Their Brilliant Mockumentary: "Dungeons and Dragons" Meets "Waiting for Guffman"

Their Brilliant Mockumentary: “Dungeons and Dragons” Meets “Waiting for Guffman”

A bunch of Penn undergrads including some of the talented actors from Penn’s improv group Without a Net as well as some Drexel improv group students partnered together to create Wizards of West Philly, a mockumentary that can be best described as Dungeons and Dragons meets the TV stylings of “The Office” and/or the film Waiting for Guffman.

Although instead of Dungeons and Dragons, this very well done short is about the followers of another (apparently) popular game called “Magic”. Producer Dave Farber (C’11) describes the game to me as “a newer generation thing, though there are adults (some as old as 40 we found) who play the game.”

Per Wikipdeia, Magic can be described as

“Magic: The Gathering is a collectible card game created by a UPenn Mathematics Graduate Student named Richard Garfield and introduced in 1993. It is loosely based on the game Dungeons and Dragons, where each player is a wizard who utilizes the magical spells, items, and fantastic creatures depicted on individual Magic cards to defeat their opponents. The game is intended for a younger audience, but has a large following among young (and not so young) adults. There are Magic grand prixs and tournaments in the U.S. much akin to Poker tournaments where players compete for cash prizes. In 2006, over $3 million was doled out in Magic tournaments across the U.S.

Watch the video above…it really is well produced! And is it me or does Anthony Levy (C’11) remind you of Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader?

Penn actors:
Anthony Levy (C’11), Molly Mitchell (C’11), Joe Lawless (C’12), Lucy Wolf (C’12),

Drexel’s actors:
Jake Beckerman – Drexel ’09, Luke Giordano – Drexel ’09

The crew that worked on it were from Prof. Ellen Reynolds Video 1 class:
Dave Farber (C’09), Tom Fang (W’10), Aliza Fischer (C’09), Jason Rasmussen (W’12), Kirstin Snyder (W’12)