Interview: Sandeep Parikh Gets Drunk, Makes Hilarious Web Series

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Tags : Interviews, Sandeep Parikh, The Legend of Neil, Tony Janning, Web series

Interview: Sandeep Parikh Gets Drunk, Makes Hilarious Web Series

Posted on 26 January 2010 by Brent Hartinger, Editor

How’s this for a premise for a web series? A loser named Neil is masturbating to a female elf in the game of The Legend of Zelda when he auto-erotic-asphyxiates himself and somehow ends up magically transported to a land of fantasy cliches.

Sure enough, it’s the idea behind The Legend of Neil, the hilarious YouTube-sensation-turned-online-sitcom.

When most of us watch television, we like to say, “This is so bad — I could so make a TV show much better than this!”

But if all the mediocre-to-horrible web series I’ve seen over the past few years are any indication, it’s a lot harder than it looks.

That’s why I was so struck by The Legend of Neil, which I found to be bust-a-gut funny — and why I was so eager to talk to the primary creative force behind the series, Sandeep Parikh, a 29 year-old Brown graduate who is the show’s creator, writer, director, editor, not to mention the voice of opening credits.

TheTorchOnline: Walk me through the process of the show’s genesis and creation.

Sandeep Parikh: My roommate claimed he could beat the original Zelda game in under an hour. I called bullshit and then watched and drank Coors Original as he played and also drank Coors Original. Don’t ask me why Coors Original has become our beer of choice at our house. It just has, and is irrelevant to the story.

Anyway, so he’s torching this game. Mind you, this game represents a solid four years of my childhood spent trying to beat the damn thing. I remember drawing maps, having cafeteria meetings with friends about different secrets and how to beat bosses, etc.

And here’s my roommate blazing through the game, collecting every extra heart piece, and going through each of the levels, killing the big bosses in seconds. It was like watching someone walk up to the girl of your dreams that took you years of groundwork to get to just to get a kiss on the cheek from, and him just saying one douchebag pickup line, and then defiling her in front of you.

Anyway, as I’m watching this, I start thinking how ridiculous the premise of this game is. So you’re an elf and you just wake up in the middle of the woods with nothing but a tiny shield. Who goes out with just a shield and no sword? Then you walk into a cave and there’s this old man who gives you a free wooden sword — convenient — and you’re supposed to kill actual living and breathing creatures with it. A blunt wooden sword against giant spiders that leap at you, doesn’t seem like very good odds.

So, the game just got funnier and funnier to me — as I become drunker — and before you know it, I’ve got the laptop open and I’m writing dialogue. In the morning, the sketch was still funny to me, despite my raging hangover, and I decide that I want to shoot it.

I sent the script to Tony Janning [who plays Neil] whom I worked with before on some other sketches, because I knew he’d play the perfect a-hole d-bag that I wanted Link to be and voila, there you have it.

Oh, and my roommate beat the game in 45 minutes.

TTO: How’d you finance it?

SP: Finance wise, we just paid for it out of our own pocket. Tony and I just threw in a couple hundred bucks each and we borrowed equipment from friends, and got everyone to work for free and stole our locations pretending to be student filmmakers. You gotta do what you gotta do to make it happen early on.

TTO: At what point did Comedy Central become involved? What IS their involvement? And what’s the current status of the show?

SP: So after we created the first episode we submitted it to this short-lived show on VH1 called Acceptable.tv. It didn’t make it on the show because by the time we were eligible the show was canceled. But it did win their podcast award for best sci-fi/fantasy pilot!

Man, if I had a dollar for every podcast award … I’d have 2 dollars.

So then I just put the video on YouTube because I thought it would do well there and, lo and behold, we got about 300,000 hits in the first few weeks.

Then I took the show to all these Hollywood types that I had met the year before pitching another project. This time I was armed with a following and measured success on the interwebs… and we got offers from the same people that rejected me before. The power of the internet!

Comedy Central came along and topped the rest of the offers and funded five more episodes for their new sister site Atom.com. The funding is pretty low by TV standards and most everyone still works for cut rates, but we genuinely enjoy our working relationship with Atom and Comedy Central. They really support the show, and aren’t intrusive with ridiculous notes. They’re all smart folk, many of whom have become really good friends. It’s a great home for Neil.

As far as the future goes, we’re hoping to do a season three with Atom. I feel confident that we’ll make it happen because they want to do it and we want to do it. It’s just a matter of figuring out whether we can come up with a situation that’ll reward all the cast and crew for the hard work from the first two seasons. So hopefully we’ll have a very exciting announcement coming real soon.

TTO: All my web geek friends talk about “monetizing” content for the web, but only a few seem to have done it. Does this thing pay for itself? Are you able to pay salaries, or has it been more of a calling card? And if it’s the latter, gotten any good gigs?

SP: As I said, we’re able to pay “web” rates to our cast and crew which is infinitely more than the nothing we were paying them before. So, I’m very happy that we can put something in their pockets. I wouldn’t dare call them “salaries” however. I’ve tried to put as much into the production as possible, keeping very little for myself, the idea being, as you say, that this will be a calling card for me.

I’ve developed great relationships with the folks at Comedy Central, and this along with The Guild [another web series I've worked on] has really put me on the map. I’m not sure which map yet, but a map.

I truly believe that this will lead to good things, and it’s been a great platform for me to show off what I can do… which is cast really funny people and make them do nerdy dick jokes.

TTO: You have a great sense of humor. I especially enjoyed the riffs on fantasy cliches. But unlike a lot of fantasy-comedy projects (*cough* Krod Mandoon *cough*), you don’t seem to just be recycling Monty Python gags. You seem to know the current genre. You do role-playing? Video games? On a scale of 1 to 10, just how much of a geek are you?

SP: First off, I love Monty Python and I’m sure I’m somehow stealing from them without even knowing it. I always catch myself making Holy Grail, Princess Bride and Army of Darkness references, and Neil is littered with them. Some are on purpose, some are by accident, that’s the way it goes when you watch a movie more than 100 times during high school and college which I did with all three of those movies. The jokes just become a part of your vocabulary.

I’ve been a fantasy lover my whole life. I wrote my college application essay about The Hobbit. I played Hero-quest and Magic The Gathering growing up but not much D&D.

Most of my time at temple as a kid was spent with my friends sneaking off and pretending to be wizards and warriors and inventing epic quests for each other, kind of a real life D&D that was sprung from our imaginations.

I play some video games, though I’m no Felicia Day [my co-star on The Guild and its creator].

I just beat Borderlands, I had a short-lived World of Warcraft addiction, but found that I didn’t have the time to grind. On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d say I’m a f*ckble, a 7… maybe a 6.

Wow, is it lame that I just quoted my own show?

TTO: No, but only because that line was so funny in the episode. Meanwhile, the musical episode was damn near brilliant — but also looked like it was AMAZINGLY time-consuming. Who was responsible for the music, and was the whole thing as insanely difficult as it looked?

SP: That musical episode was hell on earth, because we didn’t know what we were doing. But like everything else, you just power through it and figure it out as you go along. We didn’t know if any of our cast besides Felicia [who co-starred in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog] could sing.

But we figured we’d just embrace whatever they could give us. Turned out that Scott Chernoff (our Gannon) could belt like an evil Pavarotti, Angie Hill (Zelda) couldn’t sing at all so we went out and got the amazingly talented Maurissa Tancharoen to do her singing voice. Tony and Eric Acosta (Wizrobe) were pretty good and Mike Rose (Old Man) I knew he could sing and dance well because he’s gay — c’mon some stereotypes are true, hey, I love curry — but didn’t know if he could sing as the Old Man or how that would sound.

Anyway, I enlisted my good friend Nigel Cordeiro to do the music for the musical because he has perfect pitch and can play anything by ear and I knew he’d work for hugs and high fives. But he too had never composed music for a musical. So it was really a big old cluster eff trying to make it happen.

Anyway, it all came together step by step. Tony and I writing lyrics, Nigel trying one melody after another. We knew which songs that we were going to parody, so eventually it all came together.

Then figuring out how to do it all visually in such a way that wouldn’t be boring was a huge challenge. Remember we don’t have the budget for backup dancers, or all this camera movement, cranes, etc. that most musicals have the benefit of employing. It was a big deal that we even got another actor to double for Old Man.

So, we had to just pretty much re-use the sets we already made for the rest of the show, and then choreograph a dance or two and hope that it would all come together. All in all, I’m really proud of the episode, and thank god Felicia was willing to be so deliciously dirty because that in itself probably got us half the views.

Felicia Day, in the musical episode (NSFW)

One thing that I have to say even though you didn’t really ask, is that I really must have done something right in a previous life to be able to be making a ridiculous show that combines all the loves of my childhood including my fondness for crude humor and inventive swear words. And to have it be successful and likely the proverbial “foot in the door” in the biz and to be making waves in an entirely new medium on the web… I don’t know, the whole thing is just so fun, a lot of work to be sure, but ultimately a total blast.

I hope your readers enjoy watching it as much as I enjoy making it.

Watch The Legend of Neil