Maria Ferrari is a staff writer on "The Bill Engvall Show." She is a graduate of Northwestern University.

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Episode 210 – PromZilla

So this is it… the last of the new Bill Engvall shows for the summer. And, as I mentioned, it’s one of my favorites. I remember this story as coming together quickly and easily, which is often a sign a story’s working really well. It is also sometimes a sign that the season is almost over and a certain last-day-of-school attitude has taken over the workplace, but that wasn’t the case here. The production week of this episode we did some of our finest work.

One place we did not do our finest work, however, was in our research for the “Diet Cola and Nameless Mints explosion” for this episode. It just didn’t go well, despite our giving it the better part of an afternoon in the studio parking lot. Here is a stunt that has been mastered by twelve-year-olds across America and basically raised to an art form on YouTube, and our writing staff pretty much sucked at it collectively. We discovered a lot of ways to fail… leaving the mint wrappers on, using the fruity Nameless Mints instead of the minty ones, trying to re-use spent soda, a stubborn and unreasonable hope that non-diet soda would work just as well, and – I’m just going to say it – a lack of boldness on the part of the people dropping the Nameless Mints into the soda. It was really disappointing. So even though through this season Trent has had a lot of moments where he seemed sort of dim, by writing the story where Trent invents the Skateboard Rocket we are pretty much admitting he’s smarter than all of us.

And on this note, we maybe owe Crafts Services an apology. Yes, tireless Crafts Services department, we are the ones who took all the Diet Cola this week, the name brand of which I am forced to omit but it does rhyme with ‘Boak,’ and also we stole a bunch of Regular Boak because a lot of us were convinced it would work just as well for our ‘explosion’ purposes, even though a review of the literature available online clearly suggests otherwise. We also took all of the salt water taffy, although that was not for research.

So that’s it! Thanks for watching… and be sure to look for us in December. We’ll have two brand-new episodes, and pretty spectacular ones at that. The kind of episodes where you laugh, you cry, and you appreciate all the extra steps production takes to make sure no one is injured by live animals on the set. Oh, we could tell you some stories.