LoadingReadyRun

URL	http://www.loadingreadyrun.com
Type of site	Comedy
Created by	Graham Stark and Paul Saunders
Launched	October 13, 2003

LoadingReadyRun, often abbreviated to LRR, is a Canadian sketch comedy website, based in Victoria, British Columbia, founded by Graham Stark and Paul Saunders. Since its launch in October 2003, a new video has been posted to the site every week, without fail; all of them are written, performed and edited by members of the "LoadingReadyRun crew", which consists of Graham, Paul, their friends and guests.

The theme of the website is based on the Commodore 64 and its humour is often video game related.^[1] Some of their videos have been featured in film festivals such as the Comic-Con International Film Festival^[2] in San Diego, and shown on major television networks, including G4 Canada ^[3] and CNN.^[1][4] They are currently in their eighth season, and since January 2010, their weekly video has been hosted on The Escapist Magazine.

Cast[link]

Notable work[link]

How to Talk like a Pirate[link]

Part of a fictional 1970s-style language-learning series, this video teaches the nuances of pirate speech.^[5] It was released for International Talk Like a Pirate Day, 2006. Subsequent Talk Like a Pirate Days have led to the video being recirculated once a year.

Three PS3s[link]

Posted around the release of the comparatively scarce and expensive PlayStation 3, this video features Paul brazenly claiming to own "three PS3s". The video spread quickly when it was posted to YouTube, with viewers (many of whom didn't recognize the intended ironic tone) posting death threats and incensed comments as well as video parody responses. In truth, the entire crew owned zero PS3s; they borrowed two of them and the third was a hollow display model.^[6]

Halo: The Future of Gaming[link]

A fond "look back" on the immense global impact of the Halo series of video games, set in the future.^[7] The video was immensely popular online, and was most viewed video on LoadingReadyRun for years afterward.

It's Magic[link]

The first in a series of videos referencing the crew's growing obsession with Magic: The Gathering, under the Commodore Hustle sub-series. The video quickly got the attention of Magic creators Wizards of the Coast, and Graham Stark is now regarded as a notable member of the Magic fan community.^[8][9] LoadingReadyRun is now producing a series for Wizards of the Coast called "Friday Nights" which expands on this theme.^[10]

Desert Bus For Hope[link]

Loading Ready Run is perhaps best known for their Annual "Desert Bus For Hope" event. On November 23, 2007, the group started a marathon game session of Desert Bus (a minigame from Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors) called Desert Bus for Hope to raise money for the charity Child's Play. The four-man team took turns playing the game continuously, with more hours added as more donations were made. The event was broadcast live via webcam, and garnered attention both from the media, and Penn & Teller, who called in, sent pizza, and made donations. By the end of the event, $22,805 had been raised, including donations from Penn and Teller themselves.^[11][12][13]

On November 18, 2008, LoadingReadyRun officially announced that they planned a second marathon run of Desert Bus which began on November 28.^[14] The second Desert Bus lasted slightly more than five days and raised over $70,000.^[15]

On August 25, 2009, the third marathon run was announced, set to start on November 20, 2009.^[16] At 18:42 GMT-0 on November 26, 2009 the marathon completed, raising over $140,000 (after all e-cheques had cleared) for Child's Play.^[17] One notable donor, going by the alias "Octopimp", donated nearly $10,000 alone, becoming a mascot of sorts in the event's live chatroom and in turn inspiring many other high-number donations and auction bids.

The fourth marathon run was announced on May 4, 2010, and began on Nov. 19, 2010 at 6:00 p.m. PST.^[18] Penn & Teller auctioned off an "Ultimate Desert Bus Experience Pack" which included a bus ticket and sand from the Las Vegas desert, signed by Penn & Teller themselves. The fourth run concluded after 5 days and 21 hours, with $208,249.82 raised.

A fifth marathon run began on November 18, 2011 and went for six days and six hours, raising a total of $383,075.10.^[17]

Annual totals[link]

• 2007 Desert Bus for Hope: $22,805
• 2008 Desert Bus for Hope 2: Bus Harder: $70,423
• 2009 Desert Bus for Hope 3: It's Desert Bus 6 in Japan: $140,449
• 2010 Desert Bus for Hope 4: A New Bus: $208,250
• 2011 Desert Bus for Hope 5: Bussing is Magic: $383,075
• Running Total: $825,002

Commodore Hustle[link]

Commodore Hustle is a series of videos created by the crew dramatizing their personal lives. In these videos, Paul Saunders is often portrayed as a technical genius without common sense; Graham Stark is abusive to his roommate Matt Wiggins; and Morgan VanHumbeck is an egotistical bufoon. The series has its own channel on YouTube, but now publishes its videos on the crew's channel on The Escapist. A running theme in the series is the group's dysfunctional nature and infighting. On the Youtube channel, Stark tried to unite them by forming a street gang called The Runners.

Unskippable[link]

In December 2008 Graham and Paul tied for first place in The Escapist's Second Annual Film Festival with Unskippable, a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 style take of the introduction cinematic to Lost Planet.^[19] For winning the contest they were rewarded with a contract to produce a weekly video for The Escapist. The series airs every Monday and has satirized cinematics to games like Eternal Sonata, Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII and The Darkness. It has received heavy promotion on the site, including crossovers with Zero Punctuation where Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw joined the Star Ocean: The Last Hope episode and Graham produced a ZP-style review of X-Blades, which soon switched over to Yahtzee's review of Halo Wars. The ending credits included the message "People confused about Graham Stark's appearance at the start of this video obviously don't watch Unskippable and for that I pity them." They have also broadcast a one-off live special of Unskippable on The Escapist where they did a "Let's Play" of Legaia 2 in the humorous and critical style of the show. The two also appeared in episode 21 of Doomsday Arcade as themselves.

Escapist News Network[link]

In September 2009 the LoadingReadyRun crew began a second series for The Escapist the Escapist News Network, a parody newscast about video games similar to This Hour Has 22 Minutes. ENN is Written and produced by Kathleen De Vere, Jeremy Petter, Paul Saunders, and Graham Stark, who also form the backbone of its cast. On February 13, 2011 the site announced that it would no longer be producing new episodes of ENN.

Checkpoint[link]

On May 9, 2011, LoadingReadyRun premiered Checkpoint on Penny-Arcade's PATV. The show is similar in format to ENN, with Graham and Kathleen acting as anchors at a news desk, providing humorous commentary on the previous week's Gaming news.

Daily Drop[link]

Daily Drop was a feature on The Escapist, made by the LoadingReadyRun crew. It was filmed in the basement of the Victoria Event Centre. It consists of approximately 2-minute long clips of objects falling in slow motion, as recorded by a high-speed camera, and impacting the test area floor. A new installment was released every weekday between October 7 and May 25, 2011.

Crapshots[link]

Crapshots is a series featuring mostly LoadingReadyRun's Graham Stark and Alex Steacy, from EximWorks. They feature short, usually less than a minute, comedic blurbs. The episodes are labelled with miscellaneous redundant words relating to the video. Crapshots was started in April 2009, and can be found on YouTube at this channel.

Feed Dump[link]

Feed Dump, LRR's newest series on The Escapist, premiered May 25, 2011. It is a freeform, largely improvised review of strange news items from the previous week, with Graham hosting the segment and soliciting reactions and dialogue from a pair of assorted co-hosts. It is a spiritual successor to "The Phailhaüs", an irregularly updated series of bonus videos that had been running on the LRR site since 2008. The Phailhaüs in turn was based on Morgan vanHumbeck's 2006-2007 series "The Whatever Thing".

Selected Awards[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: LoadingReadyRun

• LoadingReadyRun website
• LoadingReadyRun Wiki
• History of LoadingReadyRun
• Desert Bus For Hope