The Very Unpresidential History of ‘TV Funhouse’s 'X-Presidents,’ According to Robert Smigel
“The X-Presidents! Struck by a hurricane-powered dose of radiation while appearing at a celebrity golf tournament, our four former presidents are charged with powers and strengths, rendering them all the more extraordinary! Gerald Ford! Ronald Reagan! Jimmy Carter! George Bush! Pitting their arsenal of phenomenal powers against Earth and interplanetary foes alike, the fabulous foursome for right against might. X-Presidents!”
This was America’s introduction to Robert Smigel’s recurring Saturday Night Live cartoon X-Presidents, which was part of the animated TV Funhouse segments that ran on the show from 1996 until 2008. After the first Ambiguously Gay Duo cartoon and a few segments of Fun with Real Audio, TV Funhouse’s eighth cartoon was X-Presidents, a superhero parody starring America’s then roster of living ex-presidents who were imbued with non-specific superpowers.
The X-Presidents ran for a total of nine segments, with their final adventure taking place during the 2004 presidential election, just a few months after Reagan’s death — though he still was featured as the remaining X-Presidents resurrected him.
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Here’s how all of that faux presidential history was made from the very man who put them in office (and on SNL) in the first place: Robert Smigel.
The X-Presidents’ Superhero Origin Story
The X-Presidents came out of me just laughing at how rudimentary people’s awareness of our politicians was at the time. People are more aware now because they’re flooded with information — both good and bad — but in the mid-1990s, certain things that presidents said are all that certain segments of the population really knew about them. JFK had “Ask not what your country…,” and Ronald Reagan had a couple like, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
We were also coming off this period of action movies where Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone had a catchphrase they would utter just after or before beating the shit out of someone. I thought it’d be really funny if the ex-presidents were like Clint Eastwood-esque badasses who got to say their famous catchphrases as they fight crime. But we twisted them. Jimmy Carter famously said in a Playboy interview “I’ve lusted in my heart for other women”; so in the montage he says, “I’ve lusted in my heart to kick your ass.” Or Reagan: “Just say no — to pissing me off!” Bush had “Read my lips,” and Ford started off with a catchphrase, but as we went on, he just got dumber and dumber. By the later ones, he just says “Hey!” before he hits someone.
At the end, they would play a song, just like The Archies would at the end of their cartoon. That became such a cliché in the era I was growing up on cartoons, in the 1970s and 1980s. It didn’t matter if there was nothing in the show that had anything to do with music, they would still suddenly have a band at the end of the show.
Presidential Portraits
We pretty much made the presidents look like they did while they were in office as opposed to what they looked like in the 1990s, maybe a little in-between in Ford’s and Carter’s case. I didn’t make them cartoon-y at all; I treated them like superheroes. I made the art look like a superhero comic book as opposed to a “funny” comic book.
I had Jim Morris, a very famous political impersonator, do all the voices. In a sketch, you want to see a caricature — like Dana Carvey as George Bush — more than you want to see an accurate impression. But for this, I went for the most accurate impressions possible for the same reason I went with the deadpan style of superhero drawings, because the more seriously it took itself, the funnier it would be.
Reagan was the alpha of the group. He had all the put-downs. We definitely didn’t go for benign, doddering Reagan; it was definitely jingoistic, hardass, “Tear Down This Wall” Reagan.
Bush was the fawning sidekick to Reagan. Then I added the gag with him and Barb having sex all the time — I had to compete with Mr. Peepers somehow. That was the era of SNL where the new cast was so different from my era. My era was much more writer-idea dominated. I’m not saying one is better than the other, but they were doing really broad stuff, much more physical comedy with people like Cheri Oteri and Chris Kattan, so I was worried that this bit would get too dry. It needed some big laughs, so I thought it’d be funny if Bush and Barb were having more sex than any other couple among the four X-Presidents.
X-Presidential History Books
Around 2000, Adam McKay and I wrote a whole movie script for the X-Presidents. I had been approached to write an Ace and Gary movie, but I thought they were too one-dimensional. I thought the X-Presidents were at least two-dimensional.
We modeled it after the 1966 Batman movie, so we did a rogues’ gallery of their villains like Imelda Marcos, Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi, whoever the bad guys were back then — the “Axis of Evil” in America’s mind at the time.
We thought we had sold it to a small studio, but it fell apart, so we decided to make a graphic novel out of it, which we did through Random House. It’s dirty and super silly. We actually stole a little bit of it for our later X-Presidents cartoon about Bin Laden.
Answering the Call to Action
The fourth one, about the Constitution, is probably my favorite. The first three were just silly; this was the first one to make any kind of point. I was so frustrated at the time of the Clinton impeachment, where everyone was interpreting the Constitution conveniently for their point-of-view, so it cracked me up to turn the Constitution into the villain of this cartoon.
I started to get more political with the series as time passed. After Will Ferrell left, SNL wasn’t doing a lot of stuff about the Bush administration because they weren’t as excited to do Bush humor — I thought Will Forte was great, but it wasn’t the same to people there somehow. I wanted to do Bush humor because I was very frustrated by that administration, so I did many more cartoons that were directly political, not just with X-Presidents.
More and more, The X-Presidents started to be about something, starting with the Constitution one and continuing with the one about the Iraq War, where they’re making a propaganda movie for the war starring SpongeBob with the actual voice of SpongeBob, Tom Kenny. Out of all of the X-Presidents, SpongeBob was the only one who had any objection, saying, “I dunno guys, this seems wrong.”
That was the second-to-last one. The last one was during the 2004 election, when George W. Bush was tricking them into helping him rig the election. Ron Reagan Jr. was on the team now after his father had died, and the team is kind of lost without Reagan. They were all a bunch of simps without Reagan to bully them around.
X-President 2024?
A few years ago, after Trump lost, I wrote to someone at Saturday Night Live because I had an idea to bring The X-Presidents back, but I didn’t get anyone wanting it at that time.
Who would it be today? Trump, Bush, Clinton, Obama and Carter. Trump would take on the Reagan role, I suppose — or try to. Obama was always hard to parody because he had that cool demeanor. Obama has also been idealized, which makes it harder. And Trump is almost beyond parody. The original team was three Republicans and one failed Democrat, so that, somehow, felt easier. It was also four old white guys.
I don’t know if we could do it now. It would be interesting, though.