About Our Projects

The Crispy Critters got up to a few things during 11th grade, before we called ourselves that. Dave and I were the writers, and we wrote a 12-episode serial called "The Locker Shark," about a killer shark that lived in the lockers and ate students, and parodied every science fiction concept we could think of, from Star Trek to Hal-9000. We even tried to start filming it one day, but didn't get any farther than that. The four of us wrote and performed a series of comedy sketches during the school's Shakespeare Festival, and we wrote a mockery of a play that we were forced to perform that fall for the 200th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution. The original was called "Saving a Nation," our version was called "Saving a Nation in the Raw," and was basically a line-by-line twisting of the original, to make everything about sex, which sounds pretty feeble today, but it was hilarious when we were 17, let me tell you. We pulled off a tremendous April Fool's joke on one of our teachers, and three of us performed, in a play that I wrote, in the spring of our senior year.

That same Christmas break that we invented the Wilbury brothers, we made a documentary film called "Welcome to Austin," just a personal tour around the city, as a present for my girlfriend, who wanted to know everything about where I'd grown up and who my friends were. A year later, Christmas 1989, Anthony and I went to his grandparents' home in Houston during one of the coldest winters I can remember, and we brought a typewriter and wrote a book together, iHot Tamales!. In the mid-90s, Dave and I got together a few times to either try to write, or to record some music together, but no finished projects coalesced.

In 1996, at the dawn of the World Wide Web, the four of us started to collaborate on a Crispy Critters website. It got built up a good deal over a year and a half or so, but unfortunately, only a few early versions were ever archived, and so a lot of the special material we wrote for the website has been lost. And finally, I tried to get the gang back together to play cameo roles in my movie, The Krone Experiment, but the one scene we managed to do got left on the cutting room floor.

---jrw 09-25-03