Behind the Scenes

Before the puppets ever appear, the film opens on something else entirely.

An unrelated Frank Barnett sequence, dropped in without explanation. Donald returns as Frank for a brief fight against a henchman played by Nate, which ends the only way these things usually do. Frank wins, the other guy doesn’t, and he walks off like it’s just another day. This is also where the continuity locks in that Harvey is dead, carried over into later projects without much discussion. It’s treated as fact and never questioned.

The scene itself was shot for a simple reason. It was one of the last chances to get Donald on camera. He was about to report to jail. So naturally, Daryl had him dress up as Frank Barnett and fight Nate on a playground for a puppet movie. There wasn’t going to be another opportunity for a while, so it had to happen then.

Nate took the hit, as usual. During the fight, he injured his knee, adding to a growing list of on-set injuries that had been stacking up across multiple productions. It wasn’t the only reason, but it was part of the pattern that eventually led to him stepping away after Revenge of the Golden Hoot.

Bud the Hobo & Lou the Bear came out of a long-standing obsession with puppetry and animation. Daryl had always wanted to do something in the vein of the Muppets, filtered through the sensibilities of Hanna-Barbera and Ren & Stimpy. Something cheap, physical, a little ugly, and alive.

Originally conceived as part of a larger feature of interwoven shorts, the project was meant to connect multiple storylines into a single narrative. That plan didn’t survive. What remained was this segment. The puppets themselves were not built from scratch so much as discovered and repurposed.

Lou came first. Originally a white Macy’s polar bear found at the Salvation Army down the street from Daryl’s house, he was stripped down, cut open, dyed brown, and rebuilt. Daryl and Kirsten added a purple mouth and tongue, along with a puppet sock in the back to make him functional. What started as a department store decoration became something else entirely.

Bud had a different origin. He began as a magician puppet, complete with tuxedo. Kirsten modified the costume with sewn-on patches to turn him into a hobo, while Daryl added velcro-attached googly eyes to allow for shifting expressions. The result was less refined, but more flexible, and somehow more human.

The puppet characters themselves came out of a practical problem. Daryl had wanted to involve Bob Garrett in something going back to high school, but getting him on camera was never going to happen. So the workaround was simple. Use his voice instead. “We knew you wouldn’t come out to film with us… so I decided to steal your voice.”

Bob became Lou. Robert Beauchamp became Bud. And suddenly the film had something it didn’t have before. Two distinct voices, fully committed, both clearly enjoying themselves, even if they weren’t entirely sure what they had signed up for.

Production became a running collection of whoever was around and willing. The film turns into a loose tour of people in Daryl’s orbit. Jack Lewkowitz appears for the first time, along with Brian Grima during a door-slamming montage where Bud and Lou try to scam their way into houses. They run into Hank Della, Auntie Linda and Uncle Bill, Tim from down the street, Sherin Nand, Kirsten’s sister Jennifer, and one of the only appearances of Joshua Nair. Snyder even shows up in the gorilla suit from Jack Knife vs. the Gorilla, because it was still sitting there and still funny.

Daryl puppeteers most of it, with help from Kirsten, Tyler, and Nate. At one point, Nate’s dad appears in the doorway in tighty-whities, confused but cooperative. It works because that’s more or less how he existed in real life anyway. He gives it a couple takes and that’s enough.

The film also folds in family in a way that feels casual at the time and much heavier later. The sequence with Grandma and Pa begins outside the house in South San Francisco, then cuts inside to Lake Tahoe without explanation. The geography doesn’t match. No one cares. The dialogue, however, is real.

“Hank, you want some stew?”
“Honey, I’m on the toilet! I don’t eat when I’m on the toilet!”

When Pa read the script, he paused and said, “Sounds familiar,” realizing Daryl had lifted one of their actual exchanges. They performed it anyway. Some things are too good not to keep.

.Getting Garrett to raise his voice at all took effort. Screaming was off the table at first. Eventually he works up to it, cautiously. Beauchamp has no such problem. “I’m a screamer.” And a planned sing-along to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’ “Pardners” never really took off, Daryl recorded Robert’s take and decided it wasn’t going to work out. They did actually persuade Garrett to sing a few lines of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” however!

In December of 2009, one month after recording the commentary for Bud the Hobo and Lou the Bear, Garrett passed away suddenly in his sleep. The recording, without meaning to, became a last visit.

Around the same time, Daryl and Kirsten took a long-planned trip to New York with their friend Julie Walsh, who was mailing a letter to Santa wishing for a boyfriend. While waiting in line at Macy’s, they came across a holiday display built from old teddy bears. One of them stood out immediately. A polar bear, mounted in a winter diorama, waving. The same model they had used for Lou. It felt like recognition. Like the character looking back at them.

Auntie Linda would pass that same month. Over time, more names from this film would follow. Pa. Dad. Grandma. Uncle Bill.

More than any other production, Bud the Hobo & Lou the Bear ends up carrying them with it. Not by design. Just by accident. That’s the risk, and maybe the gift, of putting your real life on camera.

It starts as a puppet movie. It just doesn’t stay that simple.