"Hey, Stranger! Wanna buy a coffin? I have something just your size."
—Undertaker

Ed Pansullo plays the overworked but very eager Undertaker in the film. Ed is known for roles in over 25 feature films like Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), Tapeheads (1988), Roadside Prophets (1992). He is a regular player in many Alex Cox films, like Walker (1987), Straight to Hell (1987), Sid and Nancy (1986), Repo Man (1984), and played a lead in Searchers 2.0 (2007). Pansullo even appeared in Cox's student film at UCLA, Edge City (1980).

In the Old West, burying the dead was usually just a side gig: Most undertakers were also furniture makers, carpenters or doctors doing double-duty. (Fortunately in our town there are enough mining accidents, murders and public health crises to keep its Undertaker employed full-time.) The name "undertaker" developed out of the various duties these cabinet makers would 'undertake' to prepare the deceased and the family for the funeral and burial. In addition to delivering coffins, they would provide the families with funeral wreaths and the necessary black crepe to dress the home. The funeral was usually quick, as bodies would decompose quickly in the heat. (Hence, surrounding them with flowers.)

Preserving dead bodies was a relatively new technology in the 1800s. Up through the Civil War, corpses were soaked in arsenic or alcohol—there are even stories of corpses being preserved in a barrel of whiskey until they could be properly buried (i.e., "dead drunk"). But the discovery of formaldehyde by German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann in 1869 changed the business of the Undertaker forever, because this magical "embalming fluid" halted tissue decay and preserved the body longer. Suddenly families could wait to bury the deceased until other family members and friends arrived for more elaborate (and expensive) funerals. The downside to formaldehyde is that it can cause lung cancer, bronchitis, and death—so the next funeral in this town might be the Undertaker's.