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!
2001-02
Although they were still experiencing difficulties finding the right show for their 8.30pm slot, NBC’s Must-See Thursdays continued to dominate the TV ratings in in 2001-02, with Friends and ER occupying two of the top three spots and Will & Grace and Just Shoot Me not far behind. Their chief competition came from CBS, whose CSI: Crime Scene Investigation was entering its second season and threatening to topple Friends from its perch. Monday Night Football was ABC’s sole top-rating show and the Alphabet network also said goodbye to two sitcom stalwarts when both Spin City and Dharma & Greg began their final runs in Fall 2001.
ABC did have JJ Abrams’s Alias and insane dating show The Bachelor on deck for the new season, though just two of a handful of notable new arrivals that also included 24, Scrubs, Six Feet Under, and Star Trek: Enterprise, while Buffy the Vampire Slayer moved from The WB to UPN for its sixth season. Genre fans were well served by new shows in 2001, with Roswell and Smallville coming on board, although The X-Files would reach the end of its conspiracy trail by May 2002. Those are all shows that were made for grown-ups, though; what about the aimed at the young and young at heart? This is the story of four of 2001’s new kids’ shows…
Super Duper Sumos (Nickleodeon): Sumo wrestling is an ancient Japanese martial art, dating back almost two thousand years to Yamato kingship period, with intricate traditions, a strict hierarchy, and an almost religious adherence by those who practice it. The respect it endears in Japan is almost completely contrasted by its image in popular western culture, where it is often reduced to fat blokes in their underpants, pushing each other around. Super Duper Sumos definitely falls into the latter category, despite being a co-production between DIC Entertainment and Korean studio Ameko (although the prospect of a long game revenge plan for the indignities the Japanese inflicted on the Koreans shouldn’t be ruled out).
Co-created by Vincent Nguyen and animation veteran Kevin O’Donnell (New Kids on the Block, Inspector Gadget, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, and more), the show was to be the first in a three-show deal between the studios, but ultimately was the only one produced. This wasn’t unusual for DIC projects at the time, with such gems as The Adventures of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: The Animated Series and GI Gadget also not coming to fruition. The Super Duper Sumos were Booma, Kimo, and Mamoo, three sumo wrestling crimefighters who use their considerable bulk, unique special moves, and ability to Sumo Size to combat the forces of Bad Inc.
Afro-Caribbean Mamoo was the group’s unofficial leader, a sensitive soul who liked to cook and used the Sumo Squeeze to finish off his opponents. Kimo was the stereotypical Zen-like Asian sumo, able to vaguely see future events and fond of employing the Honorable Thunderball, Lastly, Booma was a surfer-type, obsessed with his massive backside and putting it to good use with his Gluteus Maximus special move. Aided by their friend Prima, each of the Sumos fights for a different part of their PHaT credo – peace, honour, and truth – that was taught to them by their sensei, Wisdom-san, who often appears in flashbacks. Each episode saw the trio deal with a fresh plot concocted by Bad Inc CEO Ms Mister and her minions, including BS, Dr Stinger, Ghengis Fangus, and the Evil Sumos (He of the Extra Arms, He of the Big Iron Chest, and He of the Third Butt Cheek).
Twenty-six episodes were produced, with the first – “Binky Did a Bad Thing,” about a forty-foot teddy bear created by Bad Inc for rampaging purposes – premiering on CBBC in the UK in September 2001 and turning up on Nickelodeon in the US in April 2002. A merchandise deal was signed with UK licensing company Martin Yaffe International that fell short of a toy line but did produce the usual range of tat, and Midway Games developed a videogame for the Game Boy Advance, although this wasn’t released until October 2003, way past the show’s initial run on Nick. There was no second season and Super Duper Sumos often pops up on lists of the worst cartoons ever made, finding no purchase with fans of either sumo wrestling, comedy action shows or butt humour.
The Nightmare Room (Kids WB): It might come as a surprise to the millions of children freaked out by his horror stories, but RL Stine’s first published work was written under the name Jovial Bob Stine while he was working for Scholastic Press, for whom he created the long-running magazine Bananas. In 1986, after writing several toy and cartoon tie-in books, Stine wrote his first book in what would become the Point Horror series, Blind Date, and followed it up with Twisted and The Babysitter as he eyed a new career giving older children and young adults the heebeejeebees, all the while working on puppet TV show Eureeka’s Castle for Nickelodeon.
Encouraged by the success of his other scary stories, Simon Pulse (a division of Simon & Schuster) gave Stine his own series of horror books set in the fictional town of Shadyside. The Fear Street series would eventually grow to encompass over a hundred books across several sub-series and sell over eighty million copies worldwide, but even that was nothing compared to what came next. In 1992, Scholastic published Welcome to Dead House, the first in Stine’s new Goosebumps series. To say Goosebumps became a sensation amongst school-age children would be a massive understatement, and at one point it was selling a million books a week. A TV series followed in 1995 and only increased the popularity of the books, although a TV movie based on Ghost of Fear Street failed to spark a series based on those books.
In 2000, a new RL Stine book appeared from Harper Collins. Aimed at slightly older readers, Don’t Forget Me! was the first of a series of books to accompany a new TV series, The Nightmare Room. Developed by former Stephen J Cannell collaborator Paul Bernbaum, The Nightmare Room was based around common children’s fears, although quite what children produced fears such as being accused of being evil, being forgotten by your family, and being told that you will die in two days by your twin from a parallel world is another psychiatrist’s appointment book entirely. Seven of the thirteen-episode series were based on one of the thirteen Nightmare Room novels and the series was tied together by a narrator who was billed as “RL Stine” but was actually James Avery (Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). The anthology series was not short of talent in starring roles, either, with the likes of Amanda Bynes, David Carradine, Kaley Cuoco, Robert Englund, Tippi Hedren, Shia LeBeouf, and Frankie Muniz all lining up to scare or be scared.
One of just two live-action shows to air on Kids WB, The Nightmare Room debuted on August 31st 2001, right before the US found itself in a collective nightmare room in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Whether this was responsible for a turn away from less wholesome entertainment across the spectrum (but especially in children’s TV) is moot, but The Nightmare Room did not return for a second season, despite the ongoing popularity of RL Stine’s books.
The Ripping Friends (Fox Kids): In 2001, John Kricfalusi was ready for his big comeback. After exploding onto the animation scene with The Ren and Stimpy Show in 1991 (although students of the form were already aware of his work on Ralph Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse), the relationship between Kricfalusi and the Nickelodeon network had broken down, a result of missed deadlines and disagreements over the direction of the show. Nick terminated his contract in September 1992, just after the show’s second season had been completed, and it ran for a further three seasons in the hands of Kricfalusi’s Spümcø co-founder Bob Camp. After Ren and Stimpy, Kricfalusi made some shorts for Fred Seibert at Hanna-Barbera, directed the video for Björk’s “I Miss You” (which co-starred his creation, Jimmy the Idiot Boy), and produced what was billed as “the world’s first interactive web-based cartoon,” Weekend Pussy Hunt for MSN. He also began work on his next project, one that he had pitched to networks in the late 1980s, only to be told it was “too extreme.”
Ripping Friends was initially planned as a movie starring “the world’s manliest men,” but morphed into a TV series for Fox, one of two slated to debut in September 2000. The Heartaches – a cartoon about a girl band – never materialised but Ripping Friends would eventually be scheduled for Fall 2001 on Fox Kids. Very obviously a Spümcø concept, with character designs by Kricfalusi’s long-time collaborator Jim Smith, the Ripping Friends were four massively-muscular brothers – Chunk, Craig, Rip, and Slab Nuggett – who fought crime (or at least attempted to) from RIPCOT, the Really Impressive Prototype City Of (Next) Tuesday.
The show immediately hit problems when original animation studio Red Rover couldn’t deliver on the simultaneously complicated yet poorly communicated instructions from Kricfalusi, who was unable to directly oversee production. Fox then chose Funbag Animation to produce the show, possibly unaware of bad feeling between Spümcø and Funbag. Funbag head John Shaw instructed his team to ignore Kricfalusi’s style guide, resulting in a meeting between the two that almost ended in fisticuffs and Kricfalusi banned from Funbag’s premises. The second half of the season bears more of Kricfalusi’s unique hallmarks, a result of his “experimental” remote tinkering from a nearby hotel, but Fox seemed to want a different show from the one they’d greenlighted, and an uneasy series of compromises seldom makes for outstanding television. At over $400,000 an episode, Ripping Friends was an expensive show to not get right and it was cancelled after just one season.
Kricfalusi returned with a new Ren and Stimpy show for Spike in 2003, but it lasted just for three episodes before the channel axed its entire animation line. Still, his work on the original show alone should have made him a strong candidate for any animation hall of fame, but his reputation was trashed when he was accused of inappropriate sexual activity with young assistants in 2018. He announced his retirement (“though not by choice”) from the animation industry two years later.
Teamo Supremo (ABC): The incredibly magnanimous Phil Walsh may have credited Disney executive Roy Price with the original idea for what became Teamo Supremo, but it’s likely that the show would never have happened without him and would certainly not have looked anything like the Jay Ward and Jack Kirby influenced treasure it became. Walsh was working on the Disney show Recess in 1998 when Price took him to dinner and told him about a show called Teamo Extremo that he’d been trying to get off the ground for three years. Having created a superhero character for Recess, Walsh told Price everything he thought he’d need to get the show off the ground but didn’t hear anything more about the project until 2000.
With the bare bones of a show still languishing near the bottom of the development schedule, Price again asked Walsh to step in, and he began reworking things before writing the pilot script again from scratch. Working with director Joe Horne, with whom he shared a similar pop-cultural upbringing, Walsh evolved the show into Teamo Supremo, the adventures of a trio of superheroes – Captain Crandall, Skate Lad, and Rope Girl – who protect their state from various evil threats, including dastardly supervillains Technor the Mechanized Man, Chopper Daddy, Helius Inflato, Mr Vague, Big Skull, and the Tim Curry-voiced Laser Pirate. Initially lacking superpowers, Crandall – or Cap – believed he was an alien from another planet, mostly because his skin turned purple when he was angry. His battle cry of “Buh-Za!” was echoed by Skate Lad’s “Chi-Ka!” and Rope Girl’s “Wuh-Pa!” as the state skateboarding champion and jump rope-wielding country girl fought alongside him.
A first season of twenty-six episodes began airing on ABC’s Disney’s One Saturday Morning block in January 2002, where it did good ratings alongside Lizzie McGuire, Lloyd in Space, and Recess. The show returned for a second season in August 2002 as part of the renamed ABC Kids block, only for it to move to premium cable network Toon Disney eight episodes in to make way for Lilo & Stitch: The Series. Despite that, Teamo Supremo was renewed again for a third season, but just seven aired before the show was put on hiatus, the rest shown in Spring and Summer 2004 without fanfare.
The rough treatment meted out to Teamo Supremo didn’t stop after its cancellation. Although Toon Disney continued to repeat the show through to 2006, the show is not currently available on Disney+ and only the first two seasons can be found in their entirety on video sharing sites. With some of season three only available in Portuguese, three episodes are missing altogether, reinforcing Teamo Supremo‘s position as one of the most forgotten Disney shows, certainly of the twenty-first century. IMDB records no credits for Walsh after 2013 and reports his death in September 2020 at the age of just fifty-seven. If he’s remembered for little else, Teamo Supremo painted his superhero-flavoured childhood – something many of us can identify with – in appropriately lurid colour.
Next time on The Telephemera Years: We’re off to 1979 and Beyond Westworld!
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)
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: 1980 (part 1, 2, 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: 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: 1995 (part 1, 2, 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)
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, 2, 3, 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