David S. Pumpkins, the “Saturday Night Live”-created Tom Hanks character who’s apparently scarier than that girl from “The Ring” and a chainsaw-wielding murderer, will return for a Halloween special this weekend. Any questions?
Last October’s “Haunted Elevator” sketch starring Hanks as the pumpkin-suit mystery man and Mikey Day and Bobby Moynihan as his dancing skeleton sidekicks caused a viral social media reaction, giving the show’s writers the chance to bring it back again for a half-hour animated short airing Oct. 28.
The four-minute original sketch poked fun at NYC’s haunted elevator attractions and drew us all in with its obscurity. The smiling character who repeatedly introduced himself before popping up behind Kate McKinnon and Beck Bennett left us all to ponder — who is David S. Pumpkins and why are we supposed to be afraid of him?
“To be honest, I don’t know that we, the writers, understand David Pumpkins. He’s meant to be confounding,” Streeter Seidell, who wrote the sketch alongside Day and Moynihan, said.
An addition to a series of sketches featuring strange men popping up in unexpected places wearing vibrant suits, Seidell said viewers should look to Larry David’s “FBI Simulator” and Peter Dinklage’s “Mafia Meeting” for background, but not answers.
“The idea was that he was going to be this confusing guy who didn’t fit in with the rest of the scary haunts that pop up,” he explained, adding that Pumpkins was supposed to haunt an actual office elevator in the first draft of their sketch, which was written in one night.
“The initial draft had more of David Pumpkins answering questions, never directly, in a way that leads to more questions. There was much more discussion around the idea of putting him in an attraction leaving us to say, ‘Who is this guy? He’s not among the known Halloween universe.’”
When the David S. Pumpkins special airs on NBC, it’s guaranteed we’ll be left even more confused about the mysterious character whose tagline is, “Any questions?”
Keeping the plot under tight wraps, Seidell said real-life Tom Hanks kicks off the family-friendly special which sees his animated character leave the comfort of his elevator haunt to take a young boy and his sister on a “magical adventure” through a small, unnamed town.
“There’s really only one definitive piece of information you learn about David Pumpkins in the special and it’s very inconsequential,” the writer said. “You learn one opinion he has and that’s about it. But, you see more of what he does and how he behaves, that of course, just leading you to more questions.”
“The David S. Pumpkins Halloween Special” will air at 11:30 p.m. Oct. 28, but that might not be the last you’ll see of the character.
“I think maybe Tom understands him more than Mikey and Bobby and I,” Seidell added. “He said, jokingly, ‘hey, when we do the movie, we should call it ‘The David Pumpkins Movie 2.’”
