Aluminum Siding

Aluminum Siding is the name of a television series written, directed, produced by and starring Tristan Lotz. It ran from April 2009 until February 2011. It is the predecessor to As The Orb Turns.

Premise
The show centered on the lives of Tristan's pets, Shadow (a black cat) and Spot (a hen) and their friends, Chrome Bumper and The Slash, in the quirky town of Wacovia, attending Wacovia High School. The show's humor was based around liberal usage of non-sequitur, absurdism, sureal humor, and farce. Paradoxically, however, Aluminum Siding also had a deeper, more artistic streak.

Shadow
Shadow Lotz is the defacto star of the show. He is a rather snarky black cat owned by Tristan. He attends Wacovia High School and has a job at Kilroy's. At times he is the voice of reason, while at other times he would rather simply have fun--"I don't care about conjufactin' verbs or usin' the passive voice! I wanna go to a beach party!" as he said in the episode "Basque-ing in the Glory". He speaks with a falsetto, roles his R's, drops the letter G off of "-ing", and pronounces "th" as "d" ("Dat ain't good..."). In the episode "Shtupid Time-Traveling Poonks!", he got in a Yugo that his science teacher converted into a time machine and used it to travel to 1991 so he could romance a calico cat named Casey Welsh.

Spot
Spot Lotz is Shadow's "sister"--Tristan's pet hen. She is a self-labeled

genius and always gets perfect grades in school, which is the most important thing to her. She will sometimes be the voice of reason, but at other times play a more antagonistic role; such as in "Yes We CAN", when she was convinced that Shadow's recycling drive was hopeless. However, she has had several episdoes that specifically starred her: "Babysitterama", "Don't Judge a Bookstore by its Cover", and "Spot and the Conundrum of Creation". She speaks with a swallowed falsetto.

Chrome Bumper
(See also, Chrome Bumper )



Chrome Bumper is Shadow's dimwitted best friend. He is a skateboarder, but is terrible at it and constantly crashing (this becomes a plot-point in "Life After After Life"). He also works at Kilroy's. He has a knack for getting on Herr Grausamkeit's nerves, and spends after afternoon in detention as a result (Grausamkeit referrs to him as a "shtupid time-vaisting poonk". He is generally acknowledged as an idiot, but actually has hidden depths, as shown in the episode "Life After After Life". Strange (read: paranormal/supernature/not realistically plausable) things have a tendency to happen to Chrome Bumper, such as getting sucked into another dimension.

The Slash
The Slash (last name Slash; first name The; middle name Freddy) is the fourth member of the Gang of Four. He wears all black, a ski mask, boots, sunglasses, gloves with blades jetting from the knuckles a la Wolverine, and a breastplate with various knives, a canopener, and a fork strapped to it. He has a pathological obsession with slashing tires (among other things...) and is a self-proclaimed hedonist.

Tristan
Tristan is the defacto parental figure of the show. He often offers guidence for Shadow and Spot, but can at times be just as baffled by the absurdity of goings-on in Wacovia as they are.

Herr Grausamkeit
Herr Grausamkeit seems to the Wacovia High's history teacher and vice principal simultaneously. He has a hair-trigger temper and will often scream at students, especially Chrome Bumper. However, despite his constant putting Chrome Bumper in detention, the episode "Chrome Bumper Gets Expelled" to genuinely love him and enjoy his presence. Despite his tendency to fly into a rage, he is ironically the only reasonable authority figure apart from Tristan.

Stan-the-Nervous-Driving-Instructor
Stan first appeared in the pilot episode, "Drive Me Crazy". However, he was apparently traumatized by the events of that episode, because the next time he appears (in "Chrome Bumper Gets Expelled") he is an emotional wreck who, after being briefly heckled by George Cabrini, runs out of the room in tears, telling them he would be in the bathroom "crying my eyes out". He tried a job as the school guidence counselor, and Clarence Roland was sent to see him, but Clarence ended up helping Stan instead. Stan could be thought of as the "anti-Herr Grausamkeit".

Mr. Beletz
Mr. Beletz is the somewhat world-weary Basque teacher of Wacovia High School. In "Basque-ing in the Glory", he decides to assign the students a project in which they must translate an entire fairy tale into Basque, or fail the class and have to spend another year with him. He often peppers his speech with Basque words, but for the most part, is one of the saner teachers.

Glenn Cabrini
Glenn is the school's resident bad-boy. His older brother, George, was shipped off to Finland at the end of "Chrome Bumper Gets Expelled". He has a vicious temper, is extremely bigotted, has misogynistic attitudes as to women, and is heavily implied to be insane (screaming into a dead cellphone, maniacal laughter over cheating on math homework, twitchy-eyed reaction to having his parents mentioned...)

Arnold Chapeau and Bruno
Arnold Chapeau is the president of the Coalition of Men Who Wear Hats Indoors (C.M.W.W.H.I.), and the town's local conartist. He is always coming up with some sort of money making scheme, the most notable of which is the C.M.W.W.H.I. Breakup Service, where young people could call him up, and give him the name of their boyfriend/girlfriend and he would go to their door and tell them that their lover had dumped them.

Bruno is Chapeau's Ukrainean servant slave he purportedly bought at an auction in Mexico. Bruno addresses Arnold as "'Master" and has a tendency to get things fatally wrong, costing Chapeau money, and will always say "I am sorry, Master."

Owen Chapman
Chapman is the British host of OBC World News at Whenever with Owen Chapman, and the show's resident talking head responsible with reporting the news. Despite the show's name being World News, he only ever seems to report the events of Wacovia, usually the actions of random high schoolers such as Shadow and Chrome Bumper in "The Battle of Evermore". In one respect, he could be considered the worst news reporter ever, because of the fact that he always editorializes on what is supposed to be a neutral news program--and his opinion is always an extremely cynical, dismissive one at that. For example, in the episode "Wacovia 5K Race", he said that he expected the race to look like the Village Idiot Race from Monty Python's Flying Circus, and then cut to interviews with various people who were planning on running the race; afterward, he remarked: "Well, the village idiots have spoken."

Distribution
Lotz distributed Aluminum Siding by putting the episodes on DVDs and giving them to his friends at school. Each DVD was called a Volume, and had between three and six episodes on it. There were eight volumes all together.

Music
Music was an important part of Aluminum Siding. The show's theme song was "The Monster's Loose" by Polaris. Each volume had a distinct flavor, which could be identified by the music used. Volume #1 and Shtupid Time-Vaisting Poonks!! used mainly indie and garage rock; Vertigo used indie and electro pop; Delta used a predominantly electronic soundtrack; Right of Passage's score was mostly 80s pop; Hot Crazy Summer used a lot of alt rock like the first two volumes; Fourever used psychedelic rock; and Colours used the music of Coldplay for its soundtrack.

The credits at the end of each episode would list the names of the songs used in the episode and the artists who performed them.

Comparison to As The Orb Turns
Aluminum Siding and As The Orb Turns both had basically the same premise: Life in Wacovia. However, As The Orb Turns is a much more "mature" series, in that the writing is vastly more sober, the stories are generally more serious, and the humor much less bombastic. Aluminum Siding, on the other hand, was decidely in-your-face and humorous in an almost obnoxious way; though volumes like Delta hint at a more serious tone that would come full circle in Turns.