A day after Oz Scott received my query for an interview regarding “Mr. Boogedy,” the horror/comedy cult cinema classic he directed for Disney in 1986, he stopped by his hotel bar in Vancouver and had an incredible bout of synchronicity. Seated next to him was Kristy Swanson, the actress who played one of the leading roles in the film and who boasts one of the most prolific careers of those involved in the production.

“I have not seen Kristy Swanson in 15 years, and it was amazing,” Scott said in an interview from the city, where he was shooting the new comedic drama series “CHAOS” for CBS. “She had just gotten her driver’s license on that film.”

Little known facts about 'Mr. Boogedy'

According to Janover, there was only one son in “Cheap Thrills.” He added a second for “Mr. Boogedy” because he wanted to name them after his wife’s grandsons who were about that age at the time. He also named the daughter character “Jennifer” after someone they knew who was about the same age.

Janover got the term “boogedy” from a segment from “Cat’s Eye,” a film penned by Stephen King that was released in 1985. There was a part of the film where a man was forced to walk on the narrow ledge of the top floor of a skyscraper and the antagonist taunts him by shouting “Boogedy! Boogedy! Boogedy!” “I always thought that was kind of funny and scary, it just stuck in the back of my head,” Janover said. “And so that’s where ‘boogedy’ came from.”

One of the openings Janover wrote for “Cheap Thrills” was a word for word parody of the opening scenes of “The Exorcist,” up to the point where the priest finds a winged demon artifact at an archaeological dig site. “The only thing I changed in it, he has the winged demon in his hand and he’s looking at it and he squeezes it and the wings spread apart and two breasts pop out. But then he does it again, so he does it twice. That was the opening for the movie,” Janover said, laughing. “So it was spooky just like ‘The Exorcist,’ but not like ‘The Exorcist.’ That was the idea.”

Scott said the film's music, composed by the late John Addison, was performed by an orchestra of 20 to 25 musicians. The entire film was shot on Disney’s back lot, which has since been destroyed, and filming took just 12 to 15 days.

Of the scenes where the character of Jennifer investigates the room with the green glow emanating around the door frame, Scott said, laughing: “I remember when we put that door on. I said I need more light and we had to cut the door down so that it didn’t fit the doorway properly to get the glow in.”

Swanson's career took off after that, and she was busy enough that she didn't reprise her role in the "Boogedy" sequel "Bride of Boogedy" in 1987 (she's probably best known for playing the title character in Joss Whedon's original feature "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in 1992). But she has fond memories of the film and had an interesting anecdote for Scott in that Vancouver bar.



When she was at the audition for the film, she said, she met a young actor named Leaf who Scott had turned down for the role of one of the sons in the film, giving the part to David Faustino instead (Faustino would go on to have a successful career of his own, starring as Bud Bundy for the full run of the Fox sitcom "Married with Children"). Leaf was Leaf Phoenix, who would go on to become the Academy Award nominated actor known as Joaquin Phoenix.



I asked Scott, who hadn't heard the story before, if he'd worked with Phoenix since.



"No, I haven't," he said, laughing. "And he'd probably say, 'You turned me down for Mr. Boogedy.' "



25 years of 'Boogedy'



This month marks the 25th anniversary of the premiere of "Mr. Boogedy" as part of the Disney anthology series "The Disney Sunday Night Movie" that aired in the mid-to-late '80s on ABC, but it's likely you'll see little fanfare from Disney on the film's behalf. The short made-for-TV film — about a pair of oblivious jokester parents who move into a haunted house with their three kids — has yet to see a DVD release from the company, as does its sequel.



Yet both the original and the sequel are available to view in full on YouTube, and the film has developed a cult following online, where a "Mr. Boogedy" page boasts more than 600 fans on Facebook and a petition titled "Bring Back Mr. Boogedy and Bride of Boogedy And Release It On DVD" includes more than 7,000 signatures (attempts to reach an official at Disney for comment went unanswered).



Scott broached the subject with Disney in 2003, when he directed "The Cheetah Girls" movie for the Disney Channel, but was rebuffed.



"I said, guys why don't we do a remake or do the third installment or put it out," Scott said, "and they were like no, that's old, that's old, that's old."



Both Scott and Michael Janover, who wrote the original screenplay for "Mr. Boogedy," would love to see the film released.



"It's never been given a proper release," Janover said. "I'd love to have one myself."



'Cheap Thrills'

If things had worked out just a little bit different, “Mr. Boogedy” could have been released by Columbia Pictures as a feature film starring Cheech and Chong that Janover described as “ ‘Scary Movie’ well, well, well before ‘Scary Movie.’ ”

The original script for the film was dubbed “Cheap Thrills” and was written after Janover’s agent — a member of the legendary Los Angeles improv group, The Groundlings — asked him to pitch a project to Columbia, who was working on a deal with Cheech and Chong’s manager at the time. All Janover could think to pitch was an idea he’d had for a short film as a student at UCLA, a parody of sorts of “Dracula.”

“I had a geriatric Dracula coming into this window with the usual sexy woman, and when he leans over to bite her neck his teeth fall out. That sort of thing,” Janover said. “So they said great, let’s do it.”

So Janover wrote “Cheap Thrills,” which was basically the same structure as “Mr. Boogedy,” he said, “only much crazier. It was more like ‘Airplane’ and it was really unleashed.”

But things fell apart when he unintentionally offended the head of the studio at the time — “an older guy who was a strict Catholic” — with a scene involving the exorcism of the father character in the film.

“We had Max von Sydow, who was from the original ‘Exorcist’ — he played Father Merrin — and he was going to play himself only the parody version of himself. And I had him chasing the father down the hall with an enema bottle of holy water,” Janover said. “I think that may have been too much, so it got canceled.”

Later, Janover got a call from Disney.

“They said what we’d like you to is ‘Cheap Thrills’ but do it for Disney,’ ” he said. “So I said OK, I think I can do that. And that’s what I did.”

'A silly thing'

Rick Stratton, who served as the makeup artist on “Mr. Boogedy” and its sequel, said in an interview from his home in Los Angeles that he thought at the time the film was just “a little throwaway show” to Disney. Yet once they premiered the original and had gauged its popularity they agreed to do the sequel, and at one point there were even talks to develop the concept into a television series. (Janover said no one ever actually sat down to talk to him about this, though he noted that Michael Eisner, former chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company, was a big fan of the films.)

For all those whose dreams have been haunted by the famous “hamburger face” of “Mr. Boogedy” over the years, they have Stratton to thank. Yet the original film had a relatively low budget, he said, and he had little to work with.

“They pretty much gave me a mold for a face that was made for who knows what — it was just like some burn victim thing — and they said, ‘Do something with this,’ ” Stratton said. “It wasn’t made to fit the actor, it was just very mask-like.”

When they moved to do the sequel, Stratton — who later won two Emmys for his television work on “Alien Nation” and “The X-Files” — was actually able to cast the actor and make the piece fit.

“I was still kind of stuck with that dopey design,” he said, “but I guess it was for kids, they didn’t really care about making it too scary. It was a silly thing anyway.”

Your first horror movie

Despite being “for kids,” the movie seems to have retained a hold on those audiences who first watched it in the ’80s, and both Scott and Janover get comments on the movies to this day. Janover, who now teaches screenwriting courses for UCLA and the University of Oregon, has students who talk to him about the film.

“What’s always struck me about the movie,” he said, “is what a wide age range it appealed to.”

Many of the adults who were kids when they first saw the film now likely have kids of their own, and are in a prime position to pass on the tradition. Scott said he’s known friends of his son who knew the film by heart 10 years after they first saw it, and a movie with that kind of impact isn’t easily forgotten.

“I didn’t feel it was just a kids’ movie; the whole family could watch it,” Scott said. “I got the same comment on ‘Cheetah Girls,’ where adults said, ‘I could sit down and watch it with my kids and there was something there for me, too.’ ” (It’s a concept Scott has tried to integrate into one of his recent films, tentatively titled “Home Run Showdown,” that he shot in Taylor and Milford, Michigan, last summer.)

As for the future of the franchise, Scott says he thinks the film would do well on DVD. He even sent a YouTube link to the film to Swanson after seeing her in Vancouver, where she was shooting an episode of “Psych” for USA, and she shared it with her colleagues.

“I think people would enjoy it, especially kids, because it’s a scary movie but it’s a funny movie,” he said. “It was your first horror movie.”

Simon A. Thalmann is the online editor for Booth Features. He can be reached at sthalmann@kalamazoogazette.com.