Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, edinburgh fringe, mj hibbert, podcast

Total Hero Team Forever

Total Hero Team podcast – MJ Hibbett (and Steve)

First episode online now, with new episodes every Friday

 MJ Hibbett (the man who brought you 'Alan Moore, Standing In The Corner Of The Store' writes,

When a Fringe show comes to an end you always want to try and keep a record of it, so we're trying a new way to preserve our two-man rock opera about superheroes for future generations.

The life cycle of a Fringe show is pretty much set in stone – you get the title and vague idea of it worked out in February so it can go in the Edinburgh Fringe guide, do preview shows from April onwards, go to Edinburgh in August, then tour it around the country if you can until the next February when you lay it down to rest and the whole thing starts again.

This all means that I'm feeling a bit sad at the moment, because our current show "Total Hero Team" is coming to an end. It's a two-man rock opera about superheroes which we've had a delightful year showing off in, but now it's time for it to stop. Every year when we do this I try to find some way to preserve the show, usually by just recording it, although a few years ago we went a bit further and turned our "Dinosaur Planet" musical into a full-on concept album, with special effects, orchestras, guest stars, and a lot of explosions. At the time I thought we were making the modern equivalent of "War Of The Worlds", but it was only when we finished, three years later, that I realised that most of "War Of The Worlds" is just a band playing, without many sound effects at all.

If I'd listened to Jeff Wayne's album properly before we began, rather than just relying on memories from childhood, I could have saved myself a LOT of money, also time, and also sanity. Spending hour after hour listening to the same three second clip, trying to get just the right aural representation of a laser beam felling a battle raged iguanodon, soon loses its novelty.

So when me and my friend Steve finished the run of our 2011 show, another two-man musical called "Moon Horse VS The Mars Men Of Jupiter", I decided to go in totally the other direction, and just record a couple of live shows, edit them together to keep the best bits, and release it as an album online. It certainly saved a lot of time, but the final product wasn't half as good. Apart from anything else, people found it confusing – it was just an audio recording, so without the various hats, wigs and props that we use on stage it was difficult to know what on earth was going on. We did do different voices for the different characters, but we're not exactly professional actors!

With all that in mind I tried to find one of Tony Blair's third ways for "Total Hero Team". I sat down and re-wrote the whole thing for audio. This mainly involved characters addressing each other by name a lot more, and making sure that everybody said something once in a while to remind the listener they were there – I read an article, apparently that's how radio plays work – but I also took advantage of the fact that we didn't have to wait for costume changes and put in a few sound effects where they were needed. I wasn't creating the full-on radiophonic soundscapes of the concept album, it was more like downloading a "door opens" sound effect or the occasional explosion, but when it all got put together it sounded, I think, pretty effective.

We decided to release it as a podcast serial – the show's divided up into six parts, or rather it's "an epic, six part novel, complete in this issue", so it split up into episodes quite easily. The first episode's online now at our website, www.totalheroteam.co.uk, and we'll be putting a new one out every Friday for the next five weeks. We're coinciding all this with our final batch of shows, in London, Glasgow and Leicester. My possibly delusional hope is that people will hear the podcast and then come to the live shows to see how the story ends. It's got to be worth a try, right?

Whatever happens, we'll have an everlasting record of The United Statesman, Doc Future, Smart Alex, Chester Champion and all the other characters that we've been enjoying titting about with for the past year. And if doing it this way doesn't work, I guess we'll have to make a movie next time!

Contact Mark Hibbett mjhibbett@gmail.com

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