Read More About Bubba

Jimmie Lynn Reeves—
Count Bubba, the good buddy of darkness, hosts a late night horror show on KTRE-TV in Lufkin— a small city of 36,000 nestled in the piney woods of East Texas. This Count is a homegrown hybrid. Although his accent is vaguely Eastern European, his world view is purely Chicken Fried. (He claims to have been born “in Transylvania, a small town just off FM-350 near New Willard.”) Underneath the traditional vampire’s cape, Bubba sports a flannel shirt and bib overalls. What we have in this costume is a brilliant collision of discourses: Dracula meets Hee Haw.

In an age when syndicated shows dominate and standardize the nonprime viewing hours, Count Bubba stands as a rare reminder of TV’s untamed past, when video pioneers took creative risks and original programming had a frisky local feel. He seems to have sprung full blown from an old Philco set with finicky reception. That the Count exists today speaks to the potential of fringe TV.

Wayne Lewis, the man behind the fangs, is no newcomer to grass-roots comedy. While still in college, he did improv on the long extinct Texas All Night Network, originating in Austin. Lewis was hired to fill dead air from 1 to 6 a.m. on Sundays: “We had a real bad movie package from Viacom, and this show called Disco 77 that I think was shot in Florida somewhere with one camera— a bunch of disco music and people dancing with a lot of fog effects, star filters, and Turtle Wax commercials in between. You know, 15 minutes of program and 25 minutes of Turtle Wax. Basically the director would say, ‘Okay, at 2:30 we’re gonna have five minutes, you guys come up with a bit.’ And me and my roommate would work something out. We could do mostly anything, because on a good night, we maybe had two dozen people watching in three states.”

While working as production manager for KTRE, Lewis seized an opportunity to inflict his wit on a larger audience. Noticing the dust on the station’s inventory of Universal horror classics, he approached management with the idea of ditching some expensive syndicated programming (Solid Gold) and using this wasted movie resource. Lewis was allowed to put together Count Bubba’s Horror Classics on an experimental basis. It paid off: Within a month KTRE enjoyed a 500 percent ratings increase over previous numbers for Solid Gold. Count Bubba has become a cult star throughout the KTRE viewing area. Lewis reports he’s even in demand as an after-dinner speaker: “I’ve appeared at the Rotary Club, the Lion’s Club, sales meetings. And Halloween is a big night.”

Lewis does not aspire to auteur status— instead, like Levi-Strauss’s famous bricoleur, he borrows freely from other sources to create a new product. The primary pattern used in fashioning Count Bubba was Joe Flaherty’s Count Floyd of SCTV fame. Bubba’s performance is punctuated with the same gleeful howling that was Flaherty’s signature. And like Count Floyd, Bubba’s life is full of petty tribulation. Where CountFloyd’s problem was aesthetic— the movies he introduced weren’t scary— Count Bubba’s frustration is budgetary.

The show is generally shot on sets that serve some other function at the station. In one segment, the Count appears in front of a map and gives the Horror Weather Forecast. “Look at this,” Bubba says, “we got a low pressure system here in the Land of Lincoln, a high coming up over the Rockies pushing a stationary front right through...” at this point an enormous mechanical spider crawls across the bottom of the map. Bubba continues, “And something unusual down here. We’ve got this, well it looks like a giant tarantula creeping across Mexico bringing warm moist air.”

Count Bubba’s success stems from Lewis’s mastery of television: he knows how to exploit the medium for comic purposes, and his skits are full of references to familiar TV fare. Images of Mister Rogers as filtered through Saturday Night Live are called to mind in “Count Bubba’s Neighborhood.” (It’s a horrible day in the neighborhood, an awful day in the neighborhood...”) In another sequence, Bubba locks himself in the men’s room after hearing rumors of his show’s cancellation. The director, failing to coax Bubba out, turns to the camera, strokes his chin, and worries aloud: “What would Ward Cleaver do in this situation?”

This is television about television (Count Floyd) about television (the original TV horror-movie hosts) about movies (the Universal horror series) about popular fiction (the novels the movies were adapted from) about folklore (the legends of the vampire, the werewolf, etc.). As text washes over text, we live, for few privileged moments, in the glow of video feedback: that moment when the camera focuses on the monitor and what results is TV frames, forming a tunnel that recedes into the illusion of infinity. During video feedback, the electron gun that is the heart of television becomes visible as a ghostly light beaming at the vanishing point of that tunnel of frames.

Of course, this is the same stuff the best moments in Late Night With David Letterman and Moonlighting are made of. What makes Wayne Lewis extraordinary is that he’s managing to do it on local television.