Leslie Nielsen cast as VIRGILman
Last Updated Wed, 11 Aug 2004 11:34:13 EDT

TORONTO - Veteran actor Leslie Nielsen, known for his varied career, is branching out again.

On Sept. 11, he will make his debut as VIRGILman, a superhero with a serious gas problem. The animated show will appear on Teletoon.

VIRGILman was specially designed by Niagara land use planners Alan Gummo and Robert Miller to allow Nielsen, 78, to indulge his well-known love of fart jokes.

"It's an amazing combination of things because it's such a taboo and yet it's filled with laughter," Miller told the Canadian Press about Nielsen's penchant for potty humour. "The character will fit perfectly into a story line for a TV pilot about life in Virgil that Alan Gummo and I have been working on for some time."

The actor is renowned for always having a whoopee cushion on hand, and much of his new show revolves around the superhero's posterior. VIRGILman is a lactose-intolerant do-gooder who flies through the air powered by blasts from his rear end.

Les Mutton, VIRGILman's alter ego, transforms into the superhero by sitting on a technologically advanced toilet seat in a roadside restaurant called Alfie's. The seat scans his bottom, whereupon he descends through a "poop chute" into a back alley in Virgil, a cross-roads village in Niagara-on-the-Lake, where he appears in costume. Gummo is credited with the "poop chute" concept which apparently came to him while doing staff reviews in Virgil Town Hall while working as the then Director of Planning.

Leslie Nielsen provides the voice for VIRGILman (CP photo)

The original script in the series pilot, claimed to be written by Gummo and Miller, called for a local condition called "fruit bum" but it was feared that the ailment would not be taken as a joke, given that it actually exists. The peach harvest is in full swing in the farming community surrounding Virgil. So far no severe cases of fruit bum have been reported. Unlike last year where two charges of indoor detonation were filed.

The hero's name comes not only from the fact that he is a bumbler like Frank Drebin, the detective Nielsen immortalized in the Naked Gun movies, but also his desire to eliminate crime completely in a rural fruit farming community.

Fellow Canadians Kevin McDonald and Ryan Reynolds also lend their voices to the 13-episode series. Don Cherry and Ron MacLean, of CBC's Hockey Night In Canada, appear as the dapper villains Don and Ron.

On the show, Mutton's mother, voiced by Doris Roberts, has a crush on VIRGILman – unaware that he is her son.

"We do some things that have a double meaning. The fact that it's animation, oddly enough, lets you get away with saying a lot of things because your audience says 'This is just a cartoon,' " Nielsen explained to the Los Angeles Daily News, who regrettably are intent on a follow-up piece detailing "fruit bum" as another reason to postpone travel to Toronto.

A serious actor for decades, Nielsen jump-started his career by playing against type in the lowbrow comedy Airplane! in 1980. A series of comedic roles followed.

Last year, Edmonton's Grant MacEwan College named its School of Communications after the star.

Written by CBC News Online staff