The name Barret Eugene Hansen might not mean anything to you. He’s not Ryan Seacrest or Rick Dees or even Casey Kasem for those of us old enough to remember that last name. In fact Hansen may not even be known to you by his radio moniker, Dr. Demento. But for 40 years, radio was a little more demented. The Dr. Demento show ends its broadcast run this year.
Growing up in the 80s, there were about four stations that I was familiar with, in my hometown. There was the top 40 station B94, which is now a sports talk station. There was/is the classic rock station 102.5 WDVE. There was the AM news station 1340 WCVI which has been defunct for a number of years and is now another station under different ownership. And there was the small easy listening, oldies, and pop station on top of the mountain called 103.9FM WLSW aka Music Power 104. Between the three I received an equal dosage of 80s, Oldies, and Paul Harvey.
But something happened during the rise of popular music in the early 80s. Another musician became prominent as a parody artist, cover tunes like My Sharona, Another One Rides the Bus and I Love Rock and Roll. His emergence on the music scene was, in part, thanks to a goofy radio program called the Dr. Demento Show. Had it not been for the constant airplay and admiration for his parody styling of popular hits, “Weird” Al Yankovic might have remained an architect from Cal Poly.
Now, novelty music and parodies were not unheard of in the 1980s. In fact, Dr. Demento had already been on the air since 1970 playing hits of Frank Zappa, Tom Lehrer, Spike Jones and Allen Sherman. But it was the mainstream success of Yankovic that drew more attention to Demento’s show from the “normal” audience. I began listening around 1984 when I found his radio show being played on WLSW on Sunday Nights. It was a big thrill to me to have my own room, with a radio in it and stay up as long as I could on a Sunday night listening to songs like “Shaving Cream” and “Pencil Neck Geek.” That interest in parodies and novelty songs is probably what cemented my geekness and affinity for comedic absurdity. At the height of home recording, armed with a TDK 60 minute tape and OTR (One Touch Recording) I began taping the Funny Five and other popular songs. While other people were watching the ball drop on New Year’s Eve, I was frantically trying to record his Funny 25 over the course of four hours with only 60 minute tapes, 30 minutes on a side.
It’s not like I was recording a live concert of the Rolling Stones or Van Halen, but to me, I was in geek radio heaven. As CDs became the norm and dual cassette tape decks became something of a novelty I missed out on the radio show and didn’t even know if it was still playing on the local radio stations. Junior High, High School, College. These were times not spent listening to the radio for the rare chance to record “Stallone Again, Naturally” or “99 Dead Baboons.” There were more important things to do like drink beer and stay up all night doing absolutely nothing. I would still catch myself humming, “Dead Puppies” or “Shaving Cream” but nothing compared to the ravenous appetite for mad music that I had in my youth.
Dr. Demento represented a time and place in my life, alone in my room on a Sunday night with a tape recorder at the ready. I still love those songs and can’t help break into “Fish Heads” once in awhile, much to the eye rolling of my wife who just doesn’t get it. Even as “Weird Al” enters his 50s I feel his music is as good as it ever was and if you’ve ever heard his original music, you’d be surprised at how well the guy can write a song. I’m glad I had the opportunity to listen to him and other novelty and parody artists on The Dr. Demento Show. In fact, Dr. Demento isn’t gone forever. He’s alive and well on the Internet. Radio may have changed and demographics may be more narrow but the one place that equalizes the playing field is the Internet. Anyone, anywhere can find Demento on the air. As long as you have someone paying for the site, the music will be there. No pesky format changes or inability to expand your play list past a four song rotation. It’s a perfect match of madness and technology that speaks to the hearts and ears of geeks like me. Stay Demented!
Here’s a list of some of my favorite songs from the Demento Show
“Existential Blues Parts 1 and 2” Tom “T-Bone” Stankus
“Dead Puppies” Ogden Edsl
“99 Dead Baboons” Tim Cavanaugh
“Pencil Neck Geek” “Classy” Freddie Blassie
“The Ballad Of Irving” Frank Gallop
“Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh” Allan Sherman
“Christmas At Ground Zero” “Weird Al” Yankovic
“Yoda” “Weird Al” Yankovic
“Ti Kwan Leep” The Frantics
“Earache My Eye” Cheech and Chong
“Shaving Cream” Benny Bell and Paul Wynn
“The Scotsman” Bryan Bowers
“Wet Dream” Kip Adotta
“Beep Beep” The Playmates
“Star Trekkin” The Firm
“The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun” Julie Brown
“Fish Heads” Barnes and Barnes
“They Coming To Take Me Away, HA HA” Napoleon XIV
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Showing posts with label novelty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label novelty. Show all posts
Friday, June 25, 2010
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Want To Make Money on Cafepress? Ask Mongo.
It happened again. Some kind soul out there bought a couple shirts from the Mongo Store I keep on Cafepress. That's three shirts in less than three months. I guess I shouldn't be too excited but I don't put a lot of thought or time into managing that store. Perhaps I should, though.
You see, Mongo was an idea for a website long before it became the wonderful blog you love to read every day. In 2006, a friend and I were kicking around business ideas and it is only clear to me now that he was probably using my input to do his MBA class homework. He's like that. You never see it but usually, you're helping him do something for his own gain. Anyway, we thought with all the niche websites out there that exist and become virally popular, why can't we operate one. Set up shop, run it for a couple years and sell it for a profit. Neither one of us are an expert at any of this, mind you.
That's how Ask Mongo was perceived. I say perceived because it never made it past the idea stage. I took on this persona of Mongo, based on another coworker who was a bit of a brute. Not so much in the sense that he was mean, but he just made these statements that were just too funny. I would mimic them in a monosyllabic style of speaking and Mongo became a full fledged character. Often, I would often just burst out into angry speak. I'd knock something over or drop something and the results were rather hilarious. Then it only became a matter of time. We'd joke around and my friend would ask me a serious question and Mongo would answer. "Mongo no care about HD. Mongo smash!"
That's when it happened. What if we created a simple website that used a search engine style approach. Kind of like a twisted magic eight ball. If we could figure out a way to assign certain keywords to relevant phrases, you could Ask Mongo a question and get a hilarious response. Nothing very high brow and if you asked a question that didn't match up to any key words, you would get some pre-generated random response like, "Why Mongo care? Go away before Mongo smash!"
Unfortunately, neither of us had the extra free time or expertise in designing the site. I also didn't want to guy buy a domain and just pay for a blank site until I figured it all out. Alas, Ask Mongo never came to fruition. In fact, the only way it ever existed was a test site built in Excel. I was taking some classes in Excel and figured out a way to get a set number of responses that would match up to a key word in a question field. Still, I had the graphical designs for Mongo in my computer and began tooling around with the idea of putting the image and slogan on a shirt. I went over to Cafepress and opened up a basic store, which is free. I added my images to a couple of products, did all the tagging on my images, and other things you can do with a basic store and that was about it. I waited and I waited. I did some specific keyword searching and my products were there but unless you were looking for something specifically named Mongo the stuff was buried three or four pages deep in the results.
I kind of forgot all about Mongo. I left the site up but didn’t do any additional work on it. I did use Cafepress to make some pretty sweet calendars for my wife and other members of my family. You can make your own products and pay base price for them. Anything you wish to sell, you add a markup and that’s how you make money. I marked up most of my products by about $3.00 and hoped for the best. This was almost three years ago. I tried to make another run at selling products using MySpace but that was worthless. Again, I didn’t have time to do any extensive work or marketing and pretty much left the site go. That was until February of 2008. I’m all about free stuff and found that I could start this blog on blogger for free. I figured, I have a lot to say. Whether or not people care is another story, but regardless, it could be fun. It also provided me a reason to have and promote the store. If I could gain enough of an audience, perhaps I could drive people towards the store. Thus, Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash! Was born. I parked a link and a couple of products on the side of my blog and figured that maybe I could get a few wayward people into my Cafepress store.
I made my first sale in December of 2008. It happened without me even knowing about it. I just took five minutes one day and did a quick rundown of my stores and saw that I had a few dollars in my account. Someone had bought a shirt. I felt validate and vindicated and I only made $3.00. But it was 300% profit. I didn’t spend any money on advertising or marketing. I simply created a store and did the bare minimum. How cool is that? Now, I know I am not going to be able to quit my day job making t-shirts. But a few extra dollars can’t hurt, right? Then, it happened again in February of this year. Another person bought matching men and women’s shirts! That’s another $6.00. Hey, this is awesome.
By now, I had already thought up two more stores, Pop Culture Couture and Retro Rags. Each site had only one design for sale. That is the major drawback for Basic shops. You can have all the images you want but you can only assign any particular product to one design. If you are disciplined enough you could constantly rotate images but who wants to devote that much work to a few extra dollars. You could also theoretically own hundreds of stores but again, too much work for the reward. That was before I made those sales. I am seriously considering a premium shop. For $5.00 a month I figure it’s worth it. It might actually pay off some more. Here are some of the benefits.
Old and new design side by side.
You see, Mongo was an idea for a website long before it became the wonderful blog you love to read every day. In 2006, a friend and I were kicking around business ideas and it is only clear to me now that he was probably using my input to do his MBA class homework. He's like that. You never see it but usually, you're helping him do something for his own gain. Anyway, we thought with all the niche websites out there that exist and become virally popular, why can't we operate one. Set up shop, run it for a couple years and sell it for a profit. Neither one of us are an expert at any of this, mind you.
That's how Ask Mongo was perceived. I say perceived because it never made it past the idea stage. I took on this persona of Mongo, based on another coworker who was a bit of a brute. Not so much in the sense that he was mean, but he just made these statements that were just too funny. I would mimic them in a monosyllabic style of speaking and Mongo became a full fledged character. Often, I would often just burst out into angry speak. I'd knock something over or drop something and the results were rather hilarious. Then it only became a matter of time. We'd joke around and my friend would ask me a serious question and Mongo would answer. "Mongo no care about HD. Mongo smash!"
That's when it happened. What if we created a simple website that used a search engine style approach. Kind of like a twisted magic eight ball. If we could figure out a way to assign certain keywords to relevant phrases, you could Ask Mongo a question and get a hilarious response. Nothing very high brow and if you asked a question that didn't match up to any key words, you would get some pre-generated random response like, "Why Mongo care? Go away before Mongo smash!"
Unfortunately, neither of us had the extra free time or expertise in designing the site. I also didn't want to guy buy a domain and just pay for a blank site until I figured it all out. Alas, Ask Mongo never came to fruition. In fact, the only way it ever existed was a test site built in Excel. I was taking some classes in Excel and figured out a way to get a set number of responses that would match up to a key word in a question field. Still, I had the graphical designs for Mongo in my computer and began tooling around with the idea of putting the image and slogan on a shirt. I went over to Cafepress and opened up a basic store, which is free. I added my images to a couple of products, did all the tagging on my images, and other things you can do with a basic store and that was about it. I waited and I waited. I did some specific keyword searching and my products were there but unless you were looking for something specifically named Mongo the stuff was buried three or four pages deep in the results.
I kind of forgot all about Mongo. I left the site up but didn’t do any additional work on it. I did use Cafepress to make some pretty sweet calendars for my wife and other members of my family. You can make your own products and pay base price for them. Anything you wish to sell, you add a markup and that’s how you make money. I marked up most of my products by about $3.00 and hoped for the best. This was almost three years ago. I tried to make another run at selling products using MySpace but that was worthless. Again, I didn’t have time to do any extensive work or marketing and pretty much left the site go. That was until February of 2008. I’m all about free stuff and found that I could start this blog on blogger for free. I figured, I have a lot to say. Whether or not people care is another story, but regardless, it could be fun. It also provided me a reason to have and promote the store. If I could gain enough of an audience, perhaps I could drive people towards the store. Thus, Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash! Was born. I parked a link and a couple of products on the side of my blog and figured that maybe I could get a few wayward people into my Cafepress store.
I made my first sale in December of 2008. It happened without me even knowing about it. I just took five minutes one day and did a quick rundown of my stores and saw that I had a few dollars in my account. Someone had bought a shirt. I felt validate and vindicated and I only made $3.00. But it was 300% profit. I didn’t spend any money on advertising or marketing. I simply created a store and did the bare minimum. How cool is that? Now, I know I am not going to be able to quit my day job making t-shirts. But a few extra dollars can’t hurt, right? Then, it happened again in February of this year. Another person bought matching men and women’s shirts! That’s another $6.00. Hey, this is awesome.
By now, I had already thought up two more stores, Pop Culture Couture and Retro Rags. Each site had only one design for sale. That is the major drawback for Basic shops. You can have all the images you want but you can only assign any particular product to one design. If you are disciplined enough you could constantly rotate images but who wants to devote that much work to a few extra dollars. You could also theoretically own hundreds of stores but again, too much work for the reward. That was before I made those sales. I am seriously considering a premium shop. For $5.00 a month I figure it’s worth it. It might actually pay off some more. Here are some of the benefits.
- Personal shop on CafePress.com with your own shop URL (Also part of Basic Shops)
- Set up multiple pages and sections to display your products and designs
- Choose from over 70 high-quality products for your shop (Also part of Basic Shops)
- Unlimited use of the same product within your shop
- Customize your shop by uploading your logo and shop description (Also part of Basic Shops)
- Create a shop design of your own. This also enables you to create a seamless retail extension of your own web site
- Customization tools to personalize colors and fonts used within your shop
- Choose from custom templates to instantly design your shop – No coding skills needed
- Organize your designs and products into categories and sub-categories
- Create custom layouts to showcase your newest designs and popular products
- Promote your shop in the CafePress.com Marketplace (Also part of Basic Shops)
- Promotional tools to help drive more traffic to your shop (Also part of Basic Shops)
- Newsletter system to help you keep your customers up-to-date on your latest products and designs (Also part of Basic Shops)
- Option to create your own shopkeeper profile to tell your customers about your organization, mission, or yourself. (Also part of Basic Shops)
Old and new design side by side.
Had I opened up a Premium Shop under the 15 day trial with my original design, I would have been hosed.
So, there you have it. I probably will open up a premium shop and consolidate all of my products into different categories. I could definitely have the Mongo store and then have my Pop Culture themed products split up into different categories. I might even be able to slice and dice it by design and by product. The more ways I can present the ideas the more people will find something based on the own style of searching. I may tag this post so that I can revisit it after some time to give you a heads up on how things are going. Who knows? You might take what advice I’ve given and be the next t-shirt mogul. At least you might be able to spring for gas each month. If you Ask Mongo, every little bit helps.
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