Count/Counting: SCTV's Count Floyd

My last post, about the TV show The Great has, so far, turned out to be one of the least popular things that I’ve ever submitted to this blog, so it seems like a really, really good idea to follow that up with another TV related post. 

I’m not sure why The Theme Picker chose this theme, and frankly, I argued against it, but because I’m only a Theme Suggester and Backup Theme Picker, I lost this round. The first thing that popped into my head was to write about the SCTV character Count Floyd, memorably portrayed by Joe Flaherty. And when I read the Wikipedia article about the character, I was laughing out loud, which I think we can agree is unusual when reading Wikipedia, and that convinced me to follow this route, even it ends, like my last TV related post, with almost universal indifference. 

I’ve written about SCTV before, so I won’t repeat all of the background stuff about the show, but you are, of course, welcome to read that post before continuing.  And I'm still doing this after reading the article in Sunday's New York Times about the racism in the Second City organization.

One of the basic conceits about SCTV is that it is about a generally low budget TV network. There was a time, which I’m old enough to remember, when local TV stations ran shows featuring usually bad, low budget horror movies and/or cartoons, hosted by someone who might be vampire, a clown, an astronaut, or something else. Usually, to save money, these characters were portrayed by employees of the station. Here’s a Wikipedia article about the “horror host” tradition, and here’s the recent obituary for Bob March, who portrayed “Captain Satellite” in the Bay Area for decades. And here’s an interview with the late Frank Avruch, who was a staff announcer at a TV station in Boston before becoming probably the most widely seen Bozo the Clown. 

Count Floyd was created to host SCTV’s Monster Chiller Horror Theater, and was the alter ego of (fictional) SCTV newscaster Floyd Robertson, also played by Flaherty. Although Count Floyd was a vampire, his lack of commitment to the character often led to him howling like a werewolf. The main running joke in the sketches was that the movies tended to be awful, and often unrelated to the horror genre, forcing Count Floyd to struggle to make them seem scary, and often ending in him getting frustrated and breaking character. Count Floyd also tried to sell his supposedly young audience overpriced items, maybe hearkening to the time when Soupy Sales, a children’s show host in New York, on New Year’s Day, 1965, asked his viewers to send him “little green pieces of paper” from their parents’ wallets. 

In addition to the fact that Flaherty was hysterical, SCTV used these sketches to show bits of movie parodies, often badly executed “3D” films. such as Tip O’Neill’s 3-D House of Representatives, Dr. Tongue's 3D House Of Stewardesses, Dr. Tongue's House Of Cats, or Dr. Tongue's Evil House Of Pancakes. (Dr. Tongue was played by John Candy, and his sidekick, Bruno, was played by Eugene Levy, who has been nominated for an Emmy this year for Schitt's Creek).  And even when the movie failed to show up, Count Floyd simply made up a plot and described it. They also used the character in a “Siskel & Ebert” style review show called Scary Previews. There was even a Count Floyd album, featuring, among other songs, “Reggae Christmas Eve in Transylvania.” It was the only non-Bob & Doug McKenzie album related to SCTV. 

Like the vampire/werewolf that he was, Count Floyd didn’t die when SCTV went off the air. Rush used a Count Floyd video to introduce “The Weapon,” on tour in the early ‘80s (see the video above). And fellow SCTV alum Martin Short included new Count Floyd segments in his late 80s animated series, The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley. But that’s not all. There’s a funny Count Floyd video about how to make funny videos. A Count Floyd video about smoke detectors. And the character popped up elsewhere, mostly in Canada, promoting various things. 

Flaherty, who played Harold Weir in the great series Freaks & Geeks, wore a vampire costume in one episode, which you can see about 24 seconds into this compilation clip, and that had to be a callback to Count Floyd. 

As recently as 2014, Canadian band The Wet Secrets used Count Floyd in their video for “Nightlife,” although strangely, he looks a little like Grandpa Munster in some of the shots.

Holiday Horrors: The Twelve Days of Christmas

[purchase]

Other than “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer,” I can’t really think of a holiday song that I truly hate. There are some that are sappy, and others that are annoying. There are versions of holiday songs that I don’t like, and, especially over the past few years, I have heard some original holiday songs that grate, but who wants to write about those?

“The Twelve Days of Christmas,” though, is a generally painful song. First, there is the repetition. I understand that many old folk songs are repetitive, because they were designed to allow them to be sung and memorized before they were written down, or before most people could read. Maybe back when people had longer attention spans, this song was a hoot. But now it just goes, on and on. I’ve seen it compared to “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

Then, there are the gifts. Way more birds than anybody needs, before you get to troops of people, plus, of course, five gooooooooooooooold rings. And it annoys me that every year, some (probably junior) reporters are forced to report on the cost of the presents, as if they had some bearing on the economy. I’m guessing that it was harder back in the pre-Internet era, when, I assume, the cub reporter had to call, say, an employment agency, and ask how much it would cost to rent a bunch of milkmaids or pipers.

The song’s very ridiculousness makes it ripe for parody, and my favorite is the Bob & Doug McKenzie version, a cartoon of which is above. The McKenzies were characters created by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas on SCTV, a brilliant sketch comedy show from the late 1970’s-early 1980’s that never really got the kind of consistent scheduling that has allowed Saturday Night Live to run forever. A number of SCTV alumni later joined SNL, and/or went on to greater fame in movies and TV, but for me, the SCTV shows approached Monty Python in their inventiveness and lunacy.

SCTV was produced in Canada, and the McKenzie brothers were created in response to a requirement, or request, that the shows include Canadian content. So, these characters embodied pretty much every Canadian stereotype, and somehow, we in the USA got it. The popularity of these dim “hosers” led to a movie and a couple of albums, from which “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” comes. It is funny, sloppy and gently rude, and thus effectively demonstrates the McKenzie brothers’ charm. And they get bored part of the way through, just like me.

We’ve been encouraged to post multiple versions of the songs we choose, so here’s another parody, by Allen Sherman from the early 1960’s. Here, the recipient gets a series of cheap, tacky gifts, and exchanges them on the twelfth day. Not only is it a send up of the increasingly prevalent consumer culture of the time, one of the running gags is that Japanese electronics are inferior. Times have changed, I guess.

O Canada: Take Off

Bob & Doug McKenzie feat. Geddy Lee - Take Off

[purchase]

On the sketch comedy show SCTV, in the motion picture Strange Brew and across two albums, Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas (as brothers Bob and Doug McKenzie respectively) lovingly exploited every single Canadian stereotype you can think of. With great success too - the McKenzies became a big hit, proving that Canadians have a great sense of humor about themselves.

Take Off (which is barely even a song, just the brothers bickering and Geddy Lee from Rush popping up every now and then to sing the chorus) became a hit in 1982 and made it to #16 on the Billboard chart.

Hosehead!