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.

The Accordion: Cabbage Rolls And Coffee

[purchase The Last Polka on VHS]

I’m old enough to remember seeing The Lawrence Welk Show on TV, featuring polka music which, of course, highlighted the accordion. Not that I ever watched it—but in those days, to change the channel, you had to turn a dial and pass through each channel, so sometimes I would see a snippet of the show which looked like it was from another time. It just seemed so incongruous that during the rock era, there was a show featuring polka music, on television, and that there were people who actually watched it. The concept just was, to my mind, farcical.

So, when Eugene Levy and John Candy at SCTV created the Shmenge Brothers, a pair of “Leutonian” musicians, one of whom (Stan) played the accordion, I got the joke.

I’m also old enough to remember when Saturday Night Live was a subversive, counterculture program that quickly became mainstream entertainment. And then discovering the lower budget, more anarchic SCTV, although it never seemed to be on at any regular time. I think that, at least initially, the fact that SCTV flew under the radar allowed it the freedom to display a more subtle and weird comedic sensibility than SNL. The premise of the show—that it all related to a fictional TV station/network, also gave the show a narrow focus, yet allowed it the freedom to do wide ranging parodies. And it is hard to argue that the SCTV cast members haven’t had incredible influence on comedy—we’re talking John Candy, Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Andrea Martin, Harold Ramis, Dave Thomas, Robin Duke, Joe Flaherty, and, of course, Martin Short, among others.

The Shmenge Brothers were just one of these parodies, and like so many of their skits, the humor was subtle and character based. Candy apparently based the characters on Gaby Haas, a Czechoslovakian native who had a polka-based show based in Edmonton—meaning that there was actually more than one polka-based TV show on the air. The brothers appeared on a few episodes of SCTV, starting in 1982 and ending in 1983, with an ill-fated attempt to cash in on the “New Wave” and music videos. Their retirement was chronicled in an hour-long mockumentary called The Last Polka, based, of course, on The Last Waltz. The clip above, of the Shmenges and the Happy Wanderers playing their “classic” “Cabbage Rolls And Coffee,” comes from the film. They also performed this song on Late Night With David Letterman and at Comic Relief.

Part of the humor of the sketch is the fact that polka music, and the accordion, was at that time considered a joke in itself. Of course, the accordion, and its related instruments, has a respected place in the music of many countries and cultures.  And as the roots music movement spread, more and more musicians proudly feature a squeezebox, so that when, say, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, picks up his accordion, no one laughs.

One last admission—for a brief time in my childhood, I tried to learn to play the accordion. It didn’t take.