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Maniac Mansion (TV Series)
Encyclopedia
Maniac Mansion is a Canadian
science fiction
/family sitcom very loosely based on the LucasArts
video game of the same name
.
The series, filmed entirely in Toronto
, Ontario
, was produced by Atlantis Films
for The Family Channel
in the United States and YTV in Canada, and aired for three complete seasons. There were 66 30-minute programs in all.
, with several liberties being taken with the characters and stories.
The show centers around the Edisons, a family living in a large mansion
in the presumably American town of Cedar Springs
, headed up by father Fred (Joe Flaherty
), an eccentric scientist, his wife Casey (Deborah Theaker
), and their children, teenage Tina (Kathleen Robertson
), pubescent Ike (Avi Phillips) and toddler Turner (George Buza
). Living with the Edisons are Casey's brother Harry Orca (John Hemphill) and his wife Idella Muckle-Orca (Mary Charlotte-Wilcox).
Prior to the beginning of the series, Fred inherits the mansion from his father, also a scientist, as well as the evil, extraterrestrial meteor
that was discovered living under the mansion several generations ago. The meteor possesses odd supernatural powers, causing strange things to happen around the house, including mutating toddler Turner into the body of a full-grown man and turning Harry into a creature with a human head and a fly's body. Often throughout the series, Fred performs various outlandish experiments in an attempt to return them to normal. Aside from these science fiction
plot elements, the show largely followed the format of a typical sitcom, with plots revolving around such typical fare as sibling rivalry
, marriage troubles, wacky neighbors and teen angst.
Maniac Mansions brand of humor is similar to that of Canadian sketch comedy
program Second City Television
("SCTV"), which shared much of the same cast and writers as Mansion. The show is filled with pop culture references and occasional parodies
of movies, television shows and commercials, which served as the basis for most of the humor in SCTV.
Another staple of Maniac Mansions humor was for the show to frequently break the fourth wall. Characters (primarily Harry) would often address the camera and talk about how the episode was going, while a few episodes were entirely meta-referential
. For example, a few episodes take place "behind the scenes" of the show, where it's revealed the Edisons are actually playing themselves in a show about their lives, while the series finale, set in the future, features a grown-up Turner as a television executive who ends up creating Maniac Mansion.
animators Cliff Ruby and Elana Lesser. After having played the game and developed the idea, they pitched the concept to George Lucas
, who also saw the project's potential. LucasFilm teamed up with The Family Channel (now ABC Family
) and Toronto
-based production company Atlantis Films
and began to expand the idea.
Atlantis contacted Eugene Levy
, former writer and cast member of SCTV
, and offered him the chance to help create and produce the show. Atlantis' original treatment depicted Maniac Mansion as a darker horror-comedy in the vein of The Munsters
, but after Levy rejected the premise, he was given the creative control to shape the show in his own image. Levy recruited a number of his former SCTV alumni and developed the show into a less supernaturally-oriented family sitcom.
Upon its debut, Maniac Mansion received extremely positive critical response. Time Magazine named it one of the ten best shows of 1990, calling it "the looniest, sweetest family comedy of the year", Entertainment Weekly
described it "100-proof hilarious" , the Toronto Star
called it "delightful" and "wonderfully innovative and imaginitive TV" and the Los Angeles Times
called it a "stylized, sharp-edged comedy that's a bit like David Lynch
on helium
".
The series was cancelled
after three seasons and 66 episodes, most likely due to poor ratings in North America. The series was rerun
on Family Channel until 1994, on YTV until 1997, and on Showcase until 2002. It has not aired on Canadian nor American television since.
as "Maniac Mansion: The Love Collection". The tape has long since been out of print
and copies on Amazon are being sold for as high as $99.
An internet petition to bring Maniac Mansion to DVD which has since accumulated 680 signatures; there are currently no known plans for the series to be released on DVD.
In the original game, an homage to B-grade
horror movies
, the plot centered around a group of teenagers who venture into a dilapidated mansion to rescue their kidnapped friend. The mansion is inhabited by the quirky yet murderous Edison family: Dr. Fred, an insane scientist who is possessed by an evil meteor
from outer space; his wife Edna, a grotesque, sex-starved nurse who is into BDSM
; their son Weird Ed, a paranoid paramilitary
survivalist; and their pets, a pair of talking, ambulatory tentacles.
In order to conform to the show's family-friendly status, the game's trademark risqué black comedy
and violence had to be omitted and the plot was modified to the point where there was only a vague connection to its source, the primary links being that the show is set within a mansion that houses an extraterrestrial meteor, and the character of Dr. Fred Edison.
In the show, Dr. Fred is portrayed as a goodhearted though clumsy family man rather than the possessed mad scientist
shown in the game. The other members of the Edison family were completely changed in name, appearance and demeanor, and additional original characters were added.
The meteor is seldom referenced in the show, although it's prominently featured in the opening credits
of the first season via an expository newspaper clipping, explaining that Dr. Fred's grandfather Louis Edison discovered it under his mansion. Throughout the series, Dr. Fred can be seen conducting various experiments either harnessing the meteor's supernatural powers, or experimenting on the meteor itself.
In Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle, the 1993 sequel to Maniac Mansion, the TV show is briefly mentioned, serving as one of the plot points in which the game's protagonist must collect the royalties that Dr. Fred was promised from the creation of the TV series based on the original game (which, in the fiction of the game, was wildly successful and made millions of dollars).
, who created the show, was an original cast member and writer on Second City Television
. He developed with show with fellow SCTV writers Michael Short, Paul Flaherty and David Flaherty, and director Jamie Paul Rock. Occasional SCTV actor Peter Wildman contributed some writing, as did Joe Flaherty, John Hemphill and Mary-Charlotte Wilcox.
Additionally, nearly all of the cast, with the exception of Kathleen Robertson and Avi Phillips, were involved with SCTV. Joe Flaherty was part of the original line-up, John Hemphill and Mary-Charlotte Wilcox were supporting players and writers in its later seasons, and George Buza had appeared in a single episode. Deborah Theaker had been a part of The Second City
stage show, but was not part of the television program.
There are numerous SCTV references throughout the series. Levy, Martin Short, Dave Thomas and Andrea Martin all made one-off appearances on the show, as did minor players Juul Haalmeyer
, Tony Rosato
and Robin Duke
. A few jokes are reused and in a couple of episodes, the characters of "Count Floyd
" and "Happy Marsden" can be seen playing on television sets.
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
/family sitcom very loosely based on the LucasArts
LucasArts
LucasArts Entertainment Company, LLC is an American video game developer and publisher. The company was once famous for its innovative line of graphic adventure games, the critical and commercial success of which peaked in the mid 1990s...
video game of the same name
Maniac Mansion
Maniac Mansion is a 1987 graphic adventure game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games. It was Lucasfilm's first published video game, and it was initially released for the Commodore 64 and Apple II. A comedy horror parody of B movies, it follows teenager Dave Miller as he ventures...
.
The series, filmed entirely in Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
, Ontario
Ontario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....
, was produced by Atlantis Films
Alliance Atlantis
Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc. was a Toronto-based media company that operated primarily as a specialty service operator in Canada. Alliance Atlantis also had offices in Halifax, Los Angeles, London, Dublin, Madrid, Barcelona, Shannon and Sydney.Alliance Atlantis was acquired by Canwest...
for The Family Channel
ABC Family
ABC Family, stylized as abc family, is an American television network, owned by ABC Family Worldwide Inc., a subsidiary of the Disney-ABC Television Group division of The Walt Disney Company...
in the United States and YTV in Canada, and aired for three complete seasons. There were 66 30-minute programs in all.
Premise
The plot of the show is loosely based on the 1987 computer game Maniac MansionManiac Mansion
Maniac Mansion is a 1987 graphic adventure game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games. It was Lucasfilm's first published video game, and it was initially released for the Commodore 64 and Apple II. A comedy horror parody of B movies, it follows teenager Dave Miller as he ventures...
, with several liberties being taken with the characters and stories.
The show centers around the Edisons, a family living in a large mansion
Mansion
A mansion is a very large dwelling house. U.S. real estate brokers define a mansion as a dwelling of over . A traditional European mansion was defined as a house which contained a ballroom and tens of bedrooms...
in the presumably American town of Cedar Springs
Cedar Springs, Michigan
Cedar Springs is a city in Kent County in the U.S. state of Michigan, 20 minutes north of Grand Rapids. Known as "Red Flannel Town", the city is home to an annual Red Flannel Festival...
, headed up by father Fred (Joe Flaherty
Joe Flaherty
Joe Flaherty is an American-Canadian actor and comedian. He is best known for his work on the Canadian sketch comedy SCTV, from 1976 to 1984, and as Harold Weir on Freaks and Geeks...
), an eccentric scientist, his wife Casey (Deborah Theaker
Deborah Theaker
Deborah Theaker is a Canadian actress.Theaker is best known as Casey Edison on the Lucasfilm science fiction satire Maniac Mansion which ran from 1990 until 1993. In 1985, Theaker graduated from the University of Saskatchewan and later moved to Toronto, where she became a member of The Second...
), and their children, teenage Tina (Kathleen Robertson
Kathleen Robertson
Kathleen Robertson is a Canadian actress. She is best known for her role as Clare Arnold in Beverly Hills, 90210 .-Career:Robertson started taking acting classes when she was ten, and had roles in local theater productions...
), pubescent Ike (Avi Phillips) and toddler Turner (George Buza
George Buza
George Buza is an American-born Canadian actor who is best known for voicing Beast in the X-Men Animated Series.-Biography:Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he moved to Canada as a young man and became a Canadian citizen in 1998. He appeared as Chief Jake McKenna multiple times in the TV series Honey, I...
). Living with the Edisons are Casey's brother Harry Orca (John Hemphill) and his wife Idella Muckle-Orca (Mary Charlotte-Wilcox).
Prior to the beginning of the series, Fred inherits the mansion from his father, also a scientist, as well as the evil, extraterrestrial meteor
METEOR
METEOR is a metric for the evaluation of machine translation output. The metric is based on the harmonic mean of unigram precision and recall, with recall weighted higher than precision...
that was discovered living under the mansion several generations ago. The meteor possesses odd supernatural powers, causing strange things to happen around the house, including mutating toddler Turner into the body of a full-grown man and turning Harry into a creature with a human head and a fly's body. Often throughout the series, Fred performs various outlandish experiments in an attempt to return them to normal. Aside from these science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
plot elements, the show largely followed the format of a typical sitcom, with plots revolving around such typical fare as sibling rivalry
Sibling rivalry
Sibling rivalry is a type of competition or animosity among children, blood-related or not.Siblings generally spend more time together during childhood than they do with parents. The sibling bond is often complicated and is influenced by factors such as parental treatment, birth order, personality,...
, marriage troubles, wacky neighbors and teen angst.
Maniac Mansions brand of humor is similar to that of Canadian sketch comedy
Sketch comedy
A sketch comedy consists of a series of short comedy scenes or vignettes, called "sketches," commonly between one and ten minutes long. Such sketches are performed by a group of comic actors or comedians, either on stage or through an audio and/or visual medium such as broadcasting...
program Second City Television
Second City Television
Second City Television is a Canadian television sketch comedy show offshoot from Toronto's The Second City troupe that ran between 1976 and 1984.- Premise :...
("SCTV"), which shared much of the same cast and writers as Mansion. The show is filled with pop culture references and occasional parodies
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
of movies, television shows and commercials, which served as the basis for most of the humor in SCTV.
Another staple of Maniac Mansions humor was for the show to frequently break the fourth wall. Characters (primarily Harry) would often address the camera and talk about how the episode was going, while a few episodes were entirely meta-referential
Meta-reference
Metareference, a metafiction technique, is a situation in a work of fiction whereby characters display an awareness that they are in such a work, such as a film, television show or book. Sometimes it may even just be a form of editing or film-making technique that comments on the...
. For example, a few episodes take place "behind the scenes" of the show, where it's revealed the Edisons are actually playing themselves in a show about their lives, while the series finale, set in the future, features a grown-up Turner as a television executive who ends up creating Maniac Mansion.
Main characters
- Dr. Fred Edison (Joe FlahertyJoe FlahertyJoe Flaherty is an American-Canadian actor and comedian. He is best known for his work on the Canadian sketch comedy SCTV, from 1976 to 1984, and as Harold Weir on Freaks and Geeks...
) - Casey Edison (Deborah TheakerDeborah TheakerDeborah Theaker is a Canadian actress.Theaker is best known as Casey Edison on the Lucasfilm science fiction satire Maniac Mansion which ran from 1990 until 1993. In 1985, Theaker graduated from the University of Saskatchewan and later moved to Toronto, where she became a member of The Second...
) - Tina Edison (Kathleen RobertsonKathleen RobertsonKathleen Robertson is a Canadian actress. She is best known for her role as Clare Arnold in Beverly Hills, 90210 .-Career:Robertson started taking acting classes when she was ten, and had roles in local theater productions...
) - Ike Edison (Avi Phillips)
- Turner Edison (George BuzaGeorge BuzaGeorge Buza is an American-born Canadian actor who is best known for voicing Beast in the X-Men Animated Series.-Biography:Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he moved to Canada as a young man and became a Canadian citizen in 1998. He appeared as Chief Jake McKenna multiple times in the TV series Honey, I...
) - Idella Muckle-Orca (Mary Charlotte Wilcox)
- Harry Orca (a.k.a. Harry the Fly) (John Hemphill)
Recurring characters
- Dr. Edwin Edison (Colin FoxColin Fox (actor)Colin Fox is a Canadian actor. His acting credits include playing Jean Paul Desmond and Jacques Eloi Des Mondes in Strange Paradise , as well as voice work in various animated series, and in other roles in film, television and on the stage...
) - Richard Pratt (Mark Wilson)
- Allasyn Pratt (Wendy Hopkins)
- Keifer Pratt (Patrick Gillen)
Guest stars
- José FerrerJosé FerrerJosé Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintrón , best known as José Ferrer, was a Puerto Rican actor, as well as a theater and film director...
as himself (2-08, "The Celebrity Visitor") - Teri AustinTeri AustinTeresa "Teri" Austin is a Canadian-born film and television actress, with an extensive career in the United States.She is probably best-known for her performance as Jill Bennett on Knots Landing and season 9 of the crime drama, Matlock.- External links :...
as herself, (2-10, "Lenny...One Amour Time"; 2-11, "Lenny...One Amour Time: Part 2") - Dave ThomasDave Thomas (actor)David "Dave" Thomas is a Canadian comedian and actor. He was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, but moved to Durham, North Carolina where his father, John E. Thomas, attended Duke University and earned a PhD in Philosophy. Thomas attended George Watts and Moorehead elementary schools...
as "Hudgie DeRubertis" (2-13, "Buried by the Mob") - Martin ShortMartin ShortMartin Hayter Short, CM is a Canadian actor, comedian, writer, singer and producer. He is best-known for his comedy work, particularly on the TV programs SCTV and Saturday Night Live...
as "Eddie O'Donnell" (2-14, "Down and Out in Cedar Springs") - David CronenbergDavid CronenbergDavid Paul Cronenberg, OC, FRSC is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter and actor. He is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror or venereal horror genre. This style of filmmaking explores people's fears of bodily transformation and infection. In his films, the...
as himself (2-19, "Idella's Breakdown") - Andrea MartinAndrea MartinAndrea Louise Martin is an American and Canadian actress and comedienne. She has appeared in films such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding, on stage in productions such as My Favorite Year, Fiddler on the Roof and Candide, and in the television series, SCTV.-Personal life:Martin, the oldest of three...
as "Dr. Fontana Blue" (2-19, "Idella's Breakdown") - Jayne EastwoodJayne EastwoodJayne Eastwood , also credited as Jane Easton or Jane Eastwood, is a Canadian actress most famous for appearing in the 2002 film Chicago. She was one of the original cast members of the Toronto branch of The Second City, and was a semi-regular on SCTV...
as various characters - Dewey RobertsonDewey RobertsonByron James John "Dewey" Robertson was a professional wrestler, known best for his ring name The Missing Link....
as "The Atomizer" (3-10, "Wrestling with the Truth") - Eugene LevyEugene LevyEugene Levy, CM is a Canadian actor, comedian, television director, producer, musician, and writer. He is known for his work in Canadian television series, American movies, and television movies. He is the only actor to have appeared in all eight of the American Pie films, as Noah Levenstein...
as "Doc Ellis" (3-17, "Freddy had a Little Lamb") - Jan RubesJan RubesJan Ladislav Rubeš CM was a Czech-Canadian bass opera singer and actor.-Life and career:Rubeš was born in Volyně, Czechoslovakia, the son of Ružena and Jan Rubeš. Not too long after World War II, he graduated from the Prague Conservatoire and joined the Prague Opera House as a bass singer...
as "Uncle Joe" (3-20, "It Ain't Over 'Til Uncle Joe Sings")
Development and production
The idea for adapting Maniac Mansion into an episodic television series originated with LucasFilmLucasfilm
Lucasfilm Limited is an American film production company founded by George Lucas in 1971, based in San Francisco, California. Lucas is the company's current chairman and CEO, and Micheline Chau is the president and COO....
animators Cliff Ruby and Elana Lesser. After having played the game and developed the idea, they pitched the concept to George Lucas
George Lucas
George Walton Lucas, Jr. is an American film producer, screenwriter, and director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones...
, who also saw the project's potential. LucasFilm teamed up with The Family Channel (now ABC Family
ABC Family
ABC Family, stylized as abc family, is an American television network, owned by ABC Family Worldwide Inc., a subsidiary of the Disney-ABC Television Group division of The Walt Disney Company...
) and Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
-based production company Atlantis Films
Alliance Atlantis
Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc. was a Toronto-based media company that operated primarily as a specialty service operator in Canada. Alliance Atlantis also had offices in Halifax, Los Angeles, London, Dublin, Madrid, Barcelona, Shannon and Sydney.Alliance Atlantis was acquired by Canwest...
and began to expand the idea.
Atlantis contacted Eugene Levy
Eugene Levy
Eugene Levy, CM is a Canadian actor, comedian, television director, producer, musician, and writer. He is known for his work in Canadian television series, American movies, and television movies. He is the only actor to have appeared in all eight of the American Pie films, as Noah Levenstein...
, former writer and cast member of SCTV
Second City Television
Second City Television is a Canadian television sketch comedy show offshoot from Toronto's The Second City troupe that ran between 1976 and 1984.- Premise :...
, and offered him the chance to help create and produce the show. Atlantis' original treatment depicted Maniac Mansion as a darker horror-comedy in the vein of The Munsters
The Munsters
The Munsters is a 1960s American family television sitcom depicting the home life of a family of monsters. It starred Fred Gwynne as Herman Munster and Yvonne De Carlo as his wife, Lily Munster. The series was a satire of both traditional monster movies and popular family entertainment of the era,...
, but after Levy rejected the premise, he was given the creative control to shape the show in his own image. Levy recruited a number of his former SCTV alumni and developed the show into a less supernaturally-oriented family sitcom.
Original run
Maniac Mansion premiered in September of 1990 on The Family Channel and YTV.Upon its debut, Maniac Mansion received extremely positive critical response. Time Magazine named it one of the ten best shows of 1990, calling it "the looniest, sweetest family comedy of the year", Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
described it "100-proof hilarious" , the Toronto Star
Toronto Star
The Toronto Star is Canada's highest-circulation newspaper, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Its print edition is distributed almost entirely within the province of Ontario...
called it "delightful" and "wonderfully innovative and imaginitive TV" and the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
called it a "stylized, sharp-edged comedy that's a bit like David Lynch
David Lynch
David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound...
on helium
Helium
Helium is the chemical element with atomic number 2 and an atomic weight of 4.002602, which is represented by the symbol He. It is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, inert, monatomic gas that heads the noble gas group in the periodic table...
".
The series was cancelled
Cancellation (television)
In television, cancellation refers to the termination of a program by a network, typically because of low viewership and/or unfavourable critical reviews. Another reason why television programs can be cancelled is to make room for new television programs...
after three seasons and 66 episodes, most likely due to poor ratings in North America. The series was rerun
Rerun
A rerun or repeat is a re-airing of an episode of a radio or television broadcast. The invention of the rerun is generally credited to Desi Arnaz. There are two types of reruns—those that occur during a hiatus, and those that occur when a program is syndicated. Reruns can also be, as the...
on Family Channel until 1994, on YTV until 1997, and on Showcase until 2002. It has not aired on Canadian nor American television since.
Home video
In 1992, Family Channel video released two first season episodes of Maniac Mansion ("Flystruck" and "Fred's A-Courtin'") on VHSVHS
The Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....
as "Maniac Mansion: The Love Collection". The tape has long since been out of print
Out of print
Out of print refers to an item, typically a book , but can include any print or visual media or sound recording, that is in the state of no longer being published....
and copies on Amazon are being sold for as high as $99.
An internet petition to bring Maniac Mansion to DVD which has since accumulated 680 signatures; there are currently no known plans for the series to be released on DVD.
Differences from the game
Although the series and game share several superficial similarities, they are vastly different in terms of plot and characterization.In the original game, an homage to B-grade
B movie
A B movie is a low-budget commercial motion picture that is not definitively an arthouse or pornographic film. In its original usage, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the term more precisely identified a film intended for distribution as the less-publicized, bottom half of a double feature....
horror movies
Horror film
Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...
, the plot centered around a group of teenagers who venture into a dilapidated mansion to rescue their kidnapped friend. The mansion is inhabited by the quirky yet murderous Edison family: Dr. Fred, an insane scientist who is possessed by an evil meteor
METEOR
METEOR is a metric for the evaluation of machine translation output. The metric is based on the harmonic mean of unigram precision and recall, with recall weighted higher than precision...
from outer space; his wife Edna, a grotesque, sex-starved nurse who is into BDSM
BDSM
BDSM is an erotic preference and a form of sexual expression involving the consensual use of restraint, intense sensory stimulation, and fantasy power role-play. The compound acronym BDSM is derived from the terms bondage and discipline , dominance and submission , and sadism and masochism...
; their son Weird Ed, a paranoid paramilitary
Paramilitary
A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....
survivalist; and their pets, a pair of talking, ambulatory tentacles.
In order to conform to the show's family-friendly status, the game's trademark risqué black comedy
Black comedy
A black comedy, or dark comedy, is a comic work that employs black humor or gallows humor. The definition of black humor is problematic; it has been argued that it corresponds to the earlier concept of gallows humor; and that, as humor has been defined since Freud as a comedic act that anesthetizes...
and violence had to be omitted and the plot was modified to the point where there was only a vague connection to its source, the primary links being that the show is set within a mansion that houses an extraterrestrial meteor, and the character of Dr. Fred Edison.
In the show, Dr. Fred is portrayed as a goodhearted though clumsy family man rather than the possessed mad scientist
Mad scientist
A mad scientist is a stock character of popular fiction, specifically science fiction. The mad scientist may be villainous or antagonistic, benign or neutral, and whether insane, eccentric, or simply bumbling, mad scientists often work with fictional technology in order to forward their schemes, if...
shown in the game. The other members of the Edison family were completely changed in name, appearance and demeanor, and additional original characters were added.
The meteor is seldom referenced in the show, although it's prominently featured in the opening credits
Opening credits
In a motion picture, television program, or video game, the opening credits are shown at the very beginning and list the most important members of the production. They are now usually shown as text superimposed on a blank screen or static pictures, or sometimes on top of action in the show. There...
of the first season via an expository newspaper clipping, explaining that Dr. Fred's grandfather Louis Edison discovered it under his mansion. Throughout the series, Dr. Fred can be seen conducting various experiments either harnessing the meteor's supernatural powers, or experimenting on the meteor itself.
In Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle, the 1993 sequel to Maniac Mansion, the TV show is briefly mentioned, serving as one of the plot points in which the game's protagonist must collect the royalties that Dr. Fred was promised from the creation of the TV series based on the original game (which, in the fiction of the game, was wildly successful and made millions of dollars).
SCTV connections
Eugene LevyEugene Levy
Eugene Levy, CM is a Canadian actor, comedian, television director, producer, musician, and writer. He is known for his work in Canadian television series, American movies, and television movies. He is the only actor to have appeared in all eight of the American Pie films, as Noah Levenstein...
, who created the show, was an original cast member and writer on Second City Television
Second City Television
Second City Television is a Canadian television sketch comedy show offshoot from Toronto's The Second City troupe that ran between 1976 and 1984.- Premise :...
. He developed with show with fellow SCTV writers Michael Short, Paul Flaherty and David Flaherty, and director Jamie Paul Rock. Occasional SCTV actor Peter Wildman contributed some writing, as did Joe Flaherty, John Hemphill and Mary-Charlotte Wilcox.
Additionally, nearly all of the cast, with the exception of Kathleen Robertson and Avi Phillips, were involved with SCTV. Joe Flaherty was part of the original line-up, John Hemphill and Mary-Charlotte Wilcox were supporting players and writers in its later seasons, and George Buza had appeared in a single episode. Deborah Theaker had been a part of The Second City
The Second City
The Second City is a improvisational comedy enterprise which originated in Chicago's Old Town neighborhood.The Second City Theatre opened on December 16, 1959 and has since expanded its presence to several other cities, including Toronto and Los Angeles...
stage show, but was not part of the television program.
There are numerous SCTV references throughout the series. Levy, Martin Short, Dave Thomas and Andrea Martin all made one-off appearances on the show, as did minor players Juul Haalmeyer
Juul Haalmeyer
Juul Haalmeyer is a costume designer, best known for doing costume design on several iterations of SCTV. Haalmeyer also worked as a costume designer for many movies, television shows, theatre productions, concerts wardrobes for various artists and specials like Bridge to Silence, All My Sons, Long...
, Tony Rosato
Tony Rosato
Tony Rosato is an Italian-Canadian animated voice actor who has appeared in television and movies in both Canada and the United States....
and Robin Duke
Robin Duke
Robin Duke is a Canadian actress and comedian. Duke is most famous for her work on the NBC comedy series Saturday Night Live. In the 2000s, Women Fully Clothed, a sketch comedy troupe which she co-founded, toured Canada...
. A few jokes are reused and in a couple of episodes, the characters of "Count Floyd
Count Floyd
Count Floyd is a fictional character featured in television and played by comic actor Joe Flaherty. He is a fictional horror host in the tradition of TV hosts on local television in the United States and Canada....
" and "Happy Marsden" can be seen playing on television sets.