Found Footage Festival’s Summer Spectacular

The Found Footage Festival is a celebration of the videos that time forgot, dredged up in dusty thrift stores and estate sales throughout North America. Childhood friends Joe Pickett (The Onion) and Nick Prueher (Late Show) take audiences on a guided tour of their latest and greatest VHS finds, providing commentary and where-are-they-now updates on the people in these videotaped obscurities in their live tour and their weekly YouTube show, VCR Party Live!

Pickett and Prueher began collecting found videotapes in 1991 after stumbling across a training video entitled, “Inside and Outside Custodial Duties,” at a McDonaldʼs in their home state of Wisconsin. Since then, they have compiled the worldʼs largest collection of strange, outrageous and profoundly stupid videos.

The Found Footage Festival live show debuted in New York City in 2004 and has gone on to sell out hundreds of live shows each year across the U.S., Canada and the UK, including the Just For Laughs Festival, Edinburgh Fringe and Bonnaroo. It has been featured on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and National Public Radio and has been named a criticsʼ pick in The Guardian and The New York Times.

New episodes of VCR Party Live! premiere every Tuesday night at 9pm ET on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch and feature dozens of newly discovered VHS clips, plus special guests like Kyle Mooney, Jon Glaser, Jo Firestone, and David Cross, and regular segments like “This Week In Flying Windows” and “IMGs.” Regular viewers of the show call themselves “Melindas,” after a found VHS clip of Nick Nolte walking into a doctorʼs office and saying, “Well, hello, Melinda!” Watch the origin story of Melinda here, and join the Patreon for exclusive bonus episodes each week. Deep cuts and full VHS finds, as well as the entire Found Footage Festival DVD output, is available on the FFFʼs streaming service, Rewind-o.

Pickett and Prueher are also the masterminds behind the Kenny “K-Strass” Strasser, Chef Keith, and Chop & Steelepranks that hit local morning TV news shows across and have since racked up millions of hits on YouTube. One appearance as the strongman duo Chop & Steele resulted in a federal lawsuit that Fast Company magazine called “the dumbest First Amendment battle” of the year. A documentary about Pickett and Prueher and their misadventures on local news and on the road, Chop & Steele, most recently hit theaters and streaming platforms in 2023.