Category: blog

it’s little me, in a pair of commercials from the 80s!

Posted on By Wil
Wil Wheaton Star Wars Figure Commercial
That kid in the middle is little me!

r/ObscureMedia is one of my very favorite subreddits, and while I was looking at it today (as a tiny puppy we’re fostering slept on my lap), I saw this Star Wars figure commercial that Redditor RidleyScottTowels posted. I commented that I’d done a Star Wars figure commercial when I was a kid, and holy shit Redditor VonAether found it (I’m at 6:10 of this video):

But wait, there’s more! I thought I’d done a single commercial with different toys in it, but it turns out that I’d done two different commercials; the one VonAether found, and this other one that TheBoredGuy found:

If you couldn’t tell who I was, I was Boushh in the first one, and C3P0 in the second one.

I don’t have a lot of clear memories of the commercials I did when I was a kid, and I’d forgotten that I’d done two Star Wars figure commercials (something that was incredibly cool for a kid like me who lived and breathed Star Wars figures, even though we were forbidden from playing with them on the set), but I clearly recall that, on one of these two shoots, one of the ad agency people was a woman from New York, who wanted me to read one of my lines in a very specific way. She wasn’t a director, and wasn’t very good at communicating to 9 or 10 year-old me what she wanted, so she just started giving me line readings, and telling me to mimic her. I was very good at following directions, so I did as she asked … perfectly recreating her very thick, very nasal, very New York accent. I remember feeling nervous, and  thinking she thought I was making fun of her, but  wasn’t, I was genuinely confused about whether I should do her voice exactly the way she sounded, or if I was supposed to do my voice with the inflections she was using.

It’s amazing to me that I can clearly remember sitting in the backyard of this house in the valley where we were filming, this woman standing above me, holding the script, reading these lines for me. I can hear her telling me, “That’s better, but don’t sound so nasal,” and  realizing that not only did I know what nasal meant, but that she meant I was not supposed to mimic her voice, but just the line reading she gave me.

That was a lot of stuff for little kid me to process, but somehow I got the job done, and thanks to the weirdness of this world we’ve made for ourselves, I can see the resulting commercial over 30 years later.

upon us all, a little rain must fall

Posted on By Wil

It’s finally raining in Los Angeles, the first real and meaningful rain we’ve had this year. Our local news will be wall to wall with breathless coverage of STORMWATCH!!!! or whatever they’re calling it this time, the roads will be even more congested by incompetent drivers than usual, and no matter how much rain falls on the city, it won’t make a bit of difference in our drought.

Still, I love it. I love the rain, and its almost total absence is one of the very few things I don’t like about living here. This is, after all, a desert that people have tried to terraform into something different for over a hundred years, with varying degrees of success.

I’d love to stay home all day today, put a fire into my fireplace, wrap a blanket around myself, open the patio doors, and write on my laptop while I listen to the rain. I’d love to go outside and stomp in puddles until my clothes are soaked through, and I can’t feel my toes. I hope we get a thunderstorm, but it never rains in Southern California.

Forbidden Desert, on Tabletop

Posted on By Wil

This week on Tabletop, Alan Tudyk, Jon Heder, and Felicia Day join me for a cooperative game that’s devilishly hard, Forbidden Desert!

A couple of notes for you all, before I get back to preparing for this afternoon’s bacchanal, starting with a comment on r/boardgames, with my reply:

> You move the tiles according to the card you flip, not the “storm”. Nothing too important. But they excavate (flip) tiles that they are not on. This one makes it easier.

I’m really unhappy and annoyed that this happened. I can’t remember every single rule for every game, and if we were playing at home, we’d have the rules next to the table to be sure (we also wouldn’t be playing 21 games in 10 days). I have a producer who is supposed to catch all of this stuff, and ensure that we don’t make mistakes like this, and I think he was stretched a little too thin this season, so if we do a fourth season, I’ll make sure that we hire someone *specifically* to keep an eye on the rules.

I’m annoyed and disappointed that we’ve aired two episodes this season, and we’ve made a rules error on each of them (not such a huge deal in Tokaido, but a huge deal in this one, because we unintentionally made the game much easier on ourselves.) I know there’s a big mistake coming up later this year in Stone Age, too.

Ultimately, the goal of Tabletop is to be entertaining, to introduce people to boardgames, and to get people excited about playing games. If we misunderstand a rule here and there, it’s not the end of the world, because that happens in real life when we play at home, but I do hold my show to a higher standard, for obvious reasons.

I don’t think this is going to get in the way of anyone’s enjoyment, except for the übergamers who nitpick and complain about every mistake or sub-optimal play we make, but I’m honestly not making this show for them, anyway.

That said, I regret making such a massive and fundamental mistake.

Also, you may notice that someone in our graphics department wrote Forbidden Dessert on the thumbnail, instead of Forbidden Desert. On the one hand, this is a simple and basic grammar error that should never have happened. On the other hand, it is pretty hilarious, will obviously be corrected, and gives us something to never let that department live down until the heat death of the universe.

For some of us, today is a holiday about being thankful. For others, it’s a day off from work or school and a chance to eat a lot of food. For the majority, it’s Thursday. Well, whatever today means to you, I hope it’s a good one.

this post has no title

Posted on By Wil

Yesterday, I went up to our new Geek and Sundry offices, and watched the current cuts of three Tabletop episodes, so I could offer notes and suggestions to our editors as they take hours of raw footage and turn it into the show.

I was reminded, again, how much our show is actually made in post-production. Sure, the playing of the game is important, but turning what we do on the set into something that’s entertaining to watch is much more complex and challenging than I ever expected. I’m grateful that we have the editorial team that we do, and I hope to have them back for the RPG show.

Speaking of the RPG show: I’m going to take the next three months off from acting (with a few exceptions) to work on that full time. I haven’t been this excited about writing and creating since I realized that the manuscript for Just A Geek was coming together into a cohesive story, and this time I actually know what I’m doing before I get started!

But first, I’m off to work on an audiobook today and tomorrow.