Mr. Mike's Mondo Video and Mr. Bill's Naked Truth

Mr. Mike Hits DVD, but Does Mr. Bill Get Raped? Oh, Nooo!

In 1979, Michael O’Donoghue, legendary National Lampoon editor and Saturday Night Live’s original head writer, created one of the goddamndest things ever intended for network television broadcast: Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video.

A parody of 1960s’ Italian-made globetrotting shockumentaries (Mondo Cane, Africa Addio) that examined outrageous human beliefs and behaviors, NBC commissioned O’Donoghue to create Mondo Video as a pilot to be an occasional fill-in for Saturday Night Live.

Suffice to say, the finished hodgepodge of splatter gags, dunked cats, Sid Vicious, ancient porn, and other eye-poppers never made it to the air. Instead, producer Lorne Michaels released Mondo Video to theaters with the tagline “The TV Show That Can’t Be Shown on TV”, accompanied by a “special” Mr. Bill Show.

Shout! Factory just issued Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video on DVD, minus Mr. Bill. I’m glad to have the show on disc, but I really, really need to know the truth about that Mr. Bill short.

Here’s why: back in ’79, a kid I knew claimed to have seen Mondo Video in a theater, and he told me that the “special” Mr. Bill Show consisted of Mr. Hand greasing up Sluggo’s big, black cock with Vaseline, and then Sluggo barbarically raping Mr. Bill in the ass.

Could it be that that young rapscallion was fibbing?

It speaks to the time and place that Mr. Bill suffering prison sodomy seemed not just plausible, but a logical extension of where the character would go in truly “not ready for prime time” territory.

It would have been equally normal given the circumstances -- New York City in the late ’70s -- that my cousins’ neighbor Ronny, an otherwise unremarkable 12-year-old, would concoct comedic sexual assault on a beloved clay hero when fabricating a boast about seeing an R-rated movie he didn’t actually see.

Still, for years, I chose to believe that Mr. Bill Gets Raped ran as Mondo Video’s co-feature. Throughout the ’90s, I kept expecting it to turn up on one of those ragged VHS gross-out compilations that got passed around from one punk-rock flophouse to another.

You know what I mean: R. Bud Dwyer eating the gun, Davey and Goliath saying “fuck”, Shatner doing “Rocket Man”, Apocalypse Pooh, Chuck Berry utilizing a white woman’s tonsils as a urinal cake, and so on. But it never did.

When entire “lost” movies such as Skidoo and Who Killed Teddy Bear? began appearing on YouTube, the emergence of Mr. Bill Gets Raped seemed inevitable … until it seemed impossible.

Endless searching has produced no evidence. And while I’ve recently heard from trustworthy adults (as opposed to seventh-graders from Brooklyn) about their vividly recalled experiences of catching Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video during its quick theatrical run, none of them remember any Mr. Bill details, especially nothing that involved Play-Doh rectal trauma.

As I stated earlier, Ronny, who claimed to have witnessed Mr. Bill Gets Raped first-hand, was just an average neighborhood mook. His pop was a cop and I’m sure his kids’ pop is a cop now, too. It was one thing for him to make something like that up. It’s been another thing for me to spend three-quarters of my life in unerring pursuit of it.

That’s why, even though I have come to believe that Mr. Bill Gets Raped never did exist, I felt just the slightest glimmer of possibility when learning about the Mondo Video DVD release.

Alas, Mr. Bill is MIA among the Bonus Features, but the disc does offer a sampling of “Mr. Mike’s Least-Loved Bedtime Stories”, Bill Murray’s moving on-air eulogy from when O’Donoghue succumbed to a brain embolism in 1994, and a feature-length commentary by Mondo Video co-writer Mitch Glazer who, among the creative pillars of early SNL’s offshoots, ranks among the most low-key and, likely, most underappreciated. I had never heard most of Glazer’s anecdotes before, and each one entertains.

For anyone aware of Michael O’Donoghue at this point, his larger-than-death reputation precedes and informs every moment of Mondo Video. All others should be prepared to scratch their heads and conclude, accurately, that, yes, everyone was completely stoned throughout the entire 1970s.

Michael O’Donoghue was an effete dweeb who turned inward-directed self-loathing into outward-directed misanthropy via comedy that ran pitch black and blood red.

He wrote some of National Lampoon’s most remarkable material (including The Churchill Wit and The Vietnamese Baby Book) and produced the magazine’s storied National Lampoon Radio Hour.

O’Donoghue also created a sexy-dame-in-peril comic strip, Phoebe Zeitgeist, and turns up throughout the oddball prank film, Is There Sex After Death? (1971).

On Saturday Night Live, O’Donoghue appeared in the very first sketch opposite John Belushi, and thereafter popped up sporadically in his white-suited Hunter Thompson/William Burroughs/Richard Speck hybrid persona, Mr. Mike.

All this and more can be culled from Mr. Mike: The Life and Work of Michael O’Donoghue by Denis Perrin which is, bar none, the worst biography I’ve ever read. It may well be the worst biography ever written. But it’s there. So that’s something. (Of infinite more worth is Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, plus Timothy White’s O’Donoghue piece in the 1979 anthology Rolling Stone Visits Saturday Night Live).

The problem with the book is summed up by author Denis Perrin declaring early on that O’Donoghue “was a personal god to me” and then injecting himself throughout the narrative, thinking he’s writing in the vein of his “personal god.” Case in point: a paragraph on the New York neighborhood Soho begins, “Before it was a shopping mall for Euro-swill….”

And that was always an issue with O’Donoghue. He was a writer of gigantic imagination and frequent brilliance but, oh, what a terrible influence he was on too many people, in much the same way that the Sex Pistols suggested to 98-pound wastrels how to be “scary.”

Never was O’Donoghue’s macho-rage-in-a-wussy-package more pronounced than during “Zine-O-Mania” of the early-to-mid-’90s. While his own career had collapsed, the world became suddenly littered with Mr. Mike’s philosophical progeny communicating by way countless gleeful, Xeroxed tributes to serial killers, trepanation, satanic ritual abuse, and dead babies, all being pumped out by one “lone nut” with a typewriter after another.

Mr. Mike plus Travis Bickle equaled the average Angry White Male zine publisher back then, just before the Internet exploded with all new forms of irritants. As one who qualified for each element of the back end of that equation, all I could do was … nothing. I had to get laid somehow.

But at least I felt the resentment.

That was then, though, and 40-year-old, sober me is now, so when I watched Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video for the first time in 20-plus years, pretty much all I felt was amazement.

Make no mistake: most of it does not work. Huge stretches of Mondo Video are deadeningly dull and could have never been funny. The most famous segment – cats being tossed into a pool and swimming to safety for ten minutes, often in slow motion – is just that. However dada or avant-garde that may seem in description, consider the boring reality. And that really does set the pace.

Among Mondo’s more interminable bits are “The Church of the Jack Lord,” in which Pentecostals worship McGarret from Hawaii Five-O; repeated nonsensical “Dream Sequences”; and “Laser Bra 2000”, which chronicles Mr. Mike’s ongoing attempts to secure film footage of the titular weapon, followed by the footage itself, comprised of girls using their undergarments as ray-guns for what seems like forever.

When Mondo Video swings and connects, however, it hammers out unforgettably hilarious hum-dingers. Each commercial bumper is a gem (“Nazi oven mitts! Japanese girls bathe in the blood of dolphins! Gig Young’s groceries!”). The music is great, too, from the recurring variations of the mighty “Telstar” (which was going to be the wedding march at my second marriage that didn’t happen) to the disgustingly fabulous Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band belching and oozing their way through “Boogie Till You Puke.” Even the silent Sid Vicious clip rocks.

One Mondo Video bit, “American Women Love Creeps” is a full-blown masterpiece. It showcases the heady likes of Teri Garr, Carrie Fisher, Wendie Malick, and Deborah Harry, and others purring platitudes on the order of, “Acne and dandruff really do it for me!”, “I love it when men smell their fingers!”, and “I think it’s cute when a guy misses the toilet!” This cavalcade of come-ons is, at once, stomach-turning and a turn-on.

Beyond all else, though, is the conceit: this is a parody of and adoring tribute to Mondo movies –- complete with references to the staff as “Italian journalists” and a closing theme by Julius LaRosa -- created by network TV power brokers for mass audience consumption! Can you believe that shit?

To watch Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video now is to freshly wonder just how the fucking fuck theater audiences, settling in for the latest permutation of The Groove Tube and Kentucky Fried Movie (and this one featuring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Gilda Radner, to boot) must have reacted to this mess. The production itself is baffling enough, so couple that with the show being transferred from cheap videotape to 35mm film for maximum blotchiness and headache-induction.

In his commentary, Glazer tells of a ticket-taker in Baltimore being pulled from his box office and pummeled, but that smacks of myth most probably started by O’Donoghue himself.

More convincing is Glazer’s account of the Mondo Video premiere in Manhattan, which was attended by Louis Malle other Gotham heavy hitters. Glazer sat next to his uncle, who had helped to fund Blazing Saddles and other cutting-edge comedies, but who that night just kept snarling out loud, “Do you think this is funny?”

Mondo Video racked up apocalyptically negative reviews and I sort of remember ads for it as a midnight movie at the 8th Street Playhouse in the early ’80s. One presumes the late-night crowd was at least semi-prepared. Still, could there have been even one legitimately satisfied customer?

The only movie whose life as a theatrical release I am more curious to find out about is Gerard Damiano’s all-puppet hardcore-porn epic, Let My Puppets Come (1976). But we’ll let that be a future column.

On the topic of misappropriated kiddie amusements, the other realization when watching Mondo Video is how ahead of its time it was. Rotten.com. Wonder Showzen. Jackass. Happy Tree Friends. Every single aspect of the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim (but most especially Robot Chicken, Tim and Eric, and all the interstitials). These are the modern flowerings of the seeds Michael O’Donoghue sprayed out of his hate-hose.

Of course, being ahead of one’s time means being a failure. You’ve got be right on time, or you’re not on at all. Michael O’Donoghue died embittered, unproductive and, at 54, far too young. Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video sheds painful light on the trails he blazed in the course of boxing himself in.