Nerding Day: Count DeClues' Mystery Castle

Remember Tenko and the Guardians of Magic? You needn't lie to impress me, gentle reader. Far too much has happened in the past three months for you to recall anything that happened back in August of this year.

Allow me to jog your memory: in the mid-'90s, Saban Entertainment tried to produce an American cartoon based on a real Japanese wizard named Princess Tenko. To kick off the show, they aired a FOX Kids special filmed at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, hosted by Amy Jo Johnson of Power Rangers and a goatee of professional magicians. I thought that was FOX's first and only effort to pitch sleight of hand to the Saturday morning set in an era when primetime magic specials were all the rage, but I was wrong. There was… another.

It's unclear if Count DeClues' Mystery Castle was an attempt at a pilot or was supposed to be a one-and-done special from the start. It first aired in 1993 around the Halloween season and was repeated in subsequent years to fill airtime. Literally nobody remembers it, but the existence of two separate FOX childrens' specials filmed at the Magic Castle is incredible to me. For reasons lost to time, it was apparently of incalculable importance that the Magic Castle in Hollywood become a household name amongst kids in the 90s.

Haim Saban's fingerprints aren't on this one, though. It was produced, written, and directed by a guy named Bob Logan and his buddy Jack Mendelsohn. Let's take a look at Bob's CV and see what we're getting ourselves into.

Pretty slim pickings here, with Count DeClues seemingly piledriving Logan's directing career so deep into the ground that it took him nearly a decade to climb out. And things were going so well before that. How to Get… Revenge starring Linda Blair of The Exorcist might be worth a look at some point. And, hold up, there's a Meatballs 4?

No! No, no no! I got surprise Feldman'd by Meatballs fucking 4! This bodes ill. I need to see a guy who's the opposite of a Feldman on-screen immediately. Someone intelligent and sophisticated. Someone who achieved success as an adult, rather than as a child. Someone with a soothing baritone and a command of the arcane.

Thank you, Max Maven. It's wonderful to see you again.

Max also appeared in the Tenko special. Here he's playing the role of the titular Count, who's joined by a rogue's gallery of broad '90s stereotypes and cheap wordplay. Roll call time, gang!

First up is Illusia, the channeler.

Thank god Illusia falls into the "cheap wordplay" category. She's a channeler, which is both a term for someone who communes with spirits and also kind of a TV thing. See?

That's the one joke she gets. Comedy is cheap in Count DeClues, as we'll soon learn. Next up, there's Botler. He's a robot butler played by a guy doing an incompetent impression of Zed the Robot Comic doing an incompetent impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator.

Actor Robert Shields was trained as a mime by the king of the mimes, Marcel Marceau. He booked spots on TV shows pretty regularly throughout the '70s and '80s with his wife as the mime team Shields and Yarnell, who have an extraordinarily strange Talk page on their Wikipedia article.

After doing this special, Shields didn't appear on camera again for nearly 20 years. Count DeClues caused a lot of people involved in it to reflect on some stuff, I guess.

Next up is Professor Pixel. He's played by Danny Woodburn, in a role predating his four-year run as Kramer's friend Mickey on Seinfeld. This might actually have been his first TV role, and he's gone on to have a pretty solid career since. It's nice to know that this show didn't ruin the prospects of everyone who was on it.

The cast is rounded out by Botch, who I guess is supposed to be a Frankenstein's monster type, and "Kyle," who is a '90s surfer dude. That's his whole thing. He calls things totally trundular and weirdly doesn't even get an introduction in the opening.

Kyle just kind of rolls up and explains the inciting incident of the special: someone who just came from a barnyard-themed Eyes Wide Shut-style orgy has stolen the house's magic wand.

The house is alive and capable of speech, by the way. It's voiced by David Leisure, who is best known for playing a guy named "Joe Isuzu" on Isuzu car commercials. His deal was that he would make wild claims, like that Isuzu cars topped out at 950 miles an hour or that Isuzu would accept payment in marbles and seashells.

I have never, ever heard of Joe Isuzu but apparently he was kind of a big deal. He was on ads throughout the '80s and had a brief comeback arc in the early 2000s. This is how people are going to reflect on Hawk Tuah in forty years. This world will one day become unrecognizable to you. Perhaps it already has.

In any case, if you thought Count DeClues's Mystery Castle was going to be about solving the mystery of who stole the house wand, then fuck you. Technically we are going to solve that mystery, but not until the last five minutes. Here's the actual format of the show: weak skit, variety act, cheap topical parody, variety act, vaguely magical skit, cheap jokes, twelve minutes of hula hooping, magic trick, everyone dies. Just like life!

Skit number one features Professor Pixel repeatedly shocking Botch with an electric chair. That's pretty much it. Delight in his pain, children, for he is different from you.

"Just be glad you weren't part of that mutation experiment I did with the Turtles," the Professor tells him. "Cowabunga," Botch replies. Six-year-olds presumably lose their minds at the notion of one television program referencing another in a pre-Fortnite world.

Cut to the Magic Castle's stage for the first variety act. "Outrageous magician" Kevin James (not that one) does a few minutes of stage magic with a little person dressed as a Charlie Chaplin janitor for some reason.

Sure, fine. Kids of the era were watching Animaniacs, they recognized silent film references. But the far stranger part of all of this is what's going on in the crowd shots. I can't prove it, but I had this feeling that the taped reactions were from a completely different audience. Here's the shot of the stage.

And here's the pan across the crowd.

It's possible I'm seeing things. It's possible that I've spent more time looking at these clips than even the people who actually edited them together thirty years ago. And it's certainly possible that even if they did use unrelated child applause b-roll, that I'm the only one who's ever guessed and that my prize for this sort of hawk-eyed vigilance is a quiet "huh" resounding into an ever-expanding void. Moving on.

The next act is The Boys (not those ones). They were a short-lived '90s R&B kids group later known as Suns of Light who had a few hits and, much like Joe Isuzu, have more or less completely disappeared from the cultural consciousness. The crowd, who is definitely in the same room, country, and decade is absolutely losing their minds, though.

But we've lost sight of why we're here — we're trying to solve a mystery. Lost time. Lost love. Lost wand. You can hold only one of those in your hands, but that doesn't make it any more precious, does it? What is immaterial is most dear to us of all. Hey, that gives me an idea! Let's have a seance.

"Bring down the lights," Count DeClues says, and a chandelier crashes down into the table. "Stop!" He insists, and a stop sign does the same. These people live in sight gag hell. The smallest utterance can be taken literally by the spirit of the house and rendered real by its limitless powers. If the surfer dude said "don't have a cow" then Count DeClues would climb atop the seance table and begin birthing calves. Or sucking cows up into himself; whichever would be less funny.

Standard procedure in these incidents is as follows: Count DeClues delivers his catchphrase. Say it with me! "Count DeClues is not amused!"

This is a first draft of a catchphrase. Hemingway once said that the first draft of anything is shit. He was being generous. But look at that, the grandfather clock says it's time for another act.

Count DeClues silently prays for death. He receives, instead, this:

His name is Mat Plendl. He emerges onstage in a fat suit and makes a lackluster attempt at hula hooping, but it's the old Magic Castle bait and switch. The fat suit tears away and the true form of Mat Plendl, hula hoop maniac is revealed.

Mat Plendl's act is by far the longest in Count DeClues. Or maybe it just felt that way. I had entire emotional arcs during this thing. Please watch it. I went from laughing to shaking my head to being in awe of him. And then, during a closeup as his bespoke song about hula hooping played and he mouthed the words "I'm going to get you with my hula hoop," with such excited energy that it verged on sexual menace, I realized that he was also lip syncing.

It would be easy to mock Mat Plendl. I could talk about him like I've spoken about the rest of Count DeClues — as an inexplicable phenomenon of '90s kids programming desperate to fill air time. I could jape about hula hooping, by then a twice-resurrected trend desperately struggling to stick around in dollar store toy aisles. But if I did, it would be an act of dishonesty.

The simple fact is that I envy Mat Plendl. He figured out what he was going to devote his life to as a child in the 1970s, and he's been doing it ever since. He's been on the Dick Clark show, Carson — hell, he was a guest voice actor on a few episodes of the Ghostbusters cartoon.

Meanwhile, I still don't know why I'm on this planet. I crave the certainty and drive of a Mat Plendl, and I salute him.

But the house wand is still missing. Count DeClues is forced to suffer further indignity as Botler presents him with a suitcase that blasts silly string all over his face.

His amused level? Decidedly "un." It looks like Spider-Man jizzed all over him. "You look like Spider-Man just hurled on you," Kyle tells him. Good god, the show just anticipated my joke. Count DeClues throws the mess into a "sight gag recycling bin."

This 1993 television special has become self-aware. Like AI, we have to put it down before it misinterprets our words and creates a race of flying pigs or turns the entire planet into paperclips.

It's time to solve the mystery. Touch the glowing, outstretched finger of Count DeClues.

Now we do one of those '90s TV magic tricks that Max Maven was so fond of, in which the viewer puts their finger on a square and moves it according to his instructions to find the culprit. Was it Botler? The little person Charlie Chaplin janitor? Julius Caesar? The grandfather clock? Not Mat Plendl!

No, it was this guy, whose name I've already forgotten.

His defense? "Magicians are supposed to make things disappear." Fine. Who gives a shit. All this is time that could have been given over to more Mat Plendl.

The cast assembles outside the Magic Castle to say goodbye. They are all incinerated by a bolt of lightning. Act of god in punishment for defiance of his edicts? Random natural phenomenon? Unclear.

A groundskeeper comes by to deal with the tidy piles of ash that the Count and his friends have been reduced to. Roll credits.

Count DeClues is dead. Long live Mat Plendl.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Armando Nava, who thinks more shows should end with everyone incinerated for their crimes.

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