Jim Aquino hosts and produces A Fistful of Soundtracks (Sundays 2-4PM on KZSC 88.1 FM in Santa Cruz), writes for Silicon Valley Community Newspapers and Metro Newspapers in San Jose and wants "journalists" to please quit using that absurd term "9-1-1." Like Flavor Flav once said, "9-1-1 is a joke!"

Excerpts from the audio commentary track for the director's cut of "A Fistful of Soundtracks Christmas Special 2001"

(Note: The audio commentary track was ultimately dumped because I found out the hard way that hearing a commentary track over a radio show can almost cause one's head to explode.)

-Like all other editions of Fistful, the annual Christmas Special, which mixes Christmas movie soundtrack music with sketch comedy written by yours truly, is prerecorded.

-Fistful is always prerecorded because 1) I don't like doing live radio very much; and 2) by prerecording Fistful on CD, it allows me to give copies of the program to friends who aren't able to catch it on the radio.

-Necip Mehmet, a friend I first met in high school, has contributed voices to the sketches in each of the Halloween and Christmas Specials since 1999. I read a radio drama script he wrote for UC Riverside's radio station as part of his screenwriting studies at UCR and thought he'd be perfect for producing the sketches for the 1999 Halloween Special. (Click -here to read about how the Halloween Specials came about.) Since then, it's sort of become an annual tradition for Necip to drop by and provide voices for the sketches.

-Necip introduced me to Adobe Premiere video-editing software, which he used for editing together the sketches for the 1999 Halloween Special. A couple of months later, I stopped prerecording the program on chintzy analog tapes and started prerecording it on my PC and editing it on Premiere.

-The Halloween and Christmas Specials are the only times of the year when I allow myself to depart from Fistful's straightforward film-music format to intersperse sketch comedy in between the music. I never really wanted to be in journalism. What I'd rather be doing is writing for either a humor magazine, a late-night talk show or a prime-time cartoon like The Simpsons. So doing these sketches allows me to get close to that dream.

-Why Halloween and Christmas? Because Halloween is Halloween and, well, Christmas is a holiday that's just always been asking for it (or rather, the people who take Christmas way too seriously). To borrow a line from Oscar on the Odd Couple sitcom, "Don't talk to me about Christmas, will ya? All that sticky, phony goodwill. I'd like to get a giant candy cane and beat the wings off a sugar plum fairy."

-On second thought, maybe I'm not as surly as Oscar. I do like Christmas a little bit. I've always liked the presents thing.

-But why do most Christmas songs have to suck so much? "White Christmas?" "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year?" Blah. And what's up with this sexing up of Santa? "Santa Baby?" "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus?" Last time I checked, Santa is this ugly, hairy, foul-smelling slob who always shows up drunk for work at the mall.

-Another reason for the sketch comedy in these holiday shows is that nobody listens to the program during the holiday season. All the UC Santa Cruz students are gone for break, and so are most of the listeners who aren't students. Also, I've never gotten any phone calls or e-mails about the Christmas Specials, another sign that nobody is tuning in to Fistful during the holidays. So that means I can do whatever the hell I want with the program.

-The 1998 Christmas Special was a bit on the lame side, so I'll never air that show again, but it did feature one excellent segment, which wasn't a sketch: it was an interview I did with New Times film and TV reviewer Robert Wilonsky about the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack, one of his favorite albums of all time. In the interview, which was done over the phone, Robert elaborated on some juicy little-known facts about the soundtrack: most of Vince Guaraldi's score was originally written for A Boy Named Charlie Brown, a made-for-network TV documentary about Charles Schulz and his Peanuts strip that never aired, and the incorrect info about Guaraldi's band in the liner notes on the current Fantasy Records release of the soundtrack has angered the daughter of an uncredited musician. Another great moment in the interview was when Robert described why the classic special, which first aired in 1965, is so touching for him. Too bad phone static shows up to ruin parts of the interview because I would really like to air the interview again.

-The 1999 and 2000 Christmas Specials featured sketches in which the studio is visited by the Chorus of Department Store Santas, who can carry a tune as well as they can hold their liquor. Songs ranging from "Jingle Bells" to "Feliz Navidad" have been destroyed by the chorus.

-A recurring bit during the 2000 Christmas Special was a spoof of those ID's that celebrities record for radio stations to play on Christmas. The special featured holiday greetings from Arnold Schwarzenegger (voiced by Necip), Sean Connery (voiced by me) and Bill Gates (Necip again).

-Necip and I always try to sneak in references to Triumph the Insult Comic Dog of Late Night with Conan O'Brien fame in the Halloween and Christmas Specials because we're huge fans of Triumph. When the Chorus of Department Store Santas sings "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" in the 2000 Christmas Special, a Santa who sounds like Triumph can be heard ad-libbing, "You better not pout — I'm telling you why, you filthy whore" and "We are coming, that's right!" (Necip was actually kind of shocked that I kept his racy Triumph-esque ad-libs in the sketch.) And in a sketch in the 2000 Halloween Special, I'm repeatedly saying "Oh yes" Triumph-style while having a private moment with a stack of porno mags.

-Early sketch ideas for the 2001 Christmas Special that I eventually junked included: "Yankee Dodo Dandy," a takeoff on knee-jerk patriotism in which an overly patriotic jackoff annoys his officemates at the office Christmas party, and "Christmas Memento," a sketch about the Christmas party eggnog getting spiked, told backwards like Memento.

-I felt that the 1999 and 2000 Christmas Specials were lacking in heartwarming racial humor, so I infused more racial humor into this year's Christmas show.

-I initially thought another show featuring the Chorus of Department Store Santas would just seem tired, so one of the earliest ideas for the 2001 special was a sketch in which I killed off the chorus. It was a nice idea, but I finally decided to go with including the chorus again this year.

-However, I relegated the chorus to only one sketch, at the very beginning of the special. This year, the song they demolished was "Christmas Time Is Here," to the delight of the equally inebriated Bush daughters.

-During the "Christmas Time Is Here" bit, one of the Santas shouts, "Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor, damn!" That's a reference to a classic NewsRadio episode in which Bill McNeal does a bunch of racially offensive ads for a malt liquor company.

-The other sketches that aired on the 2001 Christmas Special were...

"Band Aid," a fake ad for a DVD featuring never-before-heard outtakes from the historic recording sessions for Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas."

"A Christmas Story Starring Charlton Heston," a sendup of the popular 1983 Christmas movie in which Ralphie, the boy who wants a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, is played by the infamous president of the NRA.

"Christmas Fear Factor," a spoof of Fear Factor in which the contestants have to confront their worst Christmastime fears. The challenges in this Christmastime edition of Fear Factor are: eating a scary-looking fruitcake from the Fruitcake-of-the-Month Club, sitting on the lap of a shopping mall Santa with a nasty case of halitosis and waking up the morning after the office Christmas party in bed with that lady in the office who has a mustache.

A reprise of "2001: A Spaz Odyssey," a spoof of the sci-fi classic 2001 that originally aired on the 2001 Fistful Halloween Special.

"Post-Sept. 11 Santa," a skit in which Santa drops off a present for Osama bin Laden.

And "Homes Alone," a Home Alone spoof featuring two characters from the 2001 Halloween Special, my 10-year-old gangsta cousin, Lil' Jo, and his friend Cease. They imagine themselves as characters in Home Alone while being forced against their will to watch a rental of Home Alone: The Next Generation ("Oh no! Anthrax! Aaaaaaah!!!"). However, Lil' Jo doesn't want to be Macaulay Culkin. He wants to be one of the burglars so that he can kill Macaulay.

-The electronically sped-up voices of Lil' Jo and Cease were provided, respectively, by myself and Necip.

-Lil' Jo is based on myself — when I was 13. I named him after my older brother Jonas and three of my cousins, Joanne, Jo Jo and another Jo Jo. My mom and her siblings tend to give their kids names with "Jo" in it. So Lil' Jo's name is an in-joke for my family.

-I always liked the name of that Junior M.A.F.I.A. rapper Lil' Cees. So I modified the name and gave it to Lil' Jo's friend/sidekick, who went nameless in the Halloween Special. In "Homes Alone," Lil' Jo explains that his friend is called Cease "because that's what his mom and his dad and the teachers and the cops are always telling him to do." In next year's Christmas Special, I think I'll introduce his sister Desist.

-The songs that I used as underscore for "Homes Alone" are: DJ Quik's "Did Y'all Feel Dat?" (for the sketch's "opening titles"), the Notorious B.I.G.'s "Gimme the Loot" (for most of the sketch) and the Propellerheads' "Spybreak!" (for the action sequence spoofing The Matrix).

-My dad has a cameo in "Homes Alone" as the voice of Lil' Jo's dad. All of Lil' Jo's dad's lines are in Tagalog. His lines are: "Jimmy Mack, Pasko na! Gusto kong kami lang dalawa ng misis ko dahil suyang-suya na ako dito sa loco-locong ito! Kriminal siya! Trobol lang and kanyang inaatupag ngayong Pasko! Ikaw na lang ang bahala sa kanya. Mayroon kaming plano sa linggong ito at hindi siya kasama! Oh, tingnan mo ang oras!" (Translation: "Jimmy Mack, it's Christmastime and I want to be alone with my wife because I've had it with this little bastard! He's a criminal! He's been causing trouble this Christmas! You're going to have to look after him for a while and straighten the boy out because my wife and I have got plans for the next few days and they don't include him! Oh, look at the time!")

-The idea of bringing back Lil' Jo came from Grace-Sonia Lee, a friend who works a few blocks from me at the Camera 3 art-house movie theater in downtown San Jose and handles publicity for both Camera 3 and the Asian American theater arts organization Contemporary Asian Theatre Scene. Grace is a newcomer to the Halloween and Christmas Specials and she did all the female voices for both specials this year. She's a fan of Lil' Jo.

-The idea for the Band Aid sketch came from Necip. In an e-mail, he wrote: "I had an idea... when you were listing all those holiday songs to open with (like the Waitresses and Run DMC, I was reminded of that ULTRA-CHEESY 80's christmas charity song. You know the one, with Bon Jovi, Boy George, whatever singing 'Don't they know it's christmas time?' or some corny catchy jingle like that. We could do a sketch of 'the making of' that song. (Maybe the premise is similar to the Christmas Story where they are releasing the music video on DVD and playing some of the additional footage) It would give us an excuse to do bad celebrity impressions. Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder getting into a fist fight with David Lee Roth and Michael Bolton? It just seems along the lines of our old Halloween specials."

-Partially written but never finished and recorded was a sketch about the not-so-nice behavior of celebrities at pop star benefits like "We Are the World" and the recent America: A Tribute to Heroes telethon, where the celebs are asked to check their egos at the door and some of them don't (like when Barbra Streisand gave the makers of the "Hands Across America" video a hard time and demanded that they shoot her cameo from her backyard). The sketch was going to be a fake ad for a sleazy home video, Too Hot for All-Star Charity Music Videos, but there was already a sketch about "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and to do another sketch about pop star benefits would be too much, so I junked it. Here's some dialogue from the unfinished sketch...

ANNOUNCER: See a drunk and tardy Elton John throw a tantrum about the snacks on the craft services table during the taping of "That's What Friends Are For!"

ELTON JOHN: [Sounds inebriated] I'm 20 minutes late, eh? Well, I don't give a flying f***! What? This is for AIDS charity? Well, can you do me a lit-ull favor, then? Change the bloody hors d'oeuvres! I didn't come 'ere to be dragged outta God-knows-where-I-was-shaggin' to munch on this stale cheese n' crackers! Bloody hell! Bugger this! [Sound of Elton shoving table to the floor] You can all kiss my lit-ull Rocket Man! And this song that we're gonna do sucks! Where the bloody 'ell is Bernie when I need him? Burt and Carole were definitely havin' an off night! "That's What Friends Are For?" The song comes from that bloody movie with Fonzie, for chrissakes!

ANNOUNCER: See Barbra Streisand berate the lighting man during the filming of "Hands Across America!"

BARBRA-LAH: Mister! This face doesn't light itself! Are ya blind? Will you hurry up and correct the lighting so that my backyard doesn't clash with my cheeks? Hurry up, you schmendrick! I've got a schedule! There's a Columbia Records release party that I've gotta be 45 minutes late for!

ANNOUNCER: And now, with newly added bonus footage! See the catfight between Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz over Tom Cruise! This never-before-seen Hollywood starlet smackdown took place after the Tribute to Heroes telethon!

PENELOPE CRUZ: Hey, hands off my man Tomas!

CAMERON DIAZ: You wanna fight right here, huh, Penelope? Well, bring it! I didn't learn a few moves from Charlie's Angels for nothing!

["Charlie's Angels 2000" Theme]

[Catfight noises]

DIRECTOR: Hey guys, are the cameras rolling? 'Cuz this catfight will definitely bring in more donations!

TOM CRUISE: Look. Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz are having a catfight about me. Am I the luckiest dude in America or what?

-Fans of the HBO prison drama Oz who miss the delightfully vicious African inmate Adebisi, one of the show's most popular characters until he was killed off last season, will be pleased to know that Adebisi has been brought back from the dead — on the 2001 Christmas Special. Adebisi turns up in "Homes Alone" and "Post-Sept. 11 Santa."

-The brief skit "The Osama bin Lewis Telethon," which opens the second hour of the 2001 Christmas Special, was patched together from Necip's ad-libs. I said to Necip, "Do Jerry Lewis as Osama bin Laden," and the resulting ad-libs sounded pretty funny, so I worked them into the special. After I finished editing together the Christmas Special, I couldn't get Osama bin Lewis' damn quasi-song out of my head for a couple of days ("Osama bin Looooooonely! My cave is emptyyyy! I need another laaaaady laaady!").

-The 2001 Christmas Special included a dedication to composer Albert Hague, who wrote the music for the songs in How the Grinch Stole Christmas and was best known to '80s TV viewers as Mr. Shorofsky the music teacher on Fame. Hague passed away in November.

-A blooper reel was added to the 2001 Christmas Special for future rebroadcasts. The montage features outtakes of Necip, Grace and I flubbing our lines while recording the sketches for the 2001 special, as well as outtakes from last year's Christmas Special and a June 2001 edition of Fistful, "Total Request Almost Live."

-For those who actually give a shit, my five favorite Christmas show/movie soundtracks are:
1. A Charlie Brown Christmas (Vince Guaraldi Trio)
2. Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics (Trey Parker and Marc Shaiman)
3. The Nightmare Before Christmas (Danny Elfman)
4. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Albert Hague and Eugene Poddany)
5. Scrooged (Danny Elfman)

-My five favorite Christmas songs are:
1. Run-DMC's "Christmas in Hollis"
2. The Waitresses' "Christmas Wrapping"
3. Donny Hathaway's "This Christmas"
4. Clarence Carter's "Back Door Santa" (which is sampled in "Christmas in Hollis")
5. Kurtis Blow's "Christmas Rappin'"

-My five favorite Christmas specials are:
1. A Charlie Brown Christmas
2. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
3. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
4. The Simpsons Christmas Special (a.k.a. "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire")
5. The first Mr. Hankey episode of South Park (the Philip Glass spoof is classic)

-My five favorite Christmas movies are:
1. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
2. A Christmas Story
3. Die Hard
4. Gremlins
5. The Nightmare Before Christmas

-Hmmm, why isn't It's a Wonderful Life on the above list? I used to be a fan of It's a Wonderful Life, but as I got older, I started to notice some flaws in the movie. For instance, just what the hell is so awful about Pottersville? Sure, a town like Pottersville is scuzzy, but places like Pottersville were also centers for some great culture and jazz music during It's a Wonderful Life's era. Frank Capra seems to be saying that America is better off without all that.

-Editing together the 2001 Christmas Special was pretty stressful, yet it was the most fun to record out of all the Christmas Specials. I think that partly has to do with the fact that a girl was actually involved with recording the special this time. An actual female! What a shock!

Happy holidays.

Click here for trivia about the 2001 Fistful Halloween Special and click here for trivia about previous Fistful Halloween and Christmas Specials.

Jim Aquino
December 14, 2001

See previous "Intros"

November 2001: On the 2001 Fistful Halloween Special

October 2001: On Sept. 11, Asian American Comedy Night and the Enterprise theme song

September 2001: On the deaths of Pauline Kael, Manuel Ticsay (an uncle) and Aaliyah

August 2001: On the Fistful episode "Fistful on the Run"

July 2001: On new Fistful IDs and the Fistful episode "Up, Up and Away"

June 2001: On Fistful's fourth anniversary