Review of Zanzibar19

Snowmen Hunters is the first production to come out of Zanzibar 19, a northern California-based production company focusing on online television series and video podcasting. The primary creative partners (who are also cousins), Ryan Neisz (playing Sherman) and Christopher Allen Smith (playing Evertt) premiered the first episode on September 6, 2006 on their website. Neisz has a background in television, having worked on Spin City, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and the WB’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is currently a digital filmmaker and a creative consultant at Delfino Entertainment in Burbank California. Smith is an experienced entertainment journalist, writing film reviews for The Chico News and Review, If Magazine, and Eon Magazine, as well as interviewing a variety of Hollywood celebrities.   He currently owns the production company Musselman Picture, Story and Sound in Northern California.

Sherman and Evertt are hilarious caricatures of two outlaw yokel racists that have taken on the systematic destruction of all snowmen as their sole purpose in life. And they are completely out of their minds. They live in the kind of unreal world-without-consequences that one is used to seeing in Wes Anderson

films. The show is filmed and edited in a documentary style, in which clips of Sherman being interviewed about his hatred of snowmen are mixed with clips of he and Everett shooting snowmen with shotguns and other images of mutilation. The five to ten-minute episodes first reveal why snowmen are evil, and then continue on to reveal the intricacies of Everett’s unlikely past, how he and Sherman go undercover, and what happens when Mentos and Diet Coke meet snowmen. Check out the blog and forum for further musings on snow-related violence and Zanzibar19 news. 

One of my favorite episodes of Snowmen Hunters is 19, in which Everett has a serious discussion with his wife Meika, a stick that Sherman has lovely pet names for, who was stolen away from him by a snowman in episode 11. He decides to leave her and proceeds to make out with something of greater arboreal substance, Mary Kathryn Gallagher-style.