Re-airing of news parody hits to start 2026 with a laugh
- Ellie Ruel
- 6 hours ago
- 4 min read
New Year’s broadcast to feature historical 49th state humor from the Bluescast’s 30-year run
By Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
For fans of headline satire and a hot-off-the-presses look at Alaskan history quirks, a broadcast of the former 20th Century Bluescast news comedy group’s greatest hits is set to bring a humorous blast from the past to ring in the new year.
The Juneau-based Bluescast program formed in the late 1970s to have fun with the news. The original ensemble was mostly journalists, so phony newscasts satirizing everything from neoprene boots to tourism and the cultural rift between Alaska and the Lower 48 were a cornerstone of the program.
Skits and songs poked fun at budget decisions and niche but relevant to their time local stories, with mixed and theatrical acts performed at the Alaska Folk Fest and Perseverance Theatre. The Bluescast's final performance together was in 2012.
Headed by longtime KTOO program director Jeff Brown, the troupe's performances aired on local public radio stations for years. Through their run, about 25 different cast members were involved in the production, ranging from lobbyists and legislative aides to educators and reporters.
“It was a great way to let off a little steam on things we were covering,” said former member Ed Schoenfeld. “In the news when you're writing an article or doing a radio story, things will pop in your head which you might think are funny, but they're not appropriate for the story.”
Schoenfeld joined the group about a year after its 1979 inception and has worked in print and radio journalism across the state, including an 18-year stint at the Juneau Empire and 15 years at CoastAlaska. Now retired, he took on the project of organizing the scattered tape recordings of Bluescast performances.
“Somebody said, ‘Boy, wouldn't it be great to track down the Bluescast recordings and do something with them?’ And I thought, ‘Well, I should be able to do that. That wouldn't be such a big effort, and it would be fun,’” he said. “ So, I asked around other members of the Bluescast, I'm still in touch with, and the answer was, ‘Whoa, I don't know where that is,’ or, ‘Oh, I got rid of that when I moved,’ or ‘It's somewhere in my storage unit for my basement.’”
After the initial search came up empty, Schoenfeld set the project aside. But after clearing out some boxes and finding “maybe 15-20%” of the cassettes, he reached back out to members and recovered old Folk Fest recordings. This time, he wound up with 30 pieces of audio digitized by Mike Sikarias.
Choosing what went into the hour-long special proved harder than Schoenfeld expected.
“Once I started listening, I realized that no matter how much fun or humorous this material was, it was very topical,” he said. “A lot of it just didn't make any sense today because it referred to people and places and events and trends that were from the 1980s through the 20 teens.”
While the program notes “you won’t pick up on every reference, but you’ll probably get enough,” some of the skits included in the broadcast are still relevant to the culture. One example was the “Camp Limited Re-entry” performance, where Alaskans hopeful to leave the state go through specialized exposure training led by "drill sergeant” Jeff Brown that includes a “baptism of fire in mall awareness maneuvers.”
A two-part “Star Wars” themed parody of the salmon allocation battles of the 1990s titled "Salmon Wars” also made the cut. The skit features characters named Luke Saltwater, Princess Lutefisk, Hans Troller, Obi-One-Week-Opening and Darth Seiner representing the British Columbian and American fisheries management perspectives.
“They may not sound very funny right now, but when you listen to it, people will get it,” Schoenfeld said.
Producing those episodes makes up some of his favorite memories with the Bluescast, since the group was fuller than usual with performers and visual aids like kayaks and paddles used in combat by a spin-off of Hells Angels.
“People just loved it. When you do comedy, you can’t just have a funny idea and riff on it for five or 10 minutes; you have to have a joke every 10 or 20 seconds or at least every minute. That had a lot of that with the names that make fun of ‘Star Wars’ characters,” he said. “There were a few people who seemed to be at pretty much all of our shows who have very distinctive laughs, and I knew we had really struck a jackpot when I heard them laughing above everybody else, because they were kind of our biggest fans.”
According to Schoenfeld, the news parodies and riffs on state headlines (ranging from mariculture misunderstandings to long-winded nicknames for politicians) helped people process current events in a more lighthearted way.
“What I think political satire and what we did for the community was to help people laugh at things that were sometimes very upsetting and controversial,” he said. “Once people laugh, they get out of some of the negative feelings, the hostility, and then they can think better about what the solutions might be. So, rather than sitting around and griping, and thinking everything's going to get worse, you hear something funny, you laugh at it, you share the jokes with your friends, and you move on with what you need to do next.”
He submitted all the recordings to the Juneau-Douglas City Museum and the Alaska Music Archives in hopes of preserving the material.
“Somebody might want to hear it one of these days,” Schoenfeld said. “I just want to have it get out there, because it’s the sort of stuff I know people did before we did, and I just don't know, you can’t find it. Maybe this’ll inspire some other people.”
“The Way It Was: The Best of the Bluescast” will air at 3 and 7 p.m. on New Year’s Day on KTOO 104.3 and 91.7 FM. The audio is also available on Soundcloud.
• Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
