Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager

Filming style and locations

The "Empire Market" scenes were filmed on location at Willy Street Co-op, Madison, Wisconsin.

Series overview

The first season follows Chad and his interactions with his co-workers. He admires his boss Randy, acquires Jeremy as an apprentice, hazes Lloyd and dates Clarissa. After troubles with Clint, Chad is moved to the night shift, where he meets Weird Jimmy, before quitting his job at Empire Market. After unsuccessfully working briefly at a number of jobs, he returns to Empire Market to re-ally with his coworkers and battle Clint to reclaim the day shift manager position.

In the second season, Empire Market is bought out by Red Leader Foods, a large corporation. Maggie McCall arrives as the corporate liaison for the new owners. After failure on the new laser checkout system, Randy is demoted to night shift manager, where he becomes mentally unstable, and Maggie becomes the acting general manager. The series also introduces another love interest for Chad, Maggie's assistant Libby and a minor antagonist, Sean Banditson. The season focuses on Chad's misuse of Jeremy and Maggie's attempts to ally with Jeremy. Afterward, Jeremy and Chad duel, leading to the accidental death of Weird Jimmy. After the battle, Chad and Jeremy reconcile.

The third season begins with the trial promotion of employees to general manager for a day. After the employees' failures, Maggie trials Clint as manager-for-a-day, where he attempts to turn the store into a "bozo circus" as Chad describes it. New employee Damien Nightshayde joins Chad and Jeremy, whilst Weird Jimmy's ghost tells Jeremy a prophecy. Finally, during the day of Chad's management, Randy attempts to blow up the store, though only Damien is killed. As a result, previous store owner Champion J. Pepper(Clint's father) buys Empire Market back and makes Chad the general manager, demoting Maggie to night shift manager. Jeremy, still depressed over Damien's death, chooses to take a leave of absence to go on a spiritual journey of discovery.

The fourth season opens up with Chad as the general manager of Empire Market. Weird Jimmy's brother Johnny enters the store to pick up his brother's stuff. When he reminisces about Jimmy, the latter possesses him, and ultimately becomes the janitor for the store again. Chad also manipulates Jeremy to return with the hope of making "the store fully operational". Distressed over the lack of faith his employees have in him, Chad becomes convinced that he must locate his "dark soul half" to become the manager that they deserve. He descends into megalomania and forces a tyrannical martial law on the store whilst a generator malfunction threatens its very existence. This leads him to have a near-death experience in the series finale when Maggie convinces him to push the button. After returning to life, Chad realises that he has always belonged in the day shift manager position and demotes himself, suggesting Jeremy as the next general manager.

Cast and characters

Chad Vader (Aaron Yonda/voiced by Matt Sloan) is the show's central character. He is the day shift manager of Empire Market. Sometimes using lines lifted from the Star Wars films (the main source of humor being Chad going about day-to-day life while retaining a behavior befitting of a Sith lord), Chad's main goal is to crush Empire Market's competition and help make the store dominate the food retailing industry. However, as Season 2 progresses along and Chad follows Randy's orders to "ditch" the Star Wars attitude and become more normal and the new leader announces that everyone has a chance to be General Manager, his main goal morphs into a great ambition to become General Manager (which he succeeds in the end of Season 3). While he has inappropriate and rocky relationships with most of his co-workers, most notably Clint Shermer, he has better ones with others, such as Jeremy, whom he adopts as his apprentice. Chad implies in the second episode that he is Darth Vader's younger, less successful brother, and that Darth gave Chad a life support suit and helmet similar to his own after Chad accidentally rode his bicycle into a volcano. This fact is mentioned explicitly on the Blame Society website (www.blamesociety.net). Though he uses a red Sith lightsaber as a weapon to threaten opponents and shoplifters, he may not be a Sith; he is never referred to as "Darth", the title given to all members of the Sith order. He is, however, referred to as "Lord Vader" by some characters. Chad had lost touch with his family when they moved to Tatooine without him. LucasArts was impressed by Sloan, and eventually this led to him becoming the new voice actor for Darth Vader. His voice appears in the games Empire at War: Forces of Corruption, Soulcalibur IV, and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. It is also noted that in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, if the player kills 12 Stormtroopers as Darth Vader during the introduction sequence, they will receive an achievement entitled "Worst Day Shift Manager Ever".

Awards and honors

Distribution

The first episode of Season 2 was released on the internet on February 1, 2009 and subsequent episodes have been periodically released. Season 3 started being released on the internet from early 2010.

It started being broadcast on Blip since April 2010.

The series also has a DVD, which contains all 8 of the first-season episodes, and one for season 2's ten episodes. Released on DVD in Fall 2008, Season 1.5 features the collection of "Chad Vader Training Videos" and other material created after the release of the Season 1 DVD. Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager has been translated into at least 6 languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Chinese, Hebrew and Lingua Franca Nova.

Other media

The titular character of Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager has appeared outside of the web series.

A spin-off web series, Empire Market Training Videos was produced in 2008. In the webisodes, Chad covers issues of customer satisfaction, custodial duties, the importance of the dress code, the perils of shoplifting and patrolling in a series of in-universe training videos teaching the potential employee of Empire Market. It retained many characters from the main series.