are you on testnet or regtest? I'd be interested to see the example, I have from time to time similiar "experience"...
It is clear, that bitcoin demands for the shortest representation of data. So you have to use (from the wiki https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script):

0x01-0x4b   (special) ... The next opcode bytes is data to be pushed onto the stack

for data, which has less than 75 OpCodes.
I'd just like to play with the examples on regtest ...