Welcome to Butler Street Studios, where everything is bright, friendly, and painted in colors that make your eyes sit up straight. We have happy little songs, big smiles, cardboard clouds, and enough lights hanging overhead to roast a Thanksgiving turkey. If you stand still too long, you might also notice the smell of warm tape, stale coffee, and whatever mystery cleaner Smeezy says is “industry standard.”
Our whole gang works very hard to make every day feel fun, safe, and educational for the boys and girls at home. Wendy keeps us organized, Mr. Whiskers keeps things moving, Squirrelly keeps the lights on most of the time, and I do my best to stay cheerful even when somebody is shouting near the prop table. That is the magic of television, because if everyone keeps smiling, the children never have to know how much sweating is involved.
I love my friends very much, and that is why this show means so much to me. We are all doing our best to make something warm and wonderful for children, even if some of us have made a few mistakes in life, in business, or around open flame. So come on in, meet the gang, and have a look around Butler Street Studios, where the lessons are good and the problems are usually kept just off camera.
I used to have a movie franchise where I bit people heads off, and for a while that was considered very glamorous. Now I am here in Butler Street Studios trying my absolute best to teach life lessons under lights hot enough to cook a pigeon. I teach safety, friendship, and honesty now, which is nice because nobody gets their head bitten off. Well, almost nobody, and the one time does not count because it was more of a warning incident.
Wendy is my rock and the smartest person in the room, which is not difficult in this room but still very impressive. She is the kindest person you will ever meet, even when she is carrying the whole day on her back and looks like she has not slept since the Reagan administration. She tells me when to stop talking so we do not get sued, and she stares at the exit sign a lot, which I choose to interpret as healthy situational awareness.
Every good show needs a bad guy, and Grime is ours. He shows up when things are going well and leaves when they are not, which is a very reliable system for ruining morale. He is slippery and sneaky and always seems to be standing just around the corner from wherever the trouble started. On the show he is the villain, which is a role he fills with tremendous natural ability. In real life I am sure he is a perfectly fine person and I genuinely hope he stays very far away from Butler Street Studios at all times.
He is my best pal, and I love him very much even when he is vibrating so hard he makes the C-stands hum. He is the gaffer or a grip or maybe both, and I still do not know the difference because every time someone explains it to me there is yelling and a forklift involved. Squirrelly is very paranoid and vibrates a lot because he loves booger sugar, which I am told is not a food despite the fun nickname. Sometimes his nose bleeds right on the equipment because he is having so much fun, and then we all just hold tight until he runs out of energy and starts apologizing to the extension cords.
Mr. Whiskers is our camera operator and announcer, which means he is the one who decides how close your face gets to the television and also the voice that tells you what is happening in case you cannot figure it out yourself. He is very calm and professional, which is honestly suspicious in this building but I choose to appreciate it. He never raises his voice, never drops the camera, and always knows exactly where to point the lens, even when the lens probably should not be pointed there. I trust him completely, and I am also a little afraid of how much he sees.
He is from The Network and he loves paperwork more than he loves oxygen. Edwin wears a suit that always looks freshly steamed, and he makes us sign thick stacks of papers saying that if we get hurt on set it is completely our own fault, even if the thing that hurts us has the network logo on it. He counts the pencils, times the breaks, and says words like “exposure” and “liability” with the same warmth other people reserve for prayer. Thanks to Edwin, we are all very, very safe from lawsuits, which is apparently different from being safe in general.
He made me a star back in the day, or at least a marketable problem with good teeth. Smeezy wears shiny polyester suits, smells like cologne poured directly onto a radiator, and keeps a phone full of favors from scary people who never seem to blink enough. He is the Producer, which means he would do absolutely anything for a dollar, although mostly he makes us do it and then keeps the dollar for himself. Still, when the lights come on and the chaos starts rolling downhill, he is smiling at the bottom with a contract in his hand.