz TV on September 28, 2006. Show number six cranked up the hyperactivitization level a bit as we brought viewers our loudest band at that time, Professor Mike, and the mysterious musical cabal known as Two Watts Of Power.
Episode Six was titled “Chris Hero Shirt,” named after Chris Hero, at the time, the reigning Heavyweight Champion of IWA East Coast. Nowadays, Chris Hero is an indie wrestling shaman, having spent years in WWE’s NXT federation under a different name. Chris later appeared on RFC in the flesh.
GI Joe returned to Radio Free Charleston in this episode. You can almost see an Action Marine sitting astride Bob Dobbs’ head in the background of Professor Mike’s performance. You can also check out an Adventure Team Astronaut menacing The Red Baron.
The host segments, shot by RFC Big Shot, Brian Young, were recorded on the roof of an unnamed parking building in Kanawha City. As I mentioned, our musical guests were Two Watts of Power and Professor Mike. We had a fake movie trailer by The No Pants Players, and a short film and repurposed animation by Frank Panucci.
My brother, Frank, is also one of the members of Two Watts of Power and created the music video we brought you. Professor Mike was recorded at the much-missed LiveMix Studio. The No Pants Players, I think, were recorded at The Labelle Theater, before one of their shows.
It’s a pretty wild time capsule of Charleston’s cross-pollinated music/comedy/wrestling scene from 2006. It’s nice that people can see this once-missing artifact. Next week in The RFC Flashback, we’ll bring you our two-part Halloween 2006 shows, edited into one big RFC.
Another historical note: I actually made a trailer for this episode of the show, and I was able to embed it in this blog (back then YouTube clips were limited to under ten minutes), and it was my VERY FIRST video ever on YouTube. Check it out…
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