Yahoo News No one gets out alive! Boy Meets World stars revisit the iconic slasher parody episode
With Pod Meets World, Boy Meets World fans get a seat at Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong, and Will Friedle's dinner table.
The trio, who portrayed Topanga Lawrence, Shawn Hunter, and Eric Matthews in the beloved 1993 sitcom, are revisiting every episode of the series for the first time since their child star days with the rewatch podcast, where they share behind-the-scenes stories, memories, and life lessons after seven seasons (plus one spin-off series) of wandering down this road that we call life.
"We have a tendency to talk about the podcast [as] feeling like one of our evening dinners that we have had a thousand times," Fishel tells EW. "When we get together, these are the things that come up for us, and now we're recording it and letting people listen in." It's been admittedly "bizarre" to revisit a younger version of yourself on screen, Strong says.
"I'm happy that I was very present and not self-conscious while I was on the show," he says. "But now I'm sort of like, 'Oh my God, what was I wearing? Why was I moving like that?' I can't help but be judgmental of myself, but overall, I'm impressed with the show. The show is good." As the actors look back, it felt fitting for EW to ask the trio to revisit one of the most quintessential episodes: "And Then There Was Shawn."
ABC Ben Savage, Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong, and Trina McGee in 'Boy Meets World'
In the season 5 episode, Shawn is reeling from Cory (Ben Savage) and Topanga's breakup, which came after Topanga discovered that her childhood love kissed ski resort employee Lauren (Linda Cardellini). What begins with classmate Kenny (Richard Lee Jackson) asking Topanga for a pencil evolves into a spat, prompting an exasperated Mr. Feeny (William Daniels) to give them all, including Angela (Trina McGee), detention.
Later joined by Eric (Friedle) and Jack (Matthew Lawrence), the gang find themselves locked in John Adams High with a masked killer on the loose. The slasher parody remains a fan favorite 25 years on thanks to its homages to Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, killer one-liners ("Virgins never die!" "I'll get as sick as you can get without actually dying"), and that meta cameo from Jennifer Love Hewitt, Friedle's girlfriend at the time.
Below, the Pod Meets World co-hosts revisit the iconic slasher parody episode for a mini oral history.
"And Then There Was Shawn," directed by Jeff McCracken, was written by horror film enthusiast Jeff Menell, who, before his turn as a producer and writer on Boy Meets World and the 2014 spin-off Girl Meets World, worked as a film critic for The Hollywood Reporter. The table read and rehearsal was unlike any other for the cast.
ABC Trina McGee, Ben Savage, Danielle Fishel, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Will Friedle, Matthew Lawrence, and Rider Strong in 'Boy Meets World'
STRONG: I remember thinking it was the most bonkers thing in the world. And we did a few episodes that kind of went crazy. We did crossover episodes with Sabrina [the Teenage Witch]. We did time travel-y sort of stuff, and I never really liked them. I didn't really like breaking those rules of the show. I was a stickler for that, but I remember loving this one from the get go. We just thought it was hysterical. I'm a huge fan of horror films. I was a fan of Scream and the revival of horror films that was going on at that moment. So I just remember loving it. It was Jeff Menell, who is going to be a guest on our show coming up. We'll hopefully talk to him about this. He was the one who wrote the original draft of this bizarre script.
FRIEDLE: I don't remember the table read at all. I remember shooting the episode. I remember how much fun we had doing the episode, but actually, the behind the scenes stuff for this week, I don't remember much. And it's strange because my girlfriend at the time was on the episode, Love Hewitt. I would think I would remember kind of the table reading stuff, but I don't. I have no recollection of this week other than the actual shooting, which, we just laughed for five days straight.
FISHEL: I remember rehearsal days feeling really fun because very rarely did we get scenes with all of us in one set. I remember specifically rehearsing the hallway scenes where we would have to run down a hallway, and then run this direction, and then run that direction. I very much remember those rehearsal days of all of us just kind of standing around and having this dialogue with Jeff McCracken, who was directing the episode, about how we wanted to do it. I remember feeling really relaxed, just really casual, no stress or pressure about the rehearsal, just a fun time together.
The episode featured the introduction of new characters, including Kenny, Jennifer Love Fefferman, and creepy janitor Freddie, played by a mysterious extra whose name unfortunately isn't featured in the credits despite his memorable turn.
ABC The uncredited creepy janitor in 'Boy Meets World'
FISHEL: Oh my gosh, when you type "creepy janitor Boy Meets World" [in search engines] what comes up is "portrayed by unknown."
FRIEDLE: Maybe he wasn't there at all.
STRONG: He was an extra. He wasn't technically a guest star because he has no lines.
FRIEDLE: We got to find him. We got to find him.
STRONG: He pointed, right? Wasn't that his thing? He'd point at us.
FRIEDLE: I mean, we must have spoken to the man.
FISHEL: I remember him getting notes from Jeff, like pushing the trashcan and when to stop, because remember he pushes the trashcan and then he stops and turns and looks in. If you were Creepy Janitor, please reach out to us at podmeetsworldshow@gmail.com.
FRIEDLE: [Lee Jackson] was great. He was so nice and so funny. He threw himself into it. That's one of the things I distinctly remember about this week, is us all looking at each other and going, "This guy's awesome. We really enjoy hanging out with this dude." Love and I had been dating for a while by that point. I think that was a year and a half or two years into our relationship. I know [co-creator] Michael Jacobs wanted to have somebody from the horror franchises. She had just done I Know What You Did Last Summer, so he asked me if I would ask her if she would be on the show. We were very close at the time, so she knew everybody on the cast, obviously, and everybody knew her well, so it seemed like a good fit.
Along with the horror film nods, the episode featured a meta Party of Five reference in a scene with star Love Hewitt and plenty of South Park references (so many South Park references!), which came courtesy of none other than South Park obsessive Friedle.
ABC Jennifer Love Hewitt in 'Boy Meets World'
STRONG: I know all the South Park references were probably because of Will, because Will used to obsess over South Park. It just felt like, "Oh, all bets are off this week. We're just going crazy," which was a blast. And it was, start to finish, the most fun we had on the set.
FRIEDLE: My first roommate out in L.A., he and I stayed friends for years, and he got his hands on a bootlegged copy of [South Park co-creators] Matt Stone and Trey Parker's The Spirit of Christmas. It was an old short that they made, which was Jesus fighting Santa Claus. I got my hands on that, and I remember running in and showing that to all of the writers, and to Rider and the actors. It was hysterically funny. And so after that, I just absorbed everything South Park. So I introduced South Park to the writers, who then took it from there and would throw in the references.
One of the most memorable South Park references is, of course, Eric's "Oh my God! They killed Kenny!" after his death by giant pencil. Infused within an episode that was genuinely terrifying at the time for sitcom standards were the kooky deaths of the John Adams High staff and students, including death by scissors (RIP, Feeny), and death by books (RIP, Eric and Feffy).
STRONG: If you had told us that kids would find this episode scary, we probably would've laughed. That never occurred to us. Obviously Jeff McCracken, who was directing the episode, was trying to do horror movie jokes, but we were just having so much fun, so we didn't find any of it scary. It was just all jokey to us.
FRIEDLE: But again, when you watch it and got the song playing in the background — that creepy song they recorded that's like, "And now you're going to die…" I mean, imagine being 8 or 9 or 10 years old. That would freak you out.
STRONG: You're tuning in for a comedy show and then it suddenly gets crazy like that.
FISHEL: The pencil death is one of perhaps one of my favorite moments on any show, ever, and definitely one of my favorite lines on any show ever is, "We'll always remember he was that tall."
FRIEDLE: I just remember the laughing. That's what I remember most about this week, is just constant laughing. It was one of the first times that I can remember where we were going out of our way to try to break each other, which was not a thing that we normally did. I mean, even though we were young, and occasionally we would do it, we were professional and doing what we had to do. But there were times we'd see somebody snicker and so we'd do it twice as hard the next time. We were actively trying to make each other laugh and that was rare for us. But it made the week a ton of fun.
STRONG: Directorially, this episode was a disaster for Jeff. He was so unhappy with us. It's very hard to do single camera jokes and effects with a multi-camera crew. He clearly was trying to do specific shots and specific homages and weird little tilts, and I think it was just a nightmare. We did not help by constantly making each other laugh and not taking the job seriously. I think it was a really tough episode for Jeff.
After much of the core group meet their deadly fates, Cory, Topanga, and Shawn come face to face with the mysterious masked killer in the library. The killer is revealed to be, well... Shawn, an unveiling admittedly much too cheesy for the cast.
ABC Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong, and Ben Savage in 'Boy Meets World'
FISHEL: I'm going to really put myself out there and people are going to absolutely hate me: I thought it was really cheesy.
FRIEDLE: It was. It was cheesy.
FISHEL: I remember being like, "What?" Of course, it's a show that's grounded in reality. And we were doing a slasher style episode of it, so of course it was going to have to somehow have an answer that was grounded in reality, but I remember being like, "Would Shawn care that much?" I think that was kind of what I thought.
STRONG: I probably felt the same way. It was probably just like, "Oh, this is a nice way to tie it into the storyline of Boy Meets World." But the reality is, we just wanted to be ridiculous and make a horror film comedy episode.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
New episodes of Pod Meets World drop weekly.
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