Behind The Curtain (4 August, 2023)
Accessible Audio for this week’s Behind The Curtain will be available soon!
JC Sunshine: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of
It had already taken us an extra 20 minutes for the pre-recorded footage to render, so we were late to go live. Our special guest, Velma Candyass of the Candyass Cabaret had been waiting patiently through the live intro banter, and the mini-movie pre-recorded segment. Then, just before the interview segment, my chair caught on fire. This, of course, was during production of the now-legendary zombie episode of the beloved web series JC Sunshine’s Fireside Chat.
That’s how I always wanted to start a piece on this subject, and all of what I said above is true, except for the words “of course”, “now-legendary”, and “beloved”. You’ve probably never heard of this show, and only a select few have seen the episode I reference above. In fact probably fewer than those in it, or involved with its production, have laid eyes and ears on the full thing. This is one of our lost episodes, and no, not because of the chair catching fire. We put that out, nothing burned down, there was a slight delay which we covered with a clip, and the interview and the rest of the show went on as planned. It was lost because Livestream deleted the files of inactive accounts a few years later, and this was one of the episodes we hadn’t re-edited and posted on YouTube.
Let’s start at the beginning. In 2009, I discovered Livestream. I believe it had a different name back then, but that doesn’t matter. It provided a studio to mix live and pre-recorded video and stream the whole thing out on your channel. It was proper pro TV on the Internet, and it was free! I was sold. I first tried to find a way for this to work with the Infringement Festival, and even streamed one live event with a bit of pre-recorded video. This was successful, but ultimately the original concept was to become something more: a TV station, but online. For the flagship show, I turned to Stephanie Laughlin and Jerry Gabriel, and told them to create whatever show they wanted, as long as it was live with pre-recorded video. I wanted to be the host or star, and use the name JC Sunshine.
I had previously used the JC Sunshine moniker hosting the aforementioned live event, but that was a cool cat type of character, like a beatnik, who should say things like Daddy-O, but didn’t. This was a different characterization. JC was now a very friendly and positive, somewhat odd, personality with a Mr. Rogers-esque speaking pattern. He wore a Vancouver Seniors Curling Club sweater (Jerry had one laying around, for some reason, that fit me), and sat by a digital fireplace with a stuffed Hallmark dog named Rex (also originally Jerry’s). The show started to take shape. JC would talk about the week, chat with his always off-camera “technical assistant” Ricardo, played by Jerry, cut to some clips, interview his guest, and answer questions from the live chat. We picked Stuart Hamblen’s Open Up Your Heart (And Let The Sun Shine In) as the show’s theme song, chopped off the religious-themed verses, keeping only the chorus (and we made it a remix to avoid any copyright issues), and shot an opening title sequence with JC walking around the Mountain. Laurence Tenenbaum joined the team, and soon after we streamed our first episode.
Things went well, and there were no major snafus, but we realized we needed some production help, so we reached out to Chris Zacchia. His first question was a good one: “Why are you shooting in a basement with black walls and no lighting grid?” After episode 2, Chris became our full-time director, and we moved production from my semi-basement in Mile-End painted by the previous communist goth roommates to his well-lit Rosemont (makeshift) studio. We completed the first season over the next couple of months, building on JC’s character, and bringing in a theme for each episode.
Some of the JC Sunshine Season 2 Cast and Crew (l-r) Marilea Isernia, Jerry Gabriel, Stephanie Laughlin, Chris Zacchia, Kayla Williamson, Jason C. McLean and Laurence Tenenbaum
Before the second season, Chris and Peter Chernoff spent several hours making a new opening with a 3D-animated JC and Rex walking through real Montreal shots (using storyboards by Luc Savoie), while I spent about 30 minutes being the human model. We also planned things ahead of time. The first three episodes would talk about getting lost in the woods, books, and cycling, respectively, but then we would add a developing narrative into the mix. It was still a talk show with guests related to the episode’s theme, but we were now also following JC through a continuous, comedic story.
First, we poured every flagrant copyright violation we could think of into our Copyright episode, with special guest Rob Britton of the Pirate Party of Canada. At the end (spoilers), JC got arrested because Rex was downloading Jingle Cats Christmas illegally and taken to jail in outer space, because… well, because. This set up our sci-fi episode, Return of the Sunshine. Interestingly, this is the one we actually got a copyright strike for. Who knew you couldn’t use the entire Star Wars opening title theme in your YouTube video (you can on Vimeo). This was also the one and only time we found our guest through Craigslist. We asked for someone who could speak Klingon, instead we got someone who could say quapla, and claimed that he saw aliens and heard voices. That last part we only found out when we were live and I was in character.
JC got rescued from space prison, and got back to earth just in time for Halloween, which led us to the aforementioned zombie episode. It’s not the only Season Two episode that’s lost in its complete version, but it is the one that we don’t even have any clips from available. It’s a particular shame, because it had one of my favourite bits of dialogue from the entire series. Following the zombie mini-movie (and following the chair catching fire, and being put out), JC goes into the introduction of the guest:
JC:
Moving along, my guest tonight is…
Ricardo:
Wait, no. You can’t just move along. What happened? First Rex was a zombie, then I was a zombie, then everyone except for you and Nic Fitt were zombies, and then the zombies surrounded you, and…
JC:
Ricardo, most of the human race have been zombies for the past four years due to our oversaturated media culture, and processed foods. Now, moving along, my guest tonight is…
We wrapped up the season with JC getting rejected by his neighbour Jenny (Valerie Weigant), then trying to track down Santa in the season finale (it all makes sense, trust me), JC Sunshine Saves X-Mas. This episode had the band Sunshine from Brooklyn, and several other show regulars take part, and produced one of our more popular clips:
Season Three saw us move away from the mostly live format, to one where we had two pre-recorded and properly edited segments separated by a live chat that wasn’t included in the on-demand version. It wasn’t my idea, as I was still hoping to replicate and replace TV networks online, but the quality was considerably better, and the clips were always more watched than full episodes, so this way, maybe more people would watch the full work. The one episode we did do the old way was the one about the Vancouver Olympics we streamed live from New York City (trust me, it made sense). That one, sadly, is another lost episode, but the clips were quite popular. We had one planned where JC would learn figure skating from a former Olympic skater, which would essentially be me stumbling and falling down, while Rex would become her skating partner. We found out the night before the shoot that her figure skating club’s insurance would, in no way, cover me being on the ice with her. So we came up with, I think, a funnier resolution:
From our Valentine’s-themed musical premier, to our film noir murder mystery closing, we were really firing on all cylinders in our third season. We still had guests, but they were, for the most part, guest performers in the storyline, rather than talk show guests. We still had the talk show framework, but it was more a show about the show. There was a season-long narrative throughline that delved into JC’s character and mental state, the in-universe (yes, there was a universe, with its own consistency) reality of what we were witnessing, as well as Rex’s drug problem (pooch liked to party). We introduced a new character, JC’s stalker Suzie, and brought back and developed recurring characters like Jenny (I won’t get into Ricardo here), as well as dropped hints that paid off.
And then it ended. We hadn’t planned for this to be the end, but, in retrospect, the Season Three Finale does work as a series finale. We had some concepts in the works for Season Four, and had planned to take a break when shooting wrapped on the third season. To give you the timeline of all this, we had started Season One in early 2009, and wrapped Season Three early summer 2010, so this all took about a year and a half, though it feels like much longer. Since an outside editor was completing the final two episodes, they only came out midway through the fall. By that time, we had already shifted focus to going out and covering shows, events, and other happenings around town on the old, which at the time was still the new .net.
We had a whole new team of people, and things were happening. As Chris put it at the time, in a question similar to his one about shooting in a dark basement: “Why are we spending hours writing, shooting, casting, and editing to produce one piece of content every two weeks that gets seen by a handful of people, when we could spend the same time getting out daily content that there clearly is twenty times the audience for?” It’s important to note at this point, in case it’s not already clear, that both of these options were on a volunteer (aka unpaid passion project) basis.
So JC Sunshine’s Fireside Chat ended after three seasons. Rex went clean and now lives with Steph and my brother Joe, but belongs to my nephew Jackson. I still have the curling club sweater. If Jerry had written this, it might have been called JC Sunshine: How I Lost Some of My Stuff. As for me, well, I’ve moved on to other things, clearly, but I’ve always held out hope that JC would develop some sort of a cult following, leading to a mass movement that will cause someone to throw a bunch of money at so we can make the movie JC Sunshine and the Battle for Bolognia. Sure, our JC Reads the News segments are full of 2009 and 2010 references, but those years can become retro cool, right?
Seriously, though, why do I care? I’ve been involved with much more successful projects before and since Sunshine, sometimes in a lead role as well. Is JC a character I particularly enjoyed playing? Not really. I’m a fan of playing the heel and chewing the scenery. JC was limiting, especially when doing interviews. I sometimes had more fun playing ancillary characters on the show, but the grass is always greener, right? It’s the universe-building. It’s the creative input in building said universe. It’s the process. It’s the knowledge that no matter what I was doing in my life, every second Sunday, and several times during the weeks, I got to step into JC and live in his world that I helped to create.
Tens of people can’t be wrong. JC Sunshine’s Fireside Chat is the greatest web series featuring a stuffed dog produced in Rosemont between 2009 and 2010 ever! Bar none!
NOTES THIS WEEK
In order to avoid any appearance of talking about current events that may or may not be of interest to Montrealers, I’ll use this space to share my Summerslam predictions instead:
Not A Chance: Drew McIntyre has about as much chance of dethroning the Intercontinental Champion Gunther as the REM train had of not messing up and forcing people to take buses on its first day of rush hour operation, just as it did on Monday. It went down twice more this week, bringing the count to three, which McIntyre will hear on Saturday. No way Gunther’s not beating the Honky Tonk Man’s record.
Because He Has To: LA Knight will triumph in the Slim Jim Battle Royal just as Montreal’s new task force, announced on Thursday, will triumph over illegal Air BnBs. Despite not being in the game two weeks ago, it’s what the people want. Yeeahh!
Look To The Sky: The match for the Women’s WWE Universal Championship is supposed to be a triple-threat between Charlotte, Bianca and Auska. All established names, just like Meta, the Canadian Government, and major news outlets like CTV fighting over Bill C-18. But then there’s Iyo Sky, Ms. Money in the Bank. Just like there’s us, and other sites, without a dog in the fight, but affected just the same. Are we going to sit idly by? Absolutely not! Andrew, I just made us Iyo Sky, are you okay with that? Just ignore the Bailey factor. (Editor’s Note: Iyo Sky is great, and I have no problem ignoring Bailey.)
Also: Roman retains the championship but Jey becomes Tribal Chief somehow, Cody over Brock, Shayna over Ronda, Logan over Ricochet (boo), and I have no clue about the World title match.
Well, that’s it, and that’s quite a bit, for now. See you all next week!
FTB Founder Jason C. McLean returns every Friday for another installment in his series, Behind The Curtain.
