THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1991 - part 3

THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1991 – 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!

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 got a full series order, though: what about the ones that fell at that final hurdle? This is the story of 1991’s unsold pilots…

Power Pack (NBC): First appearing in 1961, the Fantastic Four were regarded as the first family of comic books, although the family unit wasn’t exactly nuclear, despite their cosmically radiated origins. Twenty-three years later, Marvel comics presented a brand-new title featuring a super-powered family but with a twist: these superheroes were all children…

Power Pack was created by Louise Simonson and June Brigman, four children aged between five and twelve who are given powers by a dying alien so that they can save their parents from some other, evil aliens. The series was well-received and ran for six years, finishing with #62, resetting the status quo after quite a journey for the young protagonists.

Other than a Summer Special in 1991, Power Pack wouldn’t appear again in comics until 1994, when Alex – the oldest of the Powers siblings – joined the cast of New Warriors. No sooner had their original comic book been cancelled, though, than work began on bringing the team to TV, with New World Entertainment (which had purchased Marvel Comics in 1997) partnering with Canadian production company Paragon, best known for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Scripted by rookie writer Jason Brett from Simonson and Brigman’s original concept, a thirty-minute pilot was made with the intention of selling it to NBC for their Saturday morning schedules. Minor changes were made to the team, with some powers tweaked for better/cheaper television and the Powers parents now not being aware of their children’s extra-curricular activities. The young cast was mostly newcomers, and the wider ensemble was drawn from the ranks of Canadian television bit-parters.

NBC weren’t interested in the story of the quartet’s search for the ghostly Dr Mobius, but Fox picked up the pilot as a one-off Saturday morning special, airing it several times in the early 1990s, but didn’t take up the option of a series. Power Pack returned to comics in June 2000 as a mini-series, just as news broke that the property was among fifteen that was part of a joint agreement to develop feature films between Marvel and Artisan Entertainment, but only The Punisher and Man Thing saw the light of day before Artisan was sold to Lion’s Gate in 2003.

Tagteam (ABC): In the late 1980s, both “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Jesse “The Body” Ventura sought to escape the rigours of a professional wrestling career and turned to acting, something the vast majority of the American public were convinced they had been doing all along in their grappling days. Piper snagged the lead roles in Hell Comes to Frogtown and John Carpenter’s They Live, while Ventura was cast alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator and The Running Man, but neither were able to fully break away from the squared circle.

The next logical step, then, was to combine the two, and the perfect vehicle came long in the form of Tagteam, a pilot scripted by Robert McCullough, who had moved from production duties on the likes of Falcon Crest, Ohara, and Star Trek: The Next Generation to trying his hand at screenwriting. Originally conceived as a solo vehicle for Ventura, Piper was added at the suggestion of both men, who were working for Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation at the time.

Bobby “The Body” Youngblood and Scotsman “Tricky” Rick McDonald (guess who plays who) are two journeyman professional wrestlers who are ordered to take a dive in a championship match by their unscrupulous promoter’s wife or they will be blackballed. Baulking at such heresy, they go on to beat the Samurai Brothers. In actuality, the match featured Piper and Ventura against the WWF’s Orient Express, was shot at a WWF show, and would be the last match Ventura ever wrestled, but the result is the same and they are fired from the only jobs they’ve ever known.

After trying out many new careers (with hilarious results), the pair help stop a robbery at a grocery store and decide to become policemen, entering a police academy they seem far too old for, but winning over the captain with their loveable antics. This, then, is our show, two misfit cops (probably) using wrestling manoeuvres to take down criminals.

It’s thin gruel but, at least according to Ventura, ABC picked up the series for thirteen episodes, but before filming could commence, an unrelated lawsuit between Disney (who owned) ABC and Tagteam producers Carolco led to a six-month delay. By the time that was settled, Ventura had left the WWF acrimoniously and that departure finally put paid to any prospect of a Tagteam series. ABC did show the pilot, however, in January 1991, and it is preserved for all eternity on YouTube, should you wish to see the future Governor of Minnesota in action.

Tagget (USA): Daniel J Travanti earned two Emmy Awards for his portrayal of Captain Frank Furillo in Hill Street Blues, the heart and soul of the popular police procedural, but found post-Hill Street fame hard to come by. A recovering alcoholic, like his most famous character, Travanti grabbed a handful of roles in thrillers and legal dramas in the wake of the show’s 1987 finish, but it wasn’t until 1990 that he was offered another lead role in a potential series.

Based on a novel by Irving A Greenfield, John Tagget is a veteran of the Vietnam War, carrying both physical and mental scars from his time in the jungles of Indochina. Despite his disabilities, he is the owner of a successful electronics firm but begins to suffer painful flashbacks to the war and, when attempting to find out why, finds himself the target of former colleagues in the intelligence agencies. With the help of former Russian agent Yuri (William Sadler, best known as Death in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey), Tagget unravels a mystery that only he may have the answer to.

Alongside Travanti and Sadler is a solid cast that includes Peter Michael Goetz, Roxanne Hart, and Stephen Tobolowsky, all doing decent work under Richard T Heffron’s direction. That said, and despite its unusually positive portrayal of those with both physical and emotional disabilities, it’s tough to see where Tagget might have gone had it been taken to a full series, although Edward Woodward had just finished his run as The Equalizer and there was a gap for a former intelligence agency veteran helping out the common man on the schedule.

Nevertheless, despite an airing as a TV movie in February 1991, the USA Network passed on taking Tagget to series, and it was later released on VHS under the name Dragonfire. Travanti did eventually secure another recurring role, leading the Missing Persons crew in their search for, well, missing persons, although that lasted for just a single season in 1993-94.

Krofft Late Night (ABC): Experienced hands at freaking out the kids of the 1960s and 1970s, Sid and Marty Krofft’s focus increasingly turned to adults in the 1980s and beyond, attempting to transfer their kaleidoscopic creations into prime time. Variety shows such as Fol-de-Rol, Pink Lady & Jeff, and Sid & Marty Krofft’s Red Eye Express met with a mixed response, none of them making it past one-off specials.

In 1987, no doubt inspired by the success of Spitting Image in the UK, they created DC Follies, a satirical look at American politics built around the titular bar and its clientele, latex caricatures of political figures such as Ronald Regan, Oliver North, and Henry Kissinger, alongside wider celebrity lampoons. DC Follies lasted for two seasons of twenty-two episodes each and was nominated for two Emmy Awards, although ratings dipped during the second season and the Krofft’s thoughts naturally turned to a follow-up show.

Sticking with the arena of current affairs, they created KLN, a news show as seen through the eyes of its anchorman. The role of Leslie Peters went to Leslie Nielsen, fresh off lacklustre Exorcist parody Repossessed and about to play Frank Drebin for the third time in Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, who would present topical jokes with the aid of the Krofft’s puppets, many of whom were recycled from DC Follies, in an odd mix of the Weekend Update from Saturday Night Live and the aforementioned Fluck and Law grotesquerie.

The hour-long pilot was shown on April 5^th 1991 in the slot usually reserved for Rick “Disco Dick” Dees and his Into the Night (which wouldn’t last the season), but ABC saw nothing much of value in the concept. Like Sid and Marty Krofft in general, the idea seemed much better suited to a bygone era, and it was to be the pair’s last production for network TV.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: Saturday mornings in 1991 were really freaking weird, man!

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)