''I like to hear people say, 'I found this show!' '' ''When I hear people talk about it, they talk about it as if it's theirs,'' he said. John Miller, a senior vice president for MTV programming and one of the show's producers, says that the popularity of ''Sifl and Olly'' comes largely from word of mouth. A few months after MTV Europe had commissioned a few 30-second video clips of the characters, MTV's New York office signed the puppets up for their own series. Lynch sent copies to MTV's offices in New York and London. Crocco adds, ''Sifl and Olly could very well have been a fork and a bucket, which might have been pretty good, too.''Īfter mailing the video to his friend, Mr. Crocco inspired by an old tape on which Matt had said, for no reason, ''Hi, I'm Sifl, and this is my friend Olly.'' ''I wanted to make a video for him with puppets,'' said Mr. Lynch decided to create a Christmas gift for Mr. Lynch, a singer and guitarist, went to Liverpool, England, to attend the music and performance arts school founded by Paul McCartney. Crocco, who plays piano and percussion, moved to Nashville, and Mr. Later, they attended Kent State University for two years before going their separate ways to study music: Mr. Their favorite pastime - writing and tape-recording comic sketches and songs - led them, as sixth graders, to compile their first rock album, ''So This Is Darkness,'' which featured a single titled ''Oh, the Mushroom Cloud'' and an ode to telephone books. Crocco met as elementary school students in Kent, Ohio. LYNCH, who is the voice of Olly and the puppeteer for both Sifl and Olly, says the characters' ever-changing world is like ''their own snow globe: they don't go any place, so the place comes to them it keeps the random factor going.''ĭespite frequent on-screen disagreements about what they call ''rock facts,'' like whether or not a certain performer is, in fact, a famous race horse in his spare time, there is an easy rapport between Sifl and Olly, one that mirrors the longtime friendship of their creators.
Lynch take their audio tapes to MTV's Los Angeles studio, where a small art department creates lively computer-generated backgrounds for each scene and designs new characters and sets. (The range of musical styles includes heavy metal, New Wave, salsa, funk and something that sounds very much like the work of Kurt Weill.) Every two months or so, Mr. Crocco write all the scripts, perform most of the voices, and compose at least two original songs for each episode. ''How could we be lying,'' Olly asks disingenuously, ''if we are on television?''Īt their home studio in Nashville, Mr. In a parody of home shopping channels, a huckster named Precious Roy, egged on by the excitable Olly, hawks useless household products like Miracle Dirt, an ordinary bag of soil suitable, he claims, for cooking and cleaning. One of the most persistent callers is their landlord, who berates them for using 800,000 gallons of water a week to operate the huge water slide in their backyard. In their scripted telephone call-in segment, Sifl and Olly might field inquiries from a farmer who raises ''penicillin and monkeys'' or a stoned snow boarder character who praises the hosts for being what he calls ''crescent fresh,'' using a slang phrase coined by the show's creators. Now their puppet alter egos - two pals named Sifl and Olly - have become MTV's newest stars, as hosts of a half-hour late-night variety show featuring music, interviews, comic sketches, and nearly 150 supporting characters, all of them puppets. The video's creators, two childhood friends, Matt Crocco and Liam Lynch, both 27, were accomplished musicians but novices in the world of filmmaking. Maybe that can change though? I guess it's possible but maybe the fanbase just isn't there.A little over a year ago, a strange videotape arrived at the offices of MTV: on it, two sock puppets, adorned with the remnants of a plastic sunflower, discussed popular music and sang original songs about llamas, the fake blood used in vampire movies and their fervent desire to be rock stars. I think the problem is though that MTV holds the rights for it and aren't allowing them to release it.
I would love to see some sort of dvd release of the seasons. I even bought the season 3 dvd when it came out through Liam Lynch's Sifl and Olly website years ago.
It first came on at 12:30 at night (nice spot for viewers to find- I suspect mostly stoners found it and it was perfect for them!) I would tape it always and check it out the next day. A show I really liked back in the late 90s (even now as I still watch it) was Sifl and Olly.
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