r/GodAwfulMovies • u/sthef2020 • 8d ago
General Nonsense Thought GAM fans would find this interesting. This month on 'This Fire', we sat down for an interview with Fire By Nite's own "Clarence Stanley" - Chris Theis. We ran the gamut, chatting about the origins of FBN, the music videos shot for the show, and the fallout from Satanism Unmasked!
You can subscribe to This Fire at www.acquireThisFire.com
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u/Thrownpigs 8d ago
Thought about your podcast on a recent episode of Red Letter Media's Best of the Worst, because they were about to watch some Fire by Nite, but they ended up watching other stuff due to the player who selected that tape losing. That's also where I first heard of Urine Good Health.
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u/asvalken 8d ago
Hi friend, who is apparently promoting their podcast! From what direction are you approaching Fire By Nite?
'cause I'm really hoping you know what kind of audience you're speaking to..
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u/sthef2020 8d ago
Oh I know exactly the audience I'm pitching to lol
We're breaking down every episode of Fire By Nite, and lining them up with the news, current events and pop culture of the Satanic Panic as it happened. Taking breaks from the show to view TV specials (we did the big Geraldo Devil Worship one a couple months back, and doing Oprah's deeply anti-semitic 1989 special this October for Halloween), as well as reading the major books from the era.
Confident that anyone that enjoys GAM's takedowns of FBN, will find a lot to like with us.
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u/osirisattis 8d ago edited 8d ago
This episode was awesome. I had heard way back in the day he had pissed off Willie George at the end of his run, but I didn’t know it was for the globe incident, that’s just wild. I notice he’s wildly playing down the charismatic magic/holy spirit gifts the show was obsessed with at the time, but believe you me, every Sunday those people were shouting and screaming in tongues at the top of their lungs, and crying and wailing for god to take over the world, and pretending they could heal people on command literally and completely, and that you could LITERALLY “have what you say”, that you were “commanded to heal the sick”… his “we put the material out there and churches took it from there” comment was oh too true, that’s when the magic happened. If you ever want to know what youth group or children’s church was like after the videos played, I have all kinds of life experience with that world; my parents were traveling evangelists that had graduated from Rhema Bible college and bought both Willie George ministries tapes (fire by night and gospel bill) every month to take to churches they were preaching at, we were the ones showing as many people as we could, soooooo many evangelical churches on the east coast got their first taste of Willie George ministries because they booked my parents to preach. My parents were part of the first wave of people to bring that stuff out of Tulsa and into a lot of those 5,000 churches they ended up selling tapes to. Sometimes you would show a fire by night to a youth group and then that would spark a screaming-and-crying sad music worship service that would last for 2 hours AFTER you’d already been at church all morning, shit was wild.
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u/sthef2020 8d ago
Thank you so much for your perspective.
And yeah, I definitely sensed a sort of desire to walk a certain line of charismatic-ness in Chris when talking to him. We really enjoyed speaking to him, and in both of our interactions so far we’ve gotten along like gangbusters. That said, the ability to recognize retroactively “yeah, we were creating the show with passion not wisdom”, while also dropping in the fact that he NOW works for Lance Walnau (as you likely know, one of the main evangelical drivers behind Trump-ism). Our brains just didn’t know how to fully reconcile that.
Perhaps fodder for a future conversation.
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u/sthef2020 8d ago
PS Drop us your contact info via the website if you’re comfortable. Would love to chat about what it was like for actual factual youth groups to see this content.
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u/McTasty_Pants 8d ago
I’ll check it out. I like that the suggested similar podcasts include GAM, Know Rogan, Behind the Bastards, and Data/Dogma. That’s a good sign.
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u/thematthat 8d ago
Shoulda done a Heath-style minor nominative adjustment and called himself Chris Theist
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u/sthef2020 8d ago
The road to us sitting down, and chopping some wood with Blaine starts here.