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When the Cream Sinks to the Bottom: The Mythic Tale of “The Cream Zone,” Our Most CURSED Project
🕑 Added 2020-11-09 05:35:10 +0000 UTCHello once again, dear wizards. All Hallow’s Eve may have come and gone but I can assure you that if you’re reading this, the spooks are FAR from over. Here I have woven for you a dark tale of shadow, mist... and cream. Before we begin, tell me... in that deep, ancient part of you that slithers to life late at night, hearing footsteps down the hall, seeing movement in the shadows of your closet, and feeling piss trickle down your leg... do you believe... in curses? Do you believe in ill omens that hang like black ravens over the souls of those who dig too deep into the eldritch lore no man should ever unearth?... Nah me neither. BUT it’s fun to pretend right??
When we first set out on the ill-fated odyssey that was “The Cream Zone,” we had just experienced our first bit of success as “It’s Just Business” had blown up on r/videos and granted us our first 1,000 subs. We were elated but not sure what to do next. I, Michael, wanted desperately to make a sketch that set us apart to our new subscribers. I wanted to make something strange, uncanny, and unforgettable. I wanted to tell a grim story that bore the torch of the twisted cautionary tales of Bavarian and Slavic folklore and blended our absurd comedy with the stylings of Lewis Carroll and Dante Alighieri. If only I had known that my hubris had doomed us from the start.
“It’s gotta be something about a different realm or dimension,” I told Frank over a mountain melt at the local Ale House one dark November night. “...Something so otherworldly that the comedy comes from how unknowable and alien its ways of operating are to the main character and the audience.” ...Pretty pretentious right? It was all very “cart before the horse.” I wanted to emulate a style but hardly had a concept to back it up. Regardless, Frank and Mitch were tentatively on board. We just needed a catalyst, something to launch our protagonist into his mythic quest in this strange land… or zone. Then it hit us like a bolt of lightning and Frank and I nearly said it in unison: SPLITTING A BOSTON CREAM!
You’re confused... rightly so. Allow me to explain. A few weeks before, when working on another project, we got a half dozen donuts to split amongst ourselves. Somewhere along the way, after we had each eaten one, Mitchell ate two more donuts and left us with one final donut… a Boston cream. When we raised the issue with him, he simply replied “Just split it.” ...Just… split… it…? He wanted us to SPLIT a CREAM-FILLED donut?! We were pissed. “You want us to split a Boston cream?” Frank asked, almost crying. “Are you insane?! The cream will spill out everywhere!” I prodded, almost certainly shitting my pants. Nothing could've prepared us for what he did next. “Yeah, here.” Mitch said, and with the flippancy of a Holocaust denier, he picked up the pastry with his clammy, fat hands and TORE it hap-hazardly in two. The off-white custard ran like blood from a slain angel. Needless to say, we were speechless. He might as well have wiped his ass with the Magna Carta. He licked his fingers and smiled like he’d done us some kind of favor instead of spitting in the face of God. I mean… yeah… we ate it… but we weren’t happy about it. From then on it became an inside joke among us that NOBODY splits a Boston Cream.
It was perfect. Using such a trivial and obscure thing to serve as the mortal sin that shatters reality and sends our hero on a Pilgrim’s Progress-like journey fit the tone we were shooting for exactly. Frank was to be the every-man protagonist and I was to be Creamulus, the enigmatic, Virgil-esqe spirit guide. So, we began writing. It took us a whole week to come up with a script we could agree on. We were at each other’s throats constantly, but we fought through it and, believing the worst was behind us, were finally ready to film. How foolish we were.
Setting up in Frank’s empty childhood home that was up for sale, we shot only in the dead of night, using limited lighting and a newly-bought fog machine to create the otherworldly feel of the Cream Zone in the hollow, gutted rooms and corridors. We spent hundreds of dollars on props and hours assembling costumes and set-pieces. In order to keep the already horribly echo-filled audio tolerable and to allow the fog to billow around properly, we had to keep the air conditioning shut off for all three of those swampy 3-7 hour Florida night-shoots. With progress crawling at a snail's pace, endless cream clean-up between takes, and me sweating through a pound of makeup beneath several cloaks and a wire-framed apparatus taped to my head, tempers ran high and quality footage ran low. By the end of the weekend, we barely had half of the script completed, and after a preliminary edit of what we did have, we already wanted to re-shoot so much. Confidence in the project was abysmal but I was stubbornly committed to seeing it through and Frank and Mitch were caught up in the sunk cost.
Throughout the next week, we tried to revise the script to lessen the workload of the coming weekend. We cut the musical number (oh yeah, there was a musical number) and restructured the plot, combining some story beats and characters to simplify things but it wasn’t enough. I felt that losing some of its scale was lessening it’s potency and everyone else was growing more and more disconnected and tired. Finally, painfully, we called it. It was too stressful to be worth it anymore and we were all too pissed off about a donut joke. Looking back, I know now that I had fallen prey to the same fatal flaw as every white girl with a ukulele: I was trying too hard to be quirky and just didn’t have the personality to pull it off. It was just never to be.
When we launched our Patreon about a year and a half later, we knew we had to share what remained of this cream-filled fever dream with our patrons... we just didn’t know how little we’d have left to share. Like the fabled Boston cream, so too have our dreams been so brutally cleft in twain. Shortly after announcing our Patreon, the hard drive with all the cream zone footage vanished only to turn up just last month… now fully corrupted. All that remains is the single clip of raw footage linked below from our Patreon promo. Perhaps we'll touch-up and release the fragmented script that's honestly nearly hieroglyphic in its confusing linguistic construction. Some part of me really hopes we can recover the lost files some day, but another part of me wonders if some eldritch entity of the void does not want such accursed footage to be seen by the eyes of mortal man for fear of apocalyptic results.
Well it’s almost exactly two years later and it’s all but nearly-fictional channel lore and a ridiculous memory. Riding around on a skateboard with a donut hanging from my neck, setting off the smoke detectors with a cheap fog machine, and flinging cream at Frank’s head from off camera... these are the things I will remember most. I guess the cream always does rise to the top.
Oh… and one more thing… please... for the love of all that is holy… NEVER split a Boston cream.
Watch this and you will only have one year left to live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijNfQMcBAWI&feature=youtu.be
