At the start of the unedited version of the taping, the screen is blank. We hear a voice quietly say “go” before the opening riffs of “Ghostbusters” introduce a character in full costume. He is clothed in a black bodysuit, his face covered by a pumpkin mask. Behind him is a backdrop of a graveyard at twilight. For over four minutes, this figure dances, his choreography uninhibited yet intuitive; when the singer asks, “Who ya gonna call?” he shrugs before punctuating the choral response (“Ghostbusters!”) with two jabs.
He is Matt Geiler. But in the years following this taping, he would become known by another name: The Dancing Pumpkin Man.
Filmed in the studio of Omaha’s KXVO 10:00 PM News, the inception of the Pumpkin Dance was the result of a tight deadline and an even tighter budget. “It wasn’t supposed to be straight news,” Geiler told Complex of the nightly newscast, explaining that it was meant to model E!’s off-the-air Talk Soup or Comedy Central’s ongoing The Daily Show. With 22 minutes of programming—the first minute or so dedicated to news—the programming block was ripe for improvisation.
The multi-hyphenate Nebraskan was no stranger to the art of unscripted performance, joining improv groups at a young age. Among the highlights: Teen Improv, a group that he and “other speech and theater kids” formed in high school; The Weisenheimers, an improv comedy group based in Omaha he joined after college; and the legendary Second City Chicago, whose Conservatory Program he completed at around the same time that KXVO was looking to fill an open position.
Geiler, who had commuted from Nebraska to Chicago over the two-year duration of the Conservatory Program, said that as he was graduating, his wife Jen stumbled upon a cryptic ad. “They’re like, ‘The CW affiliate is looking for a TV host,’” he said. The host’s responsibilities were to read a few news items upfront and then, as the director had told him at his job interview, “kind of whatever you want.” The freedom raised his eyebrows. “I was like, ‘I wouldn’t tell me to do whatever I want’—but I could read a teleprompter,” he recalled in an interview with Complex. They hired him for the position soon after.
While improv is one thing, broadcast journalism is another. You’d think that, for his first on-air performance that was tapped for thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of people to see, there might be some stage fright, especially without a journalism background. So, I asked if being in front of a camera was intimidating. He shook his head: Nope. Not in the least.
Over years and years of shows—“I’d been performing live in comedy clubs since I was 17,” he reminded me—Geiler had grown to trust his instincts. Even though KXVO wasn’t a live environment where he would have had to “attune and calibrate” his performance based on the audience’s feedback, he said that at the time of his hiring, he’d already become “pretty comfortable,” having honed his skills “for so many years and [through] so many gigs in front of audiences of strangers.”
At Second City, improvisation was a method to create sketch material, where Geiler and his classmates put scenes together through various rounds to identify his beats. At KXVO, he used the news items he read and the time constraints he had to work within as source material, riffing with ease.
Having previously done on-camera commercials, industrial films, and studio voiceover work in and around Omaha, Geiler was not only comfortable with the creative aspect of performing in a studio but its technical aspects as well. Although the “sterile silence” that replaced audience engagement “sometimes [felt] weird”—external sounds would make it into the broadcast recordings and laughing off-camera was forbidden—slipping into the role of news host was nowhere near as nerve-wracking as live improv.
The meager budget also did nothing to derail the newscast, which made its debut in 2005. “We didn’t have great cameras,” he said. “We didn’t have a lot of bodies on the show. We didn’t have a cash account to go get props or whatever we might need for an idea. We didn’t have time to pre-plan.”
Geiler and the crew, who arrived at the studio at various hours of the day, worked with a time crunch as well. They had to know what they were going to do an hour before they went live, Geiler explained. Thus, their mode of creation somewhat hinged on his expertise: “What can we do between now and 9:00 PM? What kind of half-baked ideas can we three-fourths bake before we run out of time?”
By October 29, 2006, the crew had gotten used to filming his antics, whether it meant him falling into store displays or dancing around (“There was a lot of dancing around.”). That evening’s Halloween broadcast had a four-minute space that needed filling. As was the usual case, the crew looked to Geiler for direction and he, in turn, looked around for material—just as he had done throughout most of his improv career.
There was the black unitard, presumably shoved and forgotten in a box of miscellany in the studio’s green room. A pumpkin in the news station’s lobby, whose foam innards Geiler later carved out with a knife in the cafeteria. A hanger that he jammed into the pumpkin’s now hollow space, fashioning it into a mask that would stay put, at least for the length of his on-screen performance. A graveyard, thrown up on the green screen by his producer. And, finally, the finishing touch: “Ghostbusters,” as performed by The Music Makers—a song that was fittingly 4 minutes and 8 seconds long.
October 29, 2006 was also well over a year removed from the launch of YouTube. In the platform’s nascence, neither content creation nor the concept of virality were at the forefront of anyone’s mind—least of all Geiler’s, when, two days after its original broadcast date, the station’s archivists uploaded the Pumpkin Dance on the CW 15 Omaha’s channel.
“I don’t think that anybody that was on YouTube [at the time] saw it as a long-term platform for anything,” he said. “People were just throwing stuff up there.” He expected the video to be buried “under millions of layers of digital sediment that is the internet,” especially after retiring the Dancing Pumpkin Man, who would make at least one more appearance for KXVO’s Christmas Edition.
And so, retired and buried went the Dancing Pumpkin Man for a while. Less than six months after performing the Dancing Pumpkin Man on broadcast television, the network canceled the nightly newscast because of low ratings. Geiler would stay on with KXVO until 2008, after which he kept busy with filming, recording music, and doing live shows until 2009, when he relocated his family to Los Angeles.
Then, something surprising—at least for that time—happened. In 2009, three years to the day that Geiler taped the Dancing Pumpkin Man, then-editor Scott Lamb uploaded the Pumpkin Dance to BuzzFeed, and it went stupid viral. The video started a cycle in which Dancing Pumpkin Man would appear time and time again in our collective, Halloween-related cultural consciousness, cut and spliced and recreated in GIFs, animations, and the like.
Geiler, who would go on to pursue a successful career in acting and musical improv—is amazed by the evergreen nature of a character he’d created while crunching for work. Curiously enough, Dancing Pumpkin Man never made an appearance in any of his live shows.
Still, he said, “It is me,” in that it’s a representation of his approach to problem-solving: “It’s high pressure, [there’s] no time, [there are] no resources. Then my response is, ‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter; we can just be ridiculous. My solution is, I want to put this pumpkin on my head and dance around like a maniac.’” To him, Dancing Pumpkin Man was never meant to be a branding device but rather the confluence of a high-pressure, resource-lacking environment.
“That’s creativity, generally,” he said of that evening. “You’re just trying to make stuff with what’s available to you.”
Trying to put it in another way, Geiler, described the idea of Dancing Pumpkin Man (and its accompanying virality) as him “scribbling a note on a napkin or a piece of scratch paper” for him to return to, only to forget about it.
“And then, a long time later, somebody else finds it, doesn’t have any of the context around how it was created, just picks it up and decides, ‘Oh man, that’s the coolest scribble I’ve ever seen.’ I don’t feel bad about it. I’m always amazed that anybody—I can see how they get joy [from it], and how it’s funny, and how people are struck by it. As the person who made it, I’m always like, ‘Man, that’s not even finished; it’s not even done.’” But, he quickly added, “those are some of the best improv moments, too.”
These days, Geiler, the principal creative of the Nebraska-based creative studio Sick Picnic Media, continues to keep busy with artistic pursuits. An actor, musical improviser, animator, illustrator, author, speaker—amongst many other roles—he has been working on a few shorts in his studio, which are in various stages of production, as well as a new album with the lofi pop musician Frederick Julius, which is set to drop next summer. What did he think of Dancing Pumpkin Man’s expected resurgence this Halloween? He smiled.
“He now lives in the little galaxy of stuff that I make or have made,” he said.