Submitted Photo
A YouTube screen grab of part of the Ohio State Marching Band’s performance last Saturday.
Wayne Allen
PDT Staff Writer
The Ohio State University (OSU) marching band is referred to as The Best Damn Band in the Land. According to some critics, their half time performance during the OSU-Nebraska football game last weekend reiterated that title.
The band performed a nine-minute tribute to video games that some have called the best half time show of all time.
Local members of the band Collin Poage and David Pettit said the band began training for the show a week and a half before the performance.
“It was an amazing experience,” Poage said. “With these kind of shows we usually only have about a week of rehearsals. Which consists of five days two hours a day. Since we had the Michigan State game that we were going to the week prior we got to work on on a couple of days the week before. So, we trained about a week and a half before the performance.”
Poage is a Junior Trombone player in the band.
“The bands practice field is in front of two of the tower dorms. It was amazing seeing peoples responses to it watching it from their dorms. We just knew it was going to be an amazing show both musically and visually,” Poage said.
Show included reenactments from Halo, Super Mario Brothers and other images from classic video games.
According to the Columbus Dispatch, “Entertainment Weekly called the show ‘transfixing in its awesomeness’; influential geek havens Reddit and Mashable touted the clip; an ESPN.com blogger commented, ‘Your move, Michigan’; and emails and calls from around the world continue to pour in.”
Since the performance the video has been viewed more than 4 million times.
“The original video that was posted of the performance has gone viral on three different continents. It makes me feel good to be a part of that,” Poage said. “It’s going to be amazing that 20 years from now I’m going to be reminiscing some of these guys who I’m marching with now, talking about this show.”
He said the goal of the band is to not to top the video game tribute show.
“That’s not what we are going for. We do a different show every week. The way or director John Waters put it, ‘we can’t really try and top this, all we have to do is go on with life and act as if it was just business,” Poage said.
Pettit is the assistant drum major for the OSU band for 2012.
He did not perform during the show but, was impressed on how it turned out.
“As the assistant drum major, when ever there is a second script Ohio (on the field) we do that. I always twirl during the post game and I’m on backup if something happens,” Pettit said. “It was an awesome performance. It’s awesome to get all of this attention. We work hard everyday. We always have great shows and everything came together for this one,” Pettit said.
He said the idea for the show was first proposed in the spring.
“This show has been brought up several times, it was decided this was the year to do it,” Pettit said. “The show was executed extremely well and it has had a great response.”
He said the band has already started practicing for the next show, that will be an apocalypse theme, that will be performed during the half time of the Purdue game Oct. 20.
Wayne Allen may be reached at 740-353-3101, ext. 208, or wallen@heartlandpublications.com.
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