The Making of Barty Anderson 4 [2015]

Many years late, here’s a making-of look at Barty Anderson 4.

More than anything I have made thus far in my life as a storyteller, Barty’s Brew-Ha-Ha 4: Tale of the Legend of the Crystal Chubacabra [sic] is the thing I am most proud of. My masterpiece, one that debuted five years ago today.

(first off, if you want to read further, you should probably watch the original Barty Anderson movies by the Brothers Hussie, Byron and Andrew. I’ll embed the entire series playlist below.)

And then Barty 4 itself can be watched here:

The Barty Anderson series means as much to me as, or maybe more than, anything else the Hussie brothers and their internet cohorts made, because I think it’s inspired a huge amount of my creative style. A mix of broad and silly parody, endless running gags that go on forever, incoherent nonsense edited by amateurs, and that sense that everything is just a big stupid joke… the whole series is a testament to what happens to people poisoned on post-post-post-ironic humor and no longer able to enjoy anything with a single layer of sincerity.

When my friends and I set out to make Barty Anderson 4, it was not some big undertaking with a lot of planning. It was that we were watching the Original Trilogy for like the fifth time in the same summer break and someone said, “Oh we should make the next one.”

I got to work immediately–I stayed up until 6 AM, waiting until I lost lucidity and had to fight every urge in my body to climb into bed and go to sleep. Just then, everything was right. The perfect conditions to write a Barty Anderson 4 screenplay. And by 7 AM, I had completed the masterpiece.

It was time to make a movie.

Two months later after a lot of stupid production issues—only having two actors for a movie with four characters makes things incredibly difficult—we finished shooting and ended up with nearly two hours of footage. A feature film’s worth of dumb jokes, incompetent camerawork, and overly long chase scenes.

But then it turns out Windows Movie Maker is not a good program to use for videos of over thirty minutes and the entire thing bugged up constantly. We barely got the video complete in time before the project file crashed, but… we did it.

Barty Anderson 4 was alive for the whole world to see. And, thanks to all the production issues and then editing issues, the movie did not meet my script’s original vision. It was even less coherent, even more amateurish. It ascended itself and became, truly, the greatest version of itself that it could possibly be.

I don’t think it really comes close to the (accidental?) comic genius of Bartys 2 or 3, but there are still some very nice and very idiotic moments in Barty 4 that I will be forever proud of.

I have no idea what Byron, the main man himself, actually thinks about the movie, if it met his extremely high expectations for a continuation or if it simply could not muster the charisma and charm the original had. And to be honest, I’m kind of terrified at the idea that Andrew might know the movie exists, let alone the possibility that he’s seen it.

After almost five years the video still only has a couple hundred views, all of which are presumably from other Barty die-hards who watch the Original Trilogy multiple times a year and even found that one Tauhid Bondia comic that featured Barty for some reason.

But that’s okay. Barty doesn’t ever need to become famous; he’s okay as he is with his public access television show and MIDI Gremlins 2 theme playing in the background.

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If you read this whole article, it’s a pretty safe bet you’re an MSPA alumni too. I’ve got plenty of posts for you then! Such as one about one of my treasured internet communities, the MSPA IRC.