THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1979 - PART 6

THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1979 – PART 6

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 supposedly for adults… What about the kids? This is the story of Saturday morning cartoons from the 1979 season…

The New Shmoo (NBC): An American institution, Li’l Abner debuted on August 13^th 1934 and ran for forty-three years until the retirement of its creator, Al Capp, who was suffering from the emphysema that would kill him two years later. The daily comic strip satirically depicted the lives of a clan of hillbillies in the fictional Appalachian town of Dogpatch, using backwoods USA as a microcosm for the larger issues facing the nation. At its height, the strip was read by 70 million Americans, and syndicated in more than 900 newspapers. Although there was a 1959 movie adaptation (and a Broadway musical), Li’l Abner never made the jump to television, despite a pilot starring Sammy Jackson coming close in 1967, but on September 22^nd 1979, weeks before Capp finally succumbed to his illness, one of its supporting cast did…

In August 1948, Capp introduced a race of beings known as the Shmoo, discovered by Abner Yokum when he ventures into the forbidden Valley of the Shmoon. Resembling living bowling pins, the Shmoo – who get their name from the lilting noise they make – have to be kept separated from humanity. “Becuz they is so bad?” asks Abner? “Because they’re so good!” their shepherd tells him! Shmoos, it turns out, are delicious and eager to be eaten. They reproduce asexually and live off nothing but oxygen and are so playful that children require no toys and adults stop watching television. The Shmoos were eventually – and horrifically – wiped out on the orders of “captain of industry” J Rockingham Fatback, but Abner secretly saved a pair, their lifespan extended beyond their allegory for greed. Capp later introduced other mythical creatures, but none quite had the impact of the Shmoo, who were briefly so popular that they replaced Mickey Mouse as the mascot for the US Treasury’s Children’s Savings Bond, and Shmoo clubs were set up all over America.

The New Shmoo was part of an NBC Saturday morning line-up that also included new arrivals Casper and the Angels, Fred and Barney meet the Thing, The New Adventures of Flash Gordon, and The Super Globetrotters. Shorn of his previous context, the Shmoo – voiced by industry legend Frank Welker – was joined by a group of teenagers, travelling around in their three-wheeler car. Billy Joe, Mickey, and Nita all worked for Mighty Mysteries Comics and their raison d’etre was mystery solving, continuing a tradition started by Scooby Doo and Mystery Inc and continued by The Funky Phantom, Captain Caveman, and many more.

At the beginning of December 1979, NBC reshuffled its Saturday morning pack, Frankensteining Fred and Barney Meet the Shmoo, a ninety-minute package featuring The New Fred and Barney Show (a revival of The Flintstones), The Thing (Marvel Comics’ rocky superhero in solo adventures), and The New Shmoo. As with the earlier Fred and Barney Meet the Thing, the characters did not interact outside of brief bumpers between segments, although the Shmoo would team up with Fred and Barney in the Bedrock Cops segment of The Flintstone Comedy Show a year later.

The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show (ABC): One of hundreds of superheroes created during comic books’ Golden Age, Plastic Man stood out from the crowd thanks to the inventiveness of his creator, cartoonist Jack Cole. After starting out with Harry A Chesler’s studio, which sold completed comic strips to eager publishers, Cole wound up at Quality Comics a year later. There he assisted Will Eisner on The Spirit, a groundbreaking detective yarn that pushed the boundaries of what was possible in the nascent form, also creating his own Spirit clone – Midnight – for Quality’s Smash Comics.

In 1941, Quality launched Police Comics and, while Firebrand was the cover feature, Cole’s Plastic Man feature nestled in amongst the back-up features, alongside The Human Bomb, Phantom Lady, and The Mouthpiece. Firebrand and The Mouthpiece were soon replaced by The Spirit and Manhunter, but it was Plastic Man that was often cited as the book’s most popular character, the only one to appear in all 102 issues. Quality Comics ceased operations in 1956 and most of its characters were purchased by National Publications (now DC Comics). DC already had its own stretchable hero in The Elongated Man and so Plastic Man’s appearances were few and far between, save for a short run in 1966 (which was later retconned as being the son of the original).

Perhaps that son was the one depicted in The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show, the second show from Ruby-Spears Productions, a studio established by Joe Ruby and Ken Spears to compete with former employer Hanna-Barbera’s virtual monopoly on Saturday mornings. Plastic Man had almost been brought to screen in 1967 by Hal Seeger and an appearance in the 1967-68 Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure alongside fellow Quality alumni The Blackhawks was left on the cutting floor. He finally made his TV debut in a 1973 episode of Super Friends, but Ruby-Spears decided to put him front and centre – and in the title – of his own show.

The Plastic Man segments – in which solved mysteries with girlfriend Penny and sidekick Hula Hula – were just part of a wider, two-hour show that also featured Fangface and Fangpuss (which took the reluctant werewolf of 1978’s Fangface and gave him a similarly lycanthropic nephew), superhero and dog sidekick duo Mighty Man and Yukk, and Rickety Rocket, a talking rocket built by four black teenagers who solve mysteries in the future. The show was brought back for a second season in September 1980, which is where Baby Plas – Plastic Man and Penny having gotten married between seasons and issued – comes in, starring in his own adventures as well as those featuring the Plastic Family. For season two, the other segments were dropped, and the show switched to thirty minutes from the ninety minutes – Rickety Rocket having been ejected in January 1980 – that finished season one, renamed The Plastic Man/Baby Plas Super Comedy. Plastic Man has since become a more integrated part of the DC Universe, in comic books at least, although he is still waiting for his big return to TV…

Casper and the Angels (NBC): In 1984, Ghostbusters became a blockbuster hit after years of development, during which the proposed space setting was dropped in favour of a more urbane New York City. Perhaps Dan Aykroyd – who wrote the script as a follow-up project for he and John Belushi after the success of The Blues Brothers – had something buried in the back of his mind from the aftermath of another all-nighter, a technicolour Saturday morning glimpse into a world where ghosts and outer space came together in a way that also seemed to cash in on the popularity of Charlies’s Angels and CHiPs?

Casper the Friendly Ghost first appeared in a 1939 book, The Friendly Ghost, written by Seymour Reit and illustrated by Joe Oriolo, two Fleischer Studios staffers. Six years later, The Friendly Ghost was adapted as one of Paramount’s Noveltoons, with two original shorts following in 1948 and 1949. Casper embarked on his own Paramount series a year later, with Harvey Comics licensing the character for comic books in 1952 and later purchasing Casper outright in 1959, shortly after the final Casper the Friendly Ghost short. Speculated on The Simpsons to be the restless spirit of fellow Harvey Comics character Richie Rich, Casper’s four-colour exploits continued for thirty years in a succession of titles, until Harvey suspended publication of their comic book line in 1982. In that time, he also enjoyed some more animated adventures, this time on television, first in 1959 as part of Matty’s Funday Funnies on ABC (which aired the Paramount cartoons) and then in The New Casper Cartoon Show in 1963, also on ABC.

In 1979, Hanna-Barbera brought Casper back to screens as part of a revamped Saturday morning schedule on NBC. Created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, with a huge dollop of input from story editor Bob Ogle. Casper and the Angels saw him act as a guardian ghost to two female Space Patrol officers, helping them keep the “streets” of Space City safe in the far future year of 2179. As well as the short-tempered Maxi and ditzy Mini, thousand-year-old ghost Hairy Scary is also along for the ride, taking great pleasure in scaring the criminals of the future. Less welcome to see the friendly ghost are Nerdley and Mungo, two rival Space Patrol officers who try to hinder Maxi and Mini’s investigations, usually winding up on the rough end of their own machinations.

Thirteen episodes, with two stories per episode, were produced, in which the Casper and the girls put a stop to space hijackers, diamond smugglers, cat burglars, and art thieves. Two specials were also produced; Casper’s Halloween Special (in which Casper must stop Hairy Scary, Winnifred Witch, and Screech the Ghost upsetting trick or treaters) and Casper’s First Christmas, which guest-starred other Hanna-Barbera favourites, including Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, and Snagglepuss. After that, though, Casper returned to the comic book, revived by Harvey under new owners into the new millennium and through a 1995 feature film starring Christina Ricci and Bill Pullman.

Spider-Woman (ABC): In 1964, in the pages of Avengers #9 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Marvel Comics introduced a character called Wonder Man, something that did not go down well with their rivals across town at DC. Accused on infringing DC’s copyright on Wonder Woman, Marvel put the character into mothballs rather than face a lawsuit but were surprised when DC created the character of Power Girl in 1976, four years after Archie Goodwin and George Tuska created Power Man for Marvel. Realising that they really needed to lock down female equivalents of their male characters, lest DC (or someone else) do it again, Stan Lee ordered the creation of Spider-Woman, brought to life Marvel Spotlight #32 by Goodwin and Marie Severin. At least, that’s the way Lee tells it, and – for the vast majority of the last sixty-plus years – no-one dared say otherwise, the real story probably lost somewhere along the way in a mix of deliberate obfuscation and polite acquiescence to the Marvel founder.

Whatever the story behind her creation, Spider-Woman – as created by Goodwin, an actual spider evolved into a human woman – appeared again in Marvel Two-in-One, where writer Marv Wolfman and artist John Buscema presented a different origin story for Jessica Drew, involving the High Evolutionary and the terrorist group Hydra. Spun off into her own title, a succession of writers wove Jessica’s story over the next five years, seemingly ending with her death in the final issue, 1983’s #50. However, fan reaction was such that this was reversed almost immediately, leaving Spider-Woman powerless instead.

Two years after her debut in Marvel Spotlight, Spider-Woman was announced as the star of her own Saturday morning show on ABC, courtesy of DePatie-Freleng Enterprises. Founded in 1963 for ex-Warner Bros Cartoons employees David H DePatie and Fritz Freleng, the studio had entered the orbit of Marvel Comics a year earlier when DFE’s Lee Gunther worked out a deal to acquire the rights to The Fantastic Four. Hanna-Barbera were already preparing their own Fantastic Four show and a swift compromise was found by trading the rights to Godzilla, which DePatie-Freleng were scheduled to produce, for Marvel’s first family. Having completed a full season of The New Fantastic Four, DePatie-Freleng were the natural choices for Marvel’s next animated show.

Spider-Woman debuted on September 22^nd 1979 with some minor changes made from the comic books. Rather than work as a private investigator, Jessica Drew is the editor of Justice magazine, travelling the world with her nephew Billy and photographer Jeff Hunt. At the first sign of trouble, Jessica slips away and changes into Spider-Woman, borrowing the “spinning around” trope from Wonder Woman, using her spider-powers (which are more akin to Spider-Man’s than her comic book counterpart) to solve the case. Spider-Man himself made a guest appearance in the show and it was well-received, both critically and by fans. Still, as was the norm for the majority of shows, just one season was produced, with DePatie-Freleng sold wholesale to Marvel Animation shortly after.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: We’re off to 1994 for some virtual reality and teenage drama!

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)