Art imitates life: Li'l Sebastian had a constant erection on Parks And Recreation set

It’s been more than a decade since we said “Bye bye” to Li’l Sebastian on Parks And Recreation, and his legacy still looms, um, large. In a new excerpt from Jim O’Heir’s book Welcome To Pawnee: Stories Of Friendship, Waffles, And Parks And Recreation, the actor recalls working with the iconic mini horse on the Parks third season episode “Harvest Festival.” And he reveals a key detail: Aziz Ansari’s line, “Wow, that is a shockingly huge mini horse erection” wasn’t in the original script. Instead, the quip and the blurred visual effect around the horse’s “nether regions” were added because Li’l Sebastian had an actual erection basically the entire time. 

“That li’l guy was hard for hours while shooting; turns out this is a normal biological response and has nothing to do with being ‘turned on,'” O’Heir writes (via Entertainment Weekly). “After trying to wait out the erection, the producers decided that we had to start shooting something. Someone had the wise idea to blur it out in post-production, and a writer decided to give Tom that fantastic line.”

That quick and quippy thinking only added to the enduring love of the Harvest Festival episode amongst Parks fans. But even without Li’l Sebastian’s unfortunate biological reaction, he still would have been an iconic figure in Pawnee history because of the ways the other characters treated him like a celebrity. At the end of the third season, the Parks department puts on a memorial for the deceased Li’l Sebastian in which Chris Pratt performs the beloved ballad “5000 Candles in the Wind (Bye Bye Li’l Sebastian).”

In a reverse case where life imitated art, O’Heir later found out bad news about the animal actor. “Turns out that little guy was pretty old (going on twenty years) when we filmed with him,” he shares in his book. When he bumped into the animal trainer who worked on the “Harvest Festival” episode on a different set, “I walked up to her and asked, ‘How’s our li’l friend doing?’ She knew immediately whom I was referring to. ‘Li’l Sebastian, he’s passed,’ she said,” O’Heir remembers. “I think she noticed that I was getting some wet eyes, so she added, ‘Don’t worry Jim. He had a good life. A good stage life, too. He was in movies and TV for over twenty years.’ Was that supposed to make me feel better? It didn’t.” Maybe blasting some Mouse Rat would?