The Great Satan at Large (1991)
The public access program that plagued Tucson, Arizona...also, pinball
There are two notable Lou Perfidio’s in the world. One was a pinball wizard from New York. The New York Times described him in a profile thusly:
He wore a tie decorated with pictures of houseflies. ''For luck,'' he inexplicably explained. His cap was on backward. Later in the day, he planned to pick up a blind cat, a gift he professed to greatly prize. He kept saying [things] such as this: ''I'm the greatest pinball player of all time.''
Perfidio’s pinball arch-nemesis, if this profile is to be believed, was an Elvira-themed cabinet in Times Square. When Elvira embarrassed the wizard in front of the journalist, Perfidio grumbled his way to a “smut shop” on Eighth Avenue where his favorite cabinet (Robocop-themed) was located. Perfidio “challenged a patron lost in the cover of ‘Pulsating Flesh’ to play ‘the best on the planet’.” Perfidio went on to play a two-hour game on the Robocop machine.
Perfidio once appeared on the Today Show to promote the game of pinball (the dreaded Elvira cabinet lingers in the background of the opening shots, taunting Perfidio…). Bryant Gumbel introduces Perfidio, who is soft-spoken and careful with the words when it comes to his favorite game. “It’s good fun for the whole family,” he explains, as Gumbel awkwardly fumbles around with a pinball machine like he’s never seen one before. “It’s as All-American as baseball.”
It is 1990, and the Today segment lists Perfidio’s affiliation as a journalist with Vending Times Magazine. Perfidio is a freelancer with a journalism degree from Temple — a friend and former co-worker describes his early time on the beat as “a somewhat frustrated suburban correspondent.”
The Lou Perfidio in the Today segment appears composed and soft-spoken, if not braggadocious about his skill level. Even when faced with his nightmare — the merciless beast of Elvira pinball — Perfidio maintains his composure and eloquently discusses the nature of the pinball manufacturing industry. When he loses a ball to the gutter, he laughs it off and keeps going, seemingly unfazed by defeat. When Bryant pokes fun at Perfidio for not being married, for being a mid-twenties bachelor who stands alone at a pinball machine in a dark dingy arcade for upwards of 12 hours at a time, Perfidio does not sweat it.
Then, there’s the other Lou Perfidio.
There is something of a myth surrounding this Lou Perfidio, the “Great Satan” at the center of “The Great Satan at Large,” a short-lived cable access show that aired on TCCC (pronounced “T-triple-C”) in Tucson, Arizona. The show aired one episode on Oct. 5, 1991, and within a week Perfidio was removed from the public access channel after much hubbub over obscenity and censorship. For reference, Perfidio is profiled in the New York Times in January of 1990. He gets a job with the Associated Press in Tucson “a half-year later,” according to Daniel Rubin at The Philadelphia Inquirer (although, Perfidio has a by-line with The New York Times as late as April 1991, so the timeline of the Inquirer’s obituary may be slightly off).1 Somewhere between fall 1990 and fall 1991, Perfidio concocted a diabolical character that would terrorize the morally upstanding denizens of Tucson.
The Great Satan, sporting devil horns and wielding a pitchfork, ran a show built on hedonism, racist and homophobic phrases, sex acts, swastiskas spray painted on American flags, and chroma keyed footage of Hitler. Situated as direct counter-programming to Christian television, the Great Satan was the embodiment of everything a televangelist tells people to fear. If the Devil was anything like preachers said, Perfidio wanted his character to fully demonstrate this heinous sinfulness.
It is stated in a few places on the Internet that Perfidio only accomplished one airing of “The Great Satan at Large” before Perfidio fled the state to avoid the FBI.2 We can verify that the part about fleeing the state is untrue and is likely a flavorful means of heightening the lore around the “Great Satan.” In terms of how many episodes of the show aired before it was kiboshed, the reports are slightly confused. I’ve done my best to figure out the timeline.
In an interview with radio commentator John C. Scott, Perfidio is confronted for his alleged crimes (which included the broadcasting of “nudity, profanity, sex acts, and racial slurs”), and Scott remarks that these crimes are located in two episodes of the show. Based on reporting around the various charges levied against Perfidio, I believe Scott is referring to the fact that the Oct. 5 episode of “The Great Satan at Large” aired twice. One local news source stated that the show was initially slated to air every other Saturday, but the day before the second episode was scheduled to air, the channel suspended the program and its show-runner for 90 days. On Nov. 1, Perfidio was indicted for a variety of felonies related to obscenity and exploitation.
Letterboxd’s blurb for the entry “The Great Satan at Large (1991)” (which appears to be derived from this hyperbolic write-up), claims that the show “lasted one unholy episode in 1991 before being canceled by the deeply offended and seriously freaked-out management of Tucson, Arizona’s Channel 49.” Perhaps the blurb author is being coy with the lore behind Perfidio, as the hand-wringing about the show came from both inside and outside of TCCC. In fact, TCCC was very up front about the freedom Perfidio had to make the show he wanted. They did suspend him, but they were also considering moving the show to a post-midnight time slot when the show returned. This essentially mirrors the “safe harbor” FCC standard for broadcast (one wonders why the show ever aired outside of these hours in the first place…it initially ran at 6 PM, for crying out loud). All the same, TCCC publicly defended Perfidio’s first amendment rights. And legally, they were obligated to do so. The only conditions that limited public access creators were commercialism and obscenity. Beyond that, there was little TCCC could do. By law, they could not interfere with the content on the channel.3 The suspension, it seemed, was a holding pattern while the city decided what to do re: obscenity charges.
The city wanted Perfidio off the air. A minor moral panic brewed. TCCC, if anything, faced little more than an unsightly PR inconvenience from the matter. Whether the shakeup was what Perfidio explicitly intended or not, the entire “Great Satan” act was a performance art piece, and he said so himself. The idea behind it was, indeed, to stretch the limits of what defines “community standards” and the free expression granted to the public through public access forums. This is essentially what Perfidio himself says in his interview with Scott. Perfidio saw his show as the “counter foil” to the trend of televangelism. One program tells people what sin is, and Perfidio wanted one that created a representation of those ideas. There is an absurdist satire to the concept: use exaggeration to isolate what Perfidio saw as a dangerous hyperbole in media and organized religion.
An aside: this Scott-Perfidio debate (which has been preserved in a few spaces on this great wasteland we call the Inter-Weber-Zone) included a call-in vote to gauge the viewing Tucson crowd’s thoughts on community standards in public access. The prompt: “Should content standards be applied to Tucson Cable’s public access channel [TCCC]?” I anticipated that the viewers of Scott’s show would adamantly take his side and be antagonistic to Perfidio’s performance art, but no. 433 viewers said, yes, we would like content standards imposed. 486 said, no. Not only this, but Scott returns to the poll later in the episode, where the margin of victory for Perfidio had only increased (507 for, 591 against). If there is an etymology for the “posting their Ls” meme, it is one John C. Scott.
Perfidio faced multiple charges as a result of his show airing, which guests on Scott’s program claimed could have led to upwards of 20 years of jail time. Instead, Perfidio pleaded guilty to one charge of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” stemming from a guest on the show that was 17 and appeared naked on camera. Perfidio “said he thought the girl was at least 18, and he denied knowing that she would be nude,” which suggests he may have fought the charge if the plea deal had not come with the elimination of the other “six felony exploitation and obscenity charges.”
There is a rip of the episode of “The Great Satan at Large” online, but I did not feel like watching illegal media. So instead, I watched the Great Satan’s appearance on a different performance-art-at-best-edgelord-bullshit-at-worst Tucson public access program from the same time (what the hell was going on in Tucson in 1991?). The show was called “666Israel,” and people who publicly hated Perfidio’s work also seemed to talk down about this show. Sometime in January 1992, after Perfidio’s suspension lapsed, he appeared as a guest on “666Israel” armed with a fiery polemic against his censors.
Perfidio’s character exists at an interesting intersection. It is perhaps impertinent to try and map him onto the following generation of entertainers. But I see strains of both Sam Hyde (and the extremities of Million Dollar Extreme) and Brett Davis (who has at least one character that is more or less the Great Satan minus the slurs). These are not names that I thought would make sense in the same sentence, except for the fact that they once had a nothingburger of a beef. Davis, during his public access run in Manhattan, mocked and satirized a good number of comedians and comedy culture trends, including an alt-right strain of comedy that he grouped Hyde into. (Davis would go on to extrapolate on his views of this strain of comedians by playing a character who is lured into that scene in “The Podcast for Laundry”). The “Alt-right Christmas” episode of “The Special without Brett Davis” has since been scrubbed from official YouTube channels, but Hyde has commented on footage from the episode before (unfavorably).
Perfidio reminds me of these two because (1) both have enjoyed the cult status of spending time on the fringes of the media landscape, (2) they both lean into extremity for the sake of satire, and (3) both have had somewhat tenuous relationships with alternative forms of television distribution (Adult Swim canceled Million Dollar Extreme’s sketch show; the Manhattan Neighborhood Network appears to have had an amicable relationship with Davis, but Davis did once host a man convicted of manslaughter on his show, which ruffled some feathers).
It looks like this tangent didn’t get us very far. I told you this was impertinent.
Perfidio’s Great Satan appears to come from a place of anger, the hedonistic excess he preaches a direct rebuke to Christian nationalist religious leaders who preach the opposite extreme. The character asks callers to indulge in drugs and booze, to have sex freely, and, of course, to hail Satan. He stuffs an American flag down his pants, defiling it. He says “scrotum” a lot (this may be unrelated). Think whatever you will of Perfidio’s politics and intent; his content is undeniably base and loosely structured to the point of complete collapse. The show is unformed and crude enough that it is difficult to identify much of a point to it beyond the above thesis statement of pro-free speech, anti-organized religion.
The Great Satan’s appearance on his sister public access show involved a direct response to the pressure Perfidio was under at the time. As the show begins, and the character starts chastising callers, text appears on screen that promises that “Content of this program contains both the religious and secular morals and values of the citizens of this community … the explicit standards established by the majority of the voters” (god-damn, the callback!)
The problem with this reflexivity is that it essentially nullifies an argument Perfidio makes in the John C. Scott interview, which is that his identity and the character of the Great Satan are distinct. Perfidio is a person; the Great Satan is a performance art piece. Multiple times, Perfidio corrects Scott when Scott derisively refers to him as “the Great Satan.” On “666Israel,” though, the Great Satan is channeling Perfidio, airing Perfidio’s grievances with the profanity and anger that Perfidio could not express during Scott’s show. It is Perfidio, not the Great Satan, who is mad.
The legibility of the “666Israel” episode featuring Perfidio is compromised by this in-character polemic against the censors (and the many mentions of “weenies” and “retroactive abortion,” phrases which at one point just get repeated nonsensically for minutes on end). The "Great Satan,” as a television conceit and a character, is just not that interesting. It doesn’t have legs, as they say. As much as Perfidio may have had something valid to say about the lengths and limits of free expression through media, the end result is a messy, creatively inert object.
In the end, Perfidio would be taken off the air. Officially. Between being indicted and sentenced, Perfidio’s suspension at TCCC lapsed. And the man, true to his values, applied to get his show reinstated on the channel. Throughout everything, Perfidio appeared adamant in the belief that he did nothing wrong in challenging the norms of television content. Tucson would not let the man back on the cable system. In the summer of 1992, Perfidio was sentenced to two years’ unsupervised probation and a fine for the charge he pleaded guilty to. Seemingly, this negatively impacted his career as an AP freelance journalist.
Reportedly, he started working as a cabbie to pay the bills. Later, he would crop up as a vocal node in the blogosphere. His blog, “I Love Misery” (“the best explanation I have for being a Phillies fan”) contained bitter rants about the failing Phillies. His bio on the site read: “Fuck Off and Die. This is satire. Anyone taking offense should shut up, go back to the dugout, and learn how to win more games.” ‘Til the end, Perfidio had that hard-edged satirical streak in him. And while he may have faded into obscurity, there will always be traces of that brief moment in 1991-1992 when Lou Perfidio scared the hoes in Tucson, Arizona and become a minor national headline as a result.4
At Bleeding Eye Cinema, we don’t rate movies based on their artistic merits. We rate them based on strangeness, on a scale from Colin Hanks5 to full-on, run-to-the-eyewash-station Eye Bleeder.
The Great Satan at Large rates as: Sanity Reducer (3/5)
We know of Perfidio’s one by-line at the Times as a result of public filings related to the newspaper’s copyright lawsuit against Microsoft. Even in death, writers cannot avoid the scourge of AI.
At least two books on public access cite this rumor that Perfidio fled the state to avoid charges. One source, The Indecent Screen by Cynthia Chris (2018), cites the second source, Public Access Television: America’s Electronic Soapbox by Linda R. Linder (1999), in an endnote. I have not seen a primary source account that verifies this, only one that verifies that he did take a plea deal in exchange for charges being dropped.
This inability for cable channels to curb what they deemed as indecent content was changed not long after the “Great Satan at Large” incident. The Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992 went into law on October 5, 1992 (exactly one year after the show that got Perfidio banned from TCCC, coincidentally). This allowed cable operators the right to refuse “any program that ‘describes or depicts sexual or excretory activities or organs in a patently offensive manner as measure by contemporary community standards’, without requiring banned programming to meet stricter criteria for obscenity” (Chris, 2018: p. 143).
I found AP coverage of Perfidio’s Oct. 5 program and subsequent suspension that spread to multiple states, including Texas and Indiana. There was also an Entertainment Tonight segment on the Great Satan.
Colin Hanks is the true cinematic touchstone of milquetoast normieness – no offense, Colin.
Newspapers Referenced
I have to be frank. Some of the newspapers I wanted to access were pay-walled on Newspapers.com. And…I wasn’t going to pay. Luckily, they provide little screencaps of the instances where keywords appear, so I could see sentences within individual articles that clarified pertinent information regarding, in particular, Perfidio’s indictment, plea, and sentencing. Some of my academy friends would scold me for citing sources like I do below (i.e., I don’t have names of articles). But…I’ve come across an established scholar or two who cite this poorly, so…I learned it from watching you, Dad.
Arizona Daily Star, 23 August 1992, p. 26.
“Cable most foul: Careful legal weapons, not censors, work best,” Arizona Daily Star, 23 October 1991, https://www.newspapers.com/article/arizona-daily-star-lou-perfidiogreat-sa/26836374/.
“Ex-TV host admits guilt in nudity case,” The Arizona Republic, 3 July 1991, p. 11.
“‘Great Satan’ show suspended from Ariz. local access cable,” The Galveston Daily News, 27 October 1991.
Tucson Citizen, 22 August 1992, p. 12.
Tucson Citizen, 2 March 1992, p. 1.
“‘Violent, sexual’ TV show booted off Tucson cable,” The Prescott Courier, 22 October 1991, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=886&dat=19911022&id=pFdLAAAAIBAJ&sjid=u30DAAAAIBAJ&pg=7335,4108219&hl=en.