Kevin Pereira: Afternoon Delight

By Amanda Brumfield
Pop- Rock Candy Mountain


Kevin Pereira is the co-host of the popular Attack of the Show on the G4 network. He is also a musician, producer, writer and a veritable Shaft of the online/tech world.

From his Attack of the Show bio:

“Kevin Pereira started his his first two-node 14.4 “all gaming” bulletin board system at the ripe old age of seven, and has remained closely connected to the gaming scene ever since. At the age of fourteen he launched a gaming, music and internet-culture related internet radio show, which brought in an excess of 600,000 unique hits and streamed out over 30 gigs of RealAudio goodness weekly. “Pointless Audio” eventually evolved into “Pointless TV” when Kevin “Captain Immy” Pereira began creating short films for his high school video productions class. One of Kevin’s projects, featured on his gaming-related comedy site “lickmysweaty.com”, earned three California Media Festival awards and helped him obtain a full grant to the Academy of Arts College in San Francisco where he studied film and television production for a whole three-and-a-half months. It was then, after working at an ISP as a network administrator for five years and at a county-wide government television network, that he decided to pursue a career at G4. Also, he smells like salt. We swear.”

Pereira is also a master of improvisation, and if you watch Attack of the Show you know that his antics often lead to some of the most genius and hysterically funny moments on television. A few days before our interview Kevin Pereira did this:

Pop- Rock Candy Mountain spoke with Pereira about blunt force head trauma, Attack of the Show, and the good old days of the Internet.

Pop- Rock Candy Mountain (PRCM) What first sparked your interested in computers and technology?

Kevin Pierera: (KP) Well, I had zero athletic ability and pretty much zero on the social skills scale as well. So between the two it was like, read books and be a shut- in or go to the computer lab. I was actually very lucky and fortunate as a kid, i was able to get on a Pacific-Bell network back in the day called The Knowledge Network. It was a precursor to the internet- there were all of the scholars on it. I remember being in the fourth grade we got a computer at our school and I asked a teacher if I could I just plug away at it and by the end of the day I had us online and chatting with physicists. We learned what smileys were and this one guy was actually compiling one of the first smileys dictionaries.

It was such a weird moment to get involved with computers and the internet- at such a young age. I was so fortunate to be exposed to such a group of really high-brow intellectuals- very cool conversational people throughout the world. I gravitated right towards it and also it’s what led me to make all the dick jokes I do on Attack of the Show.

That’s what led me to it. I’m a big fan of trial and error but if do that with sports you can break your face. At least with the computer you can break a website but it’s ok, you can fix it.

PRCM: I think with the internet if you are a shy person it’s a great way to meet people…

KP: Oh absolutely. You can amplify any element of your personality without any sort of fear. Now obviously, we’re seeing what that has become on the internet but I think back in the day it was a really beautiful thing because there was a barrier of entry to get on the internet and into certain communities.

PRCM: So did you go through BASIC- 20 goto 10 and all that?

KP: Oh yeah and I made a bunch of nerdy games. I actually saw Laser Cats on Saturday Night Live the other night, and that was a game that I built in the 7th grade where you control a little cat that shoots lasers out of its eyes. My childhood and teenage years were a lot of tinkering with computers and playing with games and trying to make them. When I was 12 I started this sort of “Mom and Pop” internet service in northern California. I was the network administrator, so I’d make sure all of the email servers were up and running, we were competing with AOL. It’s funny looking back on it, here I was 12 years old responsible for a company’s network administration. On one hand it’s amazing and on the other it is just sad and bone chillingly scary that I was responsible for keeping so many people online. I got the job before I met the guy who was starting up the company, he asked if I knew anything about network administration, so I lied and said, “Yeah. I know all about it.”. Then I met him at a local pizzeria about a week before he launched his business, he had no idea I was 12. It turned out to be a beautiful thing.

PRCM: Working on Attack of the Show looks like so much fun. Regarding the “McHammer” incident, you seemed protective of Olivia (Munn) when you saw that she was maybe feeling a bit uncomfortable, before she realized what she’d said. You sort of stopped laughing and went back to your lines until she created an opening for you to say, “McHammer?!?”.

KP: That’s one thing that Olivia and I have refined over the past two years and the one thing that makes it work the most is that level of comfort. We have to be able to throw jabs at each other, we have to be able to spar like that brother and sister combo, but at the same time we both know precisely where the line is. There are those necessary moments of tension, but there’s always that relief when we know the other person isn’t going to step over that line.

PRCM: In other words, you’re not going to really embarrass or hurt each other?

KP: Right. I would never want to hurt her and I know she would never want to hurt me. Not only is that good personally but it’s good for the show. We really just want to build each other up on a daily basis. I mean, I try to get under her skin as nicely as I possibly can. In the “McHammer” moment, there was nothing I could do at first but walk off camera and laugh a bit, then I came back and went on. When she started asking questions I knew she was opening a door and inviting that interaction to happen, for me to call her out on the McHammer flub, which turned out to be one of the greatest moments on the show.

PRCM: It must be so much fun for you to get to preview all of the new gadgets and technology for the show.

KP: I love it. I’m such a technophile, I’m an electronic elitist, and I love that I can come in one day and there might be a box sitting on my desk that’s a brand new laptop or an MP3 player that no one is going to see for a while. We get to put it through it’s paces. That’s always a joy to me.

The real joy of the show is that it’s live. So I get to come in every day and I’m like, “Well, what are we doing today? Oh you want me in a cat suit clawing at a giant roll of toliet paper? Fantastic.”. Today we came in and we did a parody of “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads, so I came in to work, sent some emails, helped write a few segments and then they threw me in a suit and we were in front of a green screen doing a Talking Heads parody video. I never know on a daily basis what we’re getting into.

Basically I’m just a giant nerd that fell into the most fortunate position. I’m always painfully but blissfully aware of that.

PRCM: What else are you up to?

KP: Well mainly music, I’m always trying to write music. I’ve played drums since I was in the 6th grade and I also love keyboards. Just recently I’ve decided to exploit Attack of the Show to check off all of my personal goals and somehow I convinced the show to get me on stage with the rock band Coheed and Cambria. I pitched this idea back in January and then all of a sudden in early March I’m on stage at the Jimmy Kimmel studios with the band, playing the drums.

That’s just another anecdote about what the show allows us to do. Olivia and I are actually going dogfighting in planes in a couple of weeks. Like, we’ll actually be in control of the planes. So look for that on Headline News- that fiery wreck. No, no it’ll be fun!

Kevin Pereira on MySpace.

Kevin Pereira.com

Attack of the Show