THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1991 - part 2

THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1991 – part 2

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!

1991-92

As the 1991 Fall TV schedule was released, tears were no doubt shed when fans realised this would be the last time they would see such favourites as Who’s the Boss?, MacGyver, Jake and the Fatman, and The Golden Girls, although history no longer recalls how people felt in any respect about The Cosby Show. None of them were doing top ratings by the time they departed – one very good reason for such departures, obviously – but America was still wildly in love with Roseanne, Murphy Brown, Cheers, and Murder, She Wrote, as well as a brand-new show called Home Improvement about a man with a funny laugh.

Other new arrivals included The Commish on ABC, Evening Shade on CBS, the vastly underrated Herman’s Head on Fox, and a TV spin-off for Harry & The Hendersons, with Jay Leon easing into Johnny Caron’s seat on The Tonight Show ahead of everyone’d favourite David Letterman. Genre fans had it tough on the big four networks, with Twin Peaks having finished the previous year leaving Quantum Leap as the sole survivor, although Star Trek: The Next Generation was still airing new episodes in syndication. Those are all shows that people remember, though: what about the ones they’ve forgotten? This is the story of some of 1991’s “blink and you’ll miss ‘em” shows…

Scorch (CBS): Ah, ventriloquism, the second lowest form of entertainment, beaten only by impressionists in the race for the least fun possible. Still, some people seem to like it, enough that American vent Ronn Lucas was given his own show in the UK by Tmaes Television that ran for an incredible two seasons (although only those puny six-episode British seasons, let’s not get carried away).

While Lucas was thrilling UK viewers with his voice lies, he was also able to secure a TV show for his beloved dragon puppet Scorch, even providing the creature’s voice. The show was the brainchild of Allan Katz, a veteran comedy writer who got his start as one of the youngest writers on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and who had written and starred in the 1989 film Big Man on Campus, where he played a modern-day Quasimodo.

The set up for Scorch is a simple as it is disappointing: awakened from a 100-year sleep, Scorch the dragon crash lands in front of the apartment of single dad Brian Stevens and his eight-year-old daughter Jessica. When Scorch pops out of Brian’s bag during an interview for a weatherman’s job, Brian covers by claiming the dragon is a puppet and he is a ventriloquist. He gets the job and hilarity, no doubt ensues.

Or it may have done had CBS not decided three episodes in that Scorch was bad, cancelling the show and replacing it in the schedules with one about a burrito-eating dog named Tequila who has – and I quote Wikipedia here – “a street-wise, sassy attitude.” Tequila and Bonetti, as bad as it sounds, fared slightly better, with ten of its twelve episodes airing before it, too, was cancelled as Friday nights on CBS resembled a mass grave of bad ideas.

The Fifth Corner (NBC): In The Fifth Corner, hot young actor Alex MacArthur – he was Madonna’s boyfriend in the “Papa Don’t Preach” video – played Richard Braun, a man who wakes up with no memory of who he is and with a dead woman next to him in bed. What he does know is that a woman named Erica is hot on his tail and that he may just be an undercover spy known as The Fifth Corner. With sidekick Boone (JE Freeman) in tow, he sets out to find out who – and what – he is…

This intriguing concept came from John Herzfeld, a former actor whose writer-director debut – 1983’s Golden Raspberry winning Two of a Kind – reunited John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John for the first time since Grease. After directing Sylvester Stallone in Cobra, Herzfeld turned to TV, working on a series of earnest TV movies, selling The Fifth Corner to NBC on the heels of 1989’s The Preppie Murder.

The end of the first, feature-length episode of The Fifth Corner revealed that he worked for a sinister agency called The Corporation and that he had a deadly rival named The Hat. Episode three established that he has several identities and one of them is wanted for murder, and episode four would have had him discover what might be his real name and have to fight a Mob takeover of his brother’s restaurant.

I say would because NBC never let things get that far. Disappointing ratings for the premiere had already made their mind up that The Fifth Corner was a first-rate flop, and they pulled the plug after just two weeks. Three episodes remained unaired, and they reveal that Herzfeld must have had an inkling that he wouldn’t have long to tell Braun’s story as he wraps up the first arc by the end of the final episode, though still leaving room for the series to continue if necessary. It wasn’t necessary and it took Herzfeld another five years to make any kind of comeback; notably he was described as a first-time director in press for 2 Days in the Valley.

Human Target (ABC): Although there was an earlier DC Comics character with the same name and pretty much the same concept, The Human Target made his debut in December 1972 as a back-up story in the pages of Action Comics #419 by writer Len Wein and artist Carmine Infantino. After losing his father at a young age to a hitman hired by loan sharks, Christopher Chance trained obsessively in martial-arts, weaponry, and disguise. For a fee, he would assume the identities of clients whose lives were at risk from assassins and other sinister agents, not just impersonating them but becoming them…

After just eight short stories, Chance slipped into the background of the DC universe but would make occasional appearances when the story demanded it, especially in Batman titles, with whom he shared a similar back-story. In 1989, he returned to the pages of Action Comics – which was now an anthology title – for a one-off tale, “The Pow! Zap! Wham! Contract,” no doubt in response to the news that Warner Bros Television had begun work on a pilot for a proposed TV show starring the character.

A pilot was shot, written by Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, who were also working on another DC Comics transfer, The Flash, for CBS. Starring musician Rick Springfield as Chance, and with E-Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons and Frances Fisher in support. ABC passed for the 1990-91 Fall season but were interested enough to order a do-over, with Sami Chester replacing Clemons as Chance’s pilot Jeff Carlyle. ABC were happy enough with the reshoot that they ordered a seven-episode season for a summer replacement, the pilot premiering on Monday July 20^th, with the series settling into Monday nights the following week.

Critics were not exactly glowing when it came to Springfield’s performance as Chance, and there was an expectation that the show would provide comic book thrills in the same way the colourful Flash series did, something that wouldn’t fit The Human Target at all. Falling between two stools, it also failed to gain anything near enough of a following for ABC to bring it back for a second season, and Chance again faded into the background, at least until Peter Milligan and Edvin Biukovic brought the character back for adult readers in a 1999 series for Vertigo Comics.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures (Fox): Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson struck gold when a script based on a schtick they used to do in college together hit the big screen as Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure in 1989. The film grossed four times it’s $10 million budget and turned Bill, Ted, and Keanu Reeves into cultural icons. A sequel was immediately greenlit, but the world just could not get enough of Bill and Ted’s tremendous travels and DC Comics rushed out a comic book adaptation of the movie by Angelo Torres, while Hanna-Barbera produced an animated series that began airing on CBS in September 1990.

The animated series captured the spirit of the original, helped by the fact that Reeves, Alex Winter, and George Carlin reprised their roles from the movie, and with excitement amping up for Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, Fox swept in to capitalise, signing a deal to continue the series on TV in both animated and live-action form. DIC Entertainment were hired to produce season two of the animated show, and some synergy was achieved when Bill and Ted were voiced by Evan Richards and Christopher Kennedy, the actors hired to play the characters in the live-action show.

Richards and Kennedy were obviously chosen for their resemblance to Reeves and Winter rather than any outstanding acting qualities, although Richards had previously been a regular on the TV version of Down and Out in Beverly Hills, but they did a fair job providing the voices for the iconic pair when the cartoon returned on Fox in September 1991. The live-action show was supposed to debut at the same time, but Fox executives were concerned that the sequel, which hit theatres in July 1991 had yet to make a profit and halted production after seven episodes had been filmed, choosing to wait until Bogus Journey’s receipts passed its $20 million budget.

That finally happened after it was released on VHS in January 1992 and Fox scheduled the show for Summer 1992, replacing True Colors on Sunday nights from June 28^th. By that point, the animated show had been cancelled after just eight episodes and it seemed America’s love affair with the slacker pair had waned, with attentions moving on to Wayne’s World. The seven finished episodes aired through August 9^th 1992, but that was it for Bill and Ted, at least until the original cast and creators – minus Carlin, who died in 2008 – returned for Bill and Ted Face the Music in 2020.

Mann & Machine (NBC): Although he’ll always be forever linked with Law & Order, Dick Wolf was a prolific creator in the late 1980s and early 1990s, responsible for a clutch of short-lived shows including crime-solving anthropologist drama Gideon Oliver, crime-solving female attorney yarn Christine Cromwell, undercover cops tale Nasty Boys, and HELP, an all-emergency services affair starring Frasier’s dad before he was Frasier’s dad. In 1991, he teamed with Robert de Laurentiis to create Mann & Machine, the latest in a line of “cop gets a new partner and they’re a robot!” shows to try its luck with network schedulers.

The machine of Mann & Machine was Sgt Eve Edison, a lifelike gynoid capable of human emotion. Played by Yancy Butler, who’d impressed Wolf when appearing in an episode of Law & Order a few months before, Eve was paired with robot hating Detective Bobby Mann, played by David Andrews, best known at that point for the BBC show Pulaski.

The series revolved around Eve learning to be human and Mann finding out that, just maybe, fembots aren’t that bad after all, especially when they’re all sexy and that. Along the way, they solved crimes involving international steel brokers, a serial killer who uses dating agencies to find his victims, and organ harvesters, all to less-than-hoped-for ratings as a Spring 1992 replacement for Grand Ole Opry-style variety show, Hot Country Nights.

The few viewers that did tune in took the show to their hearts, but critics were less kind, comparing it unfavourably to shows with similar concepts, such as Holmes & Yoyo and Future Cop. NBC gave up on the show after just four episodes, showing the remaining batch to the only people left watching TV during the summer months. At that point, with Law & Order yet to establish itself as the juggernaut it became, there was little Wolf could do to change their minds, a million gynoid fetishes cut off in their prime.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: The 1991 shows that didn’t make it to air, including power packs and tag-teams!

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)