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I originally wasn't going to talk about this here on the forums, but since you're reading this post, well, I guess you can see that I ultimately changed my mind. Last week I took a trip to Iceland, and as you can probably assume, spent much time at the LazyTown production studio. Most of my time there was spent at the studio, actually. In this post I will talk about my relevant experiences, stuff that I specifically found interesting, or stuff that I think will generally be found interesting. The post will be very loosely organized, focusing on a more detailed description of events in no particular chronological order to when they happened. I am not much of a picture taker, though there are a few pictures that I took, which will be posted along with little stories in the next post. I hope you enjoy reading about my experiences there and I urge anyone with the desire and adequate resources to take the same leap that I did.
So a question that probably comes up first for a few of you readers is, “Did you meet Magnus?” Yes, I did. The first day that I was there also happened to be the day that some Turner bigwigs were visiting the studio, so I was made aware of that pretty quickly. I was actually sitting with Mani Svavarsson in his office when the post-production manager, Jay Coquillon, popped his head in and mentioned that “they would be coming around next.” I asked if I should leave, but I was told no. So I sat there and sure enough, a few minutes later, in walks Magnus, the Turner guy, and Bussi Sigurdsson, one of the producers. I say hello, shake their hands, and pretty much just get out of their way. They stood over Mani for a few minutes while he showed off his underscoring work for Roboticus, one of Magnus's favorite episodes, to the Turner guy. Then they left. A little while afterwards, I was checking out one of the studio rooms called the Hudson Room, which is a bit like a meeting room / lounge. In walks Magnus, now unburdened by business. So I got to formally introduce myself, and we had a little chat about my personal life, why I liked LazyTown.. etc. A few minutes into speaking to him, one of his assistants popped in and called him away. A day or two later I saw him once more, again while in Mani's office, when he came in to review Mani's current progress on underscoring the episode they were working on, Ghost Stoppers. We didn't chat much at that time, and I didn't know then that that would be the last time I'd see him or I would have spoken to him a bit more. I did end up sending him an email after I returned that pretty much thanked him for creating something so profoundly important in my life. I didn't meet any other actors, though I did speak to quite a few of the staff members there and got a long really well with some. Although, I could have sworn that during the end of my trip the guy who played the Mayor in the first two plays came in. It was tough to tell, though.
Over the days that I was there, I spent a lot of time on the filming set, just kind of checking things out and just kind of letting it all sink in. Yeah, I was in the airship. Yeah, I sat in Robbie's chair. Yeah, I was in Steph's room (which by the way, is surprisingly tiny). One thing that really amazed me was how fake everything looked. Well, maybe fake isn't the right word, but up close you can tell that everything is made of either wood or styrofoam with a few layers of paint. There wasn't much that wasn't made out of those materials. But on the show, even in HD, everything looks pretty natural. Another thing that surprised me was how messy it was. When you see production pics, everything looks pretty clean around the studio. But when I was there, if there wasn't a camera facing it, there were props and stuff everywhere. I was able to get some strings pulled and got Hannes Bjorgvinsson to take me to the storage lot next door to show me retired props and sets. He was a really nice guy who walked me around and was giving me little stories about some of the pieces. He would comment on things that he thought were particularly well made. The unit wasn't any messier than what you'd expect a storage unit to look like, but it wasn't very organized. Although, Hannes insisted that they could find anything if asked for it. There were giant boxes of props, and stacks and stacks of boxes of LazyTown merchandise, mostly in Spanish. Some of the props that made the most impact on me were the spaceship from Ziggy's Alien, which was much smaller than I expected, the cannon, which was much larger than I expected, and then some sort of princess chariot from season 4 which was really well made. The interior was all nice and everything, which was really rare from the other stuff I saw. At one point Hannes and I came upon a piece of merchandise – a piggybank Sportacus statue made in 2002. I mentioned that I once lost one of them on eBay, and he insisted that I took it. How could I refuse? I was also able to take a tiny piece of LazyTown back home with me – two pieces of “taffy” from Happy Brush Day. They won't miss them, as there were boxes full of the little foam cubes. Apart from the filming lots, of course, I got the no-doors-locked grande tour. Chloe's room, the makeup room, the costume room, the puppet workshop... everything.
While I was in the office part of the studio, I spent most of my time with Mani in his office, though I did jump around to vfx, editing, and others sometimes. As I mentioned earlier in the post, he was currently working on the Ghost Stoppers episode. The day that I got there, the gears got changed for some reason. Before I arrived, they were working on the moon episode, that we've seen production pics for, that's called 'Let's Go To The Moon,' however, for some reason Magnus insisted that they halt post work on that episode for some reason and start working on Ghost Stoppers. While with Mani, he showed me the most recent version of all the season 4 songs. The song that goes along with 'Let's Go To The Moon' (currently the song has the same title), is my favorite. I remember telling him “It's going to be tough to top Galaxy,” but I was kind of shocked at how good the song was. Coming in at close second is a song currently called “One More Time” which is a Sporty/Stephy duet, and in my opinion, the best of its kind yet. And to those who were worried about Robbie's strange disappearance from the season 3 music, fret not, as Robbie has a ton of presence in season 4 songs. I think he has something like 3 or 4 songs all to himself, and lots of presence in some other songs too. There's this one song (for which episode, I'm not sure) where Robbie hires three 1-800-Villains to help him (reference to Glaumbæjargengið), and the song is extremely ska. Like, very ska. I was really surprised at how unlike LazyTown it sounded. Oh, and just so everyone knows, the dance breaks in the middle of songs aren't a thing anymore. During my time with Mani, he gave me about 90 minutes total of freedom on hid HDD. I was checking out song demos, acapellas, vocal takes, and cut songs. It was very interesting to hear some of Juli's vocal takes. For example, like many of you, I have the melody of Twenty Times Time memorized. The lyrics, the notes, the inflections, and even the quirks. So when I'm listening to Juli singing the song, and she ****s up the lyrics, or misses a note, it's just kind of fundamentally strange. So that was an experience. He also had the lost episode “The Lazy Dance” on his HDD, which I took the liberty of watching. Maybe I'll just make this it's own paragraph.
So The Lazy Dance takes place on Stephanie's half-birthday, and when asked how she wants to celebrate, she says that she wants to have a dance party. So everyone gets together in town square and starts to practice their dance moves, when Sportacus shows up. He gets invited to Stephanie's half-birthday party, but when she tells him that it's a dance party, he gets really nervous because he doesn't know how to dance. He tells the kids this, but they don't believe him because he's a superhero, and there's nothing that a superhero can't do. When the kids leave, he does a little outloud exposition to himself that Robbie overhears. Then Robbie dresses up as a (really faaaaaaaaaaaaaabulouussssssssssss) dance instructor who offers to teach Sportacus how to dance. But he teaches him these really, really awful dance moves so that he looks stupid at the party so everyone will lose respect for him. The song for the episode is “We're Dancing” which has a really cute music video. When Sportacus gets to the party, he preforms the dumb dance moves, but the kids teach him some their own dance moves so that he doesn't look like a complete fool, and their innocence once again trumps Robbie's evil plans. Exit with Bing Bang, which doesn't have a choreographed dance yet, and is played still using Shelby's voice. The episode has no underscore, no post-voice overs, almost no audio editing, half of the cgi isn't rendered / fully rendered, and some of the audio is out of sync. Nevertheless, really enjoyable to finally watch.
I was able to watch some pretty big chunks of a few episodes. There's one where the kids are having a gift exchange and Robbie gets Trixie, but doesn't get her anything. However, she thinks it was Stephanie and runs away from LazyTown. What was a pretty good episode. There's another episode where Robbie Rotten goes back in time and kidnaps Johnny Sportscandyseed, the person responsible for plating all the plants in LazyTown. Some good jokes in that one. I was watching some of the “Let's Go To The Moon” episode, as I mentioned already, and that one really is solid. I don't think I can express that enough. I think that will be the best of the season, but there are lots I haven't seen. Of course, there's Ghost Stoppers which, spoilers, is about Robbie dressed up as a ghost. There's a wizard episode, an episode about trolls, one where Stephanie becomes a princess, and one that looks really strange that involves Pinnochio. I think there are 14 total, but that could be off. They really pulled out all the stops with guest characters this season, which I don't really think is necessary, but I guess we'll see how that plays out.
A quick break from pure LazyTownness. One of the day's, I spent a few hours aimlessly wandering around downtown Reykjavik. I stopped in at a few tourist centers and asked them to point me to some used video/cd/book stores, and they did. I was lucky enough to find a few LazyTown things for very, very cheap compared to what you'd pay on eBay. 3-4 dollars + no shipping. Much better than 20-30 dollars + 50 shipping.
Back to full Laziness. At one point, I was sat down in the main meeting room and these two very large bound documents were pulled out that had two labels each. “LazyTown” and “DO NOT REMOVE THESE FROM THIS ROOM.” They were design documents from 2001, when they were first trying to fit LazyTown into a television series. Now that's the kind of shit I eat right up. It was really, really interesting. There were a few pages for each character at the time (Stiffanie Splitt, PC Hyperbyte, Jives Junkfood, Stingy Spoilero, Bessie Busybody, Sportacus, Ziggie Zweets, Mayor Meanswell, Officer Obtuse, Cock-a-Little-Do, Robbie Rotten, and Trixie Troubleby). Those pages included character concepts, descriptions, strengths and weaknesses, backgrounds, relationships with other characters etc. For example, Stephanie's father was meant to be an elementary school teacher, and her mother, an ornithologist. Another is that Robbie Rotten was a skilled drama student and chess player in his private school, that his mother was a compulsive gambler and his father a prominent politician. Perhaps the most interesting backstory was Sportacus's. Again, maybe this should be put in its own paragraph.
So, keep in mind that while this is official documentation, this concept is how 13 years old and is probably not the current Sportacus backstory. So, as an abandoned and unnamed child, Sportacus worked in mines under a man named Mr. Kicker. Since none of the kids in the mines had names, Kicker referred to the kids by numbers.. Sportacus being number 10. There wasn't much fun to be had under the mines, so the kids spent a lot of time learning lots of different kinds of sports. At some point during mining, number 10 accidentally found a strange crystal that shone whenever someone was being hurt, and he kept it. After years of abuse, number 10 finally decided to revolt. In secret, he built a hot air balloon powered by pedals and one day, he flew it out of the mountain, taking some kids with him. Soon after, he came back and dropped down a ladder and started rescuing other kids. He eventually rescued all of the kids from Mr. Kicker, and was even able to take Kicker's spyglass from him before leaving the mines forever. Also, the mustache comes from rubbing his face with coaly hands. Interesting stuff.
Oh, after reading the design docs, I was looking around to see what other goodies there were around the room, and I stumbled upon the pilot VHS as well as the show bible from 2003. To great misfortune, there wasn't a single VHS player in the entire building. Trust me. We looked. So I never got to watch the pilot episode.. The show bible wasn't terribly interesting, as by that time, the show was pretty close to what we know it as now. It did however, have the Alex Busybody version of the Sportacus origin story in there, but again, we pretty much know that.
While wandering the halls of LazyTown one day, I ran into a woman named Eyrun Jonsdottir, who is the brand coordinator there at LazyTown. I had met her before. She said “Ah, Chris! I was looking for you! Some of us were talking and we thought it would be a waste to have LazyTown's biggest fan here and to not interview him.” “Uhm.. what? You want to interview me?” I said. “Yes. We'd love to get your view of things, if you'd like.” I couldn't refuse, could I? “Yeah. Yeah I can do that. Why not?” “Great!” She said. “Let me just go get a camera and I'll meet you back here in like 3 minutes.” So when she got back, we sat down in the Hudson Room and sure as shit, she interviewed me. Not exactly hard-hitting journalism, though. Questions like “What's your favorite episode.” “What makes you like LazyTown so much?” “Why did you decide to come out to the studio?” Stuff like that. One question that she asked me though was pretty interesting. She asked me if I wanted to say anything about the brand in general. I asked her if she thought that Magnus would ever be watching this interview, and she said probably. I know it was a little late, but I decided that it was time for the Festivus Airing of Grievances. If I had the chance to tell Magnus some of my LazyTown disagreements, I couldn't pass it up. So that's what I did. I mentioned Stephanie's superhero alter-ego, or whatever the hell that's supposed to be, the excess of guest characters, the occasional over-emphasis of Sportacus and action scenes, and the fact that Welcome to LazyTown got cut short (by the way, that's still happening in s4). After the interview, she said that if they ever used it for anything they'll let me know. I doubt it will, but we will see.
After the interview, we were just kind of chit chatting. She was a really nice lady who was really happy that I was a fan of the show. We went over to the marketing section of the offices and she started to pretty much throw stuff at me. “Do you have this? No? Here, take it. Have this? Well, take it anyway.” Can't complain about freebies. My suitcase was probably twice as heavy flying out as when I flew in.
Yeah, I think that pretty much covers all the major events. It was emotionally difficult to leave the studio. It sounds kind of dumb, but it was and I'll tell you why. As an adult fan of a children's television show, it's kind of an understatement to say that my tastes are uncommon. Yes, I have all of you to share my passion with, and I really am glad for that, but it was really, really nice to be able to share my passion with people that I could speak to. For something that's so important in my life, it's a little constricting that I can only talk to people over the internet about it. It was such a relief to be surrounded by LazyTown and people who shared my passion. My opinions were respected, instead of scoffed. I got smiles instead of the dirty looks I can get when I tell people that my favorite show is LazyTown. I loved being there and they loved having me, and they all did everything they could to make sure that I had an unforgettable experience, and I did.
I'm sure there are things that I'm forgetting, so I'll post anything significant that I remember. Also, let me know if you have any questions about anything. Pics will be posted soon.
So a question that probably comes up first for a few of you readers is, “Did you meet Magnus?” Yes, I did. The first day that I was there also happened to be the day that some Turner bigwigs were visiting the studio, so I was made aware of that pretty quickly. I was actually sitting with Mani Svavarsson in his office when the post-production manager, Jay Coquillon, popped his head in and mentioned that “they would be coming around next.” I asked if I should leave, but I was told no. So I sat there and sure enough, a few minutes later, in walks Magnus, the Turner guy, and Bussi Sigurdsson, one of the producers. I say hello, shake their hands, and pretty much just get out of their way. They stood over Mani for a few minutes while he showed off his underscoring work for Roboticus, one of Magnus's favorite episodes, to the Turner guy. Then they left. A little while afterwards, I was checking out one of the studio rooms called the Hudson Room, which is a bit like a meeting room / lounge. In walks Magnus, now unburdened by business. So I got to formally introduce myself, and we had a little chat about my personal life, why I liked LazyTown.. etc. A few minutes into speaking to him, one of his assistants popped in and called him away. A day or two later I saw him once more, again while in Mani's office, when he came in to review Mani's current progress on underscoring the episode they were working on, Ghost Stoppers. We didn't chat much at that time, and I didn't know then that that would be the last time I'd see him or I would have spoken to him a bit more. I did end up sending him an email after I returned that pretty much thanked him for creating something so profoundly important in my life. I didn't meet any other actors, though I did speak to quite a few of the staff members there and got a long really well with some. Although, I could have sworn that during the end of my trip the guy who played the Mayor in the first two plays came in. It was tough to tell, though.
Over the days that I was there, I spent a lot of time on the filming set, just kind of checking things out and just kind of letting it all sink in. Yeah, I was in the airship. Yeah, I sat in Robbie's chair. Yeah, I was in Steph's room (which by the way, is surprisingly tiny). One thing that really amazed me was how fake everything looked. Well, maybe fake isn't the right word, but up close you can tell that everything is made of either wood or styrofoam with a few layers of paint. There wasn't much that wasn't made out of those materials. But on the show, even in HD, everything looks pretty natural. Another thing that surprised me was how messy it was. When you see production pics, everything looks pretty clean around the studio. But when I was there, if there wasn't a camera facing it, there were props and stuff everywhere. I was able to get some strings pulled and got Hannes Bjorgvinsson to take me to the storage lot next door to show me retired props and sets. He was a really nice guy who walked me around and was giving me little stories about some of the pieces. He would comment on things that he thought were particularly well made. The unit wasn't any messier than what you'd expect a storage unit to look like, but it wasn't very organized. Although, Hannes insisted that they could find anything if asked for it. There were giant boxes of props, and stacks and stacks of boxes of LazyTown merchandise, mostly in Spanish. Some of the props that made the most impact on me were the spaceship from Ziggy's Alien, which was much smaller than I expected, the cannon, which was much larger than I expected, and then some sort of princess chariot from season 4 which was really well made. The interior was all nice and everything, which was really rare from the other stuff I saw. At one point Hannes and I came upon a piece of merchandise – a piggybank Sportacus statue made in 2002. I mentioned that I once lost one of them on eBay, and he insisted that I took it. How could I refuse? I was also able to take a tiny piece of LazyTown back home with me – two pieces of “taffy” from Happy Brush Day. They won't miss them, as there were boxes full of the little foam cubes. Apart from the filming lots, of course, I got the no-doors-locked grande tour. Chloe's room, the makeup room, the costume room, the puppet workshop... everything.
While I was in the office part of the studio, I spent most of my time with Mani in his office, though I did jump around to vfx, editing, and others sometimes. As I mentioned earlier in the post, he was currently working on the Ghost Stoppers episode. The day that I got there, the gears got changed for some reason. Before I arrived, they were working on the moon episode, that we've seen production pics for, that's called 'Let's Go To The Moon,' however, for some reason Magnus insisted that they halt post work on that episode for some reason and start working on Ghost Stoppers. While with Mani, he showed me the most recent version of all the season 4 songs. The song that goes along with 'Let's Go To The Moon' (currently the song has the same title), is my favorite. I remember telling him “It's going to be tough to top Galaxy,” but I was kind of shocked at how good the song was. Coming in at close second is a song currently called “One More Time” which is a Sporty/Stephy duet, and in my opinion, the best of its kind yet. And to those who were worried about Robbie's strange disappearance from the season 3 music, fret not, as Robbie has a ton of presence in season 4 songs. I think he has something like 3 or 4 songs all to himself, and lots of presence in some other songs too. There's this one song (for which episode, I'm not sure) where Robbie hires three 1-800-Villains to help him (reference to Glaumbæjargengið), and the song is extremely ska. Like, very ska. I was really surprised at how unlike LazyTown it sounded. Oh, and just so everyone knows, the dance breaks in the middle of songs aren't a thing anymore. During my time with Mani, he gave me about 90 minutes total of freedom on hid HDD. I was checking out song demos, acapellas, vocal takes, and cut songs. It was very interesting to hear some of Juli's vocal takes. For example, like many of you, I have the melody of Twenty Times Time memorized. The lyrics, the notes, the inflections, and even the quirks. So when I'm listening to Juli singing the song, and she ****s up the lyrics, or misses a note, it's just kind of fundamentally strange. So that was an experience. He also had the lost episode “The Lazy Dance” on his HDD, which I took the liberty of watching. Maybe I'll just make this it's own paragraph.
So The Lazy Dance takes place on Stephanie's half-birthday, and when asked how she wants to celebrate, she says that she wants to have a dance party. So everyone gets together in town square and starts to practice their dance moves, when Sportacus shows up. He gets invited to Stephanie's half-birthday party, but when she tells him that it's a dance party, he gets really nervous because he doesn't know how to dance. He tells the kids this, but they don't believe him because he's a superhero, and there's nothing that a superhero can't do. When the kids leave, he does a little outloud exposition to himself that Robbie overhears. Then Robbie dresses up as a (really faaaaaaaaaaaaaabulouussssssssssss) dance instructor who offers to teach Sportacus how to dance. But he teaches him these really, really awful dance moves so that he looks stupid at the party so everyone will lose respect for him. The song for the episode is “We're Dancing” which has a really cute music video. When Sportacus gets to the party, he preforms the dumb dance moves, but the kids teach him some their own dance moves so that he doesn't look like a complete fool, and their innocence once again trumps Robbie's evil plans. Exit with Bing Bang, which doesn't have a choreographed dance yet, and is played still using Shelby's voice. The episode has no underscore, no post-voice overs, almost no audio editing, half of the cgi isn't rendered / fully rendered, and some of the audio is out of sync. Nevertheless, really enjoyable to finally watch.
I was able to watch some pretty big chunks of a few episodes. There's one where the kids are having a gift exchange and Robbie gets Trixie, but doesn't get her anything. However, she thinks it was Stephanie and runs away from LazyTown. What was a pretty good episode. There's another episode where Robbie Rotten goes back in time and kidnaps Johnny Sportscandyseed, the person responsible for plating all the plants in LazyTown. Some good jokes in that one. I was watching some of the “Let's Go To The Moon” episode, as I mentioned already, and that one really is solid. I don't think I can express that enough. I think that will be the best of the season, but there are lots I haven't seen. Of course, there's Ghost Stoppers which, spoilers, is about Robbie dressed up as a ghost. There's a wizard episode, an episode about trolls, one where Stephanie becomes a princess, and one that looks really strange that involves Pinnochio. I think there are 14 total, but that could be off. They really pulled out all the stops with guest characters this season, which I don't really think is necessary, but I guess we'll see how that plays out.
A quick break from pure LazyTownness. One of the day's, I spent a few hours aimlessly wandering around downtown Reykjavik. I stopped in at a few tourist centers and asked them to point me to some used video/cd/book stores, and they did. I was lucky enough to find a few LazyTown things for very, very cheap compared to what you'd pay on eBay. 3-4 dollars + no shipping. Much better than 20-30 dollars + 50 shipping.
Back to full Laziness. At one point, I was sat down in the main meeting room and these two very large bound documents were pulled out that had two labels each. “LazyTown” and “DO NOT REMOVE THESE FROM THIS ROOM.” They were design documents from 2001, when they were first trying to fit LazyTown into a television series. Now that's the kind of shit I eat right up. It was really, really interesting. There were a few pages for each character at the time (Stiffanie Splitt, PC Hyperbyte, Jives Junkfood, Stingy Spoilero, Bessie Busybody, Sportacus, Ziggie Zweets, Mayor Meanswell, Officer Obtuse, Cock-a-Little-Do, Robbie Rotten, and Trixie Troubleby). Those pages included character concepts, descriptions, strengths and weaknesses, backgrounds, relationships with other characters etc. For example, Stephanie's father was meant to be an elementary school teacher, and her mother, an ornithologist. Another is that Robbie Rotten was a skilled drama student and chess player in his private school, that his mother was a compulsive gambler and his father a prominent politician. Perhaps the most interesting backstory was Sportacus's. Again, maybe this should be put in its own paragraph.
So, keep in mind that while this is official documentation, this concept is how 13 years old and is probably not the current Sportacus backstory. So, as an abandoned and unnamed child, Sportacus worked in mines under a man named Mr. Kicker. Since none of the kids in the mines had names, Kicker referred to the kids by numbers.. Sportacus being number 10. There wasn't much fun to be had under the mines, so the kids spent a lot of time learning lots of different kinds of sports. At some point during mining, number 10 accidentally found a strange crystal that shone whenever someone was being hurt, and he kept it. After years of abuse, number 10 finally decided to revolt. In secret, he built a hot air balloon powered by pedals and one day, he flew it out of the mountain, taking some kids with him. Soon after, he came back and dropped down a ladder and started rescuing other kids. He eventually rescued all of the kids from Mr. Kicker, and was even able to take Kicker's spyglass from him before leaving the mines forever. Also, the mustache comes from rubbing his face with coaly hands. Interesting stuff.
Oh, after reading the design docs, I was looking around to see what other goodies there were around the room, and I stumbled upon the pilot VHS as well as the show bible from 2003. To great misfortune, there wasn't a single VHS player in the entire building. Trust me. We looked. So I never got to watch the pilot episode.. The show bible wasn't terribly interesting, as by that time, the show was pretty close to what we know it as now. It did however, have the Alex Busybody version of the Sportacus origin story in there, but again, we pretty much know that.
While wandering the halls of LazyTown one day, I ran into a woman named Eyrun Jonsdottir, who is the brand coordinator there at LazyTown. I had met her before. She said “Ah, Chris! I was looking for you! Some of us were talking and we thought it would be a waste to have LazyTown's biggest fan here and to not interview him.” “Uhm.. what? You want to interview me?” I said. “Yes. We'd love to get your view of things, if you'd like.” I couldn't refuse, could I? “Yeah. Yeah I can do that. Why not?” “Great!” She said. “Let me just go get a camera and I'll meet you back here in like 3 minutes.” So when she got back, we sat down in the Hudson Room and sure as shit, she interviewed me. Not exactly hard-hitting journalism, though. Questions like “What's your favorite episode.” “What makes you like LazyTown so much?” “Why did you decide to come out to the studio?” Stuff like that. One question that she asked me though was pretty interesting. She asked me if I wanted to say anything about the brand in general. I asked her if she thought that Magnus would ever be watching this interview, and she said probably. I know it was a little late, but I decided that it was time for the Festivus Airing of Grievances. If I had the chance to tell Magnus some of my LazyTown disagreements, I couldn't pass it up. So that's what I did. I mentioned Stephanie's superhero alter-ego, or whatever the hell that's supposed to be, the excess of guest characters, the occasional over-emphasis of Sportacus and action scenes, and the fact that Welcome to LazyTown got cut short (by the way, that's still happening in s4). After the interview, she said that if they ever used it for anything they'll let me know. I doubt it will, but we will see.
After the interview, we were just kind of chit chatting. She was a really nice lady who was really happy that I was a fan of the show. We went over to the marketing section of the offices and she started to pretty much throw stuff at me. “Do you have this? No? Here, take it. Have this? Well, take it anyway.” Can't complain about freebies. My suitcase was probably twice as heavy flying out as when I flew in.
Yeah, I think that pretty much covers all the major events. It was emotionally difficult to leave the studio. It sounds kind of dumb, but it was and I'll tell you why. As an adult fan of a children's television show, it's kind of an understatement to say that my tastes are uncommon. Yes, I have all of you to share my passion with, and I really am glad for that, but it was really, really nice to be able to share my passion with people that I could speak to. For something that's so important in my life, it's a little constricting that I can only talk to people over the internet about it. It was such a relief to be surrounded by LazyTown and people who shared my passion. My opinions were respected, instead of scoffed. I got smiles instead of the dirty looks I can get when I tell people that my favorite show is LazyTown. I loved being there and they loved having me, and they all did everything they could to make sure that I had an unforgettable experience, and I did.
I'm sure there are things that I'm forgetting, so I'll post anything significant that I remember. Also, let me know if you have any questions about anything. Pics will be posted soon.
<--smile emote isn't big enough!
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