Note: Dead Eyes transcripts have been generated with automated software and may contain errors. We advise you to listen to episode audio before quoting in print.

Dead Eyes, Episode 28, “Illumination Day”

Announcer Previously on Dead Eyes.

(moody flashback music starts)

Colin Hanks Hey, did Tom Hanks say that I have dead eyes? You're never going to get that answer. You're not even going to get close to a real resolution. I think really at best you can hope for a sense of resolution and a sense of an answer. And like a lot of things in life, that's just going to have to be good enough.

(moody flashback music fades)

Connor Ratliff After my conversation with Colin Hanks, I wasn't sure exactly where I should go next. I'd come all this way, built up so much momentum and enthusiasm, got people all worked up, and now I was sort of stuck in a place where the future felt uncertain and my options felt limited. So I did what I've always done when the case goes cold.

(piano music starts)

I revisit the timeline searching for connections, clues, points where my life and the life of Tom Hanks intersect. I went to IMDb and among Tom Hanks' credits, I spotted something that I must have overlooked dozens of times before called Electric City.

When I click through to investigate, I realize that the full title was actually Tom Hanks' Electric City. His name was a possessive like Walt Disney's Fantasia. It was an animated series released in 2012 starring Tom Hanks. 20 episodes, each, roughly between four and six minutes long. When I started looking for more information, I found articles and videos about a cryptic promotional website and even a mobile app and role playing game released alongside the show. How had I missed all this?

(piano music fades)

I checked my Roku to see if it was available to stream anywhere, and it became clear pretty quickly that there was no legitimate way to watch it anymore. I ended up finding it on a YouTube playlist where all 20 episodes were available in varying degrees of quality.

(ominous music starts)

Tom Hanks as Cleveland Carr in Electric City It's best to ask no questions and be told no lies. Here in the Electric City.

(ominous music fades)

Connor Ratliff Tom Hanks' Electric City is set in a post-apocalyptic future. Power is the show's central theme, both in the sense of who's in charge and the literal generation and distribution of electrical power.

(ominous music starts again)

Tom Hanks as Cleveland Carr in Electric City For the uninformed, my name is Cleveland Carr.

(ominous music fades again)

Connor Ratliff Tom Hanks is the voice of Cleveland Carr, a grid operative who is a kind of shadowy enforcer, an assassin who answers to a secret cabal of women, a knitting circle who helped maintain order in the Electric City.

(ominous music starts again)

Tom Hanks as Cleveland Carr in Electric City I live in the shadows between truth and consequence here in the Electric City.

(ominous music fades again)

Connor Ratliff It is at times shockingly violent, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it, a recurring image throughout is that when people are killed, we see their stunned expressions and dead eyes.

(vibraphone music starts)

I didn't know what to make of this show. I liked it. But the more I learned about it, the more questions I had when I started asking people, Hey, have you ever heard of Tom Hanks' Electric City?

Almost nobody I knew had any idea what I was talking about. Looking at the voice cast, I noticed that I actually knew a couple of the actors who were in it. My friend Brian Stack, who's written for shows like Conan and Stephen Colbert.

Brian Stack The honest truth is, I don't remember what characters I played. I don't remember anything about it except going in to do the session and being excited about it. Other than that, I have no memory of what I did or what it was about. I wish I had more to talk about, but that's, that's as much as I can dig up.

Connor Ratliff OK, I can understand how it's easy enough to not remember much about a one day voiceover gig from over a decade ago, but somebody had to know something.

(vibraphone music fades)

Paul Scheer It was something I kind of forgot about. But then all these memories started flooding back.

Connor Ratliff If you listen to our previous episode, you'll recognize this voice as comedian, actor and podcaster Paul Scheer, another friend on the Electric City cast list. And fortunately, he'd kept records of his experience on the show.

Paul Scheer And I found my original emails to tell me that I got this gig. It was being offered to me and some of my experiences on it and then reading those really got me back in the headspace of this project. So I I wanted to––

Connor Ratliff Paul had so much information it was starting to paint a picture of what an ambitious project this really was.

Paul Scheer But this is Tom Hanks creating his passion project, and that's how it was always billed to us. Like this is what Tom has been wanting to do and the idea of like this social network sites, it felt like it was going to be like, this is the new Star Wars, I think, you know, that's that's at least how I envisioned it.

(Theme music starts)

Connor Ratliff Tom Hanks' Electric City did not become the new Star Wars, but what did it become and what became of it? This entire podcast began with me dredging up a show business moment that no one but me seems to remember. Now, I had discovered an entire show that seemed to be on the verge of being forgotten.

Voice of God This is Dead Eyes, a podcast about one actor's quest to find out why Tom Hanks fired him from a small role in the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers.

Connor Ratliff My name is Connor Ratliff. I'm an actor and comedian. Twenty-two years ago, I was fired by Tom Hanks. The reason I was told at the time, he had looked at my audition tape and he thought that I had dead eyes.

Paul Scheer I showed up. I said, these lines. I don't understand like how my piece fits into this puzzle, and that was the entire process, at least for me.

Connor Ratliff  And that's the short version.

(Theme music fades)

So Paul didn't really become involved with Electric City until relatively late in its development. And I wanted to go back further. For that, I needed someone familiar with the show's origins, and that person was former Playtone creative exec Josh Feldman.

Josh Feldman I was there from the beginning, pretty close to the beginning. It started with Tom, obviously, but happy to walk down memory lane.

Connor Ratliff Josh would become a key figure in the making of Electric City, part of a small group of people involved in the writing and development of the series, and wearing multiple hats as it evolved into its final form.

Connor Ratliff What was the starting point for you?

Josh Feldman Well, I worked for Tom Hanks at Playtone, so I was in the building and a few of us in the office worked on Electric City and each came to it in a slightly different way. My version of the story for me is we were renovating a part of the building that housed all of the scripts, and I found this little sliver of a script that said Electric City. And I read it and it was, you know, this pulpy, interesting thing.

(jazz guitar music starts)

And when I asked around the office, they said, Oh yeah, that's Tom's.

Connor Ratliff You liked the script before you knew that it was the boss' script, basically.

Josh Feldman I truly I did not know that it was his. It didn't say Tom Hanks. It had an alias. You know, I don't think I would have guessed it either.

Connor Ratliff Was Tom aware of that when you were first working on the show that you had read and liked it before knowing that he had written it?

Josh Feldman I don't recall ever telling him that or that he knew that

Connor Ratliff Because I feel like that's a very nice compliment to get, because it's rare to be able to get pure feedback just on the work without any baggage or history to it.

Josh Feldman And, you know, it's one of those things I think like when you stumble upon a book that maybe was not recommended to you, you know that that great feeling. And sadly, I feel like it's more rare than ever. But when you just start leafing through a book and before you know it, you look up at the clock and realize you've been reading for an hour and you kind of get drawn into something that's a great feeling. It had a kind of funny rhythm to it. I haven't thought about this in a really long time, but I just remember thinking like, I'm really enjoying the read of this. It has a kind of jazzy quality to it. And and then lo and behold.

Samantha Scharff I remember reading the script the first time and being like Tom wrote this like, really?

Connor Ratliff Samantha Scharff was a supervising producer on Electric City and a key part of assembling some of the voice cast, many of whom hail from the comedy world, which he was very familiar with, having worked on shows like Saturday Night Live and The Colbert Report. Although in some cases the roles that comedic actors ended up playing were more drama than comedy.

(jazz guitar music fades)

Samantha Scharff Yeah, I mean, it was dark. People think of Tom Hanks as like America's best friend. You know, so many of the roles that he plays are like are beloved. And so I remember we were having conversations at the time about the darkness of it all and the tone of it all, and that this was coming from him and that his name was on it. It was very different than I think what the world expects from him.

Josh Feldman Electric City was a combination of Tom's unbridled creativity, without any of the usual suspects telling him what he could and couldn't do, or industry guardrails that he even a person like him has to contend with. What eventually happened is that Tom was never lost, his enthusiasm for trying to do something with it. I think he wrote it as a kind of

Connor Ratliff As a spec?

Josh Feldman Oh, definitely as a step,.

Connor Ratliff Just like yeah.

Josh Feldman In the sense that in the sense that anything that Tom Hanks writes is speculative. But I think he wrote it for fun. I think he wrote it because he had a creative impulse and an opportunity to let his imagination go free. And he wanted to do it with puppets.

(swing band music starts)

He thought it would be really quirky if you had this hard boiled, not intentionally comedic dialog coming out of these bulbous wooden heads. And that was the original idea.

Connor Ratliff How close do you think that came to ever being a reality?

Josh Feldman We made a pilot presentation with puppets, so it began as scouring L.A. for anybody that had done puppets. I mean, we spoke to the to the team that did World Police, the movie, people that have done children's puppetry. We went to Jim Henson and it was it was amazing. I mean, from someone at the caliber of Tom kind of driving this. If it was anybody else, you'd think, what in the world are we doing? But that was sort of the engine. And we did produce a pilot with puppets.

Connor Ratliff So at the point where you got involved, they had already done the the puppet demo.

Samantha Scharff Yes, yes.

(swing band music fades)

Connor Ratliff Did they show you that before you were working?

Samantha Scharff Yes. Yes. And I had a few years prior had done a puppet show. I did. I was a producer on TV Funhouse for Comedy Central, which was puppets and animation. And so I really got a kick out of seeing the puppet pilot for Electric City. I've read some of the parts of the script that had been written at that point, and I was like, Yeah, secret society run by old ladies. Yes. Knitting needles as weapons? Yes. Sign me up.

Josh Feldman I remember one story, and again, this is like, this paints a picture of our chutzpah. Tom was filming Charlie Wilson's War, filming on the Paramount Lot, and we had a puppet update for him. So we waited for him across the street at a kind of famous margarita watering hole called Lucy's El Adobe. And Tom came over. I mean, when I think about, like, came into the restaurant, he ordered a margarita and sat with us. This is a guy that had just been acting all day, you know, directed by Mike Nichols, Tom was also a producer. The fact that we felt it was OK to, you know, to.

Connor Ratliff Yeah. You weren't. You weren't bothering him. You were. This is something he was interested in.

Josh Feldman I mean, we may have been bothering him, but he, no exactly right. It was something he was interested in, something he was passionate about enough that I'm sure he was dead tired from being on set all day in these lengthy scenes. And then he came over to talk about puppets. So that gives you a sense that he made time for it because he believed in it.

(upright bass music starts)

I think it was a pleasant distraction again. I think it was it was controversy free when it was in this very idealistic development stage, but we hung on his every word because we knew how, what rare air we were breathing to try to actualize this very unusual project of his.

Connor Ratliff Where did you land with the puppet makers?

Josh Feldman We found a phenomenal studio called Puppet Studio appropriately. They built these beautiful puppets. We shot this pilot presentation. It was moody. It was hilarious even though the dialogue was was like super dead serious. It was exactly, I think what Tom had imagined was just this unusual thing. I think he just got such a kick out of, he imagined this, and then we scurried around and made it happen. It was a kind of proof of concept, a tone piece. It was a two hander. It was this soda voce conversation in a kind of film noir, smoky cocktail lounge with a red booth banquette, having this conversation told back and forth in innuendo and euphemisms that kind of thing.

Connor Ratliff While I don't think it's likely we're ever going to see the unreleased puppet pilot. There are a handful of photos available online that give you an idea of what it looked like and how much care and effort went into executing a single scene. In the end, though, the scope and scale of Electric City was just too much to accomplish with marionettes. So they pivoted to animation.

(upright bass music fades)

Samantha Scharff So many characters, so many scenes, so many different locations, so much action. It was really, really intense. I'm still amazed that we were able to pull this off.

Josh Feldman Basically, that was the evolution, right? So it was like, OK, puppets are amazing, but maybe we need to tone down our expectations in order to get this made. And so could we digitize puppets and do it animation but have it look like puppets? And we thought about that and did some experiments with that. But ultimately, over time, the idea morphed to if we're going to do this with animation, then let's embrace animation as opposed to using another modality to mimic something else.

(wind ensemble music starts)

Samantha Scharff We were going as fast as we could, as fast as the writing was going. The scripts changed a lot, and so everybody was working around the clock and nobody cared that they were working around the clock. Everybody was so into this project. The energy around this project, we were doing something different that hadn't been done before, both in the way that we were doing it, but also in the content that we were making and the story we were making. And for me, I had only done comedy animated comedy up to that point. And so that was a really interesting shift and it was really fun to explore.

Josh Feldman Just continual writing about these characters, other characters was nonstop. Tom would write longhand Tom would write on his typewriter. Tom would write, you know, obviously on a computer. And as did we, with him, you know, expanding and building, we wrote in prose. We wrote screenplay.

Connor Ratliff To give you some idea of the timeline here. Charlie Wilson's War was released in 2007. So when Josh was meeting with Tom over margaritas to give him a puppet update, they were still five years away from Electric City being released. Once the series was being rewritten for animation, the next step would be to start casting the voice actors.

(wind ensemble music fades)

Samantha Scharff Tom called in his friends. I called in my friends from the comedy world, and it was sort of, I mean, we didn't hold open auditions. It was just we just had certain people come and figured out which part they were going to play. And so, yeah, we just it was kind of just like, Yeah, we're doing this thing. Do you want to be involved? Come audition, we'll figure out what part you're going to play.

Connor Ratliff One of those friends, Samantha called in was Tara Jayne Sands, an accomplished voice actor who coincidentally happened to be listening to this podcast at the exact moment I started following her on Twitter.

Tara Jayne Sands And it was freaky.

Connor Ratliff Yeah, and I was I was literally just going through people who were in the cast list of Tom Hanks's Electric City and then looking to see who was on social media figuring, Well, I'll follow them now and then maybe they'll follow me back and it'll be easier for me to contact people then.

Tara Jayne Sands Which is very logical. But Electric City was so long ago. I remember listening to your show, and about halfway through the episodes, I thought, Oh, I did something with Tom Hanks. Like, That's how small, like and that's why I when I I always want to yell into the device when I'm listening like Connor, your life might not be that different. Like, it's fine because I forgot I did that.

(marimba music starts)

Connor Ratliff Tara was brought in to do scratch track, which consists of rough guide vocals for the animators to work with.

Tara Jayne Sands as Roger Moore in Electric City One, four, three two, three, two.

What's so fascinating, Roger?

Tara Jayne Sands as Roger Moore in Electric City I can't tell. They must be using a new key.

Tara Jayne Sands I cover, you know, I went in and just read some of the female roles and like little boy voices and just whatever they needed. And I think if I'm not wrong, it was probably me and the producers doing the voices and animators on this. I don't think any other actors came in.

Connor Ratliff Now when you say the producers, Tom Hanks, obviously was one of the producers, I assume he was not.

(marimba music fades)

Tara Jayne Sands No, he was not. He wasn't hanging out.

Connor Ratliff  I just didn't know if that was a super casual way to drop in that Tom Hanks was there. It's just me and the producers, you know?

Tara Jayne Sands No, they they were great. They were these young guys. They were awesome. But no. And I think part of me was like, Oh, I'll do and I'll do scratch track for sure cause thinking like, Oh, maybe I'll bump into Tom. But no. A lot of my friends did overlap with him in the studio.

Connor Ratliff Who are some of your friends who are in it?

Tara Jayne Sands Jason Antoon.

Connor Ratliff Oh I talked to I talked to Jason. Yeah.

(piano music starts)

Tara Jayne Sands You did? Oh, I would have given you all these, well ok.

Connor Ratliff Listen to how small the world gets immediately.

Connor Ratliff Jason Antoon is another Electric City actor I recently connected with. Right before we talked, we both auditioned for the same role as a series regular on a network television procedural NCIS Hawaii.

Jason Antoon Dude, I'm so sorry you didn't get it.

Connor Ratliff Honestly, honestly, I I was getting ready to contact you, to talk to you about Electric City. And then I saw like a Deadline or Hollywood or whatever the announcement was about NCIS. And I thought, Well, I wonder who got that Ernie part that I read for? And when I saw it with you, I thought, Oh, great, now we have two things. Two shared topics.

Jason Antoon Well, dude, I'm sorry. I'm like, You know how it goes. You know you do it for 20 something years and something lands in your lap. And it's just I used to always say, like, if you the only way it would really be fair was if we if they got all the people together and you just ran the 100 yard dash and whoever won, actually, you actually could say, Yeah, you beat me.

(music fades)

Connor Ratliff I'm delighted for you. And I'm also delighted for me because like for some people, it literally is like, Oh, I'm moving to paradise. And then if it gets picked up, I get to live in paradise.

Jason Antoon Right.

Connor Ratliff And I think I'm years away from being ready for paradise. I don't think I'd be able to appreciate it.

Jason Antoon Yeah, I got and I've got a family and a golden doodle that we just got, which is like having a third child.

(music starts)

And it's it's like, Oh, wait, you have to have these discussions like my kids have four lizards and two fish, and I'm like, What the fuck do we do with all this stuff now?

Connor Ratliff I mean, your golden doodle would be baffled because it's they don't understand the complexities of network broadcast television and what that means.

Jason Antoon My golden doodle bites us and he ate his own shit the other day and I didn't know what he was eating, and I picked it up out of his mouth and I was like, What do you have in your mouth? He's like, rrhhhh.

Connor Ratliff Yeah, so it sounds like to a certain extent, the dog does understand some aspects of show business.

Jason Antoon Yes, exactly, eats his own shit. That's caviar.

Connor Ratliff Yeah.

(piano music fades)

Connor Ratliff Jason plays the role of Knobs Butler, a small time hustler who sells illegal radios on the black market.

Jason Antoon as Knobs Butler in Electric City Setting up is as easy as this. Be careful.

Connor Ratliff  When he crosses paths with Cleveland Carr, he is forced to become a snitch against his own customers.

Tom Hanks as Cleveland Carr in Electric City So how many wave units you move in now?

Jason Antoon as Knobs Butler in Electric City Fellow, I know, once said 'ask no questions and be told no lies.'

Connor Ratliff How long has it been since someone's been like, Hey, I want to talk to you about Electric City?

Jason Antoon Absolutely zero people, zero amounts of people. Even when I think years later, I wrote to Josh, the writer, and I said, How would we get a copy of the disk? He's like, I have no idea. So like, it just sort of was gone. So nobody asks me about it. But it's I always thought it was like one of those really cool things that like, Hey, I did a thing with Tom Hanks.

Paul Scheer So I got this offer from my agent.

Connor Ratliff This is Paul Scheer again.

Paul Scheer And we got this email. It's like Samantha is producing an animated series that Tom Hanks has created and is writing and is starring in. It is a sci fi action drama for the web. They're making 20 episodes around three to five minutes, and Playtone is going to build games, mobile apps, social network sites and a graphic novel all around the show. They're holding auditions on Thursday, October 21st. This is 2010.

(funk music starts)

Jason Antoon Would you be interested in auditioning? She goes, is attached is the character breakdowns. It's  a cast report, so it's basically all the characters, the sex, the comparison and personality and the description. So for Knobs, it says male comparison personality Danny DeVito description is stool pigeon comic relief. Gravelly voice knows the ins and outs of the city, so every character is on this with a little tidbit of the description,

Paul Scheer and I remember going into the studio to do this, and they're keeping these auditions quiet and small, and I had to fill out an NDA, so that was my introduction to it.

Tara Jayne Sands Well, voiceover's very weird like that because our jobs are so quick and we don't even always see a whole script. Sometimes we just see our lines.

(funk music fades)

Paul Scheer Sometimes you're just seeing like eight or nine of your character's lines in different inflections. Angry, happy, sad. You know, they're trying to get a sense of your voice. So a lot of times you don't know what you're reading for, and that's kind of what happened to me. I was looking at some of my emails last night, and you know my agent's like, Oh, how did it go? And I was like, Well, I I read for like 15 different roles. I don't, I don't know. Like, they kept on giving me another thing and another thing and another thing

Jason Antoon When I auditioned, you read like five characters, six six of the characters. I never did improv professionally, but I do a lot. I just, you know, I make up stuff, and I came up with five different voices with all the different characters, with the way they were described because they didn't. It's not like they gave it to you overnight. And so when they were like, Oh, you're going to play this dude, and then they give you a picture of what you look like a little like Danny DeVito, dude. And I was like, Oh, I guess my the voice I'm doing is is matching up with that.

Paul Scheer So I get this email after I audition and they go, you booked the roles of Walter La Fong as well as guest and male host in the Tom Hanks created animated web series Electric City. I wrote back to my agent, I was like, Absolutely, do you know which part it was, because I auditioned for 12? I don't know who Walter La Fong is, you know, because it was so thrown at me. You know, it wasn't like I had this material ahead of time and they didn't have. They didn't have it. I've actually can say I've never been on a set this secretive before, and it was a voiceover. You know, it was like, but there was no one there. It was in an abandoned, weird building. Very unobtrusive. You wouldn't even know it. I felt like there was like a dentist's office, a recording studio and and, you know, like a like an injury lawyer in this building. Like it was very nondescript and not very Hollywood.

Jason Antoon And then when you go record, you record with Tom.

Connor Ratliff Wow.

(clarinet music starts)

Jason Antoon All of a sudden you're in the booth and Tom comes in. He's like, Hey, and he's like, you know, he was very nice. I remember he said to me, we're going to do this like a scene like we would if we were doing this live action. So he, you know, but he was at his mic as well, and I was at my mic. But to do the scenes with Tom was cool because, you know, you felt like you were like, Oh, I'm acting with Tom Hanks, I've never done, you know, when do you ever get to do that?

Paul Scheer When I went in for my first read, it was like, OK, Tom is going to be there. He's going to be behind the soundboard and he's going to be listening. And the stress and the pressure that I had of like going in to a part that I didn't know what it was or what I would be reading. You know, a, you know, to Tom Hanks who is in my mind, George Lucasing this entire thing like he is just like, this is his baby. I just felt that there's only room for failure in this.

(clarinet music fades)

Connor Ratliff Right you don't have to sell me on how stressful it is to walk into a room knowing that knowing that you might fail in front of Tom Hanks.

Paul Scheer Well, now here's where our stories diverge. Tom Hanks not there, but always being hung as someone who was going to be there, he might be reading with you. Tom's going to be in the booth. Oh, Tom will be there today, Tom. Like, I never met Tom Hanks during the recording process, but during the recording process, it was always this fear or nervousness of Yeah, Tom might even read with you. Like, he might just jump in the booth with you and just do the other parts.

Jason Antoon And I don't even know if that's because he was just happened to be there that day. I don't. I like when I showed up. I think I recorded a little bit on my own and then he pops in the room. He's like, Hey, let's do this. Do you want to do this scene? I was like, What am I going to say, nah, dude. Nah, bro, I don't want to talk with you, man. It's not going to be helpful. And obviously, it was super helpful.

Connor Ratliff So you've never you've never not to rub this in, but you've never met Tom Hanks. You've never like.

Tara Jayne Sands My name is Tara Sands and I've never met Tom Hanks. Yeah.

Connor Ratliff But you've worked in one of the only things that has Tom Hanks in the title.

Tara Jayne Sands Well I mean, I remember at the time, and now I'm having this memory thinking, even though I did meet him, he definitely heard me. Like that man just heard me. So that's cool. He had to watch this at some point and he didn't say replace her. Like I was telling someone yesterday, I don't believe I have a part, because again, because animation is so different, it's very easy to replace me. Until something airs and I'm still on it, I often don't believe that I have the job.

(flute music starts)

So that was one of those things where Tom Hanks could have been like, eh you know what's so and so's here have them do it. And I that's I don't like to watch myself, but I will sometimes watch to make sure I got kept in the project.

Jason Antoon I remember when he was done, he was very happy and he said, Well, let's hope we can do many seasons of this. That's the last thing I heard him say to me.

Connor Ratliff When Electric City was finally released in July 2012, USA Today ran an article with the headline, "Watch When You Want, Future Looks Bright for Online Series." The other show they mentioned was a new project from Jerry Seinfeld called Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. That same day in The Hollywood Reporter, there was another article with a much more foreboding headline. "Tom Hanks' web series Electric City Launches, TV Industry Yawns." Dead Eyes will be right back.

(flute music fades)

(mysterious music starts)

Connor Ratliff So it was July 2012. Tom Hanks’ Electric City had finally been released online. That same month, Jason Antoon was present for one of its only public screenings.

Jason Antoon There was a Comic-Con premiere I saw they showed the first six episodes, which is like, what, 30 minutes long? Tom wasn't there.

Connor Ratliff So what was the audience reaction like? Do you remember?

Jason Antoon No, because it was like, So you how all the events are outside of the convention center. So I think it was at a big bar. Tom wasn't there. There was nobody there. I just happened to go to Comic-Con anyway, so it actually worked out.

Tara Jayne Sands I don't think we even celebrated like a wrap unless I just was not invited, which I can't imagine.

Connor Ratliff Jason said there was a thing at Comic-Con.

Tara Jayne Sands Oh, that's possible, but I probably wouldn't have been invited to that. That was something like, Oh, if you happen to be at Comic-Con, come meet up with us.

(mysterious music fades)

Connor Ratliff But it wasn't a red carpet premiere or anything.

Tara Jayne Sands No, which is again, like a bummer because, you know, when am I ever going to work on something like that and party with Mr. Hanks? And yeah, it's a it's a bummer.

Jason Antoon They gave you and I still have this. I think I might have two of them. It's an Electric City mobile charger. So it's like one of those old school, like one of the first mobile chargers that you know. It had solar, so it was solar powered and it said Electric, Tom Hanks' Electric City on it.

Connor Ratliff The mobile charger actually says one other thing on it, "only on Yahoo!" Because Electric City was exclusively released on Yahoo! Screen, the same digital streaming platform that had picked up the canceled NBC sitcom Community for its sixth and final season. It was also the home of the Paul Feig sci-fi sitcom Other Space, which we talked about in season two.

This was back when the idea of streaming a TV series was still a somewhat novel concept. All 20 episodes of Electric City were released over the course of three nights. Erin McPherson, the then vice president and head of video for Yahoo! told USA Today that the series was "the first project in what we call online digital blockbusters." She said, "This is new for Yahoo! and new for the internet. This is maiden territory."

Josh Feldman Yahoo! took it very seriously and Yahoo! saw, I think, the soul of the project. I know that sounds a little crazy, but we had a real kind of development style meeting with them as opposed to it being talked about as a kind of mere commodity.

Connor Ratliff It felt like they got it.

Josh Feldman Yeah, I felt like they got it. I think Yahoo! in the waning days of going to a website for your content separate from going to a social platform.

(bouncy clarinet music starts)

They they took a big swing content wise, they went down fighting. Let's put it, let's put it that way.

Jason Antoon It was the wild frontier because, you know, and especially back then, it's like, I just don't think people want to sit on their phones and watch stuff or on their computers.

Paul Scheer It was so hard to navigate through the the Yahoo! website. I was remember, like, like it was just a complicated website. It was on the front page. But then you'd have to like, click through and then you're watching a bunch of ads and I feel like the show then some of it came out and some of it was dumped. So I never really have had the experience of watching this show or if I did, I have no memory of it because I don't. When I read Walter La Fong, I was like that, that sounds familiar, but I don't think I've ever watched it.

(bouncy clarinet music fades)

Connor Ratliff It's worth mentioning that Electric City was nominated for a Webby Award, and it won a Streamy for Best Animated Series. This was before Netflix or any streaming service had ever been nominated for an Emmy.

Bo Stevenson at The Streamy Awards It really means a lot. We just want to you know say on behalf of Tom Hanks, we won a Streamy! Oh my god, what's a Streamy? But you know, it's funny, they let the producers up here to even speak about this stuff because it's really the artists––

(jazz music starts)

Connor Ratliff It's not like the series didn't get any media attention. The New York Times wrote about Electric City on multiple occasions, both prior to its launch and after it was released. But a big part of the focus was always on this being a show that needed to be watched in a new kind of way. The point was to get people to go to Yahoo! to watch TV, a habit most people simply never developed.

Paul Scheer And I think it comes down to a moment where the technology, the content and the access all has to merge at a point. That's a hard needle to thread.

(jazz music fades)

You know, when I was looking through my emails, there was, you know, this one about a Comic-Con panel where they were launching the world. And I think that that's a very tricky thing to announce. It's like when Universal decided they were going to do like we are now the Monster Universe and we're going to bring back the Wolfman and we're going to bring back the, you know, all these characters. You can't announce success before you have success. All that being said is, was there too much pressure on Electric City?

(sad music starts)

Samantha Scharff It was a bummer. A really big bummer. I mean, we worked so hard on this project, and a lot of people didn't even know about it. It's sort of just went out there, and it's such an amazing series like everybody should know about it and everybody should see it. But it just sort of, you know, was a blip. I think it's different when you do have a network behind it and they're pushing it and they're marketing it. So you miss out on that.

Connor Ratliff What was the point where you realized or maybe collectively everybody realized that you weren't going to get to make more of them

Josh Feldman To the best of my recollection, as eager as I was for it to continue, I also felt like, you know, we served at the pleasure of Tom, so it would come back or we would revisit it in an organic way, as opposed to some overlord saying, Well, kids, we're done with this. You know that that never happened.

Connor Ratliff Right, so there was never a cancelation because it wasn't a traditional

Josh Feldman No it was a, you know, negative pick up, so to speak. It wasn't a situation where Yahoo! was the studio.

(sad music fades)

Connor Ratliff I did eventually manage to find Electric City on what I believe is an official DVD release from South Korea or at the very least, it's an impressive looking region free bootleg. All 20 episodes are edited together into a single feature film. Two copies of this showed up on eBay, and I snapped them up immediately. I haven't seen any for sale since, though I do check from time to time just to see if Electric City has turned up on one of the streaming channels because just to be clear, Yahoo! Screen doesn't exist anymore. It partnered with Hulu in 2016 to become something called Yahoo! View before finally being totally decommissioned in 2019. At the time of this recording in February 2022, Electric City remains a show without a platform to call home.

Jason Antoon You would think now like why is it, why isn't it somewhere? Why does it have to be like on YouTube and like a sketchy as opposed to like, Hey, you going to see all 20 episodes on Amazon Prime or Hulu? Like why is that not, you know, everything else is on Netflix.

Connor Ratliff Was there ever a thought or a conversation about seeing if it could land somewhere else? Once Yahoo! Screen, once it was clear it was not going to be like a breakout platform?

Samantha Scharff Yes, and the conversation has continued, and Josh and I are always in cahoots trying to make this happen. I've really been pushing for trying to get it out there and also like, let's make more. There are some complications with ownership and things that have prevented it from going elsewhere.

Connor Ratliff It seems a little bit ironic to think about ownership complications for a series called Tom Hanks' Electric City. Who else owns it, if not him?

(quizzical clarinet music starts)

Then again, we are talking about a show where characters use secret machines to listen to illegal radio broadcasts, and the only way to see the show now is via unauthorized uploads. In a weird way, the show may have predicted its own fate, at least for the time being.

Jason Antoon I mean, it's still my hope that we may find a way for people to at least see what premiered on Yahoo! I think there's still perhaps a pathway that the world may get another chance to experience Electric City, but I don't have anything to announce on that, and I don't have any other specific insights other than my, you know, my my genuine enthusiasm.

Samantha Scharff Maybe this podcast will be the thing that gets Electric City out from under the dust. That would be great.

Connor Ratliff Nothing would make me happier if we could. If we could tie these two narratives together in a way that ends up with a positive outcome. That would be, what a twist that would be.

(quizzical clarinet music fades)

Samantha Scharff Tom was always so nice and so grateful and gracious to the crew working on it, and several times he sent the In-N-Out truck to the studio for the crew. And like, it just something that stuck with me because doesn't, things like that don't happen very often. And he was just always so grateful. And when he was in the studio, he'd walk around and, you know, thank everybody and it was really cool.

Connor Ratliff That's the In-N-Out burger truck.

Samantha Scharff Mm hmm.

Connor Ratliff I mean, that's nice.

(inspirational music starts)

Samantha Scharff Yeah, it was really nice and everybody was so excited. And it was so thoughtful and just, you don't get that very often.

Josh Feldman My favorite part of the process was the writing. We worked really hard, and it was also a great example that creative endeavors and creative projects are not easy to get off the ground, even if you're Tom Hanks.

Tara Jayne Sands I take solace in the fact that Tom Hanks is not always batting a thousand. Is that the expression? I don't understand sports, but yeah, that makes me feel better, like about myself. Like, he maybe had a bad day and I don't want him to have a bad day, but it's just a good reminder

Samantha Scharff He still has this whole world in his head. Like, I have hope that it will get out there at some point and we will finish it and see what happens. So I think he probably was disappointed with the outcome as we all were. But yeah, I mean, I'm I am an eternal optimist, so I'm coming from it with like, Come on, let's keep this going. I don't know how everybody else feels at this point in time, but yeah, it'd be really cool.

(inspirational music fades)

Paul Scheer So I leave this experience going like, well, I had a fun time, it was great. Voiceover there's always a little bit of detachment because you go and you do your thing. It takes a long time and then it comes out. About a year later, I am at this charity event like a Robert Smigel charity event and we're all hosting, we're all on phone lines or something like that. And Tom Hanks is answering the phone in the phone bank with me. It's like a televised fun comedy thing.

Everybody is there and there's a break and there's a bar and I go up to the bar and who's at the bar? Tom Hanks and I'm like, this is my moment, Electric City. And I can say this thing and I go up and I go, hi. And he says, hi. And as I order my drink, I kindly say to him very casually, like, Hey, you know, thank you so much for putting me in Electric City. It was such a blast. And his face lit up and he was like, Wasn't it great? And I was like, Yeah, it was. He was like, it was such a fun experience. And we had this like, really nice moment where we both embraced the coolness of Electric City, which at the time was something I had not seen.

But what stands out in that interaction with Tom was like his pure joy around this project. It wasn't like, Oh my god, I got to just tell you I love Big. It was we shared this very small experience that not wasn't well-received, but is not well known.

(poignant music starts)

And he seemed proud. He was appreciative and genuinely psyched about the project and not like we could have gotten him on that one. It felt like, at least in my opinion, in that moment, we did it. You know, I think a lot of the times we apologize for things that don't work. You know, if you see somebody at a show or if someone comes to see your show and you don't feel like it was great you go, ugh it could have been better or, you know, if someone says, why didn't that show get continued? Like, Oh, well, you're always in this state of like apologizing for someone liking the thing that you know that that you can't give them more of.

And I felt like there was none of that with Tom and I and I, as I'm saying this now, I want to take that mentality with me, which is like, Yeah, we did it. It was good and I'm happy with it. And there was no acknowledgment of whether it was a success or failure. It was a success because it was cool. It was fun. It was a great group. And that was that.

(poignant music fades)

Connor Ratliff I don't know what it's like to star in a sitcom or a big movie, let alone win back-to-back Oscars.

(pizzicato music starts)

But I do know what it's like to be in a web series that not enough people watch and then it just goes away. And the truth is, if it's a good web series and the people who do see it like it and it was fun to make, I find it hard to think of that as a failure.

(Aimee Mann's "It's Not" begins)

Dead Eyes is a production of Headgum Studios. It was created by me, Connor Ratliff. It's written by me and it's mostly me that you hear talking, including now.

Our producers are Harry Nelson and Mike Comite, and our associate producer is Jordan Allyn.

Special thanks to my guests Brian Stack, Paul Scheer, Josh Feldman, Samantha Scharfg, Tara Jayne Sands and Jason Antoon.

Also, thanks to Aimee Mann for letting us use the song that's playing in the background. It's called "It's Not," and it can be found on her 2002 album Lost in Space. If you like Dead Eyes, please do all the things that podcasts tell you to do. Subscribe, rate, review, follow us on Twitter @deadeyespodcast and talk about us nicely on social media. If you want to reach out, the email is  deadeyespodcast@gmail.com.

Please tell your friends about this show, especially if you are friends with Tom Hanks, who I just saw on TV in a spot from the Biden inaugural committee commemorating the first year of the Biden-Harris administration, pretty much the exact sort of thing we talked about a few episodes ago when I was giving examples of the kind of high-minded ads that Tom Hanks is most likely to show up in. Among the things he says, he talks about getting back up again, no matter how many times we get knocked down. And I could be wrong, but I think there is a quick shot of my subway train in the commercial. I'm not saying there's any significance to that. I just liked seeing it. Thanks for listening. Be smart. Stay safe.