An interview with Vape Kids Cool Zone: The Lost Episode artists Excess Materials & Vape Kid Jr.
Vape Kids Cool Zone: The Lost Episode runs July 3-12, 2025 at The Brick Theater
Where did the idea for Cool Zone come from?
Vape: I’m a trans woman but I’m fascinated by my boyhood. The boys I grew up with had big dreams. They wanted to draw cartoons or play ball. So why’d they all join the military and become cops? I still see those guys when I visit home. And I ask myself: who ate their dreams?
That question collided with my fascination for old children’s media like RoboCop (1988), GI Joe, and PeeWee’s Playhouse. The natural result of that equation is this big horrific puppet musical.
Excess: Sir and I had known Vape Kid for a while and were in alternative drag pageant Mx. Nobody that same year. We had been producing long form drag shows with heavy narrative and knew we wanted to write a musical. When we saw Vape Kid’s Mx. Nobody finale number we were so moved by the storytelling, humor, and message that when Exponential Festival applications came up we pitched her on creating a musical expanding on that act. She said it had been her dream to make a long form version of the show, and our collaboration was born.
What’s something people wouldn’t expect with the show?
E: The lore goes SO deep. There’s a sci fi justification for everything, there are secret documents, every character has a much deeper backstory than is ever revealed in the show. There’s just not space in an hour to show the underground CIA mutant laboratory where Courtney was raised, or the 9 episodes of the fictional TV show Cool Zone hosted by Courtney’s predecessor Sonny.
V: Most surprising thing in the show? Probably all the gunfire.
How has the show changed since the last run?
V: More songs! More Puppets! Same lovable hog boy!
What do you hope to achieve with the show?
E: The show wants to denormalize, and expose the inherent violence and contradictions built into our political structures and media. It actually takes a lot of work to get people to keep living life normally in the face of police violence, global war, and fascism, but we get so used to it that we just keep going. What if we stopped acting like the police state is “just how it is”? Also, we hope to bring the much needed curative power of laughter about topics that are painful and uncomfortable.
What parts of the process surprised you?
V: I watched 15 hours of old children’s TV shows and toy commercials as research. I found a restoration of the intro the 1987 GI Joe movie. A chorus sings “Go Joe! A real American hero” over a montage of the GI Joe Conquest X-30 fighter jets (available in stores circa 1986) dropping bombs on enemy ships attempting to destroy the Statue of Liberty.
And I’m thinking to myself. How am I supposed to satirize this?
E: Developing character voices has been fun and surreal. They need to be so unique. I sing for and voice several characters (S, Officer Opportunity, and the singing voices of Rooster and Courtney) and I’ve had to figure out how to have their vocal characteristics tell the story of who they are and make them a distinct being.
What artists and media have influenced you in this show?
V: Paul Verhoven is a big influence. He has a way of co-opting the fascists media tools to satirize them from an angle that a lot of media fails at. Starship Troopers is the Dawsons Creek of a fascist society. Vape Kids Cool Zone is the Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood of a Fascist Society.
E: Dr. Strangelove, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney, The Lazlo Letters, Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Brave Little Toaster, Wonder Shozen.
Weird production fact?
V: I needed to create security camera footage of a “Mutant” puppet escaping The Facility. I snuck into my workplace at night to film. I wore a head-to-toe pink morph suit so that I could puppeteer the “Mutant” and edit myself out later.
I was terrified I’d be seen. How would I explain that? I’d never be able to look my boss in the eye again.
