Mr. Bill Creator ‘Hurt and Disappointed’ By Resurfaced Lorne Michaels Quote, SNL50 Snub

“Oh No!” indeed. The creator of Mr. Bill is speaking out against Lorne Michaels’ recently resurfaced criticism of his former Saturday Night Live character.

In a fiery LinkedIn post, Walter Williams responds to a quote from Michaels that references a “racial tension” within the Mr. Bill shorts. Michaels’ criticism came 45 years ago, but was republished in Susan Morrison’s new biography, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.

“Bought the new book and skimmed to find Lorne’s thoughts about me and Mr. Bill. Quite hurtful and disappointing,” Williams wrote this week.

Mr. Bill, which made its on-air debut in 1976, originated not from the ranks of SNL, but from a fan-made film submitted by Williams when the sketch show solicited home movies. The success of the Mr. Bill shorts ultimately led to Williams being hired as an SNL writer, contributing over two dozen “Mr. Bill Show” sketches through 1981.

But as Morrison recounts in Lorne, Michaels had a distaste for SNL sketches taking on a life of their own and becoming rehashed by the public ad infinitum. “He struggled, mostly in vain, to keep control of the show’s cultural reach,” she describes in the book.

Morrison cites Mr. Bill as “one example of success gone sour,” describing how the character’s popularity resulted in a slew of unlicensed merchandise and a lawsuit against Williams from a former collaborator. (Williams recently recounted this fallout in a wide-ranging interview with LateNighter.) “The hearing became a media circus,” Morrison writes, “and the coverage introduced the idea that the Mr. Bill films were tainted by what Michaels called ‘a certain kind of racial tension.’”

Morrison is quoting a 1980 Washington Post article, where Michaels told Tom Shales, “There’s a certain kind of racial tension within it sometimes.”

That perceived racial tension stemmed from the colors used to depict the characters in the shorts, with Shales writing at the time, “Mr. Bill is vaguely speaking vaguely white, and Sluggo, the nasty villain, appears to be black. Heavily tanned, anyway.”

Williams offered a response in that same article—part of which Morrison quotes in Lorne. “But he isn’t black,” Williams told the paper in 1980. “The only color of Play-doh I had left was dark blue, so that’s what I used for Sluggo. It’s certainly not supposed to be black and white, good and evil. Mr. Hands manipulates everything anyway and just uses Sluggo as an excuse.”

Elsewhere in the 45-year-old WaPo piece, Michaels is quoted saying “If there’s anything annoying, it’s when you do something you think is breathtakingly innovative and all people say is, they love Mr. Bill.”

Morrison, who sat for extensive interviews with Michaels during the ten-year writing process of Lorne, does not include any new quotes on Mr. Bill from the SNL creator in her book.

Even so, Williams made his thoughts on the decades-old comment clear in his LinkedIn post.

“I challenge Lorne or anyone to show one example of racism in the 28 SNL Mr. Bill shorts or the specials and films I’ve created since,” he wrote, going on to reiterate the explanation he gave WaPo back in 1980. “Play-doh back then came in 4 colors; Red White Blue Yellow. That was my entire palette. I made Mr. Bill first; white face, blue eyes, red nose and mouth, yellow hair.”

Williams explains that his choice of blue Play-Doh for the villain had no underlying meaning, and says that his other color options—red and yellow—would have probably been equally misconstrued as racial depictions of Native Americans and Asians.

“I guess what I created was a Rorschach test,” he says.

Williams also notes that Michaels’ allegation only came after years of his welcoming Mr. Bill to SNL. “If Lorne had been concerned about racial tension, he was the only human who could have stopped them,” he says. “I made 25 Mr. Bill films over the first 5 years and Lorne seemed quite pleased with the success and kept ordering more.”

In his post, the Mr. Bill creator also speculates why the once-hugely popular SNL character has been largely wiped from the show’s history. “Is this ‘racial tension’ why neither Mr. Bill or I were invited to the 50th Anniversary show?” Williams asks. “Or is it why any reference to Mr. Bill was excluded from all the anniversaries and documentaries for the last several decades?”