IRTE's Jamie Maloney

With our first show of the season approaching, I thought it'd be great to get to know some of the cast of "The Groovy Gang Adventures" through the lens of cartoons, adventures, and groovy gang-iness.

Today, let's hear from Jamie Maloney who's going to play Peter Alan Wilcox.

Did you watch cartoons like Scooby-Doo or Josie and the Pussycats when you were young?

I watched a lot of Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space. I had a big crush on Melody when I was 5 years old. At some point in the 90's the Cartoon Network had a marathon of J & the PC's and I taped all of it. I still have that tape. I often watched Scooby Doo at a friend's house before school and would argue Scooby Doo vs J& the PC's. I took Josie's side but in retrospect I see that Scooby was the original and the best.

What were your favorites? Why?

I always liked the episodes that had guest stars. Especially when they starred real life people like Don Knots or Abbott and Costello. I wondered how they managed to make the transition to the cartoon world, and looked for discrepancies between their animated and real life selves. Phyllis Diller looked much younger as a cartoon than as a living person. I saw the Harlem Globetrotters on Scooby Doo before I saw them in real life and was disappointed by them in real life.

Tell me a little about the character you're playing in "The Groovy Gang Adventures". What inspired you to create him or her?

I'm playing Peter Alan Wilcox. He's approaching 110 years old and is inadvertently responsible for every disaster and tragedy that occurred during the 20th century. He's an unintentional super villain long past his prime. I came up with him for a show I did a few years ago called "Match Wits". He came from a few disparate sources including a character voice I did for an even earlier project and my love of history.

Peter Alan Wilcox in his black ops days.

Did you belong to a groovy gang when you were a kid?

I was kept pretty sheltered and isolated for most of my childhood so the only gangs I was in were the ones made up of my Star Wars and GI Joe figures and the occasional reluctant family pet.

Can you tell me one a memorable adventure you had when you were young?

One summer at sleep away camp I snuck off the camp grounds with a bunkmate to go to a candy store. We had to walk through the woods, past a graveyard and across a road, the whole time not sure if we were going the right way and trying not to be spotted by anyone. We dove into roadside ditches and patches of poison ivy (at least I dove into the poison ivy) whenever cars drove by. We got away with it and should have left it at that but we got greedy and went again. We had our cover story all figured out. We made it to the store and on the way back we were inevitably caught. I barely got a syllable of our story out before my dumb ass friend went and told the truth. We spent the rest of the day sitting on the Field House porch while this asshole counselor that everyone hated sat in front of us eating all of our candy while we watched.

That's an "extreme interrogation" technique used by the CIA today. No doubt Peter Alan Wilcox would make that camp counselor, and his snitch bunkmate, pay.

Thanks so much Jamie for sharing some great memories with us.

The Groovy Gang Adventures opens on April 6, 2013! For further details, visit the IRTE website!