Trivia / Mr. Bill

• Acting for Two: In Mr. Bill's sophomore outing from October 1976, he attends a party held by Vance DeGeneres, who portrayed Mr. Hands in the SNL era. Mr. Bill sketches aside, this was Vance's only credited on-camera appearance on SNL.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
  • Despite being a catchphrase plastered on almost every piece of merch, Mr. Bill never actually said "OHHHHH NOOOOOOOO!!!" in any of the original SNL shorts. He did however scream "OHHHHHH!!!!" and "NOOOOO!!!" whenever he got hurt, so it's not too far of a reach for people to just connect the two. Post SNL however, Mr. Bill would start to actually adopt the phrase.
  • On top of that, most people doing a Mr. Bill impression will exclaim "Oh no, Mr. Bill!", since even in Mr. Bill's voice, "oh no!" is far too generic a catchphrase to make the reference readily apparent. Needless to say, "Oh no, Mr. Bill!" is not the sort of thing Mr. Bill would say.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • A good chunk of Mr. Bill content isn't available on home video, like the last two SNL sketches (the season 6 finale cold open with Chevy Chase and season 7's Mr. Bill Goes To L.A.), many of Mr. Bill's Night Flight sketches, the Ohh Nooo! Mr. Bill Presents series, and many shorter, more recent clips. One theory on the exclusion of Mr. Bill Goes To L.A. is that it was excluded from home video collections due to a scene involving a giant bag of cocaine unwillingly being given to (re: dropped on) Mr. Bill.
    • On the VHS release The Best of Saturday Night Live: The Mr. Bill Collection, only one of the first five Mr. Bill sketches (Mr. Bill Goes To The Circus) is included, possibly due to Early-Installment Weirdness. All four are available between the box sets of SNL's first three seasons, if you don't mind the inconvenience.
  • You can find it on official SNL home videos, but Mr. Bill collections don't include the part of Mr. Bill Goes To Saturday Night Live where John Belushi signs his autograph for Mr. Bill, using his back as a table (and as Mr. Hands reminded him, don't forget to dot the i!)
  • Also not on Mr. Bill DVDs is the immediate follow-up to the above sketch, which appeared to be the episode's cold open. Abruptly, Jane Curtin took over the control room, angry that in four years, she'd never said "Live From New York, It's Saturday Night!", yet everyone else did, like "that meaningless piece of Play-Doh" Mr. Bill. (John Belushi came out to agree that she was right and deserved to say the line, only for him to say it instead.)
• The Other Darrin: Post-SNL Mr. Bill films and sketches usually featured Walter Williams himself as Mr. Hands, while John Borkowski was credited in the role on Ohh Nooo! Mr. Bill Presents. Of course, no one's going to nitpick the differences in Mr. Hands'... hands, but Walter's voice is kinder and softer in tone than Vance DeGeneres' was on SNL, which could make the abuse Mr. Bill gets more jarring as a result.
• Out of Order: Oddly, the 1978-79 season's Mr. Bill segments on The Best of Saturday Night Live: The Mr. Bill Collection are not presented in chronological order by airdate. This is best exemplified by "Mr. Bill Goes To Saturday Night Live" (the cold open of that season's finale) being included immediately after sketches that premiered the previous October, rather than any of the 7 sketches that preceded it that season.
  • Mr. Bill's Christmas Special was originally intended to air on the December 22nd, 1979 episode of SNL, where it would chronologically follow Mr. Bill Builds A House in the season 5 Story Arc about the collapse of his life (going from the destruction of his new house to him being homeless on Christmas.) However, the sketch was cut due to time constraints, and was aired the following season. Chronologically, it still kind of worked, as he never got a new house on camera, and he was broken out of jail in his final episode of season 5, albeit before being shot up by the Sluggo guards.
• What Could Have Been: There was a planned video game adaptation for the Atari 2600 called "Mr. Bill's Neighborhood" that was completely finished, but never saw the light of day due to the folding of its company Data Age. Even if Data Age hadn't have gone under, the Video Game Crash of 1983 most likely would have halted the game's momentum. Even in video games, Mr. Bill just can't catch a break.

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