There are two things I do with A Fistful of Soundtracks that make my program different from other movie music radio programs: 1) I prerecord the program instead of hosting it live because whenever I go live on the air, I have a tendency to wet my pants, and 2) when it's Halloween or Christmas, I like to have a little fun with the program by adding radio drama-style sketch comedy to the music. The Fistful holiday specials are an opportunity for me to revive a genre I'd like to hear more often: the radio drama. Our specials are like the Mercury Theater on crack.

Necip (pronounced NAY-jip) Mehmet, a friend from high school, has provided voices for these holiday specials and was also a co-producer for the 1999 specials. The next few pages you'll read are from a December 2000 chat Mehmet and I had via e-mail about making the Halloween and Christmas shows.

A San Josean whose current day job is biotech work in Foster City, Mehmet majored in biology and minored in film at UC Riverside. He also wrote an episode of the unproduced anthology series Shards for UCR's radio station. The story of how Mehmet got involved in Fistful's holiday shows is kind of interesting. After high school graduation, I never heard from Mehmet again until 1999, when he e-mailed me because he happened to catch an edition of Fistful one day, and he told me about his screenwriting and radio playwriting studies. I asked him to join me in making the Fistful holiday specials because of his experience with radio drama, even though his play was never broadcast. Oh — and also because he does a dead-on Bill Paxton.

Necip Mehmet: Hey Jim! First of all, I'd like to say how much I enjoy your radio program and your crazy holiday specials. How long have you been doing these Halloween specials?

Jim Aquino: I've been doing Halloween editions of Fistful since the program began. Same thing with the Christmas shows. The first Halloween show was, by my standards today, really boring, dry and staid. There was no sketch comedy. It was just me sitting in the air room, spinning horror movie music late at night for two weeks — the first Halloween show was a two-parter — and being an all-around drip on the air. In fact, almost all the shows during the program's first two years are embarrassing to listen to because I was so inexperienced when I started out, and the program hadn't found its groove yet. I consider the first "official" Halloween special to be the one I produced in the program's second year — when I first started mixing movie music with prerecorded, radio drama-style sketch comedy. Halloween is a time to get creative and goof off, so I decided to write comical intros to each tune and throw in some sketch comedy. However, compared to the two more recent Halloween specials, the '98 special's production quality was crude because I produced it on chintzy tape recorders and of course, you hadn't introduced me yet to the pleasures of Premiere (the software I use to edit the program together each week). That's probably why I won't rebroadcast the '98 Halloween show in the future, although I'm proud of a sketch from that show that former KZSC programmer Beowulf (of KZSC and KSCO's old sketch comedy program It's the Demons Again!) and I worked on using editing software similar to Premiere. It was a sketch I adapted from a goofy column I wrote for City on a Hill Press in which I imagined what life would be like at the retirement home for faded slasher movie icons.

Necip: What were the Halloween specials about in the past couple of years?

Jim: In each Halloween special, I do the radio equivalent of putting on a costume. In the '98 special, my "costume" was a dead KZSC deejay named Freddy Kroeger. Not Krueger — Kroeger. During that special, I got possessed on the air by Freddy, who wanted to get back at the station for neglecting him when he died in a freak record-needle accident during the first — and last — broadcast of his late-night all-Barry Manilow show.

Then in the '99 special, my "costume" was a zombie. People were turning into brain-and-flesh-eating zombies after watching those creepy Gap commercials with those zombie-like models singing '80s pop songs. The zombies invaded the station while I was hosting my program and turned me into one of them. So for the rest of the show, I'm introducing tunes, but in zombie-speak, with all these zombies moaning behind me: "Come join party at studio. B.Y.O.B. Bring Your Own… Brains." While introducing the theme music from the Kevin Bacon flick Stir of Echoes, we played the game that's sweeping the nation: Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon's Brains. Jean Claude Van Damme called us and said he likes the show because we talk in broken English like he does. Al Gore also called us and we found out he's a zombie too.

Also in the '99 special, there was an opening bit about how I was so sick of Blair Witch and all those Blair Witch parodies. I did my own riff on the much-parodied scene of Heather weeping and confessing — she's saying sorry to her friend's mamas, her mama, her third-grade teacher, her driver's ed instructor, her guidance counselor, her priest and Jerry Mathers as the Beaver. And then I did something different from all the other Blair Witch parodies that were popping up all over TV at the time. I had some guy come in, shoot the Heather-like crybaby in the head and then shout, "I'm so sick of these Blair Witch parodies! That better be the last one this century!"

In the 2000 special, a sci-fi anthology show spoof, my "costume" was the little girl in the Twilight Zone episode "Little Girl Lost." I came up with this scheme to juice up the station's frequency so that everyone in America could hear the Halloween show. By the way, that was inspired by something that actually happened in real life last Halloween. I was pushing people to check out the '99 special on the Internet, and then the day of the broadcast, I found out the station's Webcasting feed was on the fritz, and I was so pissed. I felt like all that Web promotion I did was for nothing. So I worked my frustrations with the station's shoddy reception into the script of the 2000 special. Anyway, back to the plot of the 2000 special: to make my scheme to be heard all over the nation work, I had a crackpot inventor friend named Norman — your character — build a proton zapper to power up the station's frequency. But the device went haywire and opened a hole to another dimension inside the studio wall, and I stupidly stepped through the hole and got stuck in that other dimension, like in "Little Girl Lost," which was memorably spoofed in the Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" segment "Homer 3-D."

Necip: Why did you choose to spoof The Twilight Zone this year?

Jim: CineRadio had sent me the Twilight Zone 40th Anniversary score compilation, which Silva Screen released in fall 1999. I thought it would be nice to build a show around this huge Twilight Zone box set someday. So when it came time to decide a theme for the 2000 Halloween special, I wasn't feeling very inspired, and then as I assembled a list of recent soundtrack releases to include on the 2000 special, I wrote down the Twilight Zone release. Then it dawned on me that I should make the special a Twilight Zone spoof, and that this would be perfect for 2000 because everyone is so paranoid and excited about the new millennium, and The Twilight Zone always played on people's uncertainties and fears about — as well as fascination with — the future. So I guess because of Y2K, the series got some attention again, with those nightly reruns and frequent marathons on the Sci-Fi Channel and that episode of Felicity that was a clever homage to the show.

So if you're a Twilight Zone fan and you pay close attention to the special, you'll notice I threw in references to four classic Twilight Zone episodes. The premise of me trapped in the other dimension was, like I said, a reference to "Little Girl Lost." The bit in which I complain about never having enough time to read my porno mag collection poked fun at "Time Enough at Last." The flashback in which I get hysterical during a plane trip and I scream and shout about a creature on the wing of the plane was a tip of the hat to "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." Finally, the sketches involving aliens who visit the Norman character and claim their intentions are good spoofed "To Serve Man." I like The Twilight Zone, even though the moralizing on that show can occasionally get corny, and that's what I was poking fun at throughout the special.

But I wasn't trying to spoof only The Twilight Zone; I was also referencing other sci-fi anthology shows that also moralize about science and the human condition, like The Outer Limits. There's a little bit of "The Galaxy Being" in the sketches with Norman and the alien leader; like that episode's titular alien, the extraterrestrials in our show come from the Andromeda Galaxy. And the special's apocalyptic conclusion is typical of The Outer Limits. Finally, the 2000 special's title, "Tales from Beyond the Outer Twilight Zone," is an amalgam of Tales from the Darkside, One Step Beyond, The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone.