Series / Super Dave

Left to right: announcer Mike Walden, Super Dave Osborne himself, and stunt coordinator Fuji Hakayito.

Super Dave (also known as The Super Dave Osborne Show) was a Canadian comedy variety TV series that aired between 1987-1991 on Showtime in the United States and in censored form on Global Television Network in Canada. A Spin-Off of the sketch show Bizarre, Super Dave was a rare example of a successful Variety Show in this era of North American television, running for 95 episodes over five seasons. Host/star Bob Einstein won a CableACE Award for Best Actor In A Comedy Series in 1992.

In this show, Super Dave Osborne (portrayed by Einstein) would play host to a variety program featuring musical performers, comedians, ventriloquists, and others. A recurring theme was how the show wasn't going as Super Dave hoped, often via a performer going too long, going off-script, or being replaced without notice, leading to his increasing annoyance.

Almost every episode ended with a pre-taped piece where Super Dave either attempted to do a stunt or showcased a new area of "The Super Dave Compound", often a tourist attraction, invention, or athletic training facility. In basically every case, something backfired and Super Dave was horribly injured. These sequences always featured host (and real UCLA play-by-play announcer) Mike Walden, and either stunt coordinator Fuji Hakayito (Art Irizawa) or compound manager Donald Glanz (Don Lake). Like Bob Einstein himself, all were previously featured in similar roles on Bizarre.

Followed by the Fox animated cartoon Super Dave: Daredevil For Hire in 1992, and in live-action by three short-run cable series (1995's Super Dave's Vegas Spectacular, 1997's Super Dave's All Stars, and 2009's Super Dave's Spike-Tacular.) Einstein, Walden, Irizawa, and Lake would all reprise their Super Dave characters in the 2000 film The Extreme Adventures Of Super Dave.

Super Dave and its later spinoffs contain examples of:

• Accidental Misnaming: In season 1, Mike Walden would consistently mispronounce Fuji Hakayito's surname in different ways each time he said it, but that gag was phased out in later seasons.
• Adam Westing:
  • Mike Walden portrays a fictionalized version of himself as a smooth, but extremely dense and self-centered, media personality who can't ever be bothered to actually help Super Dave when he's in pain.
  • In his guest appearance, Robbie Knievel mostly seems humble, but he takes advantage of Super Dave's injury in the Atomic Yo-Yo stunt to try to poach Mike as an announcer for his next stunt.
• Ambiguously Jewish:
  • Even though he's played by a Jewish actor, Super Dave usually comes across as generically white (Osborne being a solidly Anglo-Saxon name helps), but after he gets injured he always refers to Mike as a putz (the Yiddish equivalent to "dick"), and his groaning about his injuries has some Jewish Complaining vibes.
  • Oddly, this might be the case for Fuji as well. In the first Christmas Episode, he says he's wearing blue and white in celebration of Hanukkah.
• Amusing Injuries: The comedy of the failed stunt at the end of each episode, usually accompanied by Major Injury Underreaction from Dave (who typically acted more annoyed than distressed).
• Ask a Stupid Question...: Mike's inevitable "Super Dave! Super Dave! Are you all right?" as he rushes over to check on a horrifically injured Super Dave is typically answered with a sarcastic quip along the lines of "Sure, putz. I've never felt better in my life!"
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • Some stunts were set up to fail in an obvious way, only for something else to go wrong instead. The best example is the Atomic Yo-Yo, a human-sized yo-yo with a string connected to a finger on a giant hydraulic hand suspended high above the ground. Super Dave will be in the middle of the yo-yo while the hand does tricks with it. The obvious assumption is that the string will break while Dave is in the air, and he'll plummet (in fact, some people reminiscing about the sketch online misremember this as being what happened). Instead, after Dave gets strapped in, Fuji checks the motor on the hydraulic lift for the hand one last time before the string is attached, and it's not working, so the crew starts looking at it, but one of them accidentally bumps the yo-yo, sending Super Dave rolling down the grass, then breaking through a wooden fence, and finally tumbling over the edge of a tall cliff (actually the Devil's Punch Bowl in Hamilton, Ontario).
  • Several episodes ended with Super Dave cancelling his stunt in favor of showing off some new area of the compound or some amazing invention of Fuji or Donald, only for him to be demolished by some freak accident.
  • An early episode of the show has Super Dave talk about a nice fan letter he'd received, from a Taylor Ripley, about how he was a struggling comedian who wanted to bring a sophisticated form of comedy on TV. Super Dave was so moved by the letter that he brought the young fan on to do his act. Turns out, there is no Taylor Ripley — it's Rip Taylor, who proceeds to throw bags of confetti into the crowd and do the lowbrow prop comedy that was his trademark, infuriating Super Dave.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: A year or so after the cartoon was cancelled, it got one final special episode, Super Dave's Superbowl of Knowledge, which was one long rip on the show's cancellation by Fox Kids.
• Blind Shoulder Toss: Sometimes Super Dave is given an award that he feels reflects badly on him in some way, or a memento of an earlier event that he'd rather forget about. As soon as the person who gave him said item isn't looking, Super Dave will toss the object over his shoulder.
• Bowdlerize:
  • Super occasionally used the phrase "Holy chim!" in place of the s-word, which is odd since the show was on Showtime and he had no problem swearing on other occasions.
  • The Daredevil For Hire version of Fuji received complaints from Asian-American groups for racial insensitivity. For reruns, Art Irizawa looped Fuji's lines to tone down his accent.
• Casting Gag: Several cases (to the point of it being a Running Gag) of a celebrity appearing as an impersonator of themselves, like Sonny Bono as award-winning Sonny Bono mimic Bill Roberts, and Kenny Rogers as Carl Hodges, the show's studio electrician who does an amazing Kenny Rogers impression (alongside less impressive ones of Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley).
• Christmas Episode: One each in seasons 2 and 3, both of which had Classical Music guitarist Liona Boyd as the guest performer, and a Christmas-themed stunt. In season 2 he was supposed to be shot out of a cannon into a chimney, after a scene where another guest sets up a huge Christmas domino display and topples it to a Christmassy rearrangement of the Super Dave opening theme music. In season 3 he gets into an "Atomic Jack in the Box" that's supposed to fire him to the top of a large Christmas tree.
• Clip Show: Each season ended with one, and occasionally regular episodes would shoehorn clips of past stunts in odd ways, like Dave demonstrating the miniature golf course with monitors at each hole so waiting golfers could watch past stunts (which the show would then air).
• The Comically Serious: Super Dave becomes more and more this trope as the show he'd planned goes Off the Rails. A notable example is when the steel drum band shows up, always replacing the band he'd assembled for the show, and who seemingly only know how to play "Copacabana." Super Dave always has a look of quiet but palpable disgust whenever they embarrass him.
• Death by Ambulance: As the Super One is frequently injured during his stunts, an ambulance is often called for. On numerous occasions, the ambulance runs over Super Dave upon arriving.
• Drives Like Crazy: The very first scene in the debut episode had Mike Walden astonished to see Super Dave showing up to the studio in a car doing amazing stunts like driving on its side, wild spins and crashing through a billboard, before Super Dave fell out on the pavement, only slightly injured (by his standards). Then came The Reveal that Dave had hitched a ride to the studio, and it was that episode's Special Guest Ray Charles at the wheel.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Bob Einstein debuted the Super Dave Osborne character on The John Byner Comedy Hour in 1972 and got his first wide exposure in the role on Dick Van Dyke's short-lived 1976 NBC Sketch Comedy show Van Dyke and Company. While the familiar format for all his future stunt sketches was already in place for the Van Dyke sketch (a breathless announcer introduces Dave, who pompously discusses his plans), the joke here is that the "metal container down a track" that Dave paints as possibly life-threateningly dangerous is actually the Revolution roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain, and Dave rides it with a group of kids and nuns, engaging in Comical Overreacting as it goes down the track and does a 360 turn.
  • Fuji's earliest appearances on Bizarre had him as sort of a spiritual mentor for Super Dave, and he also had a less pronounced accent.
• Evil Counterpart: The cartoon introduced Slash Hazard, an evil daredevil and Super Dave's Arch-Enemy. Super Dave told the police when Slash robbed a bank, and they chased him into a wrecking yard. He was trapped in a car crusher, which turned him into a deformed Cyborg. For some silly reason, Slash blames Super Dave.
• Failure Is the Only Option: No matter what it might be, Super Dave's stunt of the week is going to fail spectacularly, and probably cause him some major physical trauma.
• Fartillery: An absolutely epic example appears in The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave: after eating a highly filling (and gas-creating) meal from his Love Interest, Super Dave enters a hospital's bathroom and cuts loose with a fart that lasts two minutes and is best described as unleashing an F-3 tornado inside of the building.
• Impossibly Tacky Clothes: Mike Walden had an endless supply of loud blazers, often in solid pastel colors or with plaid and floral patterns.
• Informed Ability: Super Dave is continually lauded as one of the world's most daring and amazing stuntmen, whose death-defying feats are "astronomically sensational" or other such hyperbole. Of course, when we actually see Super Dave perform a stunt, it backfires spectacularly and he's horrifically maimed, twisted, or crushed in some way.
  • One of the very, very few times we see Super Dave succeed is during his attempt to break the world triathlon record. Despite a shark attack, being shot, and being hit by a truck, Super Dave does succeed in breaking the record.
• Iron Butt Monkey: Something bad will always happen to Super Dave, and it will always leave him horribly injured.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Super Dave was like this in the cartoon, which depicted him more as a sort of superhero for hire. He regularly complained about having to help people, usually because he'd suffer multiple horrible injuries before succeeding.
• Left It In: Especially in the scenes where there was a demonstration rather than a stunt, Mike would wrap up the segment, but the show would stick with him, Super Dave and Fuji or Donald, then Super Dave would ask "Are we still on?", Mike would assure him they weren't, then Super Dave would either break Kayfabe and do something counter to his public persona, or get injured via a surprise mishap (and sometimes both).
• Limited Wardrobe: Super Dave is rarely seen outside his white (with red and blue trim and lots of stars) jumpsuit, while Fuji always wears a navy blue cardigan sweater (and often a baseball cap with FUJI printed on it).
• Major Injury Underreaction: The Super One could be mutilated, dismembered, even crushed into something barely resembling a human being, and yet he'll always remain just lucid enough to get into Deadpan Snarker mode so he can grumble at Mike, Fuji and/or Donald for failing him.
• Made of Iron: Super Dave's capacity to stay alive after being completely demolished by an epic mishap is just plain superhuman.
• Newscaster Cameo: Outside of the show, Mike Walden was a prolific, well-regarded sportscaster.
• Nice Character, Mean Actor: Super Dave presented himself as an all-American hero, but he occasionally showed himself to be an arrogant hypocrite and Jerkass.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Super Dave Osborne is a Played for Laughs version of Evel Knievel (though there's Expy Coexistence, since it's established that Evel exists in the show's universe, and his son Robbie Knievel was a guest on Dave's show).
• Once an Episode: Obviously, Super Dave's opening monologue, as well as the show-closing stunt. Super Dave was also fond of cutting to the latter segment by getting an audience member to come on stage, and throw it to that segment after he leaves. And he always got them to do it the exact same way:
  "Take it away, Mike Walden!"
• Punny Name: The cartoon introduced Super Dave's physician, one Dr. Payne.
• Running Gag: Several, but among the most frequent:
  • Mentioning that some piece of equipment on one of Super's devices was made of "genuine Saskatchewan seal skin" ^note  Saskatchewan is a landlocked province, and therefore would be unlikely to have seals.
  • The Super Dave Band never being there due to other commitments (usually a bar mitzvah), leaving him with a Trinidadian steel drum band that could only play "Copacabana." Also the steel band saying "we know plenty songs", and band members claiming that they used to be roommates with various music legends.
  • Super mocking Mike's outfits and calling him a "putz" after getting injured.
  • Super would disparage some news source for spreading rumors about him, treating it as if it was disreputable, then reveal it was a respected news source like 60 Minutes.
• Sound-Effect Bleep: Some of the stronger language was censored with this, although the show did air on Showtime, and clips from it online always feature said language uncensored, so it's unknown exactly what version featured this.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • The tranquil closing credits music, which would usually underscore Super Dave writhing in pain as his body was mangled in grotesque ways from his latest accident.
  • One episode included a fan-made compilation of his failed stunts, set to Petula Clark's rousing "My Love".
  • A Running Gag has Dave doing lip-sync performances, and they're always somehow songs by women.
• Surrounded by Idiots: Whenever Super Dave's big, cheesy smile starts to fade as things on his show go wrong, his low opinion of his employees bubbles to the surface.
• Variety Show: The variety show was more or less dead in the water by the time this show came around. The reason this show managed to thrive owed to its sketch comedy roots, as the result was essentially a parody of a typical variety show, constantly falling apart at the seams while Straight Man Super Dave fumed at the incompetence going on around him.
• Waddling Head: Sometimes, Dave would be crushed down to only his head and feet, which is even commemorated in the drawing of him in his official logo.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: The location of the sprawling Super Dave Compound is never specified (the majority of the show was shot in and around Toronto, with occasional inserts shot in California).
• We Help the Helpless: The Daredevil For Hire cartoon depicted Super Dave as a sort of hero for hire. Various episodes revolved around him being hired to do everything from saving the Super Bowl from being bombed to transferring a vicious convict to a new prison to stopping a runaway train from crashing to saving some astronauts trapped in outer space to training the U.S. Secret Service to trying (and failing) to get rid of a giant rat.