The vonHummer Hour

Premiering 21 October, 2001, on Mount Hood Community College TV at 11pm, The vonHummer Hour was destined for cable access greatness. Bi-weekly at first, within a year, the series went weekly and moved to the coveted Saturday night slot, at 11pm—a critical time when viewers would be surfing their channels. The look of the show was a guaranteed surf stopper at first sight of the vonHummer persona, then, further intrigue as a bizarro fake foreign language and oddball subtitles, only to then take a left turn into catchy, ironic songs in English. Many viewers were hooked this way. The producers of the show, however were operating under a mistaken assumption. They thought viewers would be enchanted by the skits and stay for the music, when in reality, viewers tolerated the skits and stayed for the music. Therisno Records was quite happy with this mistake on the part of Therisno Productions. By early 2004, vonHummer sold out a live show at Nola's Cafe in Portland, including a line out the door of autograph seekers at this, his first show since the series debuted. Below are links to the episodes, 54 in all. Some link to YouTube and some to BitChute. Many of the YT posts were flagged for copyrights, due to incidental music that was added originally to some of the sketches, resulting in muting of the soundtrack. To be fair, those musical elements were added from licensed CDs purchased for use by the cable access companies and should be allowable. There's no fighting YouTube on this, however, so where this has occurred, Therisno has endeavored here to link to versions on BitChute, where hopefully, the censorship will be slower. It goes without saying that time hasn't been kind to the series. Like a vaudeville revue, The vonHummer Hour was a product of the lowest media strata of its era. The humor is often topical, irreverent, and awful. The effects were cheap and easy. The direction, scattershot. Like his painted suits, vonHummer's TV content was committed in random, colorful splatters. There isn't much to say beyond, "It was what it was." And what it was was an experiment in music promotion, done cheap and easy—with a big perhaps, on both scores—through the medium of television.