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LOS ANGELES, Oct. 17 (UPI) -- Creator Justin Roiland and executive producer Ben Bayouth said the animated Paloni Show! Halloween Special!, premiering Monday on Hulu, includes the late Gilbert Gottfried's final voice performance. "It was about two weeks later from the recording when we heard that he passed," Bayouth told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
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Gottfried died April 12 after a long illness at age 67. On The Paloni Show, Gottfried plays an apartment manager who was dealing with a zombie outbreak in his building.
"I didn't even know he was sick," Roiland said. "He certainly doesn't come off as sick at all."
Roiland pitched The Paloni Show to FOX in 2009. FOX passed, but Hulu, for whom Roiland produces Solar Opposites, greenlit the Halloween special.
"The original 2009 pitch was a family, the Paloni family," Roiland said. "They're doing this show and the wheels just keep coming off. It just turns to absolute chaos and they have no control over what's happening, but they have to keep going with it."
The Halloween special shows Leroy (Roiland), Reggie (Zach Hadel) and Cheruce Paloni (Pamela Adlon) host an hour of Halloween-themed comedy sketches.
One sketch has a slasher killer named Dana Carver. The spoof is a reference to Halloween movie killer Michael Myers, and the real-life actor Mike Myers, whose Wayne's World co-host was played by Dana Carvey.
Roiland was unaware that the real Myers resents comparisons to the Halloween films. Jamie Lee Curtis asked him to cameo in 1998's Halloween: H2O and Myers refused.
"That movie came out when he was a teenager probably, or grade school," Roiland said. "So then it's like, 'Here we go, I'm going to get this for the rest of my life.'"
Another sketch involves the honored guest at a surprise party becoming genuinely terrified when his friends force the gathering on him. Roiland credited animator Joel Haver with the sketch pointing out the dark side of surprise parties.
"A lot of people might be in a mood where they don't want to be social," Roiland said. "All of a sudden, next thing you know you're in a room with 30 people, and it's like, oh, [expletive]."
Mike Schilling's sketch satirizes Beetlejuice. In the 1988 movie, Michael Keaton plays a ghost who comes to life if you say his name three times.
The Paloni sketch never reveals the pseudo-Beetlejuice's name. However, he tricks a man into saying his offensive name three times in public, and Roiland found it funnier to leave the offensive name up to the audience.
"That makes the joke better because everybody's going to think a different thing," Roiland said. "You fill it in and you're told that it's horrible. It makes it worse in a way for each person who's watching gets to project their own thing onto it."
