Trip to the Collingwood & Co Studio
On Thursday I arrived per invitation to Tony’s studio in Acton-Town to attend a meeting about TSS with Glynn Hayward and Helen Shroud. Andrea Tran was also present but he was on a business call most of the time, although we had a bit of a chat towards the end.
I was there for 4 hours (for what was supposed to be a 1 hour meeting), with Helen and Tony regaling me with tales of inside info and what-could-have-beens. I was allowed - even encouraged - to record the whole “interview”, but it turns out that the phone I was using didn’t actually save it (A real “Secret Spider” moment for sure). Everyone was absolutely charming, and apart from the recording flub it was a lovely day that couldn’t’ve gone better.
Highlights include, to the best of my recollection:
• If the website is to return it might have to be heavily re-structured to cope with Flash essentially being a dead platform at this point.
• Roy was voiced by Tony’s son Harry
• The Commander in Secret Spider is called Vin, and the female actor from World Savers is Jilly
• Ray’s name is Raymondo not Ray Mondo - and it’s Zebulons not Zurbulons.
• VANITOR IS CANON AND HAS ALWAYS BEEN CANON
• CD “drinks too much” - the lines “I’ll stay here and hold the port” and “12%? That’s all the proof I need!” are references to this, in addition to his wine-bottle wrapping in Secret Santa and his favourite food in one of the books being Madeira cake, the main ingredient of which is wine.
• Masters were located for 2 full ½-hour Nicktoons broadcasts, completely uncompressed, and there are likely more - although we still don’t know exactly how many were modified.
• Masters for 4 previously-unknown shorts were discovered, with the theme of “What’s The Deal With _____?” - Helen was greatly surprised they weren’t on the DVDs as the Profile shorts had taken their place. (can’t find the photo of the master as we only found it towards the end of the day but I have a pic of Helen’s copy)
• An unused villain was going to be The Puddle Heads, sworn nemesis’s of The Floaty Heads - he couldn’t find the concept art for them so he drew one in front of me to keep! I shouldn’t say much about them except that you might be seeing them sooner than you think…
• There were initially plans for each 4-digit code in the episode to each unlock something different individually on the website - this was never implemented as they never made enough goodies to cover 52 different codes.
• Helen used to have a copy of the show’s entire soundtrack on her iPod until it broke.
• Tony knows about the DeviantArt fanfics. To hear him actually say the site’s name out loud was a very surreal moment indeed.
• There’s a 4th BTS called “The Music Of the Secret Show”, which would’ve been with Roger Jackson - we found the master for the 3rd one (“The Sounds Of The Secret Show”) but not the 4th.
• There were also 4 PP Lectures made, which means there are two of those that have never been released either.
• The Space Wasps (from What’s In The Box and Planet PP) have a different origin in both simply because they needed to reuse the assets.
• Tony had the entire plot to the potential Series 3 opener all planned out, and gleefully recounted the first half of it to me in great detail. I’ll keep the specifics mum for the time being just in case it ever ends up happening after all - but I’ll say that it would’ve been amazing. Also Tony totally should’ve been a VA, his voices were great.
• Everyone was fascinated by the number of international dubs I’d managed to collect, and when I showed them the Latino-Mexican intro there was much groaning and laugher all ‘round. Speaking of which, we discovered a sampler-disc of the Catalan dub that even Tony was surprised they had:
• The reason why it’s never revealed what CD won his medal on the Mantlepiece for is because nobody could think of anything funny enough to warrant revealing.
• Unbeknownst to anyone, the physical masters for episodes 7 and 28 were AWOL from their designated boxes and remain unaccounted for, although they are still stored digitally - I know this because I re-sorted their entire TSS disc-archive for them while I was there. Andrea was happy for the heads-up and Helen gladly suggested I make a note of it on the box.
• Martin Hyder was hired almost by accident - he was called in just to record the Temp Track for Stephen Fry’s lines in the pilot as Fry had to record them separately. Someone asked Martin to fill in a line for Ray, and he suited the role so well that they casted him on the spot.
• There was an event known as “Spy Day” in which a whole bunch of children were brought together to do TSS-themed spy activities. There are two separate recordings of this.
• Tony knew that Nicktoons had once broadcast The Martian Dub (Sep 20th ‘08) but Helen was unaware. Her reaction to finding out was amazing.
• Anita’s parents were never given a backstory simply because they were never relevant to the plot - Anita’s aquatic origins shall remain a mystery….
• Glynn and I both agreed that due to internet speeds and technology advancing a truly substantial way since 2006, remastering the site’s audio from 22050Hz to 44100Hz is completely feasible, and that I could even help resample it. Tony and Helen admitted they’d lost us completely during our nerd-out which we all had a good laugh over.
• Tony asked completely of his own volition if I knew of TheSecretShow4You, which is of course our friend and empress, the Vanitor Queen. He greatly admires how much she has come up with over the years and says he loved the 10th Anniversary video.
• Helen was very surprised to learn that the first 24 episodes had reaired all throughout last April this year in Germany - presumably Disney Germany renewed their licence. Speaking of which:
• The Spider was supposed to appear in Secret Sleep - about 6 minutes in, crawling on the front edge of the bed just before PP falls asleep. Neither DVD nor Broadcast version has this due to a rendering error, although they didn’t actually believe me at the time:
The top photo is from “The Book Of Revelations” - a pair of .pdfs that track every single hidden thing from every episode along with a few other things. They are now in the Google Drive folder under “Books” for your viewing pleasure.
• I gave Tony my still-shrink-wrapped copy of the Italian Vol4 DVD as a gift for basically putting up with my wall-of-text emails over the last three years. In return I was presented with a take-home copy of the 2004 Pilot version of Lucky Leo as Tony still had a few copies left. It is now in the Drive under “Rare Broadcasts” - you will notice more than a few differences to the final version, I’m sure:
• There was an entire marketing pack produced of which only two exist. Photos of literally everything from it are in the “Studio Visit 02/11/17″ folder, along with all the master discs that we found in the cupboard.
• Two Betamax masters were found as well - I don’t know about you but I thought that was absolutely amazing:
The second tape contains an 11-minute Interview with Tony about the show which has never been shown outside the industry.
• A prototype of the UK version of Vol2 was also discovered, along with two different prototypes of Vol1 - Sadly none were found of 3 or 4 as BBC WW were actually the ones who pressed them, Col & Co simply handing the files over to them to compile.
And best for last:
• This morning, the day after the meeting, Glynn emailed me several files from his archive of the website which were previously lost - the U.Z.Z./T.H.E.M. Doorhangers, the CD Cutout, The Spiderbikes game (literally called spaceinvaders.swf) and the rarest of all, the 2007 Easter Exclusive Site Map - available now at your local Website Downloads folder. He also kindly sent some original concept art for the games that he’d drawn himself back in the day, including one that never made the cut, of which I will make another post about separately. (if you want a sneaky peek, look in the Images folder under “Flash Files And Other Site Workings”)
One final thing, for now at least - While I was there Helen and Tony deigned to show me the trailer for their newest series, “Thorgar” - I was “the first person under 30 to see it” and I can tell you now it’s absolutely amazing. Seriously, as soon as it starts airing you guys need to watch it immediately, it’s spectacular.
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