But in doing so, they were able to maintain DIY production values that gave the show its character. Sifl ‘n’ Olly, the product of two fertile, young minds, was about to make the transition from home video to big-time broadcast. After four months of phone calls, one finally made it through to Brian Graden, the executive behind South Park and the new president of programming for MTV (USA). He also sent a copy of it to MTV Europe, which promptly asked for more one-minute snippets to run between videos and shows.īut the real payoff came through persistence. Lynch went off to college in Europe, and while at the Liverpool Institute for the Arts in 1995, he took one of the tapes, edited it and married it to a VHS tape of some sock puppets as a Christmas gift for his partner back in the States. Both Crocco and Lynch eventually landed in Nashville. The two continued to make their brand of ad hoc comedy cassettes as they grew up, and as the small but loyal core of fans they played them for grew, so did their technology, graduating to a 4-track cassette deck. “We would just sit around making them up then like we do now, and we picked two names from back then.” “The names are totally meaningless,” says Crocco of Sifl ‘n’ Olly. They were prefigurations of Beavis and Butt-head, sans music videos to criticize. They would make up show formats and record them to a cassette boom box, complete with songs off records as their backdrop. Sifl ‘n’ Olly creators Matt Crocco and Liam Lynch started dreaming up comedy together when they were in the seventh grade in Ohio. If paths had crossed at a different time, it could have Shari Lewis and Lambchop up there every night, singing about carrots and reprising Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” On Sifl ‘n’ Olly, life’s lessons are conveyed in a way that straddles the line between the childish and the childlike. But its very simplicity also recalls the early days of children’s television programming. Sifl ‘n’ Olly, a show peopled by ragamuffin sock puppets with a soundtrack that’s literally recorded in a kitchen, fits in with MTV’s minimalist leanings in addition to costing virtually nothing to manufacture, it not only looks like it was made for adolescents but also made by them.
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