Otto Begged to Die

Harle and Carthree presents in association with Spectavision Veteal,

“featuring the original artwork by Rob Donaldson,”

with original music composed by Father Carthree, and new anthology horror series. Set in the world, my Heaven, tell us from a dark world,

monthly at the south, only on Spectavision Veteal, hard-alightful. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]

A child said, "What is the grass fetching it to me with full hands?" How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he, Walter Whitman. The way I look at it sometimes,

it's like I'm a prisoner of my own nostalgia, and I'm lucky if I can get an hour out of the exercise yard every day, before my creaky memories say, "Dude, you gotta get back inside, come on."

“But I think everyone's a prisoner of something,”

at least nostalgia is quiet. [MUSIC]

WMBR just never came in, right?

And my dad tried everything. He'd passed the tower on the way to work. It was maybe 10 miles away, still lousy picture. And this was a guy who loved his antennas. We were like the last kids on the block to get cable, TV.

He was so proud of his antennas. He didn't want to knuckle under to the cable, TV people. I mean, everything else came in, okay? I guess, but not MBR, it was typical. Funny thing from my childhood ever was, I'm sitting in the living room.

I'm looking through the front bay window, when I see my dad's body falling off the roof, like a stone. Boom, he hits the grass, right on his side, like really hard. I jump up, he gets up, like, he gets up, like it's nothing. And he's got a part of that TV antenna in his hand,

just like looking at it, like, "I wonder if this got broken, "is this a little bent, and he goes right back up the ladder?" He should have been dead or paralyzed at the least. I could still see his body going to the ground. Definitely the best weatherman ever.

They had John Leigh. The only weatherman in the history of TV to make you worry, he was going to start crying on the air. He'd come out and he'd do the weather. Oh my God, what was it with him?

He always looked depressed, he was never happy.

There was no banter. Yeah, John Leigh, the sad weatherman. That's what your station wants, right? Jesus wasn't like being happy when you did the weather, it wasn't a thing back in the '80s.

“What I remember, and I'll never forget this,”

is very late '70s probably. And when he did the forecast, he didn't have any tech behind him. I mean, there was lights and stuff, but there was this big white board thing behind him with Rhode Island on it. And he took a big marker, I mean, like oversized marker,

and he draw the temperatures really quick, really fast, right on the map. And then he draw these like arrows, like to show you where a front was coming from. And I remember thinking that that was the neatest thing in the world.

I wanted to draw the weather on a big map real quick, just like the guy on MBR. I remember asking my mom to pin up our road map from the car, and I took a magic marker, and I drew temperatures and arrows and little suns all over it.

And I imagined a forecast in my head, I guess. 70s, it was good to be a kid. I would swear. OK, so they had Saturday star theater,

Very, you know, whatever was five years old,

“and they could get the rights to for a night.”

I watched the reincarnation of Peter Proud. One time on Saturday star theater, that was my favorite. And maybe there was one I kind of liked where, since he's basic, was a happy, radical, blows herself up by accident.

It had rewink learned it, that kind of thing, but I swear to you, as I'm sitting here, OK, one time totally out of nowhere. They put on the 400 blows. I'm totally certain that was a Saturday star theater. You know what they also showed one time was husbands,

the Cassavetti's movie.

And I always wondered if some in-term just couldn't take it anymore,

and switched out the tapes or something. They had to watch something good, you know, wash away the WMBR steam. They also had that guy Morgan, I canning. He usually did some dumb local politics show,

but really he was great, because he would go all out when there was snow, and there were late openings. He knew all the kids were watching, so he'd put on a party hat, and he'd throw confetti up in the air. Anytime it was official, a school was going to be closed for the day.

And this was just for schools, just for the kids.

“I think he went into that studio whenever it's snowed,”

just to read all the closings.

And I don't know why I always thought that was pretty endearing.

Today there'll be sun, put some clouds, high of 58, tomorrow rain, the next day's sun, but some clouds. So, she's bigger pie. I think it came on in about nine after the first wave of cartoons.

One hour show, whenever I pretended to be sick, so I could stay home from school I always watched. Which was a lot. I wasn't, it wasn't not a big fan of school. Um, I think it went off the air when I was like in sixth grade. So maybe five years it was on.

I watched a lot of that crap, stupid title, drove me nuts. Was it a full hour? I guess it was, I must have been half an hour. A lot of dumb skits, you know, puppets, and then to fill more time, you had these knock-off cartoons.

You had to wait for the weekend if you wanted your bug's bunny and um, or foot and like, Marvin the Martian. And that was the big time. We're talking now about whatever cheeseburger pie could afford. This was stuff from, I mean, I remember this one

that had been from Scotland and the narrator had a Scottish accent. The animation was bad. That was about some kid walking around barefoot all the time. I mean, I was mostly live action kid. I watched Bang the Drum. That was the least awful one on there.

I can recall. Little kid band going around their town and solving problems with like, gospel music, something. I don't know. I don't know what that was going on there.

“Bang the drum, but I think that was an important too. I remember a lot of British accents”

and you know, really bad production values. Like, it was all put together on non, non, 8mm or something. The the King of Zenmark would demand to be told a joke. He had this big gold staff and he would tap on this little munk looking guy and say, "Bring me a joke!"

And in would come this puppet with a big scroll and he would read a terrible dad joke and there was this princess puppet with way too big a chest and pigtails and at the end of every joke, everybody in the King's court would like laugh and she would look around with this completely confused

look on her face. She never got any of the jokes and they'd cut to a close-up of her

face, just baffled and I always felt bad for her. I always assumed the King was her father and he thought she was dim and tried to ignore her. All the puppets were pretty basic stuff. I mean this was back in the day when you had to accept all the wires that were totally visible. You'd see someone's hand drop into the frame and I absolutely remember this because I saw it all the time. They were always getting the boom

if any of them touched the walls, they would totally shake. Yeah, cheeseburger pie didn't have any live actors. MBR was probably too cheap for that. Oh there was a blender bell. She was a horse. There was a clown puppet but it was barely a clown really. That was little Mason. The big wow was a sort of an anthropomorphic planet.

There was a, oh, cis and sass, the sisters. Their hair was kind of tied together and it was

really long but it was tied together. They never moved far apart and there were other ones that

would, you know, they would come in and out three or four other ones. And uh, and there was joking. I was at my high school reunion, 30th high school reunion and I started talking about our video production class. And Mr. Rodriguez, he'd worked for MBR back in the day. He was our teacher.

“I think he died. So we got to talk about cheeseburger pie and my girlfriend, not now but my”

first girlfriend ever, said, "Is anyone but me kind of terrified of Jobie now?" I said, "Oh my God, Jobie, I'm so glad you said something." Because I've actually been thinking about him for some reason for the first time and, you know, like, like decades. I can pull it up right here on my phone here.

I never go on Reddit because it's awful. Somebody called showed me. She said,

"You know, Mike's been posting like a hundred times about this old puppet he used to watch on TV. Whole form about Jobie." I figured, well, about to marry this guy in five days, maybe I'll just take a quick peek at what he's been posting. Because he's never mentioned anything.

“So the way it works, I still remember this. Like two or three of the puppets, they'd be talking”

about something, you know, just standing around the fake farm stand and then suddenly you hear this horn sound, like there's really long drawn out horn, like far away, like, "Yoo!" And, uh, and one of the puppets would say, "Oh, it happened again!" Which, you know, that meant that someone had said a four syllable word. And if someone had said a four syllable word and you heard the horn, here would come Jobie. It was like some kind of biking corner, something, with this weird echo on it. And so Jobie would come

in from wherever, but he always tumbles everywhere. Head over feet. Except he doesn't have feet,

because he's got no bottom half. Jobie is just the upper half of a puppet.

“So he comes rolling into the conversation and he's, um, go, Christ, how do I describe him?”

This was the only puppet I can ever remember where the, uh, the felt fabric was just completely white. Jobie was beached white, like a super, white puppet. And, uh, his hair, you know, didn't stick out, but all it was matted down. He had, um, you know, he looked like actually, you know, bud court from, from Harold and mop it. That, that, that, that bug court vibe. So imagine a puppet totally white face with his hair, like that in a big eyes, no legs. And he just shows up out of nowhere.

No scene ever started with Jobie already in it. Jobie only came in when the horn sounded. Seriously, there was absolutely no call for that fucking horn to go on for so long. That made it creepy. Like he was this thing from the land of the dead or someplace, being summoned, because someone said, "Fucking root of a aga." Cano was so, heard, because none of the other puppets liked him.

That was his lot in life, you know, he would try to interject himself into the conversation,

Okay, we defined the word that brought you for all the little kids out there. We wrote it on the screen for everybody. Now, you really have to go, because you're just weird and too tall, even though you have no legs. I came back to town for Thanksgiving. Ones and the Jobie tuck started because someone was saying how in chitty chitty bangbone, there was a character we forgot about, the child of the catcher. It was

really scary. And my cousin, it was like 50, really, really felt uncomfortable talking about Jobie. We actually had to stop. He even mentioned about how none of this bothered him when he was kid. It was only after he became grown up, but he started to freak out about Jobie. The part that's so bizarre to me, and this happened multiple times, is when Jobie would talk

about his brother, and this brother you never saw, Otto. But the other puppets who wouldn't

believe Otto was real, they were always wracking on him. Like, sure, Jobie, sure,

“and Jobie would go into a shirt pocket. Man, what was on his shirt? What was that drawing?”

Yeah, he wore a t-shirt, and he had these spindly little arms, and the shirt had a picture of a haystack, I think, on it with a pitchfork coming out. I don't know. It made no sense whatsoever. Looks to me like some kind of blazer coming out of some kind of machine. And the picture of his brother was just really, you know, black and white thing, the kind of picture that Matthew Brady took during the Civil War. And it was supposedly his brother, Rodo,

and his old fashion clothes, and one of those handlebar moustaches, and the picture looked like it had been, you know, through a wash of machine, and many times there was just bent and crinkled and stuff, and Jobie would hold it up and go, "This is Otto, this is Otto." He was just desperate to be believed. We all went to the diner after the reunion, like five of us. We didn't stop talking about Jobie for like half an hour, seriously. We could not get straight on why that little white

bastard kept showing people that freaky photo of his brother. We were laughing, but we were also

“talking about how scary it got them where he thought about it. I think Reddit says something that”

they never saying original songs on a show, because I probably would have been required some actual

writing talent probably, you know. So they just took a whole bunch of real old stuff, right, and read the lyrics. But you know, it might be wrong. I'm trying. Real hard to forget whatever I read about it. My theory about the cartoons is that they kept these in their back pocket for when they didn't time the length of that episode, right? Like if they made it too short. Because the Jobie ones were always real short, like maybe a minute, and they were just Jobie's weird dreams.

They drove lying in his bed, and you'd seem sleeping, and then he flies off in a drink land, stoma legs, just kind of flapping his arms. And then you just see him in dream land, or whatever it feels, and barns and puppies, and all the usual stuff. But they couldn't even do that non-creepy first on reason. They made the whole cartoon in black and white. Like, what kid wants to watch a totally silent cartoon in black and white. But I've spoke you fucking puppet, but nobody liked.

“Or maybe there was music over it. I don't know. I can't remember.”

Nope, there was never any music for the Jobie ones. Except you'd hear the wind as he sort of

floated from scene to scene, and then instead of floating back to his bed at the end of the cartoon, you just run over the hills of the town, whatever that town was called. I actually want to say it was called Cheeseburger Pie, but that can't be right. Anyway, just imagine this spooky wind sound as he floated around no legs, and just slowly go insane thinking about it. I never knew one kid, he was freaked out by any of us back then. We just need to fun of the show.

Didn't mean we didn't watch it because this was just before people. We only had so many choices, you know. But yeah, there was really nothing to talk about with Jobie. It was kind of an art to creating a puppet with personality. I think all we knew was that Jobie didn't have

We started thinking, wait, was that maybe the scariest thing ever?

I'm blanking out about what was on his t-shirt though, which is weird because you couldn't miss it. It was a tree, but bent way over, maybe? My brother's 10 years older than me. And he and Adam Brogley literally used to sit in our basement and get high while I was in the room watching TV, real classy. But one day Adam starts sort of laughing hysterically. And he said, oh my god,

“did you hear what the torso puppet just said? He said, Otto begged to die. What was that about?”

And my brother looked at me and said, don't you hate him? He didn't say that. He said,

Otto begged to die. And I remember I didn't say anything because I wasn't actually sure that

Adam wasn't right. I wasn't really sure what I heard. You know, maybe I kind of kind of worth of what they were smoking that day. Joby, look at those freaky eyes. Not fighting alien, but about as close as you could get. God is really disturbing. Look at this picture. So I'm meeting the reddit post. And there's one where Mike's talking about something he had and I had done a couple of months before. We've done this this thing where you hire the target

for to take a whole bunch of pictures of you before the wedding. You know, out in the bout, when they were like totally like these totally embarrassing pictures, you know, poses, public. He had this idea for us to go to a balloon festival. So we get in the car and we went to this festival and naturally Mike was dying inside. But the guy he was a snapping snapping away taking a whole bunch of pictures and then Mike all of a sudden told him he was feeling real sick. But he really wasn't saying

anything and he wasn't explaining it. Like there were no physical signs, no physical signs, no physical symptoms he was talking about. It just got kind of nervous and mean. You know,

“let's remember he got nervous and mean. And he told the guy, stop taking pictures. Like,”

"I'm gone. Stop taking pictures. I'm out of here." And he made up something about his stomach hurting or something. It really sounded really bogus. Like really bogus. And then I was one of the days about what was up with him. But now here I find the real explanation or reddit. He posted it for a whole bunch of strangers and he didn't even tell me about it. Turns out he'd seen this giant Milar balloon. Probably 5-10 feet wide and a giant bunch with

some others up in the sky and it like completely tripped him out. He triggered the heck out of him. He got old all over and he couldn't even look at it. It bothered him so much. Because the face, it looked exactly like this jolly puppet. Same word here, same white face and you know, Mike knew it really wasn't him. It was just a coincidence this big balloon had. But he really had an awful reaction to it. You know, again apparently, it was this wasn't for me to know.

He kept it from everyone except social media. My friend Eric calls me one day and then this is after he got into trying to find the show again. And he said, "Oh my god, you know what you know about the office tips?" And I said, "Well, what was he office tips? What are you talking about?" He got about three layers below the underneath of the whole history and it came the office tips.

“He wasn't looking for those like he was going to die if he didn't find them. I think he wound”

up spending 200 bucks on him on the second-hand market for tapes total. He invited me over and

we sat and watched him. And I remember thinking, "Okay, yeah, well, actually money will spend." No, the guy who made them was just one of the production assistants. He was listed in the credits of the show apparently, but those original show tapes were all wiped out. They actually used to do that. After they took it off the air, he went and got a job at some company that did educational

that was an ad black and white for four VHS tapes, new episodes of Cheeseburger Pie.

“You could send a check to some PO box and you get sent these random tapes. The ad said,”

"If we love a WMBR, children show, Cheeseburger Pie, a bit of exaggerating there." What he done was he'd set up two video cameras in his office where he worked. Made no attempt at all to have any kind of production value. He didn't even master fact that this was an office that much. He hung a sparkly backdrop with a fake town and moons and planets on it and that was it. He'd stayed late in his office and this was one person

brought up these four episodes of the show. They were all around a half hour from scratch. He did all the public work himself but he was the thing. These were the original puppets from the show. When they took the show off the air, nobody claimed the puppets so he just walked away

“with all of them. Yeah, the sisters, with their hair tied together, he had the postmaster,”

he had the king of Zenmark, he had little mason, everything was there. But sometimes the characters didn't move because he was just one guy and he could only do two puppets at a time. But yeah, he didn't even really block off the corners of the frame correctly. So you could sort of see the office and stuff at the edges like clear as day. He even put cartoons in, you know, really obscure stuff. He didn't even have the rights to

probably. He just cut them right in like you were watching a really bad episode of a show that was really not great. And he had absolutely everyone in there except for Jobi. There was absolutely no sign of Jobi. No Jobi and any of the appearances at all. No references to him ever. It was kind of a car accident, it was really sitting down with these tapes, but if you forgot the fact that this used to be a show, which for some weird reason the guy

insists on replicating. It's just a totally harmless, home-brewed kid show. Maybe you'd see something like this on public access. And what did WMBR care, I guess? There was no value left in

cheeseburg, a pie, there were a million other kid shows that were actually pretty good.

It was going to care about copywriting these puppets. But at some point, the guy disappeared. It's a strong word, I don't think the police ever went looking for him or anything. He just didn't show up to work where he was working anymore. I just didn't go back. I maybe got a job in Canada or something. It happens, I maybe as friends as parents just don't want to talk about him anymore. Oh, you can't tell me some shit. It wasn't seriously up with him

vanishing considering that no. Well, the note thing is, you know, how much do you want to believe what you read online? Where is this information actually coming from? You want to go off with some complete strangers or calling facts? There's no picture of the note, there's no real source. The note said, I very joe be where he can't eat anyone anymore. And he gave a very specific address and directions didn't say, why? He said it's the station, so it was kind of a public note.

He wanted it to be written here, but of course no one was going to be doing that. And then, you know, eventually someone tells someone else, that person tells someone else, and

“I assume that's how we know about it now. Oh, Jesus. I thought the note said he was trying”

to stop him from killing his brother. Hold on, I'm looking this out. No, I don't want to reach a new privacy policy at Souls. This is just a picture of a hole with a tiny little coffin in it. So it's the same thing, you know, where does this come from? It's a hole. Anyone can dig a hole, take a picture, put a coffin, they bought it a craft store in it, try to make the internet go crazy. Not even the internet, 50 people with nothing

to do in some obscure form, whipping each other up so they can get there in the style of fix or their horror fix or whatever I just, you know, I just I can't believe any of that.

In the second picture, okay, the coffin is open and Joe B's in there. The Joe B puppet

time did do it. When this popped up online, I don't think anyone's Photoshop skills were really

“that good or AI was that good that the photo could have been faked. Someone who had to recreate”

Joe B perfectly, age it with some final fake way, drive them over there to go hold the edge of that lake and you can see there's like six shots of the area. It's not just a nice lady picture. Yeah, um, the picture of the coffin was weird because there was this big stone on top of it. Like the guy had wanted to keep the lid closed but the lid was already closed. It was more like he really wanted that lid to stay shot.

That's Joe B. Apparently they even went into a shirt pocket and the picture of his brother was in there.

I got into this bizarre habit. I don't plan after college. I if I'm in a dark place where I feel nervous, like, oh, he can't think it night or

“even in a dude park or something, I say to the dark,”

Joe B, are you there? For some reason, I just need there to be no answer. That has gone on. 25 years. I was, uh, this was in my van-life period. I gave a ride to some guy at Narvee Park. I didn't know him. And this was just a really, really bad call. It, uh, pretty much ended that whole phase of my life. Because inside of 15 minutes, I knew this had been just a jekyll and hide kind of guy all along.

And he was going to do something terrible right out of a horror movie, either mug me or kill me. From before anything real developed, I swore up into a gas station that was actually closed. And I started screaming and pounding my knees like I was a crazy person.

“I was, I was screaming for him to get out of the car and he did, but, uh, but first he actually”

punched me, right in the face. He ran for it and I sat there and, and my hands were, we're shaking like, like this, like this bad. So, the engine still running, but I can't move. I'm pretty much just paralyzed with the shakes. And I turned my head and sitting right there in the passenger seat. And keep in mind, I watched that show he was on maybe five times in my entire life.

And then it had been 20 years at least. I never thought about him for a single second since then,

not in all my adult life. But there's Jobi, the puppet. Propped up, looking at me. Big white face. I recognized him right away. I even remembered his name. And I, I can't move. It's, it's like I'm tripping on something. And he's starting to open his mouth real slow, like, like, he's about to say something to me. But when his mouth opens all the way, it just hangs there, hangs there and stops.

I've had nothing to drink, no drugs. I can even see that the door behind him is still open from when the guy had run for it. I just, I just put the car in a drive and I floored it. And when I looked back at him, he wasn't there anymore. All I can think of was that it was the punch that did something to my mind, coming off such a traumatic thing with the guy. Because he hit me hard.

That was it. My scariest moments on earth, one, two, one right after another. But it's the Jobi thing. I can visualize the most. More than even the guy I thought might try to kill me. So now the question is, where did the little freak go to? If they really dug him up, authentically, no lie. There was no indication of where they took him after that. I don't want to think of him sitting up in some attic. Not because I feel bad for him.

It's because I don't want to even have a dream about him sitting up there. And there's a little brain thinking and thinking. I don't want to be dreaming and accidentally say some for syllable word. And I hear this horn and hear he comes, some are salting along the ground right up to me.

Because I will wake up in the hospital.

Can't. Did I say a for syllable word already? Some are salting. Oh, Lord.

“Would time be in some kids? We're tempted that the woods are out where we weren't supposed to. I think it was maybe”

ten. Not even that old. Maybe. And the woods opened up on this meadow and sloped up into the distance. And I saw this huge tower up there. The biggest thing I had ever seen that close up and I saw a sign on it. I could just barely read it. It said WMBR.

And my friend Dudley, he was always the smart one. He had to explain to me what I was looking at.

He said, "Yeah, man, that's a transmitter tower." And the due TV show is the signal comes out of that.

“It goes everywhere because right to your house. If you go up to that thing and put your ear to it,”

you can even hear it. I don't know if you got that part right, but you know. And this just blew my mind as a kid. I mean the sight of that tower and that sky at the top of the hill sun behind it. And all the grass blowing around. It was so beautiful. I got inspired by that. It made TV into something else for me. It was this majestic mission. The people putting out that signal were sort of mysterious and wonderful. It was like I was living in science fiction.

“Amazing science fiction vision of a good future.”

And I always wanted to get closer to that tower, but I never went back to that part of the woods.

Hi, you've reached Ken Metzger of Rhode Island Public Radio. Please leave a message and I'll return it as soon as I'm able. This is f. Why are people talking about your being now? You drive somewhere window. Make him stop.

Now, receiving frequency transmission. For me, like I will have a dream about a series of things and then that next day, those things will sort of pop up. And sometimes it's like, oh, like I know I'm going to run into this person. So I'm dreaming about them the day before or whatever. You know, I was just flipping through my dream journal this

morning. And when I opened the journal, I opened right to a page that was about Walton Goggins. And I actually met Walton Goggins yesterday. It's just felt like another weird like, oh, cool. I need to keep dream journaling. Transmission complete. Stay tuned to Spect Division Radio. Stay. Stay.