Syndicated Shenanigans: What A Dummy
Welcome back to Syndicated Shenanigans!
Obligatory intro: I have a fascination with syndicated series, particularly those that ran for multiple seasons but which I’d never even so much as read about until the internet educated me about their existence. Mind you, I’m also fascinated by the ones that only ran for a single season. Ultimately, I guess what I’m saying is that pop culture that successfully flies under the radar of someone like myself, who practically subsists on pop culture… That stuff just fascinates me to no end, period, and if you’re here, you’re either equally fascinated or else you’re just indulging me, but either way, read on as we take a look at…
“I was staying in Burbank because I’d finally gotten another series. I was cast as Mrs. Travalony on a syndicated show about a ventriloquist’s mannequin who really talked. The title adequately describes the fact that I signed the contract: What a Dummy.”
– Kaye Ballard, HOW I LOST 10 POUNDS IN 53 YEARS
When I told my wife I was going to be writing about this series, which debuted on September 29, 1990 and concluded its 24-episode run on May 25, 1991, she - like so many people - had no idea what I was talking about. After I explained the premise to her, she looked at me with bemusement and, yes, a wee bit of pity, saying, “I’m really surprised that you of all people would decide to write about this, given your history with ventriloquist dolls.”
It’s a fair cop, and when I explain why she said as much, I think the reason will resonate with a number of you of a certain age: it’s because she knew that, when I was a kid, the trailer for the 1978 film Magic scarred me me for life.
I know, I know… Those individuals of that certain age are ready to throttle me for even embedding that trailer into the piece, but I think it’s contextually important, as it explains why the decision to do this piece has proven so…therapeutic? No, that’s not quite right.
Oh, I know the phrase I’m looking for:
“doubly emotionally scarring”
Yes. that’s definitely it.
Before we move away from Magic, though, for those of you who weren’t around back then, I just wanted to clarify that this reaction was not demographically limited to 8-year-old male Virginians.
First of all, after the first time they showed the above trailer in the New York City market, the switchboards of local TV stations lit up like Christmas trees with parents complaining that their children had been traumatized by Fats, particularly with the way he ends the trailer by saying, “We’re dead,” closes his eyes for a few seconds, and then reopens them and slowly glances sideways. End result: the ad was either pulled or only aired after 10 p.m.
Most telling, though, is the story that Dennis Allwood, a ventriloquist who worked as a consultant on the film, has told about what happened after they delivered Fats [the dummy in the film] to Anthony Hopkins’ house in Beverly Hills, with Hopkins having never seen it before they dropped it off
“I got a call at three o’clock in the morning saying, ‘Come get this [CENSORED] dummy out of my house! It’s freaking me out! I’m gonna throw it into the canyon!’”
So there you have it: that goddamned dummy disconcerted everybody from Anthony Hopkins on down.
I realize that was probably way too much set-up, but at the very least, I think you’ll agree that it does explain why my wife was surprised to hear that I was going to be doing a piece on What a Dummy…and she grew even more surprised when I showed her an episode of the show.
Actually, I didn’t make her watch the entire episode. But during the portion of the episode that she did watch, she said the following things:
“Oh, dear God!”
“I… I don’t understand.”
“Wait, what year was this?”
“Help me understand.”
“Do they ever explain any of this?”
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s quite a show!
The premise: Ed Brannigan, patriarch of the Brannigan family, learns that his great uncle Jackie has died, and after his funeral, which is attended by no end of eccentric entertainers and aged vaudevillians, the family discovers that Ed - being Jackie’s closest surviving family member - has inherited all of his great uncle’s worldly possessions. Don’t get too excited, though: the whole lot of them can fit into an old steamer trunk.
As it turns out, the trunk is filled with everything from the days when when Jackie used to do a ventriloquism act, and none of it has seen the light of day in 50 years…including Buzz, the dummy from Jackie’s act, which suddenly starts talking of its own accord and, as you might reasonably expect, scares the living shit out of Ed and his family. Soon, however, they learn to tolerate the little scamp, and he sticks around, although as with all such difficult-to-explain entities that live with suburban families, he generally doesn’t speak or move if anyone from outside the Brannigan family is around.
Would you like to see what Buzz looks like?
Of course you wouldn’t. But it’s far too late to turn back now, my child…
Okay, I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t go out of my way to try to pause the video on a moment where the dummy was at his absolute creepiest-looking with his leer, but let me just assure you that when it comes to Buzz, creepy moments are not in short supply. I think you can tell that not only was there no attempt to make the dummy look less terrifying, but they seemed to actively go in search of a middle ground between Fats from Magic and Chucky from Child’s Play.
Oh, but here I am going on about Buzz, and I haven’t even told you about the rest of the Brannigan family: in addition to Ed (David Doty), there’s his wife Polly (Annabel Armour), their daughter Maggie (Janna Michaels), their youngest son Cory (Joshua Rudoy), and their eldest son, Tucker, played by - wait for it - Stephen Dorff.
He’s come a long way, baby.
On the flip side of things, there’s Kay Ballard, who plays psychic Treeva Travalony, the Brannigans’ neighbor, and decided to join the series for a very simple reason.
'’I`m doing it because they asked me,'' she admitted to the Chicago Tribune in 1990. ''The dummy is the real star, but I had to get back on television. People were arguing about if I was dead or alive. I never stopped working, but, you know, if you`re not on that box, nobody knows you`re alive. You begin to read your name in the where- are-they-now columns.''
Fair enough.
But let’s get back to young Mr. Dorff.
Dorff did an interview with Teen Beat in advance of the show – it was entitled STEPHEN DORFF IS NOT A DUMMY, because of course it was – and knowing what we now know about the series, it’s almost painful to read: not only is he struggling to explain why he’s doing the show and avoid saying anything bad about it, but he’s also desperately trying to do a tightrope walk between the lines and surreptitiously say, “For God’s sake, do not judge me by this show!”
Stephen Dorff: I didn’t really want to do a sitcom because I’ve done a lot of really important movies – serious stuff. I’m doing the show to help my comedy. The show’s pretty funny. It’s a cute show.
Teen Beat: What’s it about?
Stephen Dorff: It’s about this kid Tucker, whom I play. He’s your average teenager who’s always into trouble. His family doesn’t really pay much attention to him. Anyway, he has this mannequin dummy which kind of comes to life, but not really – it’s not like ALF or anything. The show concentrates on Tucker and how he relates to this dummy. When girls come over and stuff, Tucker has conflicts with the dummy. It’s a cool show.
Teen Beat: What’s Tucker like?
Stephen Dorff: He’s pretty much like me. But I’m kind of a pain, I guess, because I’m just a low-key, natural actor. In TV, they’d rather do things really big. But my character is just a teenager who dresses in vests and t-shirts. Some people may think he has an attitude, yet he’s really friendly, you know? He’s not irritable in any way.
One can only presume that Dorff hadn’t done anything more than the pilot at this point, because he’s describing a version of his character that doesn’t even remotely line up with the actual character he played on the show.
Oh, and while it’s not in the above portion, Dorff manages to get in one last passive-aggressive bash of the show when he’s asked what else he’s got on his plate and excitedly mentions that he’s going to be doing a movie called December, which focuses on five guys in a dormitory during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, explaining, “It’s a film that I wanted to do last year that they put off because I had to do What a Dummy because I was contracted.”
Um, yeah, there’s no movie called December in Stephen Dorff’s filmography. In regards to the number of reasons for him to angrily shake his fist at ever having signed on to do What a Dummy, you’d think that this would be the straw that broke the camel’s back…until you realize that it could’ve been so much worse if only his previous pilot had gone to series:
Mutts (1988): While in a pet store, young Eric Gillman (Dorff) is attracted to a dog named Jeepers, a canine he discovers can telepathically communicate with him.
Yikes.
I guess the old Hollywood saying is true: playing second fiddle to a ventriloquist dummy doesn’t seem so bad when you know that, but for a twist of fate, you could’ve been “that kid with the psychic dog.”
That said, reading this interview, researching the series, and watching the precious few episodes of the show that I could find, I’m beginning to understand at least a little bit about why anyone would’ve ever thought this series was a good idea…and it’s tied directly to the pilot.
Actually, make that the first half of the pilot, since that’s all I can find anywhere. But if I’ve captured your fascination at all about this series, I’d recommend that you watch it, and here’s three good reasons why:
1) Buzz is literally only in it for a few seconds, and it’s not until the very, very end.
2) It’s actually legitimately funny on several occasions, thanks predominantly to a guest appearance by Pat Paulsen and a woman who plays xylophone with… Ah, but I don’t want to spoil it.
3) It features completely different actors playing Ed and Polly…and while this is the sort of thing that happens all the time between pilot and series, I sent far, far too much time trying to find out more information about this recasting, and I can’t find a single mention of it anywhere. This never happens to me.
After watching this first half of the pilot, I was surprised to find that I actually wanted to see the second half.
Then again, that surprise may simply come from the fact that this was actually the second episode of What a Dummy that I watched…and there was never any way that this was going to be worse than that was.
Oh, and there’s one other little thing from that Stephen Dorff interview that I neglected to mention: despite the fact that What a Dummy was syndicated, he makes reference to doing the series for Fox…and he’s even holding a Bart Simpson doll in the accompanying photo.
So was the original version of the series going to be quirkier, but when Fox passed on the pilot, someone decided that the comedic sensibilities for the viewing audience of syndicated series weren’t quite as sophisticated, and…this is what we got?
Now that is horrifying.
But, of course, it was always destined to be thus, because it’s about a ventriloquist dummy that comes to life.
Still, I hate to close this out on a negative note, so l will happily concede that, even though it didn’t make Buzz any less creepy, the series did manage to pull in some pretty great guest stars, including Richard Belzer, Foster Brooks, Henry Gibson, Sherman Hemsley, Marty Ingels, Pat Morita, Marcia Wallace, and Shelley Berman.
I mean… it ABSOLUTELY sounds like a show Fox would’ve ordered in 1990.