Sponsored by AT&T and produced by Crave Online, Fanboy Funhouse is a fast-paced hosted comedy series that uses geek culture news (movies, video games, comic books, and tech) as inspiration for comedic sketches and guest interviews all while following the antics of a crazy cast of characters including an ornery dragon, a janitor with a pig nose, and a talking brain who has a mancrush on Johnny Depp.
The show is hosted, written, and produced by New Media veteran Nar Williams. Williams was formerly a producer at NowLive.com, has hosted over 150 episodes of the comedy podcast Goober and The Viking, and had another web video series with Crave Online called Heads Up with Nar Williams. He also has experience in television, having hosted Discovery Science Channel’s Science of the Movies, guest hosted on G4’s Attack of the Show, and appearing on Current TV’s Rotten Tomatoes Movie Show. Nar also writes a weekly column for the enormously popular and influential geek website, Ain’t It Cool News. Williams created the show with Jonathan London, editor-in-chief of Geekscape.net and writer/director of the 15 Gigs web series When Ninjas Attack!.
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Tubefilter asked Williams how he came up with the show and what will make it unique considering the number of hosted geek culture web shows such as Revision3’s The Totally Rad Show or theStream.tv’s The RadNerd Show. “Shows like The Mighty Boosh and Pee Wee’s Playhouse are a big inspiration for me,” said Williams. “There’s no shortage of geek culture news on the internet, so my goal is to present it in a wild and unpredictable way – with a cast of crazy characters that people will hopefully find entertaining. And I’m pretty sure it’s the only talk show with a playground slide for the guests.”
That slide, along with pretty much everything in the Funhouse, was created by production designer Pogo Saito. If you are a fan of Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, you are already familiar with her as she received a Streamy nom last year for her unique, hyperactive, colorfully explosive production design on that series. “When I asked Pogo if we could have guests enter on a slide, she didn’t look at me like I was a crazy – she got excited and viewed it as a design challenge… And she did it!”, exclaimed Williams.
Other members of the Funhouse crew include Steve Woolf (Epic Fu), who has signed on to direct Fanboy Funhouse starting with episode 3 and David Kester, the in-house video editor at Crave Online. He and Williams work closely together on editing the series to make it moves at as fast and funny a pace as possible. “David and I often look at a segment of the show when we’re editing and ask each other, ‘Is it crazy enough?’,” said Williams. “Some of the weirder moments in Funhouse happen when “editing hysteria” sets in..usually around 2 or 3am.”
We asked Williams what fans can expect for the shows 22 episode first season. “We’ll get to know all the regular Funhouse characters more and meet some new characters like Hollywood douchebag, and Nar’s archenemy, Axe Hardy. We’ll have more great guests coming down the slide for interviews – new media personalities like The Fine Brothers and Zadi Diaz (Epic Fu). We’ll have coverage from events like SXSW, E3, and Comic-Con. I also hope to use audience feedback for elements of the show. We haven’t introduced one of the characters yet – a robot – so we’re letting the audience vote on what the robot’s name should be in a poll on the website.”
Fanboy Funhouse will release a new episode every week in April, and then be released biweekly the rest of the year.
