Dan Meth's Blog

In this special blog exclusive, “Nite Fite” creators Dan Meth and Mark Vitelli explain how it all started.

Dan:
In the first half of this decade, Mark and I both were living in Queens. It’s the kind of place where you have to actively make your own fun.

Mark:
We had a lot of time to kill… We would fill this time discussing idle topics which (alcohol-aided or not) we would hold unnecessarily strong opinions about. Is Rush heavy metal? Does Pink Floyd suck? Is TV making people stupid?

Dan:
Do Nazis still exist? Was disco invented by gays?

Mark:
Anyone who has ever killed time in a bar knows these kinds of conversations.
The only rule is not to fight for what you believe in, but to take a side and argue it, as long as someone else is opposing you. And for me at least, the further you take it, the louder you get. At a certain point, maybe from the start, this gets ridiculous. Like the way people yell at each other on talk radio.

Dan:
At some point we realized that we we sounded just like Fox News. Hannity & Colmes. except we weren’t fighting about politics.. we were fighting about unimportant things. The idea hit us when we were playing frisbee one day in Astoria Park: Let’s record it. Channel the argument into something we could entertain friends with.

Mark:
All sceaming. Nothing is funnier than people screaming. Ask Pacino. So we did it.

Dan:
I made a list of all the dumbest argument we’d ever had and came up with the name “Nite Fite” and my alter ego Penalty. Mark had been calling himself Lloyd for years.

Mark:
We went into the studio where I work, called a few friends with some topics at hand and played it out. We recorded about 40 minutes of debating.

Dan:
We literally didn’t even warn our friends about what we were doing. Just called them and said “We’re recording a fake debate show, go with it” And they did perfectly… that’s the kind of friends we have.

Mark:
We cut it down to 10 non-stop minutes of in-your-face issue dealing. We even made a theme song. The audio version was e-mailed to a few friends. And played publicly once at a poetry ready in a Philadelphia bookstore.

Dan:
Years passed. “Nite Fite” faded into memory. Fast forward to 2007… I’ve been commissioned by a famous animation producer to create 39 short cartoons. “NITE FITE!”. I cut our 10 minute version into 1 minute. Having to draw the characters was pretty tough because for 3 years I’d only pictured ourselves as Penalty and Lloyd. Animated it. Uploaded it. And now the inside joke that we did as a complete lark has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. Even the comments on Youtube have been positive!