Over the years, KCOW’s basement tenant Bob S. Bestos and I have cooked up a lot of radio nonsense. For the last several years our major annual project has been the Halloween special…but in 2015 we created “The Bestos Christmas Yet”, a holiday special which aired on KCOW.
I figured Bob was worthy of the same type of big-budget yuletide spectacular as Perry Como, Andy Williams, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and other voices closely connected with the holiday. Joining Bob in this high-caliber production were Mike Glesinger, the delicate mandolin of Kalin Krohe, Coach Steve “Nelly” Nelson, Moriera Rau (our KCOW Office Manager at the time), and…through the magic of Kalin’s time machine, Bing Crosby.
Oh! And Bob’s mother, Barb S. Bestos, voiced as always by the spectacular Jason Hager. We created a promotional comic strip for the show depicting the tricky negotiations with Mrs. B.
I miss Bitstrips. It was easy to make comic strips and we did quite a few Bob ones.
Since a little of Bob goes a long way, we wrote and produced six short segments that were played in-between chunks of Christmas music. during an hour-long timeslot. There are some things I really like about this show…Gles’ recital with Kalin on mandolin is pretty awesome. And the three songs are better than they have a right to be. (Lyrics by Rogers and Wentystein.) Mo has a beautiful voice; the rest of us just warbled our way through it. Also, the “Bing and Bob” sketch was low-hanging fruit but it was fun to make and is fairly amusing.
Here’s a playlist with the six segments.