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Three stories of people hatching a plan and believing they've made a
dream—big or small—come true. Instead, they're snapped back to reality:
an experience that, as everyone knows, can be unpleasant.test
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Prologue
Heather McElhatton recalls a school bus ride when she was a little girl. The bus was stuck in traffic, and she had to pee, so she invented a plan that seemed clever at the time, but turned out to have long-lasting consequences.
The design company Brand New School did the animation for this segment. Everything except host Ira Glass's interview with the adult Heather was filmed with a still camera, many shots every second. The kids were filmed in front of a green screen (they sit on crates), and the bus was filmed separately. Some kids appear more than once, in different clothes. The idea for this kind of stop-motion look came from this Death Cab for Cutie video, though Brand New School invented a look more suited to the feeling of Heather's story.
Also, for this episode, we altered the This American Life logo to match the red, yellow, and green of the traffic light in Heather's story.
Ira was filmed on an access road in front of an oil refinery in Linden, New Jersey. For a while we considered using this take because it's just so weird, but then we decided it was just too weird. |
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Act One. If by Chance We Meet Again.
Ralph and Sandra Fisher run a show-animal business in Texas whose biggest star was an unusually gentle Brahman bull named Chance. They loved Chance, and when he died, they tried to bring him back from the dead using cloning technology being developed up the road at Texas A&M University. It worked. A baby bull was born from Chance's DNA. He seemed like Chance reincarnated. Except he wasn't. Which Ralph found out the hard way.
All three of the stories in Episode One have been on our radio show, including the prologue. (Here's the radio version of this story.) That's because this episode is our original pilot, and when we shot it, we had no idea if the network would want the series. But we loved these stories and wanted to get them out to an audience, so we put them on the radio. Our other TV stories are originals that have never appeared on the radio.
Also, filming TV stories can get a little intense. We were all freaked out during a pivotal moment shooting the bull story, and producer Jane Feltes happened to be on camera. A warning: you might want to wait until after you've seen the story to watch this clip. It's kind of a spoiler.
Appearing in this story:
• Ralph and Sandra Fisher—Owners of Chance and Second Chance
• Dr. Mark Westhusin—The doctor at Texas A&M who cloned the original Chance |
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Act Two. The Spy Who Loved Everyone.
Reporter Jorge Just brings us the story of Improv Everywhere, a group of New York City pranksters who found an unknown band from Vermont called Ghosts of Pasha and decided to give them "The Best Gig Ever." They studied the band's music and then crowded the club, pretending to be hard core fans. They thought of it as a kind of gift. But for the band, it was kind of a nightmare.
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