Exercise videos starring Angela Lansbury and a bearded hippie named Zar. Overly excited sponge-painting tutorials. A call-in pet advice video where the animals can’t stop mauling one another.

For most people, this stuff would seem weird. But for Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett … well, it’s still weird. But they love it, and for over a decade, they’ve been gathering and curating these VHS kings of kookiness ­– whether through digging around in thrift stores or taking on crummy jobs for some of that goofy training-video gold – for their touring Found Footage Festival.

"We genuinely love this footage and the people behind it," Prueher said. "It’s just so much more interesting than what’s on television right now. I love all of the imperfections and the weirdness in these videos. Certainly, we’ve had to work to find them, so we feel an attachment toward them."

This year’s Milwaukee edition lands at the Turner Hall Ballroom just before Thanksgiving on Wednesday, Nov. 25. Before the guys serve up their cornucopia of ’80s and ’90s craziness, however, OnMilwaukee got a chance to chat with Prueher about honoring weirdness, his favorite videos and an embarrassing one of his very own that we may or may not ever get to see. 

OnMilwaukee: This year’s edition is a "Salute to Weirdos." Why this year, in particular, does that theme fit better than ever before?

Nick Prueher: This is the 11th anniversary of the show, so we were kind of taking stock of what we had and thinking on a broader scale. Like, what do a lot of the videos we find have in common? And we realized that, whether it’s somebody behind the camera or in front of it, they all involve some sort of huge weirdo. Where would we be without the weirdo, the kind of unsung hero of what we do? So we thought, for Thanksgiving, it would be fun to give thanks to the weirdos this time around.

OnMilwaukee: Do you ever get concerned about balancing that line between showing these funny, weird, old videos and potentially mocking these people?

Prueher: I think there would be (a concern) if we were mean-spirited about it, but we genuinely love this footage and the people behind it. It’s just so much more interesting than what’s on television right now. I love all of the imperfections and the weirdness in these videos. Certainly, we’ve had to work to find them, so we feel an attachment toward them.

So I don’t think we’re ever mocking them. I think we’re having fun, but we’ve met a lot of the people in the videos, and they always love it. They are celebrities for the time that they’re at the show. And I think there’s been enough time and distance where people can laugh at this stuff and not take it too seriously.

OnMilwaukee: Are you worried you’ll have to up the ante with the Found Footage Festival like shows like "Tosh.0" and even "America’s Funniest Home Videos" at some point?

Prueher: Yeah, of course, but that’s more of a self-imposed pressure to want to top yourself. One of the ways we’ve gone further is, now that we know there’s an audience for what we’re doing, we’ll take an extra step. If we’re fascinated by a guy in a video and want to track him down, instead of just looking online and being like, "Well, no sign of him," we’ll hire a private detective. So we actually did that, and we’re going to play an interview with a guy that we tracked down using a detective in Texas. We just go a lot further than we would have 11 years ago.

OnMilwaukee: Do you have a particular favorite new video for this year’s festival?

Prueher: One thing I’m really excited about is a video we’ve played small snippets of before called "Petpourri." It’s a pet advice call-in show from Long Island, New York that we found a few episodes of, hosted by this pet store owner who would take a bunch of animals from the store, put them on a countertop and take viewer calls. And the funny part is that these animals should not be on a countertop together. There’s an iguana and a kitten, and it’s just chaos; they’re biting each other and falling off the table and the guy is just completely oblivious.

We actually found him – he still owns this pet store on Long Island – and we got three years of footage of this show. So we got even more insane highlights from this show that we’re going to debut. Plus, we interviewed the guy.

OnMilwaukee: Do you have any personal home videos that you could put into the Found Footage Festival?

Prueher: There’s one. I mean, first of all, we can dish it out, but we can’t take it. We’d much rather play someone else’s videos than our own.

But yeah, there’s a video I made in 1988 when I was in seventh grade where I convinced my sister – at either Disney World or Busch Gardens or something – to do one of those Make Your Own Music Video things, where you did a karaoke version of a song and then made a video for it. I convinced my parents to pony up the $30 for it, and my sister’s name is Jessica, so we did DJ Jazzy Jess and Fresh Nick.

We did "Parents Just Don’t Understand," and first of all, my sister’s voice was deeper than mine. She’s two years younger than me, but my voice hadn’t changed yet, so that’s embarrassing. I’m about 30 pounds heavier than any seventh grader should be and I was not of the "less is more" comedy club at the time, so I just grabbed every wacky prop they had and used it.

I think more disturbingly in retrospect, I realized that that song is about him picking up a girl, you know, in his dad’s Porsche … and my sister’s playing the girl. I was, like, wait a minute, there’s something really wrong about that.

OnMilwaukee: Yeah, that’s unpleasant.

Prueher: It was so embarrassing, and once I went through puberty and realized how embarrassing it was, I hid it away. But Joe actually stole it one time and went down to the public access studio in our home town and played it at a time when all of my friends were watching. So I drove down to the studio and took the tape and smashed it with a hammer.

OnMilwaukee: Oh no!

Prueher: The tape is destroyed as far as I know. Joe keeps saying that an extra copy is out there somewhere, and I’m worried that I’ll be ambushed with it at the worst possible time. So there may be another copy out there somewhere – I don’t know – but we certainly have some VHS skeletons in our closet as well.