Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/15/sctvs-forgotten-comedy-hero-remembering-joe-flaherty-rip.html
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My favorite Count Floyd “movie” was definitely Tip O’Neal’s 3D House of Representatives
SCTV - Count Floyd - 3D House of Representatives (youtube.com)
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Yoy: I was a big SCTV fan back in the early 80’s. You’re right, it did seem like if you were a fan that you were in on a big secret that no was else knew yet. John Candy came down to my college at SIU-C to film a TV special in 1981. I saw him at a bar and shouted out “Johnny LaRue!” and he gave me a shrug and a smile in the way Johnny LaRue would. It was a huge sign of mutual respect. 
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He should have gotten more due during his career. It’s possible that he wasn’t as successful as the others due to him being older than the rest of the crew.
There is a piece missing in the SCTV story. Martin Scorsese started making a Netflix documentary on them, and it was big news when he interviewed them a few years ago. That project seems to have been scuttled. Nobody is commenting, and Flaherty was kind of upset about that near the end of his life. The documentary needs to see the light of day.
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Looking over his filmography, he was never out-of-work for long (lots of kid’s TV and cartoon voices) but never a big stand out roll. I’ll always remember him as the Western Union man in Back to the Future 2.
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He is among my favorite TV dads due to Freaks and Geeks.
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Even if in reality it was reruns of a show that had run in prime time for several years on network tv. Which some of us will admit to being old enough to remember.
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In my area SCTV was on late Friday nights so it was often competing against the local horror host–and, for me, always won. But Count Floyd was good for both a laugh and a way to get my horror host fix. It was nice to see he was inducted into the Hall Of Fame in 2021.
Martin Short had a Saturday morning TV show, The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley, which my friends and I never missed…but only because each episode had a live action segment of Count Floyd.
I know Flaherty did a lot of other things, a lot of really good things, but it will always be Count Floyd I remember.
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Aykroyd credits him here for his teaching:
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He’s stuck in my head as his hybrid Slim Whitman/Che Guevara character, serenading Indira Ghandi.
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We were married in 1984 on Thanksgiving weekend. We were young and stupid and pregnant. We had to choose that weekend because with 3 weeks planning it was the only weekend we could get a hall and church.
The added bonus was our anniversary aways fell on a holiday but not in Canada so we could get a long weekend without things being closed for the holiday.
Toronto became our second home for anniversaries and vacations. It was close and for many years the exchange rate was crazy.
We’ve been to Second City in Toronto many many times.
Always an awesome show, we never saw any of the famous alumni though.
But if you were on the stage in Toronto you were extremely talented.
Toronto was/is also home to many great comedy clubs, you could just take a walk and find an awesome comic on stage any weekend evening.
Bob and Doug McKenzie (Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas) we’re huge when we were kids.
What a great time to experience stuff like Second City.
Take Off You Hoser.
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Does anyone know if Count Floyd was the same Floyd as the news reporter character Floyd Robertson?
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forgotten by somebody maybe, but not by me. i loved and followed all the SCTV people through their careers. They have all been fantastic.
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Respect!
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Yes, the fictional station SCTV was too poor to hire more, so the news presenter had to moonlight as Count Floyd
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OMG! I remember how special it was to stay up for SCTV on NBC! I also have fond memories of SCTV on Cinemax in the '80s so that you could watch it in the afternoon. The '80s brought us some great comedy memories.
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They filmed some of the last season in my home town, which always made for a treat when I’d recognize some park bench or storefront in the background of a silly scene (Rick Moranis singing ‘Downtown’ on Main Street in downtown Leduc Alberta always felt like a joke that was written specifically for about 15 of us)
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Yep, I loved his SCTV stuff, but for me he’ll always be Mr. Weir.
(And lest we forget his brilliant nod to Count Floyd in this show!)
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Loved that show.
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We all watched and appreciated SCTV too. My eternal favorite was with Joe Flaherty as the dad in the Shock Theatre bedtime story sketch.
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