NOTES: The effects make it a little unclear as to what's going on, but in case you can't tell: A not fully-formed E.T. is in the materialization cone of the transporter, wishing Pee-Wee a Merry Christmas. ALF rather rudely kicks him out. I'm not exactly sure if the miniature ALF is in scale, and I had no reference anyway, so oh well. I COULD have used the larger ALF to do his smaller size digitally, but this was at the stage where I wanted to keep things in-camera as much as possible.
NOTES: The one thing that gave me the most headaches and heartache out of everything in this project was Hardrock, Coco, and Joe. The original special had a cut-down version of the Grampy cartoon Christmas Comes But Once A Year, but inserting Count Floyd into the special changed the flavor of the cartoon--I needed something recognizably Christmassy, but also a little creepy. The initial plan was to simply link to the complete, three-minute short, but I wanted to create a more authentic experience. To that end, I downloaded an open-source video editor, put the file into it, hacked off everything after the second verse, put a little bit of black screen in there, separated the audio from the video at the end, and capped it off with an authentic fade and "The End" card from what was used on Playhouse at the time.
What you're seeing here was the fourth or fifth attempt. There's still just a little bit of a join between the cartoon and the edit.
So this cartoon is famous in Chicago for being featured on the old Bozo's Circus from the 60s to about the 80s, back when Bob Bell portrayed Bozo the Clown--I grew up with Joey D'Auria's version; he lasted from about 1985 or so until 2001-2002. The 40th Anniversary special featured Hardrock, and WGN shows it along with a Frosty the Snowman cartoon (no, not the more famous Rankin-Bass one) and Suzy Snowflake every Thanksgiving.
NOTES: Reba gets Annette Funicello's lines, because Annette's equivalent isn't here yet.
In the original special, the cartoon was preceded by Joan Rivers on Hollywood Squares....and her replacement wasn't initially Count Floyd! Her cameo would have been replaced by the Max Headroom hijacker, breaking in on Pee-Wee's signal to deliver an obscene and insulting greeting. That changed when I saw a "Retro Glow Dracula" figure on NECA's Facebook page, and I thought the prototype looked a little bit like Joe Flaherty as Count Floyd from SCTV.
I didn't quite know exactly how tall Drac would be, so I painted the sets months before he arrived. Everything is weirdly out of scale, and the two walls make no sense whatsoever when put together, which works for the internal logic of it: my head-canon was that Monster Chiller Horror Theatre had borrowed the sets from a high-school production of Dracula, and the set painters were working off of actual references but had forgotten to scale the brickwork down to smaller flats. After the play ended, the school then donated the sets to the SCTV station.
Fun fact: In 1988, right around the time when Pee-Wee was enjoying its biggest success, NBC commissioned Hanna-Barbera to produce The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley, an animated Playhouse follow-the-leader starring Martin Short's manchild character from SCTV and Saturday Night Live. And Count Floyd made appearances on Grimley.
NOTES: The giant Pee-Wee doll is a thing, and yes, Paul Reubens cut a deal with JC Penney to produce exclusive kids' clothing and merchandise, the crown jewel of which was a child-sized version of Chairry. The Chairry and the giant Pee-Wee are very rare today. It was the Ventriloquist Pee-Wee doll for about three or four drafts, and only changed when someone posted about finding the larger doll on Facebook. Go directly to Paint, erase the Ventriloquist dialogue, and write the new dialogue into a blank thought-cloud.
The Super7 figure seen here, which represents this collectible, was almost destined for a gag in which Pee-Wee tries to grow bigger than ALF, but he grabs a Poison Mushroom from the fridge instead and then shrinks. I cut the scene because this figure wasn't small enough to make the joke work.
I can't help but think that the head-sculpt looks a little more like Don Adams than Paul Reubens. :D
