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TITANS OF TELEPHEMERA: SUNBOW

Written By:

Alan Boon
Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars!, 1991-92

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!

Sunbow Productions

The roots of Sunbow Entertainment lie in New York advertising agency Griffin Bacal. Formed in 1978 by Tom Griffin and Joe Bacal, who had previously worked together at the Benton and Bowles agency, one of Griffin Bacal’s first major clients was Hasbro, for whom they devised a series of animated commercials. The natural next step was to move from commercials into television, and the studio – often in partnership with Marvel Productions – became known as Hasbro’s unofficial TV arm. Sunbow’s first big hit was their GI Joe: A Real American Hero cartoon, which ran for two seasons in syndication between 1983 and 1986, with the ninety-eight-episode The Transformers (the first two seasons of which were produced in association with Japanese giant Toei) following soon after.

Jem and the Holograms and My Little Pony consolidated that success, but by 1987 Hasbro were losing money and ended their once-fruitful partnership. Sunbow continued to produce both original and tie-in shows through the 1990s until they were sold to Sony in 1998. That state of affairs lasted for just two years before Sunbow was sold again, this time to German company TV-Loonland and, despite a flurry of planned and unreleased projects, the first season of Cartoon Network’s The Cramp Twins was Sunbow’s final production before the studio went dormant. We’ve written about GI Joe and Jem in our 1983 and 1985 features, but there are other stories worth telling…

The Great Space Coaster (syndication, 1981): Before Sunbow became associated with Hasbro, their first foray into the world of children’s television was The Great Space Coaster, a 1981 show for which they acted as little more than distributors. The show was the brainchild of Kermit Love, one of Jim Henson’s original Muppet designers and builders, and who – to prove that the real world is always stranger than fiction – met Henson five years after Henson had created and named Kermit the Frog.

Love had begun his theatrical career at the age of nineteen in 1935, building marionettes for a government-sponsored theatre in New Jersey. After a long career on Broadway, during which he built at near-thirty-foot marionette for a production of Don Quixote, he met Henson when the two collaborated on a commercial for Chinese food brand La Choy. The dragon they created together would later serve as the base for Big Bird and it wasn’t long before Love was creating other characters for Henson, including Oscar the Grouch, the Cookie Monster, and Mr Snuffleupagus.

With Henson buy building the Muppets brand during the 1970s, Sesame Street chiefly became Love’s domain, but he had time to take freelance work and it was in this capacity that he created The Great Space Coaster for MetroMedia Television, a production company that had grown out of the DuMont Network that briefly challenged the domination of the big three networks in the 1950s. The Great Space Coaster starred Emily Bindiger, Chris Gifford (who would later go on to co-create Dora the Explorer), and future Village People member Ray Stephens as three human children brought to an inhabitable asteroid named Coasterville, where the formed a vocal harmony trio.

The Great Space Coaster, 1981-82

There they would join a clown called Baxter aboard his spaceship (which resembled a roller coaster car) and have adventures, encountering some of Love’s creations, including Goriddle Gorilla, Gary Gnu, and Knock Knock the Woodpecker, many of whom were puppeteered by Love’s protégé and future Elmo, Kevin Clash. Slight peril was introduced in the form of MT Promises, a circus owner looking to bring Baxter back to the carnival.

The Great Space Coaster premiered in January 1981 and ran for an incredible 250 episodes over five seasons, with stars such as Mark Hamill, Valerie Harper, “Sugar” Ray Leonard, and Henry Winkler dropping for guest appearances. Once the show had concluded its run, Clash was brought onto staff at Sesame Street by Love, who retired in 1990 but nevertheless kept busy, designing full-body puppets for a production of The Nutcracker at the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago, and Aza, the mascot for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Love – who appeared as Santa Claus on the cover of New York magazine in 1982, 1985, and 1985 – died in 2008, his death marked by few other than Muppet obsessives, despite the huge part in played in building generations of children. At least, with The Great Space Coaster, he left some of his singular vision for the ages, even if it remains a piece of classic telephemera.

Inhumanoids (syndication, 1986): As fleshed out by former Ruby-Spears staffer Flint Dille, who had previously worked on both GI Joe and Transformers, Inhumanoids was a line of action figures released by Hasbro in Spring 1986. According to Dille’s backstory, the Inhumanoids themselves were three gargantuan monsters that had been sealed in the Earth aeons ago by a smaller, friendlier race of creatures known as the Mutores. The discovery of one of their kind – D’Compose – trapped in amber in the modern day drives evil industrialist (is there any other kind?) Blackthorne Shore to find and release the other two (the plant-like Tendril and volcanic Metlar), seeking to control them for his own ends.

Only the Earth Corps, a government-sponsored geological research team, have the expertise and the equipment to battle the Inhumanoids before they can release Metlar, with all concerned available in a series of action figures ranging from 6” for the humans to over 14” for the giant Inhumanoids themselves. Inhumanoids began as part of the Super Sunday (Super Saturday in some markets, and originally Super Week) block, which had begun in October 1985 with Robotix and Bigfoot and the Muscle Machines as twin features. Jem and the Holograms was added a month later, and Inhumaoids arrived in June 1986 for a three-month run until the show was stood down in September.

Inhumanoids, 1986-87

Like Inhumanoids (and like GI Joe and Transformers, Sunbow’s earlier collaborations with Marvel Productions), all the Super Sunday ‘toons were based on a toy line from Hasbro (or one of its subsidiaries), and the six-to-seven-minute shorts were collected as “movies” and released on VHS. Although the Robotix and Bigfoot and the Muscle Machines stories stop there, both Jem and Inhumanoids were spun off into their own shows for the Fall 1986 season, with the Super Sunday segments for Inhumanoids again re-edited, this time into the first five episodes of the season, an arc titled “The Evil That Lies Within.”

Inhumanoids was unusual for its time in that, although it didn’t adhere strictly to continuity, it did include several ongoing storylines that enhanced viewing for regular viewers. This, coupled with a distinctive animation style and graphic scenes that would cause conniptions for the likes of Action for Children’s Television, gave the show a more mature feel than its contemporaries, but – tucked away in syndication – it escaped the attentions of censorious parties.

Not that it mattered in the long run, because after an initial season of thirteen episodes (including the five that were repurposed from Super Sunday), no new episodes of Inhumanoids were produced after Hasbro decided the end the toy line. Several designs for future toys did make it into later episodes of the animated series, and there were even plans for a fourth Inhumanoid, Sslither, in the works. There have been efforts to bring the series back as a comic book in recent years, but the most recent attempt to build a shared Hasbro universe – Image Comics’ Energon Universe – has yet to expand beyond GI Joe and Transformers characters.

Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Wars! (syndication, 1991): To seasoned fans of both action figures and the animated series that promote them, Larry Hama is a big name. After every other writer at Marvel had reportedly turned the assignment down, military veteran Hama was given carte blanche by Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter when the publisher began collaborating with Hasbro on turning a series of military-themed action figures into a fully realised concept. Hama’s work on the 1982 GI Joe comic book – which now stretches beyond 300 issues after resuming in 2010 – laid the foundations for the toy line (for which he wrote most of the “fact files” on the back on the packaging) and the subsequent animated series from Sunbow.

GI Joe wasn’t Hama’s first foray into creating a toy line, however. In 1978, while working at DC Comics, he was encouraged to develop what would have become the publisher’s first creator-owned comic book. Inspired by the massive success of the Star Wars line from Kenner, Hama designed a series of characters that would work as both comic book characters and action figures but left DC before the concept could be brought to market (with worries over just how creator-owned it might be playing at the back of his mind).

Hama had gotten his start in comic books with Neal Adams’s Continuity Studios, where he became one of the gang known as the Crusty Bunkers. Adams had been an early adherent of creators’ rights and started his own comic book line – Continuity Studios – in 1984. Among the first titles published by Continuity was Bucky O’Hare, a spacebound story of a green rabbit developed from Hama’s aborted 1978 DC pitch. With artist Michael Golden on board, six issues of the comic were published, later collected as a graphic novel.

Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars!, 1991-92

Hama always intended to return to the series, but other work kept him busy until Bucky O’Hare was optioned for an animated series by Sunbow in 1991. In association with Abrams/Gentile Entertainment, French company IDDH, and Marvel Productions, and with animation by Korean studio AKOM, the series debuted in syndication in September 1991. It was accompanied by a toy line produced by Hasbro, fulfilling Hama’s original concept to a tee, with ten action figures and two vehicles making up the line, all of which were given ample airtime in the extended adventures of Bucky O’Hare in the aniverse.

Hama and Golden began work on an expanded series of the original comic, only five issues of which saw publication before Continuity shut up shop in 1994, but even that outlasted the animation series, which got just one season of thirteen episodes before the plug was pulled when Hasbro declined to continue the toy line. Still, further issues of the comic book were published in the UK market and video games for the NES and the arcade were released in 1992, ensuring the legacy of Bucky O’Hare had a reach beyond other shows of its time and style, with a range of action figures re-appearing in 2017 from Boss Fight Studios.

Conan the Adventurer (syndication, 1992): In an age where authors license their works to Netflix before they even pick up a pen, it seems remarkable that it took fifty years for Robert E Howard’s famous barbarian to get the TV treatment. There’d been comic books, of course, and the two Arnold Schwarzenegger movies in the early 1980s, but the small screen remained Cimmerian-free until Sunbow and JetLag Productions partnered on Conan the Adventurer, debuting in syndication in September 1992.

The show was developed by Christy Marx, a writer who’d gotten her start selling a story to Marvel Comics for their Savage Sword of Conan title in 1978. Marx had moved to Los Angeles with her husband, who wanted to pursue Scientology, but found it wasn’t for her and was instead slowly absorbed by Hollywood. Her first TV scripts were for Marvel Comics shows Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends before dipping her toe into the Sunbow pool with scripts for both GI Joe: A Real American Hero and Jem and the Holograms.

Conan the Adventurer, 1992-93

In 1991, Marx scripted six episodes of Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Wars!, which put her in the frame to develop Conan the Adventurer, once Sunbow had obtained the license from the notoriously hard to please Howard estate. Marx set Conan’s adventures in his earlier days, the first episode acting as an origin story of sorts before pitching him into full-blown opposition to the evil Wrath-Amon’s empire. One difference between Marx’s Conan and those that came before was in the character’s morals; the Conan of the books, comic books, and films had little compunction with killing, pillaging, and womanising – this Conan is definitely less barbaric.

To accompany the thirteen-episode first season, Hasbro produced a series of action figures, with no less than four Conans in the eight-figure range, including Ninja Conan, something that Howard probably never dreamed of. Ninjas or not, the animated series was praised by many seasoned Howard fans for its faithfulness to the worlds he created, even if others were less enamoured by what they saw as a sanitisation of some of the more adult elements in the Conan stories in this, a show aimed at children.

A second season of fifty-two episodes (taking the total to sixty-five, a magic number in syndication which allows for three months of weekday episodes without a re-run) followed in September 1993, produced in association with former DIC founder Jean Calopin’s Créativité and Developpement Studio. Unusually for animated series of the time, the show ended with a definite ending, although room was allowed for a sequel if desired.

That next chapter came quicker than expected, a March 1994 debut for Conan and the Young Warriors, a thirteen-episode series overseen by animation veteran Michael Reaves. Featuring a slightly older Conan, training a trio of young apprentices to one day rule Hyboria while dealing with the treat of serpent-man sorceress Sulinara. Unlike its predecessor, it ended after thirteen episodes with no storyline resolution, and Conan next returned to TV in 1997 in live-action.

GI Joe Extreme (syndication, 1995): In 1995, Sunbow returned to the franchise that had made its name and partnered with Hasbro once more to bring GI Joe Extreme into American homes. The original run of GI Joe: A Real American Hero had ended in 1986 after ninety-five episodes, followed by GI Joe: The Movie in 1987, in which Golobulus and Cobra-La were unleashed upon the world. A single season, forty-four-episode reboot, also titled GI Joe: A Real American Hero, was produced by DIC Entertainment in 1989, but that was the last the animated world saw of Snake Eyes, Scarlet, Storm Shadow, and the rest, with the toy line spluttering to an end in 1994.

Plans were already underway to reboot the line, however, under the name Sgt Savage, slightly bigger than the old GI Joe figures at a full 4”. Sunbow came on board and produced a pilot episode – Sgt Savage and his Screaming Eagles, which included characters from GI Joe to tie the lines together – but the toys did not do the business Hasbro had hoped. Hasbro went back to the drawing board again, this time returning the iconic GI Joe name to the property but making even bigger – you could say, more extreme – action figures of 5” tall.

In mid-1991, Hasbro acquired Kenner Products as part of a deal when they bought Tonka, complete with the Star Wars license which had lain dormant since 1985. Eyeing an opportunity to develop new Star Wars figures in the wake of the original films’ reissue on VHS and laserdisc, Kenner produced Power of the Force, a slightly larger, more muscled range of action figures based on the original trilogy. The new GI Joe Extreme figures more closely resembled the Power of the Force line than they did earlier GI Joe figures, and they needed an animated series to go along with it.

GI Joe Extreme, 1995-96

GI Joe Extreme debuted in September 1995, developed by The Real Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles veteran Michael Edens. Rather than Cobra, this new team of Joes faced the threat of SKAR (Soldiers of Khaos, Anarchy and Ruin), and gone too were the familiar faces of yore, replaced by a motley crew let by Lt Stone and including ninja Black Dragon, heavyweight Freight, and a returning Sgt Savage. One thing did continue over from the original cartoons, however: each episode ended with a “Knowing is half the battle”-style public service announcement starring the Joes.

The world moves quickly, though, and what worked in 1983 was not going to cut muster twelve years later. Hasbro ended the GI Joe Extreme line after just one wave of action figures, but production was well underway on season two of the animated show. Another thirteen-episode affair, it aired between September 1996 and February 1997 (with a two-month gap between episodes six and seven), but it would be the last fruits of the Sunbow/Hasbro relationship. By the time GI Joe returned again with 2006’s GI Joe: Sigma 6, Sunbow were all but a name on a balance sheet.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: Spoon!

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 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: 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 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: 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

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