Lawrenceville, GA—October 2018… Mike the Mime and his friends are characters in more ways than one. The brainchild of video and podcast producer, writer, and director Scott Ross, the comic Mike the Mime the Podcast (www.mikethemime.com) presents Mike and his friends’ outrageous misadventures, combined with Ross’ well-timed sound effects and backed with professionally composed and produced music from Stockmusic.net.
The son of a drama teacher and football coach, Ross is a classically trained actor who makes his living producing corporate videos in the Atlanta area. He produced one feature film but the cost of film production discouraged him from attempting a follow-up. “My buddy who plays Doc in Mike the Mime insisted we had to do something new,” Ross recalls. “At the time short video webcasts were big, so I started writing Mike the Mime scripts for a webcast. But I could never find anyone to play the women’s parts because the Denise Roy character does some crazy stuff.”
Instead of shooting a video webcast, Ross decided to write and produce a podcast that would be like an old-time radio show. “I loved shows like the Jack Benny Show, Burns and Allen, and Orson Welles’ stuff,” he enthuses. “You have to use your imagination to ‘watch’ them. So we took the old webcast scripts and adapted them to do more of an old-time radio show—but we can say more outrageous things than they could back in the 1930s and ’40s. I’m not a musician, and I was already using Stockmusic.net exclusively for my commercial videos, so it was the obvious choice for the podcasts.” Ross chose Stockmusic.net’s “Whistling Kisses” by Joi Veer for Mike the Mime’s theme song.
Mike the Mime episodes are written for maximum silliness, designed to get you laughing. The podcasts can be irreverent to the point of being mildly politically incorrect—“I’m tired of politically correct,” admits Ross—but it’s all in fun. “I equate our plots to those of a Three Stooges plot or a Marx Brothers movie, where there’s often no real plot; it’s just comic bits,” Ross muses. “Then we continue some of those bits.” Ross’ wife voices practically all of the female characters, and his children contribute their voices, as do actor friends he has worked with over the years.
Ross commonly uses music from Stockmusic.net to set the tone of a scene and to provide amusing counterpoint. For instance, in the first episode, we attend the funeral for Doc’s wife, with “Ave Maria” playing in the background to create a somber tone. Meanwhile, characters offer public tributes to the dearly departed in which they laud her for having sex with virtually every man she met.
“Once I have a scene in my head, I figure out the tone of the scene,” Ross explains. “I go to the Stockmusic.net website and use the Music Finder, which works really well. It lets you search by mood, genre, and other criteria, so I can search for funny music, or romantic music, or children’s music and listen to everything they have of that type. For example, I might choose music that sounds like something from a kids’ cartoon but that also can play with the adults. You can search by period, so I’ve browsed the 1970s section for disco-y music. Often I’ll find a nice piece of music and decide to create a whole scene around the music; the music inspires the scene.”
Ross started using Stockmusic.net ten years ago, long before creating Mike the Mime. “When I started producing commercial videos many years ago, I had to find a music library. The top libraries at the time were very expensive, and they used needle-drop pricing where every time you used the same musical clip, you had to pay again. It would just kill us financially. Those services got even more expensive when they redid their price scale for the Web, and their music got old. So I started looking around for an alternative and found Stockmusic.net. They have great music in a zillion different genres. It just costs $40 per piece, and once you buy a piece, you can use it as much as you want to, royalty free, so it’s a lot less expensive than other services. Their customer service has been great, as well. Stockmusic.net is the only music house I use in my business and for Mike the Mime. The next podcast episode will have about 10 Stockmusic.net cuts, and I’m planning on using a lot more in the future.”
