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THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1988, part 4

Written By:

Alan Boon
Incredible Hulk Returns, 1988-89

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!

1988-89

It was tough time for anything that wasn’t a sitcom in the 1988-89 ratings, with thirty-minute yuckfests filling nine of the top eleven spots, several of them newcomers gatecrashing a party that had been going on for a number of years since the mid-1980s action show slump. Although his terrible sweaters are now far from the worse thing about him, Bill Cosby and his family ruled the roost, although fresh competition from the more blue-collar Roseanne was ready to push it close for the number one slot. The Cosby Show was one of six NBC sitcoms in that top eleven, the rest of the slots filled by Roseanne’s ABC compadres Who’s the Boss? and Anything But Love, with CBS supplying the only non-comedy shows in the list, the ever-dependable 60 Minutes and Murder, She Wrote.

The turn away from hour-long crime and action shows saw Moonlighting, Simon & Simon, The Equalizer, and Miami Vice all enter their final seasons as Fall 1988 rolled around, with the rebooted Twilight Zone and whatever the Hell Highway to Heaven was also coming to an end. In their places, there was fresh hope from Midnight Caller, Father Dowling Mysteries, and time travel show with a difference Quantum Leap, a rare genre arrival on a schedule all but shorn of such fare, although the furries still had ALF and Beauty & the Beast to keep them satisfied. Those were all shows that got at least a small run, though: what about those that didn’t even make it to series? This is the story of 1988’s unsold pilots…

Badlands 2005 (ABC): Chances are that if anyone is talking about an Australian film director named George Miller, they’re thinking of the Mad Max director, but there was another George Miller, working at the same time, and forced to put his middle initial of T – for Turnbull – into his name to differentiate his work from that of the Witches of Eastwick and Lorenzo’s Oil man. George T Miller was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, but moved to Australia as a child, beginning his career at Crawford Productions, where he worked on popular TV shows such as Homicide, Division 4, Matlock Police, and The Sullivans. In 1982, he helmed his first feature, an adaptation of The Man from Snowy River, a beloved poem by Australian bush poet Banjo Patterson. Starring Kirk Douglas in dual roles, the film became the highest grossing Australian film of all time, putting Miller firmly on the map.

In 1985, Miller furthered his reputation with the mini-series Anzacs, and made his first Hollywood feature, The Aviator, which starred Christopher Reeve and Rosanna Arquette. According to Miller, he was offered Crocodile Dundee – which soon eclipsed The Man from Snowy River as the highest grossing Australian movie – but was unable to do it due to signing on for another film, one which then failed to enter production. Three more Australian features, including cult favourite Les Patterson Saves the World, brought Miller back to Hollywood and Badlands 2005, a pilot for an ABC series written by Reuben Leder. Leder got his start scripting films for his father, cult director Paul (including incredible Korean King Kong clone APE), and earned his first TV stripes as writer and story editor on The Incredible Hulk.

Badlands 2005, 1988-89

After a stint on Magnum, PI, Leder sold two scripts for potential series, with Badlands 2005 joined by Danger Down Under for NBC, which was to star Lee Majors as an American horse breeder living in Australia and raising three sons as a single father but didn’t get past the pilot stage. Badlands was right out of the other George Miller’s playbook, a post-apocalyptic tale of US Marshall and his cyborg partner, who are tasked with escorting two mail-order brides to a remote outpost, only to fall foul of the local bandit king.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and North and South’s Lewis Smith and Robocop’s Miguel Ferrer were cast as our heroes, sent on missions by their controller, a still four years from Basic Instinct Sharon Stone, at that point probably best known for Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold and Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol. Had the project gone past the pilot stage, this would have been the core cast, alongside local colour provided by Mad Max’s Hugh Keays-Byrne and Gus Mercurio, a regular George T Miller collaborator. Ultimately, ABC opted against going to series, but Miller stayed in Hollywood to helm two more TV movies before landing The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter, a rare note of interest in an otherwise solid, if unspectacular, career.

Out Of Time (NBC): Even in 1988, there was nothing new about Out of Time’s concept, the story of a lawman using time travel to hunt a criminal before he can do damage to the timestream. In November 1951, Roy Steffens created, wrote, and starred as Captain Z-Ro, safeguarding history from his remote laboratory in thinly disguised history lessons for children force-fed education with their entertainment. Low-budget 1966 time-spy adventure movies Cyborg 2087 and Dimension 5, Irwin Allen’s The Time Tunnel, and HG Wells versus Jack the Ripper in 1979 yarn Time After Time all trod similar ground, while the 1980s brought The Terminator and its imitators to the table. The previous year, Timestalkers had failed to make it past the pilot stage with a similar conceit at CBS, but NBC proceeded regardless, confident that Out of Time – from Hill Street Blues and V producer David Latt – had something a little different.

Re-Animator’s Bruce Abbott starred as Channing Taylor, a cop from the year 2088 who is suspended after allowing criminal Richard Marcus (pop star Adam Ant) to escape using a time machine invented by Taylor’s great-grandfather, Maxwell. Looking to put things right and theorising that Marcus might have gone after the inventor of the machine to prevent anyone following him, Taylor travels back to 1988, but finds that Maxwell isn’t quite the man so revered in the future; in fact, he really hasn’t gotten his act together at all, with Bill Maher – trying to make the transition from stand-up comedy to TV – playing the comedic foil for the uptight Abbott. To achieve his original objective, Taylor has to help shape his ancestor’s destiny and negotiate life in the twentieth century, with romantic distractions provided by My Sister Sam‘s Rebecca Schaeffer and Kristian Alfonso, who has appeared in over four-thousand episodes of Days of Our Lives as Hope Brady.

Out of Time, 1988-89

Out of Time was written by Briana Alan Lane, who before transitioning was known as Brian. Lane’s first work was on Remington Steele, first as a scripter and then as story editor, also selling scripts to Blue Thunder, Hunter, and MacGyver. Their first original script, Out of Time was polished by Kerry Lenhart and John J Sakmar, who worked alongside Lane on Remington Steele, and put in the hands of Robert Butler, a veteran director with over a hundred credits, including The Untouchables, The Fugitive, Batman, and Hill Street Blues.

Despite some decent turns by the principal cast (and a hammy Barbara Tarbuck as an evil scientist), NBC passed on the pilot but did show it as part of NBC Sunday Night at the Movies in July 1988 and it was subsequently released on VHS. Five years later, the Prime Time Entertainment Network – a joint venture between Warner Bros Domestic Television and Chris-Craft Industries – launched with three new shows, one of which was Time Trax, in which future cop Darien Lambert is sent back two-hundred years to 1993 to apprehend criminals who have escaped using time travel. Everything old soon becomes new again.

Jake’s Journey (CBS): It’s impossible to know what Graham Chapman’s early death from cancer in 1989 robbed the world of. The rest of the gang gradually found their niche after the end of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, whether it was directing fantasy films, touring the world for a series of BBC documentaries, singing the theme tune for a show about a man who doesn’t believe it, or becoming a cantankerous bore, but in the period between starring as Brian Cohen in Monty Python’s Life of Brian and his untimely demise, Chapman never seemed to find the right project. He made Yellowbeard in 1983, but the heart was torn out of the project when his friend Keith Moon – whose desire to play Long John Silver led Chapman to write the film – died before production could begin in 1978, and the long-delayed final production wound up being Marty Feldman’s final film after the comedian died of a heart attack shortly after filming.

Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels attempted to get Chapman to star in his new show, The New Show, but Chapman passed, and the SNL-clone lasted for just one season. He became involved in the Dangerous Sports Club, pioneering the sport of bungee jumping, and undertook several tours of US colleges giving lectures about his time with the Pythons and the DSC, but wasn’t tempted to write anything new until he was offered the chance to script a contemporary remake of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Mark Twain’s novel had been adapted many times, most recently by Disney as Unidentified Flying Oddball, and although Chapman liked the story, he felt that the Middle Ages setting might prove restrictive in storytelling terms.

Jake’s Journey, 1988-89

Instead, Chapman teamed with long-time partner David Sherlock and Andy Schatzberg to create Jake’s Journey, the not-terribly-imaginatively titled story of American teenager Jake Finley, whose family move from the US to the UK, where Jake has problems adjusting to his new environment. To add to his woes, Jake also occasionally finds himself in the Middle Ages, where Chapman himself starred as the eccentric knight Sir George, who needed Jake’s help on a quest. Chapman intended for Jake to encounter George at various periods in time, with a scene in the script also having them meet in 1939 Europe through whatever mysterious time travel mechanism would, presumably, eventually be explained.

CBS were interested and a pilot was filmed in England with newcomer Chris Young (soon to appear as young hacker Bryce in Max Headroom) as Jake and a cast that also included Peter Cook, Rik Mayall, Griff Rhys Jones, Alexei Sayle, and Gabrielle Anwar as both a medieval princess and Jake’s contemporary love interest. Behind the camera was Harold and Maude and Shampoo‘s Hal Ashby, and Chapman was excited about the project, but Ashby died from fast-spreading pancreatic cancer soon after completing the pilot, and Chapman himself died, also from cancer, within a year of the director, leaving a promising series – and the potential for so much more – unfinished.

The Incredible Hulk Returns (NBC): Debuting as a pair of pilot movies in November 1977, ahead of the launch of the series proper in March 1978, The Incredible Hulk enjoyed a five-season run on CBS, with bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno painted green and given a fright wig to play the jade giant, and Bill Bixby well-cast in the role of scientist David – neé Bruce – Banner. The Incredible Hulk was the first of a series of shows planned to showcase Marvel superheroes and was followed by pilot movies for Dr Strange and Captain America before CBS decided it didn’t want to become known as the superhero network. A truncated final season left nothing resolved and Bixby was keen on continuing the series, at one point contacting Nicholas Hammond – TV’s Spider-Man from the 1977-79 series, also on CBS – to gauge interest in a team-up movie between their respective heroes.

Bixby’s post-Incredible Hulk career included the one-season sitcom Goodnight Beantown and a move into directing, something he’d begun in earnest while his time as Banner was winding down. He also formed Bixby-Brandon Productions with agent Paul Brandon but never gave up on bringing the Hulk back to TV, eventually convincing NBC and New World Television – who at the time owned Marvel Comics – to back a TV movie that would be used as a backdoor pilot, not only for a possible Hulk revival but also to bring another of the House of Ideas’ favourite sons to TV. Although it seems odd when discussing a mythical figure that had been worshipped since the Iron Age, Thor was created by Jack Kirby, Larry Lieber, and Stan Lee in 1962, first appearing in anthology series Journey into Mystery before graduating to his own title in 1966, which has been published almost continuously since.

Incredible Hulk Returns, 1988-89

Thor had appeared on screen in the limited animation The Marvel Superheroes series in 1966, and guest-starred in other Marvel cartoons, but this would be his live-action debut. Newcomer Eric Allan Kramer was cast as the God of Thunder, with The Paper Chase’s Steve Levitt as his alter-ego Donald Blake, in this incarnation a former student of David Banner who seeks his help when he is possessed by the Norse god. Bixby and Ferrigno reprised their roles from the TV show, with Nicholas Corea – who directed twelve episodes of the classic series – returning to direct. Corea also wrote the script, which featured the usual clash of the titans ahead of their teaming up to stop mobster Jack LeBeau (Trancers’s Tim Thomerson) from stealing a Gamma Transponder that Banner hopes will cure him of his Jekyll and Hyde problem.

NBC aired The Incredible Hulk Returns as part of the NBC Sunday Night at the Movies series and it garnered high ratings, despite critics being less than kind and general scoffing from Marvel Comics fans. Although the network didn’t immediately order a series for either the Hulk or Thor, another TV movie was ordered for the following year, also acting as a double backdoor pilot, this time for blind crimefighter Daredevil.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: 1988’s new kids’ shows, including Ernest P Worrell, Clark Kent, and Ed Grimley!

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

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

The Telephemera Years: 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: 1976 (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: 1979 (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

The Telephemera Years: 1980 (part 12, 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: 1988 (part 1, 2, 3)

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

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

The Telephemera Years: 1991 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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

The Telephemera Years: 1994 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1995 (part 12, 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: 2001 (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: 2007 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2008 (part 1, 23, 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: Filmation (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: Rankin/Bass

Titans of Telephemera: Ruby-Spears

Titans of Telephemera: Sunbow

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