THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1979 - PART 3

THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1979 – PART 3

Written By:

Alan Boon

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!

1979-80

Brand new for 1979, ABC’s That’s Incredible was became the third most watched show in 1979, completing a top three that also saw the alphabet network’s Three’s Company come in at number two, well behind the current affairs juggernaut of 60 Minutes. Otherwise, CBS dominated the ratings, even if it was saying goodbye to Hawaii Five-O. From Alice in fourth, down to the debuting Archie Bunker’s Place in eleventh (and taking in M*A*S*H, Dallas, and The Dukes of Hazzard, the Tiffany network was riding high, something that really could not be said for NBC, who had just three shows in the top twenty-five for the year and would soon bid farewell to old favourite The Rockford Files as it entered its final season.

There was no let up from CBS, either, with Flo, Dallas spin-off Knots Landing, M*A*S*H spin-off Trapper John MD, and the Salem’s Lot mini-series all arriving. ABC countered with Benson and Hart to Hart, while the peacock network pinned their hopes on The Facts of Life, The Misadventures of Lobo, and Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century. For genre fans, Buck joined Fantasy Island, Mork & Mindy, Salvage-1, and The Incredible Hulk, but those were all shows that made it to air… What about the ones that fell at the final hurdle? This is the story of four unsold pilots from the 1979 season…

Earthbound (NBC): To say that Star Wars changed the Hollywood landscape would be a massive understatement as studios scrambled to grab their own piece of the sci-fi pie. Of course, with more limited budgets than their feature film brethren, TV producers had to lower their horizons, looking for more earthbound fare, literally in the case of NBC! Earthbound was written by Michael Fisher, a writer and producer who’d started his career scripting Westerns Bonanza and Gunsmoke, later working on Ironside, Starsky & Hutch (where he was also a story editor), and as supervising producer on the first three seasons of Fantasy Island.

His script caught the attention of Sunn Classic Pictures, a studio based in Park City, Utah, that had started life in 1971 as an offshoot of the Schick razor company. The company was largely owned and operated by practising Mormons (and had added a second N to its name to differentiate itself from a publisher of pornographic books), and usually employed a tactic known as “four-walling” for its movies, whereby it rented theatres to show its productions in order to keep the box office receipts. Sunn had previously enjoyed major success with The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, selling a subsequent TV spin-off to NBC, but was more usually known for documentaries such as In Search of Noah’s Ark, ancient astronaut investigation The Outer Space Connection, and The Lincoln Conspiracy.

NBC were interested enough in Fisher’s mix of sci-fi and comedy that they greenlit a pilot, shot in April 1979 with In Search of Noah’s Ark director James L Conway behind the camera. NBC rejected this initial version but ordered a second pilot, which was filmed with an all-new cast, save for veteran actor Joseph Campanella. In Fisher’s script, a family of aliens and their green space monkey (which eats lightbulbs) is taken in by a kindly innkeeper after their spaceship crashes nearby. As the aliens help the innkeeper with their special abilities, he struggles to protect them from curious locals, all while a government agent (Campanella) keeps a careful watch, wary that the aliens may be able to mingle with human society undiscovered.

In the second go-round, musical film legend Burl Ives was cast as innkeeper Ned Anderson, with Todd Porter (who’d later appear in Whiz Kids) as Tommy, his orphaned grandson. The alien family was made up of parents Zef and Lara – played by Christopher Connelly (who’d starred alongside Jodie Foster in the short-lived TV sitcom version of Paper Moon) and My Three Sons‘ Meredith MacRae – and children Dalem (Marc “Jaws” Gilpin) and Teva (Elissa Leeds). John “Holmes & Yoyo“ Schuck and Stuart Pankin filled out the cast, with high hopes for a slot in the Fall 1979 schedule or, at the least, a thirteen-episode order as a mid-season replacement in January 1980. NBC passed once again, though, and the movie was shelved, only to be pulled out of storage by Taft International Pictures – who bought Sunn in July 1980 – for a limited theatrical release.

America 2100 (ABC): One of ABC’s big hits for the Fall 1978 season was Mork & Mindy, the spin-off from Happy Days starring Robin Williams and Pam Dawber as a wacky alien and the Colorado woman who takes him in. A sci-fi sitcom at number three in the ratings in its first year is astounding and the alphabet network were tempted to add another for 1979, one which took Washington Irving’s 160-year-old story Rip van Winkle and updated it for the space age (like Woody Allen’s Sleeper five years before). America 2100 was created by the screenwriting team of Lowell Ganz and Mark Rothman, who had first teamed up on the TV version of The Odd Couple, before creating proto-slacker sitcom Busting Loose.

Ganz and Rothman’s script was picked up by Arim Productions, a new company formed by Irma and Rocky Kalish, a husband-and-wife team who’d started out as joke writers for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis on The Martin and Lewis Show on radio, staying with the pair when they moved to TV. The Kalishes later wrote for I Dream of Jeannie, My Three Sons, My Favorite Martian, The Flying Nun, and dozens more, moving into production in 1976 with Good Times, for which they also wrote. Irma and Rocky gave the America 2100 script a polish and sold it to Paramount Television, who ordered a thirty-minute pilot, shot in the spring of 1979.

Jon Cutler (who was also cast in Chris Lemmon flop Brothers and Sisters) and newcomer Mark King played Chester Barnes and Phil Keese, a pair of struggling stand-up comedians who retire to their freezing motel room after another failed gig. Putting some warm milk on the stove and popping some sleeping pills, the pair are overcome by gas from the faulty stove and died, only for the overflowing foam from the milk to react with the cold air and harden around them, acting as a preservative. 120 years later, they are found scientists and revived using cell regeneration, waking up in a strange world controlled by a supercomputer named Max (voiced by sketch comic veteran Sid Caesar, fresh off playing Coach Calhoun in Grease), who rules from Newark, New Jersey, the future capital of the USA.

After voicing their disapproval at a system which places people in the jobs they will do at age six, the pair are placed in a zoo as specimens from ancient times, where they befriend Dr Karen Harland (played by Hollywood Squares regular Karen Valentine). Taking pity on the pair, Harland convinces Max that they should be released into her care, and that’s your set-up for a futuristic fish out of water yarn. Despite a decent performance by Caesar, ABC passed on the show in favour of Mork & Mindy, which was probably the right decision given how Robin Williams’s career turned out. The pilot was shown in July 1979, a fate which also met Arim Productions only other foray into TV production, the Shelley Long-starring Ghost of a Chance a year later.

Captain America (CBS): Made as part of the deal that saw Universal Television pick up the rights to twelve Marvel Comics characters, and which had already borne mixed fruit with the successful Incredible Hulk show and a not-so-successful Dr Strange pilot, Captain America actually marked a return to live-action for the character. A sensation when he was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in 1940, punching out Adolf Hitler on the cover of Captain America Comics #1, Cap had starred in a 1944 film serial. The series was Republic Pictures’ most expensive to make, but the exploits of the Sentinel of Liberty – as played by Dick Purcell – were a box office hit.

Captain America disappeared from comic books in 1954 but was revived by Kirby and Stan Lee in 1962 in The Avengers, and he subsequently appeared in the limited animation TV show The Marvel Super Heroes in 1966. After an acclaimed comic book run by Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema in the mid-1970s, the character fell into the mid-tier of Marvel characters and the announcement of a possible TV show for Cap was met with some surprise. Veteran producer Allan Balter (the husband of actress Lana Wood and who had overseen production on The Six Million Dollar Man and the Shaft TV show) was handed the reins, and he set Kojak scripter Chester Krumholz to work on crafting a story.

The set-up, later tweaked by Don Ingalls in his script for the pilot, saw former US Marine turned artist Steve Rogers (Reb Brown) travelling the US in a camper van, only to receive life-threatening injuries in an accident that may not have been so accidental. To save his life, Rogers is administered the Full Latent Ability Gain – or FLAG – serum, developed from his father’s blood; a former government agent, his father had been nicknamed Captain America due to his patriotic views of his father. With his new abilities, Rogers becomes a government agent himself, complete with a colourful costume inspired by a drawing he made based on his father’s tales of heroism in the 1940s. Furthermore, his van is kitted out with the latest tech, and he is given a state-of-the-art motorcycle to chase down those responsible for his “accident.”

Wearing a motorcycle helmet rather than his comic book cowl – a decision made at the behest of the California Highway Patrol, who refused to allow motorcycle stunts without one – Cap takes down the villain of the piece before he can detonate his neutron bomb. Reaction to the pilot, which – like Dr Strange – was shown as a Movie of the Week, was mixed and the decision was made to hold off on a possible series and instead film a second pilot (subtitled Death Too Soon), which was shown over two one-hour slots in November 1979. This time CBS made a definite decision, with chief executive Bill Paley ordering all superhero projects save for The Incredible Hulk to stop, not wanting the Tiffany network to become known as the Comic Book network.

Sgt TK Yu (NBC): Born in Eumseong in Japanese-ruled Korea in 1936, Yoon Jong-seung came to the US in 1962 on a Korean Navy scholarship to study at Ohio Wesleyan University. By 1964, he was performing stand-up comedy in clubs in New York, the start of a thirteen-year slog which finally paid off when Johnny Carson saw him perform in Santa Monica and invited him to appear as a guest on The Tonight Show. Yoon – who anglicised his name to Johnny Yune and became a US citizen in 1978 – became one of Carson’s most popular guests and began to earn small roles in sitcoms and dramas, including M*A*S*H and Kojak.

Hanna-Barbera’s Joseph Barbera was convinced Yune had the potential to carry his own show and tasked Terry Morse Jr – who had produced The Skatebirds, The Beasts Are on the Streets, and Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park for the studio – with overseeing the production. Morse, the son of director Terry O Morse (who directed the American inserts into the first Godzilla movie), brought in former Rockford Files scripter Gordon T Dawson, who crafted a premise that played to both his and Yune’s strengths, and NBC ordered a pilot.

Sgt TK Yu starred Yune as the eponymous detective, a “black belt” (although in exactly what is never specified) Korean policeman on an exchange program. Directed by Hawaii Five-O‘s Paul Stanley, the pilot saw Yu investigating the disappearance of a pop singer played by Switchblade Sisters‘ Monica Gayle, which the LAPD put down to a publicity stunt. Convinced by a local gangster (John Colicos) who is in love with the missing singer that there is more to the case than first seems, Yu discovers she has been murdered and has to go undercover as a stand-up comedian in the clubs of Los Angeles. Not unusually for the time, the pilot – which also starred Marty Brill and John Lehne – was aired on January 24^th 1979 as part of NBC Wednesday Night at the Movies and earned a decent reception. However, a repeat showing scheduled for April was pulled at the last minute, possibly signalling NBC had no interest in taking the project any further, and no subsequent series was forthcoming.

Although he remained one of Carson’s favourite guests, eventually making thirty-four appearances by the mid-1980s, Yune’s star soon faded, although he did achieve cult fame in the VHS era as the star of They Call Me Bruce? in 1982 and its 1987 sequel, They Still Call Me Bruce, as a chef whose resemblance to famous kung-fu star Bruce Lee (although Lee was Chinese and not Korean) leads to all manner of chop-socky hijinks. Yune later hosted The Johnny Yune Show, the first US-style talk show in South Korea, but the show only lasted for a year after Yune – a committed Republican – expressed fears over the independence of the South Korean media. Regaining his Korean citizenship in 2013, he died in California in March 2020 after suffering from dementia, leaving his body to medical science.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: More of 1979’s unsold pilots, a bumper year for creativity (if not hits…)

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)