Feature Category: Article

The Telephemera Years: 1974 (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

The Telphemera Years: 1976 (part 1, 2)

The Telephemera Years: 1992 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1999 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: O Canada! (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Stephen J Cannell (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Hanna-Barbera (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Titans of Telephemera: Glen A Larson (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Quinn Martin (part 1, 2)

The Telephemera Years: pre-1965 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Fabio Frizzi • CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD

Out this week on 4K UltraHD Blu-ray from Arrow Video is Lucio Fulci’s 1980 film, City of the Living Dead. The first entry in the Italian director’s Gates of Hell trilogy was followed by The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery in 1981, and all three films stand as masterpieces of Italian splatter horror. In addition to Fulci’s imaginative, skilful filmmaking and eye for colour, the trilogy also owes much of its success to the masterful scores composed for each. While Walter Rizzati and Alessandro Blonksteiner scored The House by the Cemetery, the first two films saw the director partnering with his frequent collaborator, composer Fabio Frizzi.

While Frizzi took a break from scoring films for most of the early ’00s, in recent years, he’s come roaring back with work for films such as Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich and the Castle Freak remake. Additionally, he’s revisited two of his Fulci scores, The Beyond and Zombie Flesh Eaters, in expanded Composer’s Cuts, which see him taking the musical ideas from 40 years prior and making them even bigger than they once were.

We spoke with composer Fabio Frizzi about his work with Lucio Fulci and his current plans.

STARBURST: In recent years, you’ve returned to and expanded the scores for Zombie and The Beyond. What appeals to you about revisiting your past work?

Fabio Frizzi: Let’s say that every time you pick up an older score written a long time ago, it’s always a confrontation with yourself. For example, I wrote Zombie in ’79. I was 28, now I’m a little older [laughs], so the first very interesting thing is the relationship with yourself, trying to understand how you were then, your ideas on music, but not only on music. This is a great psychological encounter with yourself, and obviously, there are many things that have changed. And even the movies. when you see a movie from Fulci, it’s always alive. It’s as if it’s done the year before.

When I, for example, redid The Beyond for the first time we did it in concert, Antonella Fulci, his daughter, was there. She’s a great friend of mine, and I’ve known her since she was a baby. She told me she thought this was a new way of seeing that movie, and I was so happy.

Bob Murawski is an editor from Los Angeles and the boss of Grindhouse Releasing. He had a copy of The Beyond without music, so I could work from scratch. There’s now a version called The Beyond: The Composer’s Cut with the new music, which is very similar to the old, obviously, but there’s something absolutely new.

Speaking of seeing things in a new way, how does it feel for you to see the deluxe restorations for these films?

I’m always in love with the older things. I love old cars. I love old guitars and things like this. So, obviously, when you see a movie in 35mm projected, it’s something great, but I think that these restorations can, first of all, keep the market alive. I know people, friends, and fans that have every single release of that movie and the other movies, so the market goes. But I can tell you that I’ve seen The Beyond recently, and with the 4K restoration, you see details that you haven’t ever seen before. It’s like two situations, but I think it’s it’s cool. It’s really cool.

Why was your working relationship with Lucio Fulci so long and fruitful, do you think?

Yeah, but you know, after so long, we often use the term legend, not just saying Lucio was a legend or Fabio was a legend. It’s something that the story in a moment that’s almost unknown: I went to the editing room, and Lucio was there, and then the editor. This happened some time ago, but it happened.

Lucio was the age of my mom, for example. he was like a parent for me. I think that I had a great respect for him. Maybe he could see a young composer with a great future in me. We were far in age, but I think we were near in passion because Lucio always – until the last time I saw him – was crazy for cinema, crazy for telling stories. I think that we catch each other’s quality in the best way.

After Lucio was gone, I met Antonella Fulci again because of the request to do another tour in America. We met again after a long time. So we hugged, it was a fantastic moment. She told me, “You cannot imagine how my dad was speaking about you. He loved your way so much.” And, as many fathers don’t, he never told me. I said, “Well, it’s absolutely beautiful, more beautiful than I could suppose.”

Are there differences in making scores these days versus 40-plus years ago, and if so, what are they?

Practically everything has changed. Basically, from the technical view, I started – and it seems to me five years ago, but it was 50 years ago -with four tracks, a maximum of eight tracks. The Beatles did the first record with four tracks. Nowadays, we don’t have a limit. You open Pro Tools or Sibelius, and you can write on hundreds of tracks. But the way of doing musical commentary has changed a lot because we are, nowadays, fast in using things. We’ll take a look at the reels on the telephone, ta ta ta, and there is a receipt, and so everything changed, but I think that there is one thing that never changed. Basically, the white piece of paper is always there.

When you need to have an idea, you are just by yourself. Even if it is a great computer with many possibilities, the idea must come from here [points to head], despite the AI, but I don’t believe that it will substitute us. But my philosophy is always the same: if you want to do the best you can for a job, the only real secret is to let you go into the story, understand what the people around you – the producer, the director – want you to do and go. And this is absolutely the same 50 years before.

Given that you’ve toured extensively in recent years and released various albums and collections, what does 2024 offer you?

Well, let’s say that enthusiasm is the basis for feeling the many windows that you have on the table. It’s like a mosaic, our lifestyle. Let’s say that I discovered touring very late because I was just a musician in a recording studio. Then, exactly 10 years ago, I did Frizzi 2 Fulci in London. That has brought us – me and my musicians – really everywhere with great enthusiasm also from fans. We had our 10th anniversary in the Union Chapel on October 28th last year. It’s really something important.

When we did the Zombie Composer’s Cut, American friends would say “Please come and do it,” so I think that maybe in September, possibly in London, too. We are trying to build a good story going deeper into the movies. Every morning, I wake up, and I feel I will do it. The curiosity is my gasoline, and we’ll go ahead.

CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD is out now on 4K UltraHD Blu-ray from Arrow Video and is available to stream on ARROW.

THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1976, part 1

1976-77

Several big shows bade their farewells this season with The Streets of San Francisco finally running out of road, the departure of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Phyllis setting women’s emancipation back a few years, and Sanford and Son a victim of America’s disposable Capitalism. Coming in to take their places were interfering coroner Quincy, bear-worrier Grizzly Adams, and Roots, the first of the blockbuster mini-series that gave schoolchildren everywhere license to say Kunta Kinte. But those were all hit shows – what about those shows that didn’t hang around, that didn’t make much of an impact on the 1976 public? This is the story of four failed TV shows…

Lanigan’s Rabbi (NBC): The ongoing search to find that unique angle on the detective genre has touched on some strange corers, with blind detectives, fat detectives, woman detectives, and more all given a shake of the stick. In 1976, however, NBC decided to take inspiration from the man upstairs and bring a man of God to the table, foisting Lanigan’s Rabbi on a nation of Jew-curious gentiles.

Based on a series of books by Harry Kemelman, a former New England college professor whose first hit novel starred a New England college professor as its gumshoe principal. He hit gold with his series of novels featuring Rabbi David Small, beginning with 1964’s Friday the Rabbi Slept Late which saw him use Talmudic wisdom to find the real culprit of a crime it appeared he’d committed. Kemelman’s books were heavy on the traditions of conservative Judaism, often bringing Small into conflict with less observant types, although Kemelman seldom comes down on one side or the other.

After Stuart Margolin had played him in the pilot, Bruce Solomon stepped into the Rabbi’s shoes, fresh off over a hundred episodes of satirical soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and he was joined in the main cast by The Honeymooners’ Art Carney as Paul Lanigan, local police chief and a practising Catholic with whom the Rabbi often discusses religion between cases. After that pilot film – an adaptation of Friday the Rabbi Slept Late – was a hit, the show continued as a series of ninety-minute films, all written by Don Mankiewicz, who’d adapted Ironside from that series of novels.

“Corpse of the Year” aired in January 1977, followed by three more films – “The Cadaver in the Clutter,” “Say It Ain’t So, Chief,” and “In Hot Weather, the Crime Rate Soars” – in March and April as part of the NC Sunday Night Mystery Movie wheel format, replacing Quincy, ME, which had been spun off into its own series. There would be no spin-off for Lanigan’s Rabbi, though, as NBC discontinued the format and cancelled the show, alongside McCloud and McMillan & Wife, although Columbo was given one more series before it, too, got the axe.

Mr T & Tina (ABC): A spin-off of popular remedial education comedy Welcome Back, Kotter, Mr T and Tina was one of the first shows on American TV to have an Asian lead, admittedly one born and raised in California. Pat Morita – for it is he – had made a career out of guest appearances as the token Asian character on shows such as McCloud, Columbo, The Odd Couple, and Sanford and Son, and was starring as Arnold on Happy Days when he got the call from Mr T creator James Komack.

Morita’s character of Taro Takahashi had appeared in Kotter’s season two opener “Careers Day,” where he offered Gabe Kaplan’s character a job with his company at three times his school salary, and reaction to Morita from viewers was enough that he was brought back for a turn of his own just two days later. Of course, TV doesn’t work like that but who would I to be to suggest that his Kotter appearance was nothing but a cynical marketing ploy?

In Mr T and Tina, Takahashi is a widowed inventor sent to Chicago to run a new branch of his family company, Moyati Industries. To look after his children, he employs madcap free-spirit Tina Kelly as a nanny and it doesn‘t take long for her liberal ways to clash with his uptight Japanese traditions. Of course, that’s where the comedy – and the possible “Will they? Won’t they?” – lay, and Arnold was written out of Happy Days in anticipation of the show being a hit.

Unfortunately, even after the pilot was re-written eight times, viewers hated the show, even if they loved Morita, and the show lasted just five episodes, with Kotter writer Mark Evanier later claiming that the decision had been made to cancel the show before the pilot even aired. Morita went back to being Arnold on short-lived Happy Days spin-off Blansky’s Beauties, returning to the main show for its final two seasons in 1982. Luckily, writers hadn’t taken Tom Bosley’s suggestion that Arnold be killed off by “some crazy kamakazi (sic) pilot…”

The Andros Targets (CBS): In the wake of Woodward and Bernstein breaking the Watergate scandal, crusading newspaper reporters were all the rage in the mid-1970s, with All the President’s Men -starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein themselves – nominated for eight Oscars alone. TV was quick to pick up on the craze, with Lou Grant blazing a trail on The Mary Tyler Moore Show for CBS, and it was the Tiffany Network that also dipped its toes into more dramatic fare with The Andros Targets.

James Sutorious, with just medical drama The Doctors of any note on his résumé, was Mike Andros, an investigative reporter for the New York Forum specialising in tackling corruption and uncovering miscarriages of justice. With the aid of young assistant Sandi Farrell (newcomer Pamela Reed), Andros joined a list of people doing the police jobs for them, alongside coroner Quincy and lawyer Petrocelli.

Creator Jerome Coopersmith, a former writer on Hawaii Five-O and The Streets of San Francisco and probably best known for Sherlock Holmes musical Baker Street, based Andros on Nicholas Gage, a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and New York Times who wrote two bestselling books about his investigations into the Mafia. Gage is given a credit as “journalistic consultant” but whether he ever had to investigate cases involving the pornography-linked death of a young stress, a doctor administering illegal amphetamines, or a brainwashing religious cult is unknown. Andros, did, though, in episodes one, four, and six.

The Andros Targets debuted in January 1977 as a replacement for the cancelled Executive Suite on Monday nights but struggled to find a consistent audience opposite football and movie presentations on the rival networks, ending its thirteen-episode run in May with an average rating that placed it eighty-fourth for the year. There was no second season and Lou Grant was given his own eponymous show a few months later instead.

Future Cop (ABC): Given that Holmes &Yoyo had lasted just thirteen episodes on ABC before being cancelled in December 1976, quite why the network decided to go ahead with Future Cop is anyone’s guess. Both shows featured uptight policemen saddled with robot partners prone to malfunctioning, although the pilot of Future Cop – shown as a TV movie – predated the other show by a few months so who knows what was going on at ABC that year!

Anyway, the Future Cop pilot starred Ernest Borgnine and John Amos as veteran patrolmen Joe Cleaver and Bill Bundy, who are given a new rookie partner in the shape of handsome young John Haven. Haven, though, is more than he seems – he’s possibly the future of law enforcement! – and the two crusty old flatfoots need to learn to embrace the future even as they impart valuable life lessons to their new android pal.

Future Cop was less slapstick than Holmes & Yoyo and not without pathos: it must have been this that convinced ABC that it could succeed where the earlier show had failed and a full series began in March 1977, in the same Saturday night slot as H&Y. The first episode saw Haven go undercover as a boxer to uncover a crooked betting operation and subsequent adventures saw the odd trio – although it was very clearly the Borgnine and Shannon show – tackle revolutionaries, drug pushers, and kidnappers.

Although viewers gave Future Cop even shorter shrift than Holmes & Yoyo, two people who did notice the show were sci-fi writers Harlan Ellison and Ben Bova, who had written a short story called “Brillo” in 1970 about a policeman and his new robot partner, later adapting their story as a pitch for a TV show. The pair claimed significant similarities between their story and Future Cop and launched legal action, finally being awarded over $300,000 in damages when the lawsuit was settled in 1980.

In the meantime, ABC employed writers John T Dugan, Dawning Forsyth, and John Anthony Mulhall to retool the concept as Cops and Robin, shooting a pilot with pretty much the same cast in 1978. This was aired as a TV movie in March 1978 although, this time at least, more sensible heads prevailed and there was no subsequent series for Borgnine’s cantankerous old cop with a heart and Shannon’s synthetic rookie (also with a heart).

Serpico (NBC): Al Pacino was nominated for an Oscar for his 1973 performance as Frank Serpico, a real-life New York cop shot in the face after blowing the whistle on police corruption, possibly at the orders of his fellow officers. Sidney Lumet’s movie was a blockbuster hit, turning Peter Maas’s book on which it was based into a bestseller but Serpico’s story – he retired in 1972 with a begrudgingly given Medal of Honor – was a one and done, and Pacino and Maas turned to other projects.

Nothing is ever truly done in television, though, and the success of Serpico’s debut on terrestrial TV in 1975 set wheels in motion at NBC, where Police Woman creator Robert L Collins was tasked with developing a series based on Frank Serpico’s general demeanour, if not his real-life exploits. A pilot film – Serpico: The Deadly Game – aired in April 1976 and was well-received enough that a full series was greenlit, debuting on Friday nights in September 1976, with The Rockford Files as a lead-in.

Playing Frank Serpico in both the pilot and the subsequent series was David Birney, a stage actor whose TV résumé featured a ton of guest appearances and one lead role, the 1972 sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie with Meredith Baxter. Birney was a decent actor but also looked a little bit like Pacino in a certain light, and was given solid back-up from Tom Atkins as his boss, Lieutenant Sullivan, the only other regular cast member in a show that featured its principal mostly undercover in a different scenario each week.

Soviet defectors, loan sharks, crooked union bosses, and more crossed Serpico’s desk but viewers just didn’t buy into the continuation of his story, even with veteran directors Collins, Reza Badayi, and Paul Stanley on board. After just fifteen episodes, NBC pulled the plug, replacing the show with Quincy, ME, and it would be six years before Birney found another starring role, as Dr Ben Samuels in the first season of St Elsewhere. As for Frank Serpico himself, he’s still alive and still speaking out about police corruption but not getting shot in the face for it.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: More of 1976’s misses, including another Happy Days spin-off and Playboy‘s favourite rock star!

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: 1974 (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

The Telephemera Years: 1992 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1999 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: O Canada! (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Stephen J Cannell (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Hanna-Barbera (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Titans of Telephemera: Glen A Larson (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Quinn Martin (part 1, 2)

The Telephemera Years: pre-1965 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Tom Payne • IMAGINARY

In new film Imaginary, Jessica and her family return to her childhood home, but events escalate quickly when a mysteriously disjointed bear called Chauncey latches on to the mind of her daughter Alice. Maintaining a sense of stability in the movie is partner and father, Max, played by Tom Payne. STARBURST caught up with Tom to discuss what it was like to play a parent on screen for the first time, practical effects, and the terrifying possibilities of imagination…

STARBURST: What do you remember the most from reading the script for the first time? What stood out to you?

Tom Payne: There’s a moment in the script, and in the film, about two-thirds in that made me audibly gasp. Which I don’t remember ever happening, reading a script. Sometimes I’ve been like “Oh, that’s cool! Or, oh, that’s exciting!” But, literally, when it came to reading this script, there was a moment where I gasped. Which is awesome. That’s when I’m like, “Oh, this is cool! If it made that happen to me, while reading it, then it should translate really well on-screen.” That made me excited to be a part of the movie. Then, lots of things on top of that, I wanted to work with Blumhouse for a while, I was very excited to get into business with them. Then DeWanda Wise was the lead, and I think she’s awesome. I was very excited to work with her. And, to be a dad on-screen! I hadn’t done that before, so I had to jump into that side of my career, and this was a great way to do it.

As a parent yourself, did that add any kind of perspective to the process?

Yeah, I would say that it actually worked the other way around. When I shot the movie, he was eighteen months old, and his kind of imaginary world hadn’t quite established itself yet. But now he’s two, I can definitely see his imagination running wild. When you tell him a story, you can tell that he is there, in the story. He is not just thinking about it, he gets this faraway look in his eyes, and he’s absolutely in the story that you’re telling. Which is so cool, but it shows you how strong a child’s imagination is, and how present they are in that. This movie is called Imaginary, and it’s all about that. The imaginary world of a child and how strong that can be.

Max provides a level of comfort and safety for the other characters, can you elaborate on that, and maybe what you wanted to see from Max?

Yeah, I think Max is the most stable character in the movie. For all of the other characters to kind of, pivot around. I talked to Jeff [Wadlow, director] about that at the beginning when I joined, I was like “OK, fundamentally, what is his function in the movie? What role does he serve?” And it’s that solid stability for his daughters. He broke up with his ex-wife to protect them, and move away and do the best for everyone involved. Then, he found a partner in Jessica who he fell in love with, and he thinks is also a good step Mum for his daughters. They move into the home, and start a new life. He is making decisions always based around what’s best for his family. Then, Jessica and he obviously have a great relationship, and she’s like “You should go and do this for yourself” he says “I can stay, I don’t have to go” and she pushes him to go. Then, when he leaves, everything takes a turn, and I hope that the audience is like “No, Max come back!” as much as the characters are, it’s just nice to be that source of stability in the picture.

Everyone is dealing with a tough backstory. Can you tell us about what that family dynamic was like to work on, and build upon as a whole with your cast?

It was wonderful. I have a teenage daughter in the movie, which is a big step for me, because I had never played a dad on screen before, and suddenly I have like a grown up daughter, and a slightly younger one. I had experience in my life, of being in a relationship that I probably shouldn’t have been in for as long as I was. I was able to easily step into what it would be for Max in the story. But I didn’t have children with my previous partner. So, in this situation he had had children, and then another child maybe, thinking, “Oh this’ll make things better!” Then I’m sure they all as a family went through this crushing realisation that it’s not going to get any better. You have to make that really tough decision. Even tougher than I had to make in my life. Max has two kids, but this is still the best thing for them, and for their mother. To separate. So yeah, that is a tough backstory for them. Pyper’s character Alice has a scar on her arm, which is obviously reminiscent of a difficult history. Yeah, everyone is carrying their own personal issues in the film.

What was Jeff Wadlow like to work with, and what did he bring to the creative process for yourself?

On set, Jeff is very egalitarian and ‘best idea wins’, and even though he wrote and directed it, he is very much “Okay! How can we make this better? What do you think? Let’s try and make the best film we can!” Which is great. I don’t particularly want to work with anyone who is very dictatorial, “do what I say, or get out” kind of thing. First of all, I don’t think that that atmosphere should exist on set. In this movie, Jeff and DeWanda are also both incredibly collaborative, and it’s “let’s work together to make this the best product that we can” and that’s just a very nice atmosphere to have on set. It makes everyone feel very empowered, and excited to do that.

Jeff confirmed that practical effects were really important for Imaginary. As an actor, what did you see from the practical effects within Imaginary, and how fun were they for you to work on?

I grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s watching a lot of movies with a lot of practical effects. In the modern day there’s a lot more CGI, and as much as we have strong imaginations as actors, it still requires extra effort to imagine something in front of you and then react to it, so when you actually have the physical thing in front of you, it takes away a lot of that effort. All you have to do is just react, which is amazing. We had such a great team on this movie making these wonderful effects. I was so excited about that! Like “Wow, these are actual things in front of us that we can react to.” It helps the actors, but it also translates to the audience as well, because you can tell. There is an artistry to it. Not that there isn’t an artistry to CGI, but when you’re seeing it in front of you, and you know that someone has made it with their hands. Like, if you watch a Guillermo del Toro movie, it has a very different feel to something where the monsters are CGI, and it just makes it more grounded, and rooted in something real. Which makes it scarier, I think.

Finally, what do you remember the most from seeing Chauncey for the first time?

There are a few different types of Chauncey. I think I saw all of them, we were just very excited. When Chauncey first came to set in his special case, we were all just really excited to meet him. It’s so funny when you think about what happens in the movie. Like I said, to work with something practical like that, it’s so useful, and creepy. You’re actually like “Oh that’s creepy that he can do those things” and he can actually do them. It’s not like stop-motion, like, someone is coming in and moving him. He is moving. And that’s just amazing. It just adds something to the movie.

IMAGINARY is in cinemas now. You can read our review here.

W.D. Richter • INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

The 1978 adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is widely regarded as one of the best remakes ever. It kept the essence of the story while adding so much more. With the Arrow Video 4K edition in stores now, we caught up with acclaimed screenwriter W.D. Richter (also known for Big Trouble in Little China, the 1979 version of Dracula, and as director of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension) to chat about his work…

STARBURST: How did you come to adapt Invasion of the Body Snatchers?
W.D. Richter: Producer Bob Solo liked my work and approached me to adapt it. He was simultaneously wooing Phil Kaufman to direct. Phil and I knew and liked each other, but the way I remember it, Bob didn’t know that, and I wasn’t aware that Bob was talking to each of us at the same time. That was a risky move on Bob’s part. It’s always best to get either a writer or director set first and then work with that person to find a compatible partner as writer or director.

Were you on set for the production?
I was there in San Francisco for both preproduction and production, going on location scouts with Phil and, in a hotel all during production, doing a major rewrite of my first draft script. That version had been set in a small town like the original movie. Once we decided, at the last possible minute, to move it into San Francisco proper, I was writing nonstop, often only days ahead of a scene’s being shot. The set was fun, and full of really talented people. I met the terrific and profane costume designer Aggie Rodgers there, and also Jeff Goldblum. That’s why they both came aboard Buckaroo Banzai.

One of the most terrifying moments is the dog with a human face. How did that come about?
Phil and I discussed it before it was put into the script. I loved the idea because it graphically demonstrated that nobody anywhere is perfect, not even the fearsome alien invaders. They wanted to snatch the form and the stature of the apex predators on our planet — humans — but sometimes you just can’t get between a guy and his dog.

The climax of Body Snatchers is wonderfully bleak; can you talk a little about how that came together?
Phil and I wanted to make a movie about the consequences of complacency in the face of a mindless mob bent on relentlessly and mercilessly crowding out diversity, tolerating only conformity… sort of like today’s white Christian nationalists or Don’s Terrified Base. I live in the Vermont countryside now, on a farm at the end of a dirt road at the forest’s edge, so through my bodysnatcher radar that’s developed over the years, I watch all the invasive plant species in our woodlands similarly crowding out diversity, oppressing ‘the other’, if you will, acting blindly in their own worst interests as they try to establish a fragile monoculture that would eventually collapse in on itself and kill them off, as well. I recall Donald Sutherland’s line in the movie about Brooke Adam’s boyfriend: “Maybe Jeffrey’s turned into a Republican”.

Don Siegel’s original ending was just as dark as ours, but a cowardly studio forced him to tack on a hopeful final scene. Fearing the same reaction, we kept the last few minutes of our story a secret during the entire shoot. I wrote a different, more upbeat ending for the same location, and all production copies of the script had only those pages in them. Just Donald and Veronica knew the real ending, and I think Phil only told them toward the end of the shoot just what was coming on the last day. Miraculously, Mike Medavoy, the studio chief, thought it was a great idea.

W.D. Richter (second left) with the cast of Buckeroo Banzai.

When adapting a story, what is your process?
Oh, god! Pretty much improvisation because all adaptations are different. Some books are hundreds and hundreds of pages long — Stephen King’s Needful Things was a backbreaker — and others are too internal for easy visual translation — Dracula fits that category. I always start by reading the book, a hard copy back then, with pencil in hand, marking sections I feel the movie needs. I might or might not do a rough outline. I worked closely on a lengthy treatment for Dracula with both John Badham and the great producer Walter Mirisch. With Big Trouble In Little China, I wrote it before John Carpenter even came aboard. It was a page-one ‘adaptation’ — I prefer ‘transformation’ — of a period western into a contemporary, mystical, action extravaganza. I wrote that first draft in about four furious weeks under a deadline of, I believe, a looming writers’ strike. No real notes or outline. Just a stack of books on Chinese mythology piled alongside my computer — I’d gone digital by then. I just tried to put the hero Jack Burton and his motormouth into corners I didn’t know how to get them out of when I wrote them in. I thought if I could figure out the next morning how to get Jack out, I’d surprise myself and the audience, too.

Which was the easiest to adapt – Body Snatchers or Dracula?
That’s a hard question to answer. Each presented different, tricky challenges. There was certainly more pressure to produce quality work quickly on Body Snatchers for reasons I’ve mentioned, but just before I started my adaptation of Dracula, Walter Mirisch let slip that they already had a start and release date!

Could you tell us how you came to work on Big Trouble in Little China – were you around on set for that one?
That was a strange experience. The script that existed was a late-19th-century western — cowboys and horses. It was a spec script that Fox had recently bought. he original writers did a second draft for the studio, but that disappointed, so Fox and the producers, Keith Barish and Paul Monash, decided to replace them. The spec script was submitted to several writers who were asked to come in and talk about a new take, if the project interested them. I was one of those writers. I thought the problem was conceptual: having a mystical underground kingdom in a period western. It seemed twice removed from a modern audience’s reality. Why do that? So, I just said I’d make the story contemporary, then the only unusual thing about the setting was what lurked beneath ‘little China’… essentially play the movie off our world, not the 19th century’s. That notion immediately got everyone excited — studio execs are often a desperate, impressionable lot — and they hired me on only that thin proposal. Luckily, I stumbled upon Jack Burton’s voice as soon as I started writing. It was like he was real and couldn’t be shut up. That doesn’t always happen, at least not to me.

I did a polish for John when he first came on, but my work was done before principal photography began, and John, whom I knew from USC film school, shot the script pretty much as written. I only visited the production once, just to meet everyone and see the sets.

Have you had any input on the Big Trouble remake?
None. I was never approached. Do you mean the one with The Rock as Jack Burton? Is that still alive?

What made you turn to directing with Buckaroo Banzai? And what was that experience like?
Mac Rauch, who created and wrote Buckaroo’, was a good friend. My wife, Susan, and I paid him a small stipend to develop his idea. When we pitched it to David Begelman and he hired Mac to write a full script, with me and Neil Canton producing, He asked me if I wanted to direct it. I did because nobody else writes like Mac.

Directing it with crazy, suicidal David Begelman looking over my shoulder had its hellish aspects. But the cast and production team were great, and we were all determined to get the job done, especially after Begelman fired my first cinematographer, the peerless Jordan Cronenweth, out from under us because the operating room and nightclub scenes that Jordan shot looked to Begelman “like Blade Runner“. No shit, Dave. I’ve done dozens of interviews over the years about this. Begelman was a sad, late 1950s Beverly-Hills’ throwback who still had a manicurist lacquer his toenails because going sockless in Gucci loafers was his crowd’s gold standard in the ‘80s and who knew when you might have to remove your Guccis in public?! Not very Buckaroo.

How does it feel to know the films you’ve worked on are still being discussed and still finding new audiences?
Strange, for sure. Buckaroo is almost 40 years old. When we shot it, Gone With the Wind and The Philadelphia Story were 40 years old and seemed to have come from another world. That people are still passionate about Buckaroo and new folks are still stumbling enthusiastically upon both it and some of the other stuff I wrote is gratifying, of course. And in many ways baffling. No complaints, though. Take chances, that’s what I’ve learned. Never look over your shoulder. Just make movies that you want to see and let time sort things out.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS is out now in 4K from Arrow Video.

THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1976, part 2

1976-77

Several big shows bade their farewells this season with The Streets of San Francisco finally running out of road, the departure of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Phyllis setting women’s emancipation back a few years, and Sanford and Son a victim of America’s disposable Capitalism. Coming in to take their places were interfering coroner Quincy, bear-worrier Grizzly Adams, and Roots, the first of the blockbuster mini-series that gave schoolchildren everywhere license to say Kunta Kinte. But those were all hit shows – what about those shows that didn’t hang around, that didn’t make much of an impact on the 1976 public? This is the story of four more failed TV shows…

Sugar Time! (ABC): Barbie Klein became an overnight star at the age of eighteen when, as part of the ensemble cast of Playboy After Dark (an attempt to portray an “authentic” party at Hugh Hefner’s place), she caught Hefner’s eye. They embarked on a relationship which saw Klein – now calling herself Barbi Benton at Hefner’s request – put front and centre of the Playboy empire, appearing as a centrefold on four occasions and given an enlarged role on After Dark. It was Benton who discovered the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles and encouraged Hefner to buy it, and the two were together from 1969 to 1976.

Alongside her Playboy duties, Benton also appeared in films – 1970’s How Did a Nice Girl Like You Get into This Business? – and on TV as part of the cast of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and Hee Haw, as well as guesting on the likes of The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. In 1977, she was cast as Maxx Douglas, a nightclub hatcheck girl looking to make it big as a rock star with her band, Sugar Time! A three-piece, the band also included dental hygienist Maggie and dance instructor Diane, with the cast also including Wynn Irwin (who’d appeared alongside Dom De Luise in On the Buses remake Lotsa Luck) as Al Marks, the owner of a club which allowed the girls to perform… for free.

Sugar Time! was created by James Komack, who’d also created The Courtship of Eddie’s Father and guided Welcome Back, Kotter to the screen, as well as last week’s Mr T & Tina, and he had high hopes for his trio of unknowns to strike a (sorry) chord with American audiences. Maxx, Maggie, and Diane – or Benton, Marianne Black, and Didi Carr – sang the theme tune, “Girls, Girls, Girls,” written by Paul “We’ve Only Just Begun” Simpson, but the series sat on the shelf until August 1977 when it was put out on Saturday nights in a slot vacated by Wonder Woman.

Four episodes aired before Sugar Time! was shunted by the arrival of season two of Fish, with episode five randomly popping up on a Monday night in November. It was clear that the network saw Komack’s show as nothing but a space filler, which is a shame because the single surviving episode on YouTube reveals a sweet, good-natured comedy with some likeable leads. Episode six then had to wait until April 1978, when it began a run of six episodes that ended in late May, leaving the last two episodes unaired.

By that point, Komack’s follow-up series Roller Girls had also failed to find an audience and he had one foot out of the business, although he did direct Porky’s Revenge in 1985. Barbi Benton kept acting for a few more years, most notably appearing in schlock horror classic X-Ray in 1982 but retired after the birth of her first child in 1986 and went into real estate, putting that Playboy Mansion-spotting talent to good use at last.

Gemini Man (NBC): David McCallum starred in the 1975 TV version of The Invisible Man, loosely inspired by HG Wells 1897 novel, as Daniel Westin, a scientist who accidentally turns himself invisible while trying to discover the secret of teleportation. The series was a huge flop for NBC, who cancelled the show after just thirteen episodes had aired, ultimately leading to McCallum returning to the UK and gifting us Sapphire & Steel.

NBC, though, had not had their fill of the concept and producer Harve Bennett engaged The Outer Limits creator Leslie Stephens to retool the basic Invisible Man idea in a way that would use the special effects they developed for the McCallum show but in a much cheaper way. Stephens came up with Gemini Man, the story of Sam Casey, a hip, motorcycle-riding, denim-clad secret agent who is exposed to a huge dose of radiation while trying to retrieve a downed Soviet satellite. Rather than kill him, the radiation turns Casey invisible, a process reversed with the use of a special wristwatch that stabilises his DNA. Using the watch, Casey can turn himself invisible at will, but only for fifteen minutes a day. Any more and he will die and so Casey must “NEVER EXCEED!”

Starring as Casey was Ben Murphy, three years after finishing the role that made his name, “Kid” Curry in Alias Smith and Jones. His follow-up show, Griff with Lorne Greene, had lasted for just thirteen episodes before being cancelled, though, and he must have hoped that Gemini Man – where he was backed by Katherine Crawford and William Sylvester – would turn a once promising career around. A pilot was shot from Stephens’s script and did well enough when it aired in May 1976 that NBC took the show to series for the new Fall season.

Unfortunately, despite a writing crew that featured Robert “Psycho“ Bloch, future Arnie wrangler Stephen E de Souza, and Steven Bochco, audiences just weren’t interested in stories featuring Casey fighting robots, tangling with doppelgangers, and guarding a women’s swimming team in enough numbers to justify the budget. Given the low ratings the first few episodes garnered, NBC made the decision to pull the plug after just five episodes had aired, although the rest of the eleven finished adventures were later shown on BBC1 in the UK, where it became enough of a hit to earn a soundtrack album and an annual from Brown Watson.

Blansky’s Beauties (ABC): Ah, there’s nothing quite like the 1976 ABC approach to spin-off shows, which doesn’t waste precious time on such trivial matters as waiting for audiences to get to like a character enough to warrant their own show. Instead, ABC would introduce a character in one of their most popular shows and immediately launch their own programme, safe in the knowledge that anyone who appears in as little as a single episode of Welcome Back, Kotter was sure to be able to convince that show’s audience to follow them across the schedules.

Happy Days was the king of the spin-off, of course. To be fair, Laverne and Shirley appeared in three episodes of that show before they got their own, and Joanie and Chachi’s love affair would play out across five seasons of the parent show before their own, doomed spin-off, but Blanksy’s Beauties was another thing altogether. Later, Mork from Orson would also appear in just a single episode before getting his own show but they at least waited to see viewer feedback before greenlighting it (and rewriting the Happy Days episode he appeared in to make it possible).

Nancy Blansky was introduced in a third anniversary celebration episode of Happy Days on February 4^th 1977. Howard Cunningham’s cousin, she was visiting from Las Vegas, where she owned an apartment complex, but eight days later had transformed into a den mother for showbiz girls, having apparently enjoyed a long career as a dancer herself. And, despite Nancy Walker looking no older than her earlier appearance, there was definitely room for that because Blansky’s Beauties was set in 1977, even featuring Laverne & Shirley’s Eddie Mekka as the younger cousin of his character on that show!

The ties to the Happy Days universe didn’t end there, with Fonzie’s ex Pinky Tuscadero appearing in the first episode and Pat Morita reprising the role of Arnold after the failure of Mr T & Tina (see last week’s The Telephemera Years for that story), as well as a few mentions of a clumsy girl called Laverne. Joining Walker and Mekka in the cast were future Happy Days regulars Lynda Goodfriend and Scott Baio (a proto-Chachi as the lecherous twelve-year-old Anthony), as well as Caren Kaye and Johnny Desmond, with the whole shebang overseen by Happy Days’ Bob Brunner, Garry Marshall, and Arthur Silver.

Unlike Laverne & Shirley – which ran for eight seasons – the Fonzie magic didn’t rub off on Blansky’s Beauties and the show – a midseason replacement for Holmes and Yoyo – did not return for a second season. Walker stayed on Rhoda (which she made simultaneously with this show, as did Mekka with Laverne & Shirley), while Baio, Goodfriend, and – eventually – Morita returned to Happy Days.

Delvecchio (CBS): Judd Hirsch was still two years away from his breakthrough role as Alex in Taxi when he was cast as Sergeant Dominick Delvecchio, a tough Italian American who had graduated law school but chose to become a detective in the Los Angeles Police Department. Hirsch was picked to play Delvecchio by producer William Sackheim, who’d used him as a complete unknown in The Law two years earlier. Sackheim was also responsible for 1954’s The Human Jungle, about a police captain who qualifies as a lawyer but sticks around to helm a tough precinct.

Delvecchio was created by Sam Rolfe (the man behind The Man from UNCLE) and Joseph Gunn, very much in the spirit of the time; as such, Delvecchio’s nickname on the force was “Delwop,” his fellow detective Paul Shonski “The Fat Polish Sausage.” The man responsible for much of the feel of the show, however, was producer Steven Bochco, eight years into a career that would see him create Hill Street Blues, LA Law, and Cop Rock. Bochco wrote eight of the twenty-two episodes that made up Delvecchio’s first season and many of his later flourishes were evident even at this early stage.

The show made its debut opposite The Streets of San Francisco, then in its final season and very much on the wane, slipping from twenty-sixth to fifty-second in the ratings. Sackheim hoped that the first episode would make an impact against weak programming before moving Delvecchio from Thursdays to Sundays two weeks later, where its opposition came from movies on both ABC and NBC. In his first few weeks on air alone, Delvecchio had to deal with unethical cops, desperate informants, traumatised rape victims, and loan sharks, setting the scene for an uncompromising season of hard to crack cases.

Unfortunately, despite Sackheim’s careful planning and some clever writing from Bochco, Michael Kozoll, and Michael Rhodes, and solid performances from Hirsch, Charles Haid, and Michael Conrad (the latter two later following Bochco and Kozoll to Hill Street Blues), Delvecchio never set the ratings on fire, finishing the season down in seventy-ninth place, well below its so-called weak opposition The Streets of San Francisco.

Dog and Cat (ABC): In 1976, male and female detective partnerships were rare enough in the LAPD that “dog and cat” was used to describe them in police slang, borrowed for the title of this show by creator Walter Hill. Having scripted a number of flicks including The Getaway, The Thief Who Came to Dinner, and The Drowning Pool, Hill had just directed his first feature – bare-knuckle boxing yarn Hard Times, featuring Charles Bronson – when a young ABC executive named Brandon Tartikoff made it his one of his first projects for the network.

Hill scripted the pilot (which apparently influenced Shane Black when he was creating Lethal Weapon) but was otherwise busy working on The Driver, leaving much of the work on Dog and Cat to executive producer Lawrence Gordon and future Supernatural showrunner Robert Singer. It was Singer who oversaw the casting of Lou Antonio and Kim Basinger, a former model who had just turned to acting and had a handful of small parts under her belt, including Charlie’s Angels (which she reportedly turned down a regular role on to take this part).

Hill’s pilot saw Jack Ramsey (Antonio) reluctantly accept the slightly oddball JZ Kane (Basinger) as his new partner when his old one is shot in the line of duty. Together, and completely platonically, they work undercover to ferret out some of the LAPD’s most wanted. After a promising start, and with Starsky and Hutch as a lead-in, the show hit a hiccup in week two when the planned episode, “Live Bait,” was pushed back a week due to its controversial subject matter – a serial rapist – and replaced with a jewel heist yarn.

The episode did air the next week but it was clear that the network weren’t completely behind the show, despite some positive reviews for both the concept and Basinger’s performance. There was a two-week gap between episodes three and four, by which point a decision seemed to have been made to cancel the show. Just seven episodes were completed, the last of which trickled out in mid-May 1977 after another three-week break, Ramsey and Kane’s beat-up old Volkswagen Beetle never to be seen around the streets of LA again.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: 1976’s unsold pilots, with witches, detectives, and a proto-Lost!

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: 1974 (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

The Telphemera Years: 1976 (part 1)

The Telephemera Years: 1992 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1999 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: O Canada! (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Stephen J Cannell (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Hanna-Barbera (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Titans of Telephemera: Glen A Larson (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Quinn Martin (part 1, 2)

The Telephemera Years: pre-1965 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1999, part 4

1999-2000

As US TV moved into the twenty-first century, the schedule was full of comings and goings. Sure, old reliables like ER, Friends, Frasier, and Touched by an Angel could be relied upon to bring in millions of viewers for NBC and CBS, but everyone was talking about the new kids on the block. ABC took the top three slots in the ratings with the thrice-weekly Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, while CBS jumped into the reality market with two feet, debuting both Big Brother and Survivor to an America hungry for average Joes. Also arriving on the network schedules was Judging Amy, Malcolm in the Middle, Law & Order: SVU, and The West Wing, while HBO debuted The Sopranos.

For genre fans, Buffy spin-off Angel premiered on The WB, as did UFO drama Roswell, and Relic Hunter, The Lost World, and Beastmaster are began syndicated runs. This made up for the loss of Sliders and Poltergeist: The Legacy, both of which were entering their final seasons, along with Boy Meets World, Chicago Hope, Beverly Hills 90210, Party of Five, and Veronica’s Closet. That’s what the grown-ups were watching, at least, but what about their kids? This is the story of some of 1999’s more intriguing cartoon debuts…

The Avengers: United They Stand (Fox): It might seem difficult to imagine now, after a decade and a half of the MCU and the Avengers Initiative, but there was a time when The Avengers were deeply unfashionable. Despite some solid storytelling from Roger Stern and John Buscema in the mid-1980s, the team had lapsed into a mostly second-rate affair by the start of the 1990s, with Captain American, Iron Man, and Thor occasionally joining the team but rarely together, even after Kurt Busiek’s celebrated reboot in 1998.

It’s not surprising, then, that the efforts of Marvel Studios were directed more towards the X-Men and Spider-Man throughout the 1990s, with occasional diversions into other properties never seeming to include the Avengers. That changed in 1997 when Roland Poindexter, the head of Fox Kids, asked X-Men: The Animated Series writers Robert N Skir and Marty Isenberg to work up a treatment for an Avengers cartoon. That was soon set aside for a proposed Captain America solo series but in the end neither happened due to Marvel Comics’ oncoming bankruptcy.

A year later, and with things more settled at Marvel, Poindexter decided to revisit the Avengers idea and gave the series bible created by Skir and Isenberg to another former X-Men staffer, Eric Lewald¸ who polished the concept for a series that, like the comic books of the time, wouldn’t feature any of the big three. Instead, Avengers: United They Stand was more loosely based on the West Coast Avengers comic book of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with Falcon, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, Tigra, Vision, Wasp, and Wonder Man joining a team led by Ant-Man.

The series got off to a strong start with perennial Avengers villain Ultron threatening the world and went on to feature threats from such Avengers regulars as Kang the Conqueror and the Masters of Evil, with guest appearances from Captain America, Iron Man, and the Sub-Mariner. To capitalise on the success of Batman Beyond, a late decision was made to set the series twenty-five-years into the future, although without ageing the characters, and the Avengers were often given armoured costumes, presumably to make them more toyetic (and new Marvel owners Toy Biz did, indeed, release a line of action figures based on the show).

A first season of thirteen episodes was produced and plans were underway for a second season – which would have explored the origins of the characters – but Fox cancelled the show before work began on that extension. It would be 2010 before the Avengers got their own show again as Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes ramped up the excitement for their 2012 feature film debut. Notably that series had the big three along for the ride, as well as Hulk and Black Panther, as lessons had obviously been learned…

The Weekenders (ABC): Although it gets much, much worse in adulthood, that feeling of the weekend slipping away from you, with Monday morning fast approaching, is keenly felt by schoolchildren the world over. What better premise, then, than the adventures of a gang of middle school children over a weekend, with a ticking clock counting down until the end of their precious free time…

The Weekenders was created by Doug Langdale, a veteran animation staffer with credits such as Earthworm Jim, Pinky and the Brain, and Darkwing Duck on his résumé. His show revolved around four diverse character – friendly Italian American Tino Tonitini, the hyperactive Lor MacQuarrie, Haitian immigrant Carver Rene Descartes, and Tish Katsufrakis, a whipsmart Jewish girl whose relatives come from “the Old Country.”

Each episode begins on Friday afternoon as school gets out (although, tellingly, their school life plays little part in the show), setting up the adventure for Saturday and Sunday, all behind a theme tune – “Livin’ For The Weekend” – by Whose Line Is It Anyway? Regular Wayne Brady. The first season, which aired as part of Disney’s Saturday morning block on ABC alongside Recess and Pepper Ann in February 2000, saw the gang deal with unrequited love, immaturity, and makeovers, all wrapped up in a neat package of exploring what their friendships mean in the face of adversity.

The Weekenders was popular enough – it knocked the previously unassailable Pokémon off the top spot – that it was renewed for a second season in September 2000. A third – this time on UPN – arrived a year later and a final season of five episodes brought the total number of episodes for the gang to thirty-nine, although all but five of the episodes featured two adventures per half-hour. The final episode ended with Tino seeing his dad for the first time in eight years, a fitting way for a show which wore its heart firmly on its sleeve to go out.

Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot (Fox): Frank Miller rose to prominence with a celebrated run on Daredevil for Marvel Comics, much of which continues to be mined by both comic book and TV stories featuring the blind crimefighter. Miller cemented his reputation with The Dark Knight Returns, his gritty exploration of an ageing Batman, and by the end of the 1980s was preparing to work only on creator-owned projects, published through Dark Horse Comics.

The first of these was Hard Boiled, a collaboration with French artist Geof Darrow, a protégé of the legendary Mœbius. Hard Boiled was ultraviolence personified, illustrated beautifully in Darrow’s ultra-detailed style which made each panel look like a still from an explosion. Miller followed Hard Boiled with Give Me Liberty with Dave Gibbons, and with his own Sin City project, but also returned to Marvel to produce Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, a retelling of the hero’s earliest days. This set Darrow on a path to do a superhero story with Miller and the pair initially worked on an Iron Man treatment, which Marvel passed on.

Miller and Darrow retooled their pitch into Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, with Big Guy making his debut in two issues of Mike Allred’s Madman series, also published by Dark Horse. Two oversized issues followed in the summer of 1995, telling the story of Rusty, an Atom Boy-like Japanese defender of liberty, and Big Guy, his American counterpart, standing several stories high and perfect to combat the threat of alien kaiju.

In 1999, Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot came to TV, courtesy of Fox Kids, who tasked animation veterans Richard Raynis, Duane Capizzi, and Jeff Kline – who had worked together on Extreme Ghostbusters – with adapting the comic for the screen. In the show, which debuted in September 1999, Rusty was the replacement for Big Guy, a more advanced robot capable of saving Earth on his own, but his inexperience leads to Big Guy being recommissioned to act as his guide. In reality, Big Guy is not actually a robot but has to be piloted by Lieutenant Dwayne Hunter, a weakness which the enemy are always striving to discover.

The thirteen-episode first season saw the character’s introduced and given depth, with Rusty in particular wondering what it means to be an artificial boy. In fact, the TV show was by degrees more mature and rounded than the comics that inspired it, which were – fun as they are – little more than excuses for Darrow to stretch his considerable artistic talents. A second season, also of thirteen episodes, appeared a year later but, despite the series ending with a B-movie-style question mark, there would be no third. Big Guy made one final comic book appearance – a cameo in Sin City: Hell and Back, but otherwise the pair have been absent from any media since the end of the show, hopefully still prepared to defend Earth should they be called upon.

NASCAR Racers (Fox): The received wisdom that NASCAR – the USA’s most enduring form of car racing – is only popular in the American South was briefly threatened in 1999 by the arrival of NASCAR Racers, an attempt to sell the concept to kids nationwide through an animated show on Fox Kids. Produced by Saban Entertainment using a mixture of traditional and computer-generated animation, the series debuted in November 1999 on Saturday mornings, sandwiched between Digimon and Transformers: Beast Machines.

Unlike the real-life NASCAR, which currently has twenty-three teams competing for the NASCAR Cup, NASCAR Racers has just two teams fighting for supremacy, Team Fastex and Team Rexcor. Fastex are the good guys, led by Mark “Charger” McCutchen, a second-generation racer who has a crush on teammate Megan “Spitfire” Fassler, the daughter of the team’s owner. Facing them are the ruthless Lyle “The Collector” Owens and his mean-spirited Rexcor bunch, including the spooky Specter and former model Zorina.

Another difference from the real-life NASCAR racing, which mostly takes place on large ovals, is in the tracks, which encompass a wide range of styles and terrains, making a lie out of the real sport for any fans tempted to tune in by the cartoon. The races were drama- and incident-filled, and the introduction of an android programmed to win races for Rexcor and destroy Team Fastex upped the ante towards the end of season one.

Season two saw independent drivers enter the equation, goading the Fastex and Rexcor racers into accepting their challenges, the most successful of them – “Redline” O’Rourke – even winning a race, as well as competing with Charger for Spitfire’s attentions. There were plans for a third season which, alongside Saban’s sale to Disney, were abandoned after the real-life death of beloved NASCAR racer Dale Earnhardt during the Daytona 500 in February 2001. Whether Rexcor’s android was responsible is still to be confirmed.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: We’re back in the time machine and off to 1976, where future cops, rabbis, and invisible men await!

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: 1974 (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

The Telephemera Years: 1992 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1999 (part 1, 2, 3)

The Telephemera Years: O Canada! (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Stephen J Cannell (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Hanna-Barbera (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Titans of Telephemera: Glen A Larson (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Quinn Martin (part 1, 2)