Maniac Mansion
Genre	Sitcom
Created by	George Lucas
Based on	Maniac Mansion by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick
Developed by	George Lucas Rick McCallum Cliff Ruby Elana Lesser Bob Carrau Eugene Levy
Starring	Joe Flaherty Deborah Theaker Kathleen Robertson Avi Phillips George Buza
Opening theme	"Maniac Mansion" - sung by Jane Siberry, composed by Lou Natale
Country of origin	Canada United States
Original language	English
No. of seasons	3
No. of episodes	66
Production
Executive producers	George Lucas Rick McCallum
Running time	30 minutes
Production companies	Lucasfilm Ltd. Television Atlantis Films
Original release
Network	Canada YTV United States The Family Channel
Release	September 14, 1990 (1990-09-14) – April 4, 1993 (1993-04-04)

Maniac Mansion is a sitcom created by Eugene Levy, which aired concurrently on YTV in Canada and The Family Channel in the United States for three seasons from September 14, 1990, to April 4, 1993.

The series is loosely based on the 1987 video game of the same name by Lucasfilm Games. While Lucasfilm served as co-producers on the series, the show thematically has little in common with its source material (see § Differences from the game).

Overview

Maniac Mansion centers around the lives of the Edisons, an American family living in a large mansion in the upscale suburban neighborhood of Cedar Springs. The Edisons consist of patriarch Fred (Joe Flaherty), an eccentric scientist and inventor, his level-headed wife Casey (Deborah Theaker), and their children, teenage genius Tina (Kathleen Robertson), prepubescent Ike (Avi Phillips) and precocious toddler Turner (George Buza). Also living in the Edison mansion are Casey's brother Harry Orca (John Hemphill) and his wife Idella Muckle-Orca (Mary Charlotte-Wilcox).

While Maniac Mansion primarily derives its storylines from typical sitcom fare such as family life and parent-child relationships, the series incorporated several prominent elements of science fiction. Fred Edison is a scientist who works out of his basement laboratory which is partially powered by a mysterious extraterrestrial meteorite, and many episodes revolve around Fred's outlandish and occasionally disastrous experiments and inventions. As it is revealed in the series premiere, a mishap with one of these inventions caused genetic mutations in two of the main characters, Turner Edison and Harry Orca: for the complete run of the series, toddler Turner is a fully-grown man with the mind of a child and Harry Orca is a normal-sized housefly with a human head (similar to the 1958 version of The Fly).

Sharing many writers and performers with the 1976–1984 Canadian sketch comedy series Second City Television, Maniac Mansion has a very similar style of humor, featuring much of the dry wit and cultural satire common of SCTV, ranging from pop culture references to film and television parodies. A particular staple of Maniac Mansion's comedy was the series' pervasive tendency of breaking the fourth wall, with characters – usually Harry – addressing the audience to comment on the particular episode. Meta-referential humor was also a regular element of the show: a few episodes are presented as "behind the scenes" documentaries, depicting the Edisons as an actual family starring in a sitcom based on their lives.

Cast and characters

Development and production

In a special printed in the Summer 1990 issue of The Lucasfilm Fan Club magazine, the initial conception of an episode television series based on Maniac Mansion is credited to Lucasfilm animators Cliff Ruby and Elana Lasser, who pitched the idea to George Lucas.^[1] Convinced on the project's potential, Lucasfilm contacted the Toronto-based production company Atlantis Films to begin work on the series.^[1][2]

Atlantis enlisted comedian and former Second City Television writer/performer Eugene Levy to creatively spearhead the development the series. Originally pitched as a more overtly horror/science fiction-themed comedy in the vein of The Addams Family or The Munsters, Levy ultimately rejected this approach, recruiting a number of The Second City alumni and re-working Maniac Mansion from the ground up into the more lighthearted and slightly surreal series it eventually became.^[1][2]

Shot entirely in Toronto, Maniac Mansion premiered on September 14, 1990 on The Family Channel in the United States, and September 17 on YTV in Canada.^[3] The series lasted for three seasons and sixty-six episodes before its cancellation in 1993. The series continued to air in syndication on The Family Channel until 1994, on YTV until 1997, and later on Canadian channel Showcase until 2002.

Episodes

This Maniac Mansion episode list was compiled from United States Copyright Office database.

Home video

In 1992, Family Channel Video released a VHS tape entitled "Maniac Mansion: The Love Collection", featuring two first-season episodes of the series, "Flystruck" (#102) and "Fred's A-Courtin'" (#105). This was the only official video release of the series; as of 2018, there are no known plans for Maniac Mansion to be released on DVD.

In 1991, a Japanese company HRS Funai released another VHS tape "マニアック・マンション (Maniac Mansion)", sold in Japan. It contains four first-season episodes, "The 10th Anniversary Special" (#101), "Webs, The Really Tangled Kind" (#110), "Good Cheer On Ya" (#114) and "The Cliffhanger" (#122), each episodes having Japanese subtitles.

Reception

Differences from the game

While ostensibly an adaptation of the 1987 computer game, Maniac Mansion shares several superficial similarities with its source material, though is vastly different in terms of plot, tone and characterization.

The premise of the game, a homage to horror and science fiction B movies, follows a group of teenagers who venture into a dilapidated mansion to rescue their kidnapped friend. The mansion is inhabited by the homicidal Edison family, consisting of Dr. Fred, a deranged scientist who is possessed by an evil meteorite, his wife Edna, a sex-starved sadomasochistic nurse, their son Weird Ed, a paranoid paramilitary survivalist, and their pets Green Tentacle and Purple Tentacle, a pair of sentient, ambulatory tentacles.

Whereas the television series was produced for family television, the tone of the game was decidedly more adult, featuring much risqué black comedy and surreal violence amid LucasArts's traditional style of offbeat humor and slapstick which was entirely omitted from the television adaptation. The game's original characters are also completely absent from the series with the exception of Dr. Fred Edison, whose character was drastically changed from an insane antagonist with a balding, elderly appearance in the game to a clumsy but good-natured family man in his forties in the television show.

The most overt thematic connection the series had to the game was the setting of a mansion housing an extraterrestrial meteor. The meteor itself is seldom referenced in the show, although it is prominently featured in the opening credits of the first season via an expository newspaper clipping, revealing it to have been discovered underneath the mansion by Fred's grandfather Louis Edison. Throughout the series, Fred can be seen conducting various experiments either harnessing the meteor's supernatural powers, or experimenting on the meteor itself.

Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, the designers of the original Maniac Mansion, have never made any public comment on their opinion of the television series. However, in Day of the Tentacle, LucasArts' 1993 sequel to Maniac Mansion, the television show serves as a minor plot point in which the game's protagonist Bernard Bernoulli must help collect the royalties that Dr. Fred was promised from a vaguely explained in-universe television series based on a video game based on the events of the first game.

See also

• Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show, a later program with a similar premise, also starring George Buza

References

External links

• Maniac Mansion at IMDb
• Archive of Mansion Site: A fansite for Maniac Mansion