Feature Category: Features

Ah, telephemera… those shows whose stay with us was tantalisingly brief, snatched away before their time, and sometimes with good cause. They hit the schedules alongside established shows, hoping for a long run, but it’s not always to be, and for every Street Hawk there’s two Manimals. But here at STARBURST we celebrate their existence and mourn their departure, drilling down into the new season’s entertainment with equal opportunities square eyes… these are The Telephemera Years!

1976-77

For some reason – the US’s failure in Vietnam is often blamed – the American public could not get enough of the rock ‘n’ roll era in the 1970s, a point never more heavily underlined than with the success of Grease in 1978. It started before that, of course, with George Lucas’s American Graffiti giving birth to the Fonz on TV. It was almost as if the whole country wanted to forget the last decade or so and that Happy Days was the number one show for 1976-77 is no surprise. That spin-off Laverne & Shirley is number two is perhaps a little more surprising, but there’s Korean War comedy M*A*S*H at number four to ram things home. Outside this yearning for the past but also making headway in the TV ratings were telefantastic Jiggle TV mainstays Charlie’s Angels and The Bionic Woman, as well as The Six Million Dollar Man, Baretta, and Hawaii Five-O; if there was somewhere the US TV viewing audience wanted to be in 1976 it was not the 1976 outside their door.

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: pre-1965 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1966 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1967 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1968 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1969 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1970 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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

The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1977 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1978 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1980 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1981 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1982 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1983 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1984 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1986 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1987 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1989 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1990 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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

The Telephemera Years: 1995 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1997 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1998 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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

The Telephemera Years: 2000 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2002 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2003 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2005 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2006 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2008 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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

Titans of Telephemera: Irwin Allen

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

Titans of Telephemera: DIC (part 1, 2)

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

Titans of Telephemera: Kenneth Johnson

Titans of Telephemera: Sid & Marty Krofft

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

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

Titans of Telephemera: Ruby-Spears

Ah, telephemera… those shows whose stay with us was tantalisingly brief, snatched away before their time, and sometimes with good cause. They hit the schedules alongside established shows, hoping for a long run, but it’s not always to be, and for every Street Hawk there’s two Manimals. But here at STARBURST we celebrate their existence and mourn their departure, drilling down into the new season’s entertainment with equal opportunities square eyes… these are The Telephemera Years!

1976-77

For some reason – the US’s failure in Vietnam is often blamed – the American public could not get enough of the rock ‘n’ roll era in the 1970s, a point never more heavily underlined than with the success of Grease in 1978. It started before that, of course, with George Lucas’s American Graffiti giving birth to the Fonz on TV. It was almost as if the whole country wanted to forget the last decade or so and that Happy Days was the number one show for 1976-77 is no surprise. That spin-off Laverne & Shirley is number two is perhaps a little more surprising, but there’s Korean War comedy M*A*S*H at number four to ram things home. Outside this yearning for the past but also making headway in the TV ratings were telefantastic Jiggle TV mainstays Charlie’s Angels and The Bionic Woman, as well as The Six Million Dollar Man, Baretta, and Hawaii Five-O; if there was somewhere the US TV viewing audience wanted to be in 1976 it was not the 1976 outside their door.

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: pre-1965 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1966 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1967 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1968 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1969 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1970 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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

The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telphemera Years: 1976 (part 1)

The Telephemera Years: 1977 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1978 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1980 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1981 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1982 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1983 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1984 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1986 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1987 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1989 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1990 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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

The Telephemera Years: 1995 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1997 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1998 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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

The Telephemera Years: 2000 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2002 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2003 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2005 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2006 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2008 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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

Titans of Telephemera: Irwin Allen

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

Titans of Telephemera: DIC (part 1, 2)

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

Titans of Telephemera: Kenneth Johnson

Titans of Telephemera: Sid & Marty Krofft

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

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

Titans of Telephemera: Ruby-Spears

Ah, telephemera… those shows whose stay with us was tantalisingly brief, snatched away before their time, and sometimes with good cause. They hit the schedules alongside established shows, hoping for a long run, but it’s not always to be, and for every Street Hawk there’s two Manimals. But here at STARBURST we celebrate their existence and mourn their departure, drilling down into the new season’s entertainment with equal opportunities square eyes… these are The Telephemera Years!

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: pre-1965 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1966 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1967 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1968 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1969 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1970 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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

The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1977 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1978 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1980 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1981 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1982 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1983 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1984 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1986 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1987 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1989 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1990 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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

The Telephemera Years: 1995 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1997 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1998 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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

The Telephemera Years: 2000 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2002 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2003 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2005 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2006 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2008 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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

Titans of Telephemera: Irwin Allen

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

Titans of Telephemera: DIC (part 1, 2)

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

Titans of Telephemera: Kenneth Johnson

Titans of Telephemera: Sid & Marty Krofft

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

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

Titans of Telephemera: Ruby-Spears