Tuesday, May 04, 2021

Welcome To The Wasteland

 J-Dubb's Theatre Trivia

One thing I've been wanting to do with this blog, is a segment, where I talk about behind the scenes J-Dubb's Theatre trivia from the past. Today, what I want to talk about, deals with a video series I created in the beginning of the YouTube days, called, The Network. This was a two season series, that was intended to continue for more seasons, and is full of trivia that never actually made it to the YouTube channel. I guess you can say it was cancelled after the second season, although Belphegor, the Executive, made some cameo appearances in later videos.

 
 Belphegor in the video, El Pollito J-Dubb Here
 

The first season of The Network was actually the conclusion to a "YouTube Land" series, where I bump into people and events from other YouTube channels. In "The Network", the organization controlling the television networks considers the YouTube Community to be a threat. An entity named Belphegor, who works as a network executive, causes YouTubers to disappear, and replaces them with clones who say whatever the Network wants them to say. The second season deals with the return of Belphegor, and his attempt to take over YouTube and the Internet in order to create a new Network, which he controls, to rival the old Network. 

Originally, Belphegor was played by my friend Jon, but in the second season, in which Belphegor has taken on my likeness and is posing as me, I had the series explain that Belphegor's "Jon form" was merely an image pulled from my mind, in order to explain why Jon also exists in the series as himself.

 
Jon plays "The Executive", whose name, Belphegor, was not actually revealed until the second season
 

One of the major themes of The Network, is an ethereal forest in my mind, where Belphegor is able to pull me in and trap me. In the first season, I disappear, like the other YouTubers, and find myself in this forest, where I face down Belphegor. Belphegor has brought me there to send me into the void, but I end up pulling him in with me, causing everything he's done to be undone. In the second season, Belphegor has been trapped in the forest in my mind for over a year. He is able to manipulate me to a point of weakness, where he can draw me back into the forest and trap me there, while he takes over my body and does bad things in the real world.

In the first season, Belphegor refers to this forest as the "In-between Worlds". Originally, he was supposed to say "Welcome to the Wasteland". I drove around the Portland area with Jon, looking for a good spot to film this scene. One place we considered, was right  next to a radio tower, which would have been perfect, except that it was surrounded by fencing that was locked, and  we couldn't get in. We couldn't really find anything that looked like a wasteland, without driving a considerable ways away. So we found this wooded area in the hills, with a wooden staircase, that we thought would work great. Jon, however, thought that maybe we should call it something other than "the Wasteland", since it didn't really look like a wasteland. So I changed his line to "Welcome to the In-Between Worlds".

 
 Jon as Belphegor, behind Portland Community College
 

When we went to film the second season, we had no idea where the original filming spot was, and figured that it probably had a neighborhood built over it, anyway. So we filmed in a wooded area behind Portland Community College's Rock Creak Campus. I interjected footage of the staircase from the previous season, in order to show that it was the same place. In this scene, I had Belphegor explain that the forest was a space that he had created in my mind.

 
J-Dubb has lost his mind. Filmed at Noble Woods Park
 

 All further scenes which showed me stuck in this forest were filmed at Noble Woods Park.


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