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Gatorbox Comes Full Circle with "Alligator Television" Project
🕑 Added 2024-02-23 01:20:02 +0000 UTCSince the turn of the millennium I've lived my life in front of a camera. Starting in the year 2000/2001 my friends and I put together a video series called "Code: BS". In a time before YouTube we shared our skits via KaZaA by intentionally naming them pornographic things and filling the metadata tags with X-rated things. We figured people were either looking for free music or porn and in order to get ourselves out there we'd have to bait and switch someone in one of those two ways. Ultimately we made it so that if you downloaded something called "hot 18yo anal orgy barely legal teens video x-rated explicit" you'd instead be greeted by yours truly dressed as what in today's society we'd call an extremely racist caricature of a Middle Eastern man named "Muhammad M. Muhammad" talking about counterfeiting Pokemon cards with his accomplice consequently named "Mohammed M. Mohammad". I tried to attach a picture but the Patreon site must be implementing AI that can detect racist things and it's not working.
The point I'm trying to make here is that doing sketch comedy and stupid stuff like that has been in my blood. Before a camera was pointed in my direction I recorded spoken word humor on cassette tape with my best friend. I started hosting Gatorbox in 2012 and in 2013 I took over the project and now it's all I do. You guys already know this story by now. Hell, the only people who can see this post are those of you who are literally giving me money every week to support this show. I think it's safe to say you're familiar with the history of Gatorbox. You're as invested in it as you possibly can be without appearing on camera (and for some of you who support the show such as Rockyowitz and Zahando87 you've actually done the impossible and hosted this damn show).
Gatorbox has eaten up a significant amount of my time since I took over the project 11 years ago and in the process I inadvertently just stopped doing sketch comedy and funny videos. I kind of miss doing that so I wanted to put something on the back burner that might let me spread my wings again and get out there and do some dumb shit for the amusement of everyone else. We have "Gatorbox: OFF AIR" for things I do that happen outside of the stream but that series is just kind of a glorified GatorUNbox that covers things that would take too long to do live on the air. I still have two more episodes of OFF AIR to record and edit and both of them (unintentionally) follow in the footsteps of the episodes that were released prior. Also I've been meaning to re-edit the Mare Juice episode, which was the first episode of OFF AIR, and re-upload it. (The episode was delisted because one half of the Mare Juice gag happened during an episode of What's Yiffin', a show that has been scrubbed from Gatorbox history. You probably remember it though...)
So I have this idea for something on the side that involves doing dumb shit, sometimes in front of other people (while I'm still youthful-looking enough to get away with it at least). I needed a name for the project and I literally thought about this for days while the solution was looking at me the entire time. Surely by now you know the name "Gatorbox" came about from playing with Translation Party, a website that would repeatedly translate a phrase from English to Japanese and back over and over again resulting in funny Engrish results. The site used Japanese by default but since it used Google's API you could pick any language supported by Google and use that instead. "Gatorbox" came about from pinging the phrase "Alligator Television" back and for in Mandarin Chinese, I believe. There was my project name, sourced from the seed that bloomed into the "Gatorbox" we all know and love.
So I got my project name. Now you're probably wondering what the preview picture associated with this post means. That's a work-in-progress YouTube thumbnail. Much like how Fanfiction Factory was branded differently to make it stand out from the rest of Gatorbox I'm doing the same with Alligator Television (except unlike Fanfiction Factory I'm keeping this series on the main channel). This whole idea was spawned because I caught wind of a website called Punsteria that contains thousands of puns, all of them AI generated, none of them funny in the slightest. The image in the thumbnail is from their list of "Pokemon Puns" and it's obviously just AI-generated trash. On this page we get such knee-slappers like:
--- What do you call a Pikachu with good manners? Polite-achu!
--- What do you call a Pikachu that can fix your computer? Ctrl+Pikachu!
--- What do you call a Pokemon that tells jokes? A comedi-yawn!
There are hundreds of these abominations on the Punsteria website plus pages for countless other topics. Pokemon was literally just the first thing I thought of.
It seems like there isn't a lot of coverage about this website out there online. No one's made any YouTube videos about it, for example. I have this gut feeling that this might be a potential gold mine if I can do this correctly. My idea is to deliver some of these "jokes" into the camera on the Gatorbox set but I also want to hit up the coffee shops local to where I live on their open mic nights and read these off to an unsuspecting audience. I assume they will absolutely hate these but I want to be sincere with my delivery as if I think these are the funniest things on the planet. I could also walk around my town's tourist district and hit up people on the street, though right now we're not in tourist season. In order to do this I'd need a small crew to go with me to these places and that's going to be the hardest part of this whole endeavor. The best part about this is last year the Supreme Court ruled that anything created by AI is not eligible for copyright so I can literally just read Punsteria jokes verbatim and I'm 100% in the clear.
As for other episodes of Alligator Television that's something I'd have to think about. I would want to do more than just make fun of Punsteria of course. I could possibly do an episode all about eating free food (i.e. stealing) from Walmart and present it the same way annoying YouTubers do the "life hacks" thing. I might even be able to revive a couple of old sketch ideas from video series of years gone by if the folks I originally filmed these videos with are on board with reprising their roles. That would open the doors to doing bits on how to upgrade your PC, build a BattleBot, draw a dragon, and more. I want to see if videos like these are feasible before I jump on doing the first episode about Punsteria, otherwise I run the risk of starting a series while only having enough material for one episode and that's it.
Anyways that's all I have for you all in this update. No ETA on when Alligator Television will release (or if it will even come to fruition). Just a heads up that this is something I want to pursue and I'm looking into avenues to make it happen. Thank you for your continued support of Gatorbox on Patreon!
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Magic Beans
I never thought I’d yearn for the comedic wit of Carole P. Roman, but here we are.
