Corporal Walter O’Reilly

Corporal Walter O’Reilly was Cerebus' Chief of Security at the Sanctuary. His post was directly outside of Cerebus' door.

Basis

He is a parody of Radar O'Reilly from the M*A*S*H film and TV series.

Dave Sim on Corporal Walter O’Reilly

• "I had spent a certain amount of time trying to cast the 'chief of security outside the door'. I kept coming back to Radar O'Reilly, the character played by Gary Burghoff in both the M*A*S*H movie and later the television show (the only carry-over actor from the one to the other) both for the fact that he was intrinsically competent and his CO, Colonel Blake was so intrinsically incompetent. I intentionally made him Walter O'Reilly instead of Corporal O'Reilly because it was in the television episode where the field hospital had treated a soldier who believed himself to be Jesus that the character was first given the name Walter, which seemed appropriate to the subject matter.

As I went along, the voice and speech patterns I pictured for the character started changing to that of Smithers, the aide-de-camp (accent on the camp) to Montgomery Burns on The Simpsons. Which also seemed appropriate given the latter's advanced age and malignant personality. Since the character never actually appears "on camera," it didn't seem like a big problem to move from one to the other mentally."