Maniac Mansion

Maniac Mansion is a sitcom created by Eugene Levy, which aired concurrently on YTV in Canada and The Family Channel in the United States for three seasons from September 14, 1990, to April 4, 1993. The series is loosely based on the 1987 video game of the same name by Lucasfilm Games. While Lucasfilm served as co-producers on the series, the show thematically has little in common with its source material (see § Differences from the game). Overview Maniac Mansion centers around the lives of the Edisons, an American family living in a large mansion in the upscale suburban neighborhood of Cedar Springs. The Edisons consist of patriarch Fred (Joe Flaherty), an eccentric scientist and inventor, his level-headed wife Casey (Deborah Theaker), and their children, teenage genius Tina (Kathleen Robertson), prepubescent Ike (Avi Phillips) and precocious toddler Turner (George Buza). Also living in the Edison mansion are Casey's brother Harry Orca (John Hemphill) and his wife Idella Muckle-Orca (Mary Charlotte-Wilcox). While Maniac Mansion primarily derives its storylines from typical sitcom fare such as family life and parent-child relationships, the series incorporated several prominent elements of science fiction. Fred Edison is a scientist who works out of his basement laboratory which is partially powered by a mysterious extraterrestrial meteorite, and many episodes revolve around Fred's outlandish and occasionally disastrous experiments and inventions. As it is revealed in the series premiere, a mishap with one of these inventions caused genetic mutations in two of the main characters, Turner Edison and Harry Orca: for the complete run of the series, toddler Turner is a fully-grown man with the mind of a child and Harry Orca is a normal-sized housefly with a human head (similar to the 1958 version of The Fly).