Spammers beware, you may have met your match!
For those that don’t know who Ted L. Nancy is, he was basically the internet troll before we had a legitimate run of internet trolls. Crazy thing is, Ted would troll even WITHOUT the internet.
Ted Nancy aka comedian Barry Marder has been for YEARS writing ridiculous letters to companies under a surname usually complaining about something related to a product or a service. For example in one of Ted’s first books he had written a letter to the Lost and Found Department of a hotel looking for his missing tooth. He would then take the usually written responses from those letters and publish them in books that would have some sort of a ‘Foreword written by Jerry Seinfeld’.
Years later, trolling would become a regular thing in both social networking and with commenting on blogs, but Ted sought to use his trolling techniques in a whole different light…emailing. Yep, ever get spam mail from Nigerian Princes looking for cash to save his cousin or some crazy shit like that? Welp, Ted does too, and for years he has been writing back and forth with these spam accounts until eventually they’d give up but along the way would get some rather humorous responses all of which would be a topic of a recent article/interview over on Yahoo. However it looks as though simply publishing these emails for a new book wouldn’t be enough so Ted is looking to try another medium altogether.
According the article, we could be seeing a Ted Nancy animated web series with potential voices like Jerry Seinfeld on board as well as Alan Marder being tapped to animate. The series would go for a 10 episode run that chronicles the email exchanges between Ted and whomever the crazy morons are that setup these email campaigns and of course what the end result of those exchanges would be.
The idea of the series sounds brilliant, but right now I would probably peg it as being in development with no firm start date. Guys like Rob Delaney have made a career out of trolling big corporations and celebrities on Twitter and I usually enjoy the hell out of those so this could be similar and maybe even better being that the exchanges are being animated.