Saturday TV Funhouse creator Robert Smigel has unearthed an installment of the Saturday Night Live cartoon that never made it to air.
The “lost” segment, which dates back to 2003, was actually abandoned in the middle of production. It tackles the G.W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, by way of depicting Bush attempting to take down a hive of honey bees.
Smigel released the video on his Triumph the Insult Comic Dog Youtube channel yesterday to mark the 22nd anniversary of the US invasion into Iraq.
“To many people, the idea of ‘liberating’ the civilians while killing thousands of them and destabilizing the region seemed hollow and, uh, bullshitty, especially with Dick Cheney’s conflicts of interests re the valuable oil resources there,” he wrote. “So we started to make a TV Funhouse cartoon mocking the endeavor.”
The cartoon begins with President Bush (voiced by Smigel) in the Oval Office, presenting “alternative programming” that Americans can watch to avoid the stress of war coverage, namely a show titled “President Bush’s World of Adventure.” In it, Bush presents the honey bee as an international threat who attacks innocent people. He teams up with Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld to take down the root of the problem: the dictator Queen Bee.
“Not for the honey,” Dick Cheney chimes in to reassure viewers, in a nod to the then-VP’s Iraq oil interests.
Smigel went on to explain why the sketch never aired. “Within a few weeks, Baghdad fell, and any skepticism about the war was drowned out by the majority, energized by the sight of civilians taking down Saddam’s statue. So I hesitated, concerned about taking on the prevailing wind on such an emotional issue, and we bailed on finishing the cartoon… the only time that ever happened.”
The nearly four-minute abandoned sketch is largely intact, with some sketches, storyboards, and rudimentary animation included to round out the unfinished project.
“It’s not our funniest,” Smigel says, “and it would’ve surely bombed with an audience at that time. But, yeah, it doesn’t feel great to have backed out.”
Future TV Funhouse episodes didn’t shy away from the US-led invasion. The next Saturday TV Funhouse, aired a month after this one was shelved, was the G.I. Joe-inspired cartoon “Saddam and Osama.”
The former SNL writer and featured player produced over 100 TV Funhouse segments for the show from 1996-2008, and the segment briefly gave life to a Comedy Central spinoff. The last one aired on SNL unexpectedly came in a 2011 episode hosted by Ed Helms.
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