Creative director(s) Jolon Gabriel Bankey Country of origin United States Final episode date 10 December 2008 Language English | Starring John Hodgman Narrated by John Hodgman First episode date 2 March 2008 Number of seasons 1 Genre Comedy Cast John Hodgman | |
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Voices of Dana DevonshireRuss GoobermanJohn HodgmanXeni JardinErik Sheppard | ||
SPAMasterpiece Theater (or S.P.A.M. Theater) is an American web series starring humorist John Hodgman where he does dramatic readings of unsolicited email spam received by Boing Boing editors in a parody of Masterpiece Theatre. The series featured images and videos from Creative Commons-licensed media.
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S.P.A.M. Theater
In 2008, S.P.A.M. Theater debuted. Each episode features a dramatization of email spam. Originally, the series featured images and videos from Creative Commons-licensed media from the image hosting and video hosting website Flickr and the nonprofit digital library Internet Archive. The second episode "FOR MY DAUGHTER'S SAKE/DE@L OF A LIFETIME" featured the voices of Russ Gooberman and Dana Devonshire. In the third episode "Love Song of Kseniya," Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin reads her own email spam. In the fourth episode "The Proposition," Erik Sheppard of Voice Talent Productions contributes a voice.
SPAMasterpiece Theater
In October 1, 2008, Jardin announced the official debut of the web series SPAMasterpiece Theater—almost a month before the American release of John Hodgman's satirical almanac More Information Than You Require. Hodgman described it as "true tale[s] of romance, adventure, infamy, and low-cost prescription drugs, all culled from the reams of actual, unsolicited emails, received here by us and people like you -- what we call SPAM." The hosted series included dramatic readings by Hodgman in a parody of Masterpiece Theatre. In 2010, Boing Boing Video's Jardin was picked as "Curator of the Month". She commended the series with "These were so much fun to put together."
Music
The first four SPAMasterpiece Theater episodes opened with a chiptune remix of Jean-Joseph Mouret's "Rondeau: Fanfare" (1735) by Hamhocks Buttermilk Johnson.
Reception
PopSugar's Lee Pace called the first episode of SPAMasterpiece Theater "the best viral video of the week." Vulture's Matthew Perpetua praised the series with "Hodgman's deadpan delivery is typically excellent, but we're particularly fond of the deliberately pretentious juxtaposition of stock footage in the dramatizations. PBS might want to look at this." In a retrospective celebrating the anniversary of Boing Boing TV, BBC Online's web producer Ellen West described SPAMasterpiece Theater as "It's like Adam Curtis doing a nonsense Power of Nightmares."