Just before Halloween in 2016, Saturday Night Live aired a skit featuring guest host Tom Hanks that didn't make any sense. The "Haunted Elevator" was a thrill ride in which the doors opened to a different scary scene on each floor, except several floors opened to David S. Pumpkins and a couple of sidekick skeletons who weren't scary at all and no one could figure out who he was or why he was there. The new character went immediately viral, and pumpkin suits sold out wherever they were available. Hanks returned as Pumpkins again in a prerecorded video the next spring, and in October 2017 had his own special on NBC. The character was reprised in 2022 when Hanks and the character's creator Bobby Moynihan returned to SNL.
But how did the concept of the character come about? The "Haunted Elevator" sketch was written by Moynihan along with Streeter Seidell and Mikey Day. As Moynihan tells the story, it was the result of an all-night writing session based on a 1986 song they knew from a viral video with the unexpected restriction that Hanks doesn't breakdance. Read that story of how one idea led to another until we got David S. Pumpkins at Cracked. Any questions?