#it really is bizarre to me that it took Daffy such a long time to come around merchandising/popularity wise

[dafpork]

only Daffy and Porky interaction i've found so far in this latest comics binge... but i have no notes. A+

[lookbackmachine]

Manny The Uncanny Oral History Transcript

00:07 Speaker 1: When you're a kid, there's a few television moments that make you say, "What the hell was that?" Those shocking moments in which you're exposed to something wholly different than you've ever experienced. This doesn't occur often because most television shows created for kids are trying to replicate what has already worked in the past. It's why after a juggernaut like Ninja Turtles you get Biker Mice from Mars, Street Sharks and Moo Mesa. Children's television breaks with the old adage, "everything old is new again". Instead it's everything new is new again. In addition as a child, you are limited in what you can see. Your movies generally go up to PG, PG-13 if your dad was cool or if your older brother was cool, and NC-17 if your grandmother was weird. Profanity, sex, and violence are beyond your cultural scope. Not to mention as a kid you don't have the cultural framework or vocabulary to describe what you've seen. It's a purely internalized experience of the weird. That's why when there's something truly different it's so memorable. In the '90s, Manny the Uncanny definitely falls within this distinguished, "what the hell" category. Not only because he's weird; he certainly is, but because this...

01:21 Speaker 2: Why don't you go talk to the head potty guy? Come on! And Mr. Jim Langely, the head potty guy, is going to be telling us all about what happens with our potty bits. Tell me about potty bits.

01:32 Speaker 3: Potty bits?

01:33 Speaker 2: Potty bits.

01:33 Speaker 3: Potty bits.

01:34 Speaker 2: Grandma's trousers!

01:38 Speaker 1: Was on a Disney-branded Saturday morning. It begs repeating, What the hell? This character creation comes from the brilliantly deranged mind of Paul Rugg, and he spent the majority of his adult life making your childhood strange. But first a little history. Steven Spielberg has made several attempts to be Walt Disney. There was An American Tail, which eventually launched his own animation company Amblimation. There was Roger Rabbit and the Roger Rabbit shorts. And of course there was his most famous endeavor, DreamWorks. And yes, he's not Walt Disney, but he's damn close. And what puts him even closer to the heights of Walt Disney's pencil thin moustache was his run at Warner Brothers Animation in the '90s.

02:24 Speaker 1: It had been 20 years since the studio had created an animated short. The days of Termite Terrace were long gone, and that's where Spielberg saw opportunity. He thought maybe a Looney Tunes movie would work, and was working on one in 1987 about young Tunes learning from the greats at the Acme Academy, but it never panned out. Instead, the movie was put into television development, which was better suited for the wonderful short form zaniness of the Looney Tunes, and thus Steven Spielberg Presents Tiny Toon Adventures was born.

02:55 Speaker 1: The show borrowed the Disney television animation model and infused historically cheap television animation with cash resulting in smoother animation and live orchestration for every show. Before the first episode, $25 million had been spent on Tiny Toons. After all, there was a daunting legacy to live up to, and it did. In its second year it was beating Darkwing Duck, Ninja Turtles, and DuckTales. Buoyed by that initial success, Spielberg and Warner Brothers Animation created the Animaniacs, which gracefully captured the essence of the old Looney Tunes classics, that have long evaded reproductions. Because the classic Looney Tunes shorts are perfection. That's not an exaggeration or an opinion; they are perfect. If you're a non-believer, imagine writing a joke that's still funny 70 years later. Imagine doing animation 70 years ago that is still seen as some of the best to this day, which is why its spirit has been so difficult to recapture. But the Animaniacs are the closest thing to the Looney Tunes since Looney Tunes. An integral part of the team that captured the bygone era was Paul Rugg.

04:02 Paul Rugg: I was in, sort of a offshoot of The Groundlings, called the Acme Theatre, which was founded by some people from the Groundlings. Where the Groundlings was more Hollywood-based, we were more San Fernando Valley-based, just because we were all very lazy and we all live in the San Fernando Valley. I had written some sketches for a show. Sherry Stoner, her partner Mark Sweeney, he was the director, and she started liking my stuff along with John McCann, and she said, "You know, I think you should come and we're developing this show." And I was like, "Oh, okay." And I didn't really know what they were talking about. They sent over a bible, which is everything about the characters, what the characters are. And I think I read that a couple weeks, and so did John McCann. And then we went in to meet Tom Ruegger to just get one script. He sort of told us more about characters, that they were very similar to the Marx Brothers, which is all I really needed to know. Over a week sort of wrote one and then got hired the day I turned it in, and that was it. When I saw that all of the scripts were being sent to Steven and we were waiting for his approval, and then I was like, "Wow, so he's gonna read these, huh?"

05:15 Paul Rugg: When they started doing the auditions, backgrounds, he was... We're always pending Steven's approval, so after a time I was like, well, he really does read this stuff, and he looks at this stuff and he listens to the record. And then I'd written something that never actually made it, but he sent me a memo saying, "That was really funny," so I was like, "Wow, he really is reading this stuff! My gosh, this guy really is involved". We really were writing for ourselves, and luckily he sort of liked that style. We never wrote for him, or oh, he likes this or he likes that, we were just doing what we thought was funny. And luckily he was liking it.

06:01 Paul Rugg: Once or twice, I think I might have written a joke and Tom Ruegger would say, "There's no way a kid's gonna know what that means," and I remember changing it. But maybe that happened twice out of all the scripts that I wrote. So, no, we never really thought about kids. We always wanted to keep it clean, but I can't remember ever catering a joke or a line or any of the ideas for a kid. I remember we did a parody of... Not of Apocalypse Now, but the documentary that Coppola's wife made about his making of Apocalypse Now, which is so totally obscure, and it was like, yeah, make that. So [laughter] I don't think... If we were really writing for kids, we never would have done that.

06:47 Speaker 1: Then there was Freakazoid! Which Paul voiced, wrote, and eventually produced. Freakazoid! Came along during two major changes, Time Warner would create The WB, and the Warner Brothers Animation shows would be transferred from Fox Kids to the new network. And the second, Spielberg made his final attempt to become Uncle Walt.

07:07 Paul Rugg: They were developing Freakazoid! For Steven. It was Bruce Timm and Paul Dini, and Steven wanted to take a really quirky turn and make it more very, very comedy-based. Tom Ruegger took over, and then he took John McCann and I off of Animaniacs and said, "You know, you really gotta help me, this show airs in like eight months, we don't have anything." By that time, I of felt that I had written as much as I could about Animaniacs, and as much as I loved the character I was looking for something new to do, so it was perfect.

07:38 Paul Rugg: The WB just didn't like it at all. I just don't think they liked it, which was a shame because we were having a great time with it, and Steven was really having a good time with it. We would send him a script, he goes, "This is crazy, I can't believe you guys are doing this, this is nuts". So we were all just loving it. But the WB was trying to think about... Well, in the second season, they asked us to do half hour stories in the hopes that it wouldn't be so bizarre. All that really did was [chuckle] give us a license to do more bizarre long-form stuff. Yeah, I don't think they were delighted with what we were doing.

08:20 Paul Rugg: Our demographics were coming in. Well, they weren't coming in right at the sweet spot that they want, we were really appealing to an older group, more high school, college, and some very intelligent younger children. Well, I don't wanna say The WB changed everything, but it did change everything. I think The WB in and of itself was sort of the demise of Warner Brothers Animation as we knew it then. They had a definite agenda, and that was to compete in this broader field of children's television. And they had a certain idea about what that should be. Well, they wanted Pokemon, they wanted... Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was doing really well, they wanted stuff that wasn't what necessarily we were doing. They wanted hits. While I think Warner Brothers Animation was doing very well, you know Animaniacs was doing well, they didn't care what it was, they wanted big hits. And well Freakazoid! , while it was doing really well with the critics and Steven was happy, it didn't fit in their wheelhouse.

09:34 Paul Rugg: They didn't really understand what they had. They had Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, they had the golden chest, in my opinion. And then they had the Yakko, Wakko, and Dot. I don't think they ever really truly understood what they had. The way Disney sort of takes care of their characters... I think for reasons that I've never really understood, I think that they didn't really understand the characters. And therefore you got things like Space Jam, which you might like Space Jam, but it was... I remember we all watching and we're like, "Oh my gosh, what are they thinking?"

10:12 Paul Rugg: When he formed DreamWorks, we still had, I think, some Freakazoids left to do, Animaniacs left to do, but we knew that, that sort of partnership was over. And then there was a lot of talk about us all maybe moving over. I think we all got interviews at DreamWorks when they were just starting it, we all went over there and had a meeting. And then some of us decided to go, some of us decided to stay. I was one who decided to stay because I really liked working for Ruegger, I really liked working for Jean MacCurdy. As far as bosses go, they didn't get any better.

10:54 Paul Rugg: We used to work at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, and there was this fountain where we would all... We would go down from the lobby and sit and talk, and I remember sitting there and somebody came up and said, "Hey, Steven's starting this big new thing." And we all went upstairs, and I don't think there was the internet then, but somebody got a copy of Variety and we read it. We're like, "Wow, this is big." And I think... As I recall, we were still doing the first season of Freakazoid! So I started putting that in some of the Freakazoid! Scripts, there's a Lord Bravery script that mentions DreamWorks. And in typical Warner Brothers fashion, we made fun of it because that was our job, so. Nobody was scared, I don't remember being scared because I remember we were really happy working at Warner Brothers and we really liked the anarchy there, but I think maybe people were ready to move on, to try different things.

11:53 Speaker 1: Peter Hastings was a writer who had his fingerprints all over Warner Brothers television animation. And this resume led to Disney putting him in charge of creating the vibe of Disney's, One Saturday Morning. He based the program around Bob McAllister's '70s kids show, Wonderama and Late Night with David Letterman. The colors were bright, the jokes were fast. And if you were wondering if an elephant could crush a blueberry pie with its foot, you could find out here. And within this wonderland train station was a man, a beacon of weirdness, an 11 on the dial, if you will. Manny the Uncanny.

12:32 Speaker 2: How's it going? I'm Manny the Uncanny today with the US Mint in Philadelphia to see how they make the coins. Come inside and don't be lazy. How does, how does, how does it... This is the build, large epoxy quarter. Here it is. This is touching, feelings. It transfered here, into this machine which is drilling it in there. It goes from shrunk down to this, which will make our coin.

12:53 Speaker 5: That's exactly correct.

12:54 Speaker 2: Wow, you learn... So much. Does Amos make you nervous? Okay Tim, now you're... Hey, I'm Manny the Uncanny. Do you ever wonder where all of your potty bits go when you flush them down? It comes here to the sewage treatment plant. Let's go talk to the head potty guy. Come in. Hey, hi there and all of that, this stuff. I'm Manny the Uncanny and today I am at the Bazooka Joe where... Sorry, Joe Blasco Cosmetics where we're going to learn about the make-ups. But not the make-ups for going to market or going to the fishing store, it's the makeup of scariness to be in the movie. So I tell you what, let's...

13:37 Speaker 1: Manny is delivered to each destination by a hot air balloon man, known as Mr. Lighter Than Air. He's suspended below the man's belly by cords that are similar to a baby's jumper. His glasses are thick, his suit God-awful plaid and he looks like a cartoon exiting a dynamite explosion. He's of course not the first bizarre children's TV show host. In fact, Linda Ellerbee and LeVar Burton come to mind as the only normality within this group. At the top of the list is of course, Pee-wee Herman. The voice, the suit, the bike. Strangely enough, his world is so off-kilter that Pee-wee, despite the odds, is the straight man in many of his scenes. A weirdo pointing to bigger weirdos and saying, "Isn't that weird?" In fact, Pee-wee Herman loves who he is and goes home to his amazing house filled with warmth and friends. He's undeniably happy. Manny, on the other hand, is desperately trying to relate in man-on-the-street segments with real people while having a complete inability to do so and lack of understanding of how to do it.

14:40 Speaker 1: And you can't imagine Manny going home to a magical talking chair. Instead his one counterpart is a mechanized cat puppet which you know Manny controls and voices. There's no magic, just desperation and loneliness. Because even though the shows are titled, "Manny Goes to the Mint" and "Manny at the United Nations", they might as well be titled, "Manny tries to make a friend." It's tragic comedy. This isn't Greek by any standard, but there is something incredibly human about this fictional farce that comes from Paul Ruggs's performance, which is real and grounded. But he's playing off the wall insanity.

15:20 Paul Rugg: Because we knew that Freakazoid! Was cancelled. So myself, and John McCann and Doug Langdale were developing a Daffy Duck show based loosely on the Larry Sanders Show where Daffy had his own extravaganza sort of like the old Carol Burnett Show. And it was sort of behind the scenes and in front of the scenes, and then it was clear that the WBJB counter didn't really want anything like that so that's when I decided to leave Warner Brothers. I had shot a couple of things for Peter Hastings who was... Who really wanted me to do Manny the Uncanny for One Saturday Mornings. Manny developed out of a thing I had been doing at Acme. He was this sort of washed up, cruise ship entertainer, he was the worst magician ever. So that's what I would sort of do on stage. And Peter always liked it, and I sort of always liked it, and the audiences always liked it. Which is why [laughter] I was more surprised than anyone that give me... Sort of said we should do it there but that's all Peter.

16:21 Paul Rugg: I mean Peter wanted to have fun, that sort of goes back to what we learned at Warner Brothers. If we think it's fun, hopefully it'll be fun. And then he said, "Well, maybe Manny should just go out and sort of meet people." a la Cole Huaser who was sort of a very famous guy on public television here who used to go out and visit with various people in the LA community. He would go to a bagel maker and spend time with the bagel makers. And we said, "Well let's do the same things." So Manny's segments basically became, where are the really weird places that we can go where Manny can be the world's worst interviewer. So he took a camera while I was working at Warner Brothers and decided to film some stuff of me doing Manny. I guess they really liked that. And I was writing the Daffy show when he asked me to come actually be Manny for the wrap arounds that they were doing, the on set, the whole digital set they had created. So I took two weeks off of Warner Brothers and filmed that. And then, came back to Warner Brothers. And then, I left Warner Brothers because they didn't pick up Daffy. And he called and just wanted to know if I wanted to come be a part of it.

17:38 Paul Rugg: I helped him pitch it. I remember sitting in front of the executives [chuckle] who were sort of horrified because I had dressed up in my whole Manny costume and I was, I was sort of doing my whole Manny act for them. And I don't remember them being very enthused that there was this really weird guy with funny hair in front of them, but. Which was, [laughter] which was kind of funny, but. They were liking it but they didn't wanna be a part of the Act, meaning, executives are very funny, they're like, "Great we like it, just don't put us in the position of having to sit there and be a part of this", they were just more like, "Don't look me in the eye, stop it" and so we was like, I think that day Peter and I learned a very valuable lesson. Never go pitch and sort of make those people you're pitching to part of the act. Because Manny was very abrasive he was very silly and I remember literally picking out people who we're pitching to and these are the big, big wigs and I'm insulting them and they were smiling but you could tell they wanted it to end like now.

18:51 Paul Rugg: Peter and I were having a great time I think we just did the whole thing, we were just having a blast we heard later that you probably shouldn't do that, but then we were Walt... Warners and we were more pushing the boundaries having some fun. Because I helped Tom Ruegger do the same thing at Warner Brothers when he was pitching Hysteria and he had me come as Nostradamus and do my whole act in front of the president of Warner Brothers and they were all very happy about it. So it's just a different culture at Disney it's a little more... I found it to be a little bit tightly wound, let's just say, and the Warner Brothers vibe was a little bit more it wasn't that I had never worked at Disney and so, and I was so stuck in that Warner Brothers we can do anything it never occurred to me that they wouldn't like it. So I was never surprised that we were getting away with it 'cause I didn't know that we were getting away with anything if that makes sense. I didn't know sort of what I know about Disney which is a fine company and stuff but they are definitely hands on and they want it done as a certain way, but back then I don't really remember knowing that.

20:09 Paul Rugg: Well after I left Warner brothers and did other things, I went back in for a meeting once when all of the people that I had sort of known were gone and it felt like walking into Disney and I remember going that's a shame. Because I think it was a very specific time a group of people got together and were just having a great time doing what they were doing. Manny works in very minimal doses. Anything beyond five minutes you sort of are like okay he's really beginning to annoy me which I love but no, we really didn't get any notes the biggest shout was stop screaming and that was it.

20:54 Paul Rugg: 'Cause Manny is very energetic and very sort of excitable and that is where I would play it on stage but when you put a camera like two inch in front of him it basically looks like he's gone insane. So we sort of modified him a bit and I wasn't quite sure how the bits were gonna cut together but we really lucked out and the first editor whoever took a crack at sort of putting the Manny's together was the lead editor on Waiting for Guffman and he was sort of in between gigs he just got this footage together in a way that was so surprising and fun that it really set the tone for all future editing then he eventually got busy and had to move on but we decided to sort of copy his style which was making the editing even more bizarre and it really worked. Peter Hastings and I came up with at Warner brothers and I have no idea why I think we were in the elevator, once and doing weird voices or doing something we came up with it's true.

22:00 Paul Rugg: And I have no idea where it comes from but I remember we just started giggling and then when he came in to say we need Manny song for his intro. I remember we wrote that in about 30 seconds, because we realized Manny didn't make sense so I remember, I just went into his office he goes, "I need this now". And we went in there we recorded it and that was it. I think we recorded at once it was just dumb and it made no sense, and It made us laugh and we're like okay we got that.

22:28 Speaker 2: Where are we going today miss Mr. Lighter than Air?

22:34 Speaker 6: Well, Manny some place wonderful.

22:40 Speaker 2: Hi there oh and happy days let's have some fun. And not be lazy it's true.

22:46 Paul Rugg: Yeah, I was trying to think about how Manny would get around and it just made me laugh my friend Mark Dropman was super, super, super funny guy I said I have this idea what do you think he goes, "That sounds great", so yeah, we filmed it I don't think we could get away with that now, but gosh it made us all laugh and I remember being in that harness and I think a couple of the execs might have come in and go, "Why are you in a harness?", I go, "Well I'm floating below Mr. Lighter than air." And they're like, "What the heck is that?"and I'm like, "Oh, never mind I think I've said too much already". So I don't think we would have the same budget today. We had this great makeup person and she always wanted to get Manny's hair perfect. So I think we went through literally 10 gallons of hair spray and she would sit and work on his hair and I remember that being like, Wow, I never thought anyone would be working on my hair. I remember they had been shooting a lot. They only needed me for a little bit. I came in one day and they said, "Stand here", and I was doing obviously my Manny thing very broad, very big, and the elephant wasn't liking it and they told me to not move so much 'cause the elephant was freaking out.

24:05 Paul Rugg: The trainer came over and said, "Really this elephant is about to kill you, so... " So, I might have changed a little bit. Maybe if you see it now because I hadn't seen if for years. But maybe you'll notice a very rather muted Manny who doesn't wanna get trampled by a very large elephant. I think maybe they separated me from the elephant at one point, but the elephant didn't like men. People, depending on who they were when they sort of saw what we were doing and how we were conducting the interview. And then was just all a bunch of fun, they really got into the fun. Some places didn't really like it. There was a... I remember we did something for the Egg Board of California. And we got... I think I got five minutes in to the interview, and they thought we were making fun of them and kicked us out. So, they literally put their hands in the in front of the camera and told us to leave because they thought... I don't know who they thought we were, but then as I just started airing, people were like, "Yeah yeah, you can come and do that." They saw that we were just having fun. But yeah, some people didn't really like it.

25:25 Speaker 1: Despite the Egg Board, most people seem to be enjoying themselves. They're in on the joke, which eliminates any cynicism. And they're as nice as they can be to Manny. It reaffirms acts of charity that deep down all people are good, or maybe they just wanna be on TV. Either way, it humanizes them. Likewise Manny never gets the best of someone. The ordinary people constantly try to help him understand. In the same way they would help an over-questioning kid understand. It's actually kinda sweet. The guy who is in charge of the State Quarters, or any of the knights at medieval times are for once, cooler than the TV personality, with Letterman, Conan, and Leno, that's never the case. Those are smart asses picking on the defenseless. While Manny is less than defenseless. It's this dynamic that provokes the wonderful moments in the sketches. In which an ordinary person who probably thought they had a lame job smiles. And it reads on their face "Yeah, I guess my job is pretty cool after all". As for Manny, there's a respite for the strange ones. In spite of everything, the security guard that Manny once feared... Well, see for yourself.

26:35 Speaker 2: Thank you very much. It's been a great pleasure. You wanna go get a soda or something?

26:44 Speaker 7: Sure.

26:46 Speaker 1: In that moment, there's hope for anybody weird, awkward, to meet at least somebody for a soda. Make sure to check out Paul Rugg's Freakazoid! Celebration Freak-A-Con on March 15th on Facebook Live.