Jon and Al Kaplan continue telling Prodigeek about their unique musical talents.  Click here to read part 1 of the interview with creators of Silence: The Musical and 24 Season 2 Musical.

Prodigeek: What can you tell me about the 24 Season 2 Musical? How did that come together?

Kaplans: Our mother kept bothering us to follow up Silence with this “the musical” or that “the musical” and we just couldn’t stand it anymore so we decided to adapt our favorite season of 24. We also liked the idea of doing a musical that was so weirdly specific and even more impossible to stage than Silence was.

Prodigeek: Haha, very true I’m sure

Kaplans: So we wouldn’t have to worry about other people taking it and staging it

Prodigeek: What musicals did your mother suggest?

Kaplans: Our mom would suggest literally anything she saw on cable. She even suggested a musical about her new husband. Which actually would have been funny but only to us.

Prodigeek: I think the 24 musical is funny, even though I prefer season 4 mostly due to my hatred of Kim Bauer and the killer cougar.

Kaplans: That Kim story is the reason we had to do season 2. And Kevin Dillon. As straight seasons, 4 and 5 were our favorite. 2 had more to offer musically.

Prodigeek: Yeah, Kim Bauer makes more sense in a musical world

Kaplans: The first two thirds of season 2 are fantastic. The Kim stuff provides the necessary comic relief. Then they ran out of ideas for 8 episodes, which is why there are no songs covering anything after “Three Countries in the Middle East”.

Prodigeek: Haha, right. So aside from musical spoofs, what do you do for money and lively hood?

Kaplans: Jon co-runs an online film music magazine (Film Score Monthly). Al sleeps in his bed and writes CD liner notes, and we both compose for pay on occasion. We’re doing the music for Code Monkeys on G4 now. Other random stuff as it comes up. We almost scored Starship Troopers 3 but we didn’t have a German passport.

Prodigeek: And what’s the passport for?

Kaplans: They told us the composer needed to be German. A certain percentage of the crew on the film had to be German in order for them to get some kind of budgetary discount. Either that or they just told us that to make us feel better when they were telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Prodigeek: Aw, that sucks.

Kaplans: That’s okay; we’ve found lots of cool ways to not get features to score.

Prodigeek: Haha. You guys do lots of the vocals for your music. Do you have performance backgrounds or another reason?

Kaplans: We don’t have performance backgrounds, but doing the performances (provided they’re not live) is half the fun for us. We like imitating our favorite characters and forcing them to sing. Especially people who would never ever sing and would probably have terrible voices like Jack Bauer.

Prodigeek: Do you have any new projects in the pipeline?

Kaplans: We’re going to take another five-year break from musicals. Right now, fans of Silence will no doubt want to check out our work on Just Pals, the 1920 silent film blockbuster we scored for Fox DVD. We are currently working on a follow-up, slated for December release, called Lucky Star. Truth is we have no idea when we’ll do another musical but we’ll at least be doing stand-alone songs in the meantime. We’ve always got songs in various stages of development. We’re working on a Schindler’s list song, among others

Prodigeek: Oh that’s gotta be good

Kaplans: It’s called “I Pardon You,” performed by Ralph Fiennes

Prodigeek: Haha, speaking of those stand alone songs, any plans to update Dumbledore’s “Hermione Song” now that we know he’s gay?

Kaplans: We’ve absolutely thought of that, just haven’t made the effort. We’re very lazy. In our song he’s just trying to convince us that he’s not gay. We think J.K. Rowling made him gay because she heard our song and got angry.

Prodigeek: I think that’s very logical.

Kaplans: That’s why there was no evidence in the actual books.

Prodigeek: I don’t know if I’d say no evidence…

Kaplans: We wouldn’t know, we’ve only read the first book, but we like all the movies, except for three of them.

Prodigeek: so which 2 did you like?

Kaplans: Jon likes 1 and 4; Al likes 1 and 3.

Prodigeek: Thank you so much for your time and please keep up the great work

Kaplans: Thanks a lot, we appreciate it.

You can download MP3s for all their music on Jon and Al’s website. Click here to read part 1. Come back later today for part 1 of my interview with Timothy Smith and Hunter Nolen, creators of the Star Wars Musical.