TITANS OF TELEPHEMERA: FILMATION - part 2

TITANS OF TELEPHEMERA: FILMATION – 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. Dedicated miners of this fecund seam begin to notice the same names cropping up, again and again, as if their whole career was based on a principle of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. What’s more, it isn’t all one-season failures and unsold pilots, there’s genuine gold to be found amongst their hoards; these men are surely the Titans of Telephemera!

Filmation

Having formed a partnership when they were working at Larry Harmon Pictures on the televised Popeye cartoons in the late 1950s, Lou Scheimer and Hal Sutherland founded Filmation Associates in 1962, along with former radio DJ Norm Prescott. The nascent studio’s first credits were on the production of Rod Rocket a year later, a project they inherited from former employees SIB Productions. After struggling for years to complete an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz – and failing to sell to sell their first original cartoon, The Adventures of Stanley Stoutheart – they were about to close the studio down when DC Comics’ Mort Weisinger approached them to produce a cartoon based on DC’s most famous character.

The New Adventures of Superman debuted in 1966, just as Batman-fever was taking hold of the US, and turned Filmation into a major player almost overnight. More DC comics ‘toons and adaptations of film properties Journey to the Center of the Earth and Fantastic Voyage followed, with The Archie Show, The Hardy Boys, and Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Stand Up? leading into a massively prolific 1970s. By that time, the company had been sold to the TelePrompTer Corporation, who themselves were bought by Westinghouse in 1981. It was Westinghouse who closed Filmation in 1989, shortly before selling the properties to French make-up firm L’Oreal. The closure came one day before a new law would have given employees two months’ notice, but by that point Scheimer was the sole founder left at the company. He went into retirement soon after but did make one last feature in 1999; Robin and the Dreamweavers, a Dutch-backed erotic space adventure, was sadly never released, although it can be seen on YouTube.

The Telephemera Years has already featured many of Filmation’s most-famous shows but no true round-up of the world of disposable televisual entertainment would be complete without investigating the balance of the studio’s work. With that guiding us, this is the story of their second decade and beyond…

Tarzan and the Super 7 (CBS, 1978): We wrote about the origins of Filmation’s Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle in our 1976 feature, but two years later he was given company in the form of the Super 7, of which there were either six or twelve, depending on how you count them. After starting with a simple half-hour slot, and then spending his second season as part of The Batman/Tarzan Adventure Hour, the jungle hero’s time was again expanded for 1978, when Tarzan and the Super 7 occupied a ninety-minute block on Saturday mornings.

Although they occupied two very different worlds, The New Adventures of Batman was still around as a co-feature, even if it had lost title privileges, and five new features were added to the slate, all superhero (or space adventurer) based. First up was The Freedom Force, which took Isis from the 1975 live-action show The Secrets of Isis and gave her four comrades. Hercules had previously appeared as one of the Space Sentinels in 1977, but Merlin, Sinbad, and Japanese hero Super Samurai were new, at least to the world of Filmation. Manta and Moray featured the underwater adventures of Manta, the Monarch of the Deep, awoken from a long spell in suspended animation by Moray, a human woman who becomes his partner in crimefighting.

The protagonists of the third new feature, married couple Chris and Christy Cross, were remarkable in two ways; they were the first African American couple to star on a children’s TV show and they were the superheroes Superstretch and Microwoman! Both Manta and Superstretch would become the focus of a lawsuit later field by DC Comics against Filmation, alleging that the characters were thinly veiled knock-offs of Aquaman and Plastic Man. A court found in DC’s favour in 1980 and on appeal in 1986, and neither feature has subsequently been released on home media.

A similar fate was narrowly avoided by the fourth new animated segment, Web Woman, which had been initially titled Spider-Woman before Marvel Comics learned of their plans and hastily created their own Spider-Woman (who got her own animated show a year later from DePatie-Freleng Enterprises). Filmation’s renamed heroine was Kelly Webster, given amazing powers when she saves the life of a dying alien. The final segment – and the only live-action feature – was Jason of Star Command, which followed space adventurer Jason (perennial guest star Craig Littler) and his crew – Professor Parsafoot and pocket robot W1K1 – as they battle James Doohan’s Dragos.

Despite its title, each episode of the show featured five segments, one each from Tarzan and Batman, and a revolving set of three from the other five; Jason of Star Command was the most regular attraction, with sixteen episodes, while Freedom Force notched just five. After running throughout the 1978-79 season, the show returned for Fall 1979 with a couple of changes as Jason of Star Command was spun off into his own show, and the block was reduced to an hour in length.

In 1980, Tarzan ran off to join John Reid in The Tarzan/Lone Ranger Adventure Hour and the show was renamed Batman and the Super 7, now making even less sense as it consisted of just five different segments. No new episodes were produced and there was a change of network as NBC took the block. The show was Batman’s last solo animated outing until Batman: The Animated Series in 1992. Only the Jason of Star Command and Freedom Force (the latter as part of a set with Space Sentinels) have ever been released on home media, complicated rights issues (and legal action) consigning the rest to the dustbin of history, otherwise known as YouTube.

Fabulous Funnies (NBC, 1978): Tarzan and the Super 7 wasn’t the only new anthology show on the 1978 slate from Filmation as Fabulous Funnies debuted on NBC. It couldn’t have been more different from the superhero-themed offering on CBS, however, concerned as it was with classic characters from the newspaper funny pages.

Six strips were originally featured, three of which – Alley Oop, Broom-Hilda, and The Captain and the Kids – appeared in every episode, with the other three (well, two, but more of that later) rotating through the series. Alley Oop first appeared in newspaper in December 1932, the creation of cartoonist VT Hamlin. It originally focussed on the adventures of the titular caveman in the Stone Age but later evolved to have Alley Oop travel through time at the behest of wacky inventor Dr Elbert Wonmug. Hamlin continued the strip until 1991, when he handed it over to Jack Bender. He died two years later but new adventures of Alley Oop still appear, albeit in a dwindling number of newspapers.

Russell Myers’s Broom-Hilda was a fairly late addition to the great comic strip cannon, first appearing in April 1970, the story of a cigar-smoking, beer-guzzling 1,500-year-old witch who was constantly after a boyfriend; it has recently moved into its fifty-fifth year of consecutive publishing, still in the hands of its octogenarian creator. By contrast, The Captain and the Kids had its origins in The Katzenjammer Kids, a strip that first appeared in 1897 from German American cartoonist Rudolph Dirks. In 1914, a series of legal disputes between Dirks and the Hearst group of newspapers led to the artist leaving the strip, only to pitch up at the Pulitzer group with The Captain and the Kids, using the characters he’d created for Hearst. Both strips continued (with Harold Knerr taking over The Katzenjammer Kids in 1912) until 1979, when The Captain and the Kids ended, with the rival strip continuing until 2006.

Alongside the three mainstays were Emmy Lou, Nancy, and Tumbleweeds, although the latter – a humorous tale of the old west created by Tom K Ryan in 1965 – only appeared in the first episode, after which Filmation realised they didn’t actually have the rights to the strip. Emmy Lou began as Bobby Sox and starred teenage Mimi, described by The San Francisco Chronicle as a “precocious sub-deb with a flair for trouble.” Created by female cartoonist Marty Links, the term bobby sox had become outdated by 1951 and she changed the title to reflect its current protagonist, although the stories still told of the trials of teenage life until Links ended the strip in December 1979.

Nancy didn’t start out as the star of her own strip, instead first appearing as a side character in Ernie Bushmiller’s Fritzi Ritz feature, which had begun in 1922. Nancy made a splash when she arrived as Fritzi’s niece in January 1933 and within five years it was her name on the masthead, audiences much preferring the adventures of a troublesome, if thoughtful, eight-year-old girl and he best friend Sluggo. Fritzi continued to appear in the strip, but she was less girl-about-town and more stand-in mother figure. The comic strip Nancy still continues to this day in the hands of offbeat cartoonist Olivia Jaimes, the fifth person to take the strip on after Bushmiller’s death in 1982.

Fabulous Funnies debuted on September 9^th 1978 and enjoyed a first run season of thirteen episodes, after which it entered into re-runs. After appearing in the first episode, Tumbleweeds was withdrawn, although Ryan agreed not to sue if no more episodes based on his strip were aired. The show received a mixed reception, with many critics pointing out that the unique humour of the strips had been neutered by NBC’s insistence that they impart a moral message on air. Two years later, Mendelson/Melendez partnered with CBS to create a one-off special, The Fantastic Funnies, which featured many of the strips featured in Fabulous Funnies alongside new arrivals such as Garfield and Peanuts.

Sport Billy (NBC, 1980): It’s no surprise that Sport Billy has the feel of a European cartoon translated for the American market, because that’s exactly what it was. Based on a German comic strip by Rolf Deyhle that was popular across mainland Europe, Filmation was approached by Sport Billy Productions in 1980 to make an animated show for the French and German markets, starring sports mad Billy, his friend Susie, and dog pal Hannibal (the original comics had another character – Dickie – but he was phased out before Filmation came on board).

Billy is from the planet Olympus, Earth’s twin planet on the opposite side of the Sun, although whether it is the one first seen in 1969 British sci-fi movie Doppelgänger is pure conjecture. Billy is given the Omnisack – a magical sportsbag from which he can produce any piece of sporting equipment he desires – by President Sportikus XI and sent to Earth to encourage teamwork and sportsmanship. Opposing him is the evil Queen Vanda, who finds fair play disgusting. Teaming with his Earth friends, Billy must stop Vanda ruining a different Earth sport each episode.

Twenty-six episodes were produced for the European market and with the 1980 Olympic Games – for which NBC had paid $87 million to obtain the broadcast rights – fast approaching, Filmation brought the show to the US, with an all-new voice cast led by man of many voices (and animal sounds) Frank Welker. Subtle tweaks were made, with Susie and Hannibal becoming Lily and Willy, respectively, and the show was scheduled for Fall 1980, ready to pick up an audience on the back of US success in Moscow.

Unfortunately, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to a boycott of the Olympics by the US, almost bankrupting NBC. US audiences were less than enthused by the US’s replacement event, The Liberty Bell Classic, a twenty-nine-country event that saw the home nation carry off twenty of the thirty-three gold medals on offer, and Sport Billy was shelved for two years until after the World Cup of 1982, although an edited together feature length adventure did get an airing on HBO.

The World Cup tie-in was fitting as the character had been adopted by FIFA in 1978 as a fair play mascot (with 1978 official mascot Gauchito bearing more than a casual resemblance to the character), but it’s probably notable that – among its English-language markets – soccer-centric Billy is better remembered by those who saw it on the BBC in the UK than American viewers of the syndicated show.

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983)/She-Ra: Princess of Power (1985): It’s probably fair to say that there’d be no He-Man as we know him without Strawberry Shortcake. It’s a story that begins in 1969 when Mattel sponsored a Hot Wheels show on ABC, designed to promote their line of toy cars. The show attracted the ire of the Federal Communications Commission, who considered it a half-hour commercial against the regulations of the time, but ABC fought their corner and the show remained on air for two seasons.

Afterwards, though, networks became more circumspect about promoting toylines on their shows, but the blockbuster success of Star Wars and its associated toyline brought about a change of thinking, especially as movies were not regulated in the same way when it came to being used as advertising fodder. In 1980, having partnered with Kenner to produce a doll based on its popular greetings card character Strawberry Shortcake, American Greetings hired Murakami-Wolf-Swenson and Japanese animation studio Toei to produce a thirty-minute animated special entitled The World of Strawberry Shortcake.

The special aired in syndication after major networks rejected it, fearing the ire of the FCC, but the recent election of Ronald Reagan saw a relaxing of government attitudes to, well, just about anything that concerned the almighty dollar, and it began to dawn on TV bosses that previous restrictions on using their Saturday morning shows to advertise toys to America’s children were a thing of the past. One of the first to take advantage was Mattel, who commissioned Filmation to produce an animated show based on their new Masters of the Universe toyline.

Mattel won the gig after producing several animated commercials for the company, but when Mattel pitched the show to ABC, they were unimpressed. Instead, they took it to the 1983 NATPE convention for independent TV stations and sold it into syndication, the first such series based on a toyline. Attempts to mitigate the violence on show, and as a sop to those who still considered using cartoons as commercials to be beyond the pale, each episode came complete with a moral imparted at the end by one of the main characters. By mid-1985, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was airing on 152 stations across the US and Mattel decided to repeat the formula with a new line of toys for girls.

On March 22^nd 1985, a feature length He-Man and the Masters of the Universe film entitled The Secret of the Sword was released in US theatres. The film told the origin story of He-Man’s twin sister, She-Ra, and was preceded by a range of nine action figures in late 1984. In September 1985, She Ra: Princess of Power went into syndication, its ninety-three-episode run taking the combined number of He-Man and She-Ra episodes to a mammoth 224.

Despite their origins as a toyline, and a series bible created by seasoned television Michael Halperin, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and She-Ra: Princess of Power have Lou Scheimer written all the way through them like a stick of rock. Not only did he co-write the closing theme, Scheimer also provided voices for many of the characters when the regular voice actors were unavailable, and the latitude he allowed his staff in the production of the shows ensured that they remain extremely watchable even now, with She-Ra miles from the “He-Man with boobs” it so easily could have been.

Time was running out for Filmation, though, and only two more shows would see production before its closure in 1989. We wrote about one of those, Ghostbusters, in our 1986 feature here, but the story of Filmation – that started with The New Adventures of Superman in 1966 – ends with BraveStarr…

BraveStarr (1987): Even with the most charitable attitude, there is little to recommend Ghostbusters, Filmation’s attempt to spoil DIC’s The Real Ghostbusters by bringing back the cast of the 1976 live-action show that owned the name before Dan Aykroyd and company showed up with their proton packs and particle throwers. It does, however, play a part in the creation of BraveStarr, the final Filmation show to make it to air before Westinghouse shuttered the studio in 1989.

While Ghostbusters was less than a success, Lou Scheimer was particularly captured by a design for one of the show’s villains. Scheimer thought that Tex Hex, a purple-skinned Old West prospector type, had potential beyond an enemy of the week for Ghostbusters and tasked Arthur Nadel and John Grusd with developing a science-fiction show based around the character. As the project developed, Tex Hex returned to his villainous status, but this time as one of a bunch of ruthless outlaws known as the Carrion Bunch, often under the employ of the Stampede, a monstrous crime boss.

Standing in their way, the concept fleshed out by writer Bob Forward, was BraveStarr, a galactic marshal of New Texas, and his chief deputy Thirty/Thirty, a human/horse hybrid. Thanks to his Native American roots, BraveStarr is able to call upon spirit animals, endowing him with the Eyes of the Hawk, the Ears of the Wolf, the Strength of the Bear, and the Speed of the Puma. In harmony with his spiritual side, BraveStarr often prefers to mediate rather than punish, although he is not above getting hands on with the show’s villains (which, alongside Tex Hex, include Outlaw Skuzz, Cactus Head, Thunder Stick, Sand Storm, and Vipra.

In an attempt to repeat their earlier successful partnership, Mattel produced a range of action figures based on the show, but released them early, almost a year before the show debuted in syndication in September 1987. Scheimer thought that this undermined the show, suggesting that it led viewers to think the cartoon was a cash-in for the toys when, in fact, the toyline was based on Filmation’s original concept.

Regardless, BraveStarr was successful in syndication, and an animated prequel movie was released theatrically in March 1988. This was not a commercial success, but plans were underway for a second season of the show, and also a spin-off – Bravo – featuring the adventures of the Prairie People, one of New Texas’s native species. All this – and a new show, Bugzburg, featuring characters from Filmation’s animated movie Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night – was put on hold as Westinghouse prepared to sell the studio, and finally abandoned when Filmation was closed down ahead of the sale to Paravision International. One final feature film – Happily Ever After – had been completed, but it didn’t see a release until 1993.

Next time on Titans of Telephemera: We ask for sight beyond sight and turn our attention to the cartoon productions of Rankin/Bass!

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)