It's been nearly 20 years since the immortal words "Ohh Nooo!!!" first echoed off the walls of living rooms and bedrooms across this great nation--forever engraved in the minds of countless individuals. Repeat those words with the proper pitch and phrasing, and anyone thirty-something or greater will quickly respond, "Mr. Bill!" Yes, believe it or not, Mr. Bill is no longer a teenager. To celebrate the beginning of his post-adolecense life and to remind you of what put him on the top, the "Mr. Bill's 20th Anniversary Special" should be coming to a television set near you very soon, on the wings of NewTek's new non-linear digital editing system, the Flyer, no less.

Battling a tight deadline, record rainfall, flooding, and even a dead car battery, I finally sat down with Mr. Bills creator, Walter Williams, at his home/studio in Hollywood, California.

Walter Williams started making comedy films after getting out of high school. "It was either Mr. Bill or med school. I figured Id be better off mutilating little Play-Doh characters rather than real people." I always thought he was made out of clay or something, but Walter indicated he was "hooked on the smell (of Play-Doh) at a very early age."

Walter got exposed to film-making through a guy who was dating his sister. He got to work on a low-budget feature film down in New Orleans, his home town. Working with the crew and doing sound really got him excited about film-making. The whole concept of filming a story out of sequence and then putting it back together to create a finished product, fascinated him. This excitement seems to have stayed with him to this day.

It wasn't too long before he was making his own short films using a Super-8 movie camera. He showed these around New Orleans at live shows and such. One particular film he made was "Mr. Bill." Williams explains, "it was a takeoff on bad animation and it fit into my budget at the time, which was about ten dollars per film, the Play-Doh... It was not even stop-action. He has never moved. I have to admit it--I don't deny it anymore, but I cheated. But that was the whole point of the joke. Mr. Bill is kind of a victim of his animator, the hands. He can't really do anything. He's got to sit there and complain. He either gets moved by Mr. Hands...or a Mac truck." (He had to buy a lot of Play-Doh too, as a figure never lasted longer than one film.)

While trying to decide whether to go to Los Angeles or New York to start a professional film-making career, Williams sent a reel of his films to "Saturday Night Live" (SNL), which was in its first season. (Yes, SNL is 20 years old too.) To his surprise, they liked the "Mr. Bill" film and told him they were going to air it.

Walter told everyone. Unfortunately, that episode of SNL was pre-empted in his area by coverage of the Mardi Gras parade. Luckily, he was able to go down to the network affiliate and see the show, but Williams (half-seriously) lamented, "no one believed (it was on)." Needless to say, Walter decided to go to New York.

Williams made several more Mr. Bill episodes for SNL, while also doing stand-up comedy at the Improv and other clubs. Eventually Mr. Bill became so popular, SNL's producer, Lorne Michaels, gave Walter a permanent position on the SNL staff. By the fourth season, he was making about a dozen Mr. Bill films per season.

"When I got hired for SNL, Lorne Michaels just said go do it", says Walter. "He said, this year I want you to do ten films. And you trust me to do this? No, if they don't work, I won't put them on. If they do, you'll be a hero and I'll be a hero. So, he basically just let me go off and make them."

The film-maker also got to write some material for the show. One of his writing gems, which he also directed, was "the Concert for Elvis Presley's Coat", a sketch for some reason I remember vividly. These were the glory days of SNL and Williams got to write jokes and sketches for the likes of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. At the end of the 1980 season, at the height of Mr. Bills popularity, Lorne Michaels left the show as did the entire staff, including Williams.

There were a total of 25 Mr. Bill episodes made for the first five seasons of SNL. A bit of little known trivia is that although some sources indicate 24 episodes were made, an additional one was made for a sketch with Chevy Chase where Mr. Bill came back to SNL for a "live" performance.

Mr. Bill has always been nearly a one-man production. "I go to Woolworths. I buy the Play-Doh," he recites as if reading from a checklist. "I open the cans and smell it before I buy it to make sure it's fresh. I have to make the stupid thing. I film the things. Write the scripts. I edit it. Do the voices."

About the only thing he didn't do was Mr. Hands, but it was out of necessity. "I've had various other people do the hands," Walter told me. "I'd do that too only running the camera with one hand and Mr. Bill in the other, my head would probably get in the way... Yes, it was all my fault. I take full blame."

Since 1980, Mr. Bill has shown up on a Bob Hope special, David Letterman, and many other shows. Mr. Bill was also seen in a short film that was distributed nationally with the movie "Ernest Rides Again." Walters first book featured Mr. Bill and became a number one best-seller. Released in 1993, the Mr. Bill Collection from the Best of SNL videotapes has sold more than 100,000 copies and has far outsold any other volume in that series, according to Williams.

In recent years, people started teasingly (I'm assuming) associating Mr. Bill with President Bill Clinton creating somewhat of a resurgence in Mr. Bill's popularity. Williams also created the very Mr. Bill-like Pizza Head commercials for Pizza Hut.

Williams has keep busy doing other things as well. In 1990, he was responsible for getting the Video Toaster its first network TV exposure. That was on "Into the Night Starring Rick Dees." He used SuperVHS cameras and put together an off-line editing system at home to avoid the pressures of an hourly rate at a post house.

Initially, Walter was hired to make some short films for the show and was also a writer on staff. However, he was able to fill a void where there was no budget and give the show a more interesting look using Amiga graphics and the Toaster. "If they had a budget of anything", says Williams, "then everyone would have questioned (using the Amiga). But they saw the results and liked it. So they had no reason to." Unfortunately, the show didn't last very long, but I don't think anyone can blame that on the Toaster.

Interestingly, although Super-8 is not considered a "professional" format, Walter stayed with it for four SNL seasons before moving on to 16mm. Before his SNL success, arguably confirming the acceptance of the format, people warned him that he'd never get Super8 on television. However, Williams felt that if he couldn't use it, he wasn't going to be able to afford to make any films. If he had tried to just pitch the Mr. Bill concept to any of the networks, it would probably have never made it.

Using this simpler film format on SNL gave Walter more creative control than he would have had otherwise. "I didn't really have to go sell or talk someone into it. I could just make the film. So that's what (was) appealing about the Amiga. You just take a video cable, plug it into the back, stick it into your VCR or TV and you get computer videos. That kind of stuff was really attractive to me because I try to approach this stuff on somewhat of an artistic level. Something I like; fun to me; and, not have to have it filtered through all kinds of people. Especially in comedy, timing is so important. You have to set up a gag and then pay it off, and it has got to happen in the right amount of time to get someone to laugh."

Williams feels very strongly that effective comedy requires a single point of view, whether that comes from an individual or a group. He says, "it has to be a point of view that's carried through the whole process of making a film, which is very long and tedious. From the moment you get an idea, through the time of building the props, or casting, and shooting... By the time you're in the editing room, it's very stale and boring. You hate it and it's not funny. But you just have to plow ahead at that point and realize that if it was initially funny and I've done all the steps in between and I put this together again, it should be funny. The audience would not have seen it before."

Walter talked his wife into letting him get an Amiga 1000 by telling her he was going to design a new character on it. Well, that 1000 is long gone, but the character, Hokie the Shobot, will make its first official appearance on the 20th Anniversary show. He's a little robot that is running the satellite network backstage while everything keeps breaking down. (His original 1000, by the way, was given to a friend and is still working perfectly.)

Now days, using his Amiga 3000 and 4000, and SuperVHS editing equipment, Williams often does small-budget projects. Taking advantange of the Amigas multi-tasking capabilities, he uses all of his equipment in concert with each other, literally. To score the video, he begins with SuperJam controlling a One Stop Music card (Blue Ribbon Soundworks). SuperJam creates a song based on a particular style you select. The melody can be altered on the fly, which Walter does as he watches the video.

Once he gets something he likes, the SuperJam song is recorded into Bars and Pipes (Blue Ribbon Soundworks), where it can be further refined. Of course, Bars and Pipes is also remembering the SMPTE timecode from the video, so when the video is played back again, the music will be perfectly synchronized.

SunRizes AD516 with Studio 16 software is also part of the audio picture and is used for multitrack 16-bit sound bites, like music, voices, sound effects, narration, etc. These are all cued based on SMPTE timecode as well. The SMPTE timecode goes from the video into the AD516. Bars and Pipes has a special feature that allows it to follow the same timecode.

The AD516 is installed in Walter's 3000. You shouldnt be too surprised to learn that he also runs AmiLink on the 3000 to control the Toaster in his 4000 as well as his videotape decks. To summarize: AmiLink on the 3000 is controlling the Toaster in the 4000 and the video decks, which are providing the SMPTE timecode signal being sent back to the AD516 in the 3000, triggering 16-bit multitrack audio, as well as synchronized music from Bars and Pipes played on the One Stop Music card. Got it?

Williams likes the total video production package the Amiga provides because it allows him to also work on personal family type projects, which would never be even attempted if he had to go outside to do any part of the production.

Although, he plans to add a Window NT machine for LightWave rendering in the future, Walter openly admits that he could not do the video work he has done without the Amiga. It is also not only a question of cost. "This, right here. Having all these multitasking programs running simultaneously. You cant do that on a Mac. (Although) you can do parts of it on certain machines. I've got eight tracks of audio. Even on a Macintosh with ProTools, you only get four tracks, with a high-end $20,000 software package."

Without revealing names, Walter told me that a friend of his who works at a Mac-only studio, sometimes comes to him--tape in hand--because their equipment can't do real time full-screen video. Williams uses the PAR for this chore, which he plans to use as another video source with the Flyer.

Walter does use some Mac software, like PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator, and Quark Express, but he runs it on an Emplant board in his 4000. The guts of his 4000, by the way, have been transplanted to a ToasterOven (Ambitious Technology), a procedure he bravely performed himself. The initial 20th Anniversary show announcement was created using his Mac software and delivered to the printer on a Mac-formated Syquest cartridge, with no actual Macintosh involved! The printer never knew the difference.

Williams is very excited that he will be creating the entire 20th Anniversary show on the Flyer. The 30-minute show is going to include some clips from the SNL Mr. Bill episodes, plus some new material. LightWave 3D was used on some of the new stuff and looked pretty cool. On effect involves using 2-D images and clipmaps mapped on a flat plane. This allows the objects to cast a shadow giving them a 3-D look. Keeping the camera at a certain angle with respect to the objects helps not to betray their 2-D form. He has also incorporated lots of actual photographs mapped onto wall objects and other things, giving his LightWave scenes a very rich look. The photos were digitized using PhotoCD.

What's more, he has created his own "network", called the Sluggo Broadcasting System. Walter plans to upload the show to a satellite and allow anyone to record and preview it before committing to it. Sort of like network TV shareware. (I was surprised to hear that this is a relatively inexpensive thing to do.) Stations will have exclusive rights for their particular market on a first-come first-served basis. Williams wants to get a lot of play out of this and has, accordingly, made it very affordable. About 2,000 full-color "teaser" postcards were mailed to every TV/cable station in the country. The postcard tells them to look for a follow-up letter which will give a specific time, channel, and pricing information.

"You need a face like this (pointing to Mr. Bill on the postcard), at this point in history, to get the attention of a station manager. Everyone who is a general manager or station manager of a TV station right now is basically my age (and) grew up on Mr. Bill, watching SNL. They're going to notice it. It will at least intrigue them enough to have their engineer record it and look at it. Then they can decide if they want to join in on the festivities of the whole SNL celebration."

Williams has been wanting to do this for a long time. But with the availability of the Flyer and SNL's own 20-year anniversary promotion, he feels that this is the right time to do it.

He is going to physically deliver a pair of 9GB Flyer hard drives to a satellite uplink site. There, they also have a Flyer and he'll just connect the drives to its SCSI bus. The Flyer output will be laid off to D2 machines which will then be used as the broadcast source. Although in theory you could go straight from the Flyer, using the D2 machines will eliminate any Flyer-related playback problems that might crop up unexpectedly.

"I look at it as the same as wordprocessing versus typing on a piece of paper", Walter says comparing the Flyer to normal videotape editing. "I can't imagine having to retype, if you wanted to change just one word, or insert, or anything. And thats even more amplified in film-making: the option of being able to insert something between two shots or take it out, or just to see what it looks like in reverse. Being able to drag things in a general order and then go back and continue to refine and tweak them... The advantage is I could theoretically be editing right up to the satellite feed. I wouldn't want to, but the way jobs go... At SNL I was pushing it always up to the last moment each week to get the film finished. With a video (tape) edit, youd have to lock yourself down at least a week, two weeks, in advance and prepare your on-line. You're really locked solid. (With the Flyer), if I go shoot something at the last second...I can just pop it in the beginning of the show and everything else gets re-adjusted. Im just really excited about the whole (thing)."

In addition to "Mr. Bills 20th Anniversary Special", Williams is also putting the finishing touches on a feature film idea. He gave me no details on this other than it will be comedy.

If you thought the creator of Mr. Bill was going to be a one-dimensional kind of guy who got lucky, you should be convinced otherwise. Just getting Mr. Bill off the ground took a lot of guts, hard work, and talent. The one thing that impressed me more than anything was that he still gets excited about his work and continues to push the envelope. His pioneering efforts should pave the way for artists with limited resources to more directly express themselves to a larger audience.