Okay, this is the requisite spoiler alert…. If you really, really don’t want to have all the magic sucked out of your enjoyment of Smells Like Yukon, you should probably stop reading right now. The account that follows is guaranteed to shatter, once and for all, any illusions that Jesse and Mark are just a pair of quaint, unsophisticated Yukon yokels who bumble along producing radio segments by the seats of their pants on a shoestring budget.

Mark can’t remember how the idea for “Designer Guise” came about, but it must have happened sometime after the end of Season One. The story wasn’t included on the fancy, typewritten list of story ideas that Jesse presented to A New Day producer Arnold Hedstrom early in the summer. However, by the time Mark and Jesse held a “pre-production” meeting on a sunny afternoon on Mark’s back deck, the story (tentatively titled “Pimp My Outhouse”) had found its way onto the proposed Season Two line-up.

Both Mark and Jesse had pretty crazy schedules over the summer and, as much as they wanted—no, longed—to produce the segment on location in Haines Junction, using the real outhouse of their friends “Deb” and “Ted,” this was not to be. Instead, the whole thing was done on a soundstage in Burbank, California.

This probably warrants some explanation.

In early August, Mark was down in L.A. taping a Jeopardy episode and pitching the WB network on a reality TV series called Mallet Huang, P.I.—kind of like The Amazing Race meets Magnum meets Mike Hammer meets Hong Kong. By coincidence, Jesse happened to be passing through town en route home from friggin' Afghanada, where he’d been entertaining Chucky, Coach, Deaner, Stu, Major Campbell, Lieutenant Petrovsky, Hannah, Corporal Eric Hashani and all the other Canadian troops. (Apparently, Jesse’s tour had been going pretty well until the Taliban, tipped off by the friggin' imam, tried to crash one of his shows. But that’s another story….) By an even more amazing coincidence, “Deb” and “Ted” were also in L.A. Ostensibly, they were there to take their kids to Disneyland, but we found out later that they were actually stalking Leslie Nielson. (In a stranger twist, we discovered that they’d been arrested in Ottawa the previous summer for stalking Leslie’s brother, Erik.)

Over lunch at Spago, the two couples looked at their schedules for the month of August and quickly realized that getting together at Deb and Ted’s outhouse in Haines Junction was going to be next to impossible. That’s when Mark pulled some strings with Yukon’s own up-and-coming Hollywood actress, Amy Sloan, who’s starring in a new show called Big Shots for ABC this fall. With her help, the cast and crew of Smells Like Yukon segment nine managed to sneak onto the show’s set, which had been temporarily outfitted with an amazing replica of the Haines Junction outhouse and surrounding yard. (The photo on the segment guide page was actually taken on this set.) The recording session flew by, thanks in no small part to the uncredited direction of James Burrows, who showed up unannounced. Before we knew it, we were all partying our asses off with Lindsay Lohan at some club downtown.

If you think this story couldn’t get any more fantastic, you’re dead wrong. The real highlight of the trip was still to come. After the recording session, Jesse and Mark, thanks to the assistance of Leslie Nielson (long story there), got Deb and Ted out of jail, then flew the source tapes up to George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch outside of San Fran. Upon arrival, George personally ensured that the top special effects people from his company Industrial Light & Magic were charged with tuning up the crucial construction sequence in “Designer Guise.” Talk about a gracious guy…. Before leaving, George gave Mark a complete set of action figures from the original Star Wars—a replacement for the set that Mark tragically lost somewhere at his family’s Tagish Lake cabin circa 1979. Sadly, George didn’t have an empty Crown Royal sack to house them all.

Other than these few minor deviations, everything about the production of “Designer Guise” was pretty standard and hardly worth writing about.

(Posted October 2007)