Tartan Staffers Dress Up Plea for Toiletries

Three teachers used YouTube to get information to students about a recent toiletry drive at the school for the upcoming event. Guidance counselor Andy Bodurtha, employment/work coordinator Josh Mattison and math teacher Ted Strub appeared as Mizta McButterpants, G-Cubed and Johnny Turtles (inspired by the hit YouTube video “I Like Turtles”) respectively in the music video, which on Monday was up to 1,218 views. Their efforts helped bring in more than 4,000 items and beat North High School in a friendly competition. Because the students brought more than 1,200 items, Bodurtha, along with a group of staff members and administrators, dressed up in super hero gear for the students Monday, March 7. Oakdale Patch sat down last Thursday with Bodurtha, Mattison and Strub to learn more about their video work.

Oakdale Patch: What was it like making your YouTube debut?

Ted Strub: It was exhilarating.

 Andy Bodurtha: We’ve been working really hard to get up to that point. 

Josh Mattison: A little bit of background on that—Me and Bodurtha came from Maplewood Middle School and we were the same characters, and we would do different videos for the school like, promoting pride in your school and how to act in the hallways and stuff, and that wasn’t ever YouTube-based. So when we came here and did this video on YouTube, it started to get a little more global.

Strub: What have we got, Conan next week? Jimmy Kimmel and then George Lopez?

Oakdale Patch: How did you come up with your characters?

Bodurtha: Truth be told my brother-in-law called me Fatty McButterpants, and that had a negative connotation, so I wanted a positive connotation—so Mizta McButterpants, not Fatty. He was very proud when I told him that was my name.

Oakdale Patch: This was a pretty long video, how long did it take you to put it together?

Bodurtha: Three hours max, maybe four.

Strub: We wrote the lyrics in about an hour, 45 minutes to an hour to write the song.

Bodurtha: Two hours of editing, maybe five total hours.

Mattison: That’s what we kind of prided ourselves in at Maplewood. We called it guerrilla filming where one day we’d crank it out and we’d put it out there and it was raw and it was what it was.

Bodurtha: We still have a lot of outtakes we should put in, but that’ll be later.

Oakdale Patch: What made you want to do a video for this particular cause?

Bodurtha: The big thing we want this article to reflect is Project Family Connect. They asked us to do a toiletry drive and it was kind of last-minute, so we didn’t have a lot of time to get word out, and we brainstormed, “How can we get word out rather than hang posters up?” And we said, “How about YouTube, because maybe that will hit more kids?” Then we chose a video rather than putting posters up. Literally it was like a Wednesday and we did lyrics Thursday, we taped Friday and it was on.

Oakdale Patch: Did you show it in class?

Strub: I think almost every teacher showed it in class, from what I hear, and I think as soon as word got out, you could hear the kids mimicking the lyrics in the hallways. And they asked in my class every hour, probably because I was in it, they were saying “Can we watch it? Can we watch it?” It was a good way to get the word out.

Oakdale Patch: How did you do in the toiletry drive?

Bodurtha: We got 4,775 items, and counting. We actually might get more tomorrow from what I hear and hit 5,000. It was a classroom competition, and we’re also taking on North High School. A lot of classrooms came out of the woodwork and brought tons. Our biggest classroom brought 1,338 items. They dominated. … When talking to the teachers … they were a huge catalyst in coming up ... with exciting ideas besides pulling stuff out of their house.

Mattison: It sounds like they got donations for some of it.

Strub: I know a couple of the teachers and even some of the students went to local stores and said, this is what we’re doing, "can you give us a discount if we purchase so many of these items?” and some stores were offering discounts, some were just giving free, donating their own items for a good cause.

Oakdale Patch: How did the students react to seeing the video?

Mattison: It was pretty mixed. Some kids really liked it and some thought it was lame—thought they could do better.

Strub: I would say the majority of the class had a positive, fun outlook on it. They enjoyed it. They thought it was corny, but one of the best comments was the line that somebody put on there, “the teachers at Tartan aren’t just teachers, they’re like embarrassing parents.” I think that’s a good way to sum up how the kids felt about it. They were embarrassed for us, but yet they really enjoyed it.

Oakdale Patch: What about other teachers?

Bodurtha: I got a lot of different feedback, most of it positive like "goofball" or "idiot" or "funny job."

Strub: I think they were happy and pleased with what we did, because they know it’s for a good cause.

Oakdale Patch: Will there be another one of these videos in the future?

Mattison: I just got hired here, and we thought it would be really cool to do a guidance counselor work coordinating video. We’d been kicking that around, and it just so happened that the toiletry drive kind of gave us the right venue to do one.

Bodurtha: It’s definitely not the end of Johnny Turtles, Butterpants and G-Cubed. They’ll come back in some way.