rob was visiting me in SF and the dot com krap was blowing up (probably around 2000). rob came into my office and saw what i was doing with a Mac G3 tower, a little DV camcorder and final cut pro, he flipped! he goes, "dude, i wanna do that!" so i told him to get a little DV cam and then a mac and suggested he videotape his antics with his friends down in roppongi or wherever he was (one example:rob dressed as ELVIS doing karaoke on the street singing REALLY freakin' loud with this outdoor battery powered annoyance machine).
i think he started doing that, like, 4 years (and over 150 tapes-each a full hour long) ago. back in the day, he'd send glitter and japanese sticker covered tapes back (FOLLOW ME LOOKING MY ASS was my fave sticker!) and his costume would evolve and he'd do sillier and stupider stuff. my roomate freakin' HATED it. me, this girl and my old college radio buddies LOVED it. so we told him what we wanted to see more of (girls) and less of (rob drunk) and the show got pretty slick. rob's "superman suit" evolved and he even stopped drinkin' until AFTER the camera was off (however, drunk rob pongi is kind of funny, just **a different kind of** funny).
me and all my homies would just be totally crackin' up as the tapes rolled in. but the bits were interspersed with boredom and our fair pongi needed me to unleash a can of whupass on the ol' boy so he could become a full-fledged video editor final cut pro NINJA. (i wrote a book and teach this stuff in a trade school, at apple and at pixar). he succeeded because he not only sucked my brain dry, he actually worked his ass off learning all the shortcuts and now owns his very own case of whupass cans.
to do this, he flew me out a ton of times to the big T (decimating the pongi fortune
) between 2000 and now. early on, i taught both he and Freedom (of TokyoDV) a krapload of final cut pro and they both just went OFF!! before long, rob was yelling at me because he could cut stuff faster then the sensei! 
BTW, did you know that rob has literally hundreds of bits that have never been seen on his site? do you know that he has like 5 half hour shows and an hour long rob pongi extravaganza called "Rob Pongi's Cherry Blossom Special"? i am looking forward to the day when rob UNLEASHES the full gnarlyness of what i call the "pongi national archives".
this year, we plan to make a DVD on par with the "monty python and the holy grail" nuttiness to it with lots of twists (great DVD if you don't have it).
all i can say is one thing:
i can't wait to do more happy hour stuff with Rob. after spending a year writing a book, i am ready to help Rob shoot new material and we are talking about shooting a DV Movie. Just need the right sugar daddy...and we know a few.
if any of you have an idea for a story, i'd love to hear it. a melange of "lost in translation" and "seven samurai" would be a heady mix.
i've got WAY more pongi stories and escapades rob and i have gotten into (ask me about hiroshima some day
). so stay tuned!
