Join us Sunday April 22nd at 4:00 PM EST as we present our 50th Episode of Star Wars In Character with a Live Webcast event!

Live Video Webcast, real-time chat room, panelist vs. chat trivia, the final round of the second SWIC Trivia Tournament, and more to come!

See your there, only at: www.neozaz.com/swiclive

While we prepare for our 50th Episode Live webcast, we’ve put together this Best of Star Wars In Character Volume 2 episode. In this Best of, we play memorable clips from Episode 13 through 24 and play some special requests made on our Facebook page.http://www.swic.neozaz.com/episodes/SWIC-BESTOF-VOL2.mp3

The Real Episode 49 – “Admiral Ozzel”. In this episode we discuss the fleet commander with best long distance death scene ever caught on film from Star Wars Episode V “The Empire Strikes Back.”

A good amount of pre-planning and discussion went into how we wanted to try to do this episode. Here are some of the more interesting “behind the scenes” facts about the creation, recording, and release of that April Fools Episode.

The idea was first thought of around the time we were working on the Holiday Special. The initial idea was to do a Star Trek character. The second idea was to make up a character that was in the entire saga and take turns writing their backstory. In the end, Dave did the first draft to get us started and we all liked it enough that we stuck with that story and used it on the show.

The character name is combination of all four hosts of the show. The original name was “Mave Chrim”, but later changed to “Mav K’rim” to help disguise the origin of the name from the host names “Matt, Dave, Chris and Tim.”

An early potential character name for the episode was “Abril Fawlsdai”

Hiding the fact that the character was a fake started in episode 48. In the original recording, Chris did announce “Join us next time, when we discuss “Mav K’rim”, but after a brief discussion, we decided to cover the character name with a microphone crackle sound. The idea behind this was to keep anyone from being able to search for the name and figuring out it was a fake before the episode was released. When asked on facebook who the next character was, we simply (and uncharacteristically, sorry) didn’t answer.

The show opens with an inside joke referring to the fake back story creation. When Dave says “I hate this, whoever wrote this is an asshole”, he’s referring to himself.

In typical episode recording fashion, Tim, Dave, and Chris all worked from the notes Dave wrote. Matt had no notes to refer to during the episode – though he did read them a few days prior to recording.

The image of Mav K’rim used for the episode artwork was rendered from a photo combination of Kevin McKidd as “Lucius Vorenus” in the HBO series “Rome” and a photo Matt took of himself with his phone after a long, windy run.

There is a very obscure hint that this is an April Fool’s joke in the episode art work. The Star Wars font used vertically on the left side of the art work is usually the character’s name. In this episode, it says “April Fools”.

The names for the panelist in this episode where written by Matt, “Skip Bickman” is another fictitious character – sort of, but that’s another story.

The answers to the first 3 trivia questions were made up using an online “Random Star Wars name generator”. The answer to the last question was a shout out to the host of “AmericaAemPT“, Ricardo Silverstri who has been kind enough to interview all of us on this podcast.

The trivia questions were written just before recording the show. Multiple choice answers were a combination of answers from other past questions, answers to random questions in the trivia book, and answer made up on the fly.

The other three negative cutters listed as choices in the fourth trivia questions are all real, professional, and accomplished negative cutters.

The Mav K’rim costume story Matt told was based largely on a real event in that Matt did have a girlfriend studying fashion deign create him a Star Wars costume – the real costume was a Luke Skywalker Return of the Jedi costume. The costume was never completed and Matt eventually used what was done as a “Kato” from “The Green Hornet” costume.

The Trivia book wasn’t used for the trivia portion of this episode so there were no sound effects recorded for the correct answers. The correct answer sound was pulled from a previous episode and edited into the April Fool’s episode to help sell the joke.

Apart from the Live 25^th episode, this episode was the longest recorded. Considering this, there was only 1 moment where the panelist made a mistake that would have blatantly revealed this episode as a hoax. The rest of the recording was deeper details and stories about the fake character. In the end, large sections of the show were removed for time purposes only.

Tim’s “behind the scenes” facts about the actor and character design of “Mav K’rim” were made up on the spot during the recording. He mentioned possibly using Johnny Weissmuller, Jr as the actor prior to recording but not to the detail he recorded in the podcast. The Siegel and Shuster story was completely off the cuff.

Those are the highlights, we hope you enjoyed this brief behind the scenes look at the April Fool’s episode of “Star Wars In Character” and we hope you enjoyed the episode as well. We’re thrilled to be reading your comments on the episode of Facebook, thanks for listening!