THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 2004, part 4

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!

2004-05

After finishing the 2003-04 season with just one show – perennial favourite Monday Night Football – in the top twenty rating shows, ABC hit back in Fall 2004 with a slate of new arrivals that took the US by storm. Crashing into the top ten were both Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy, while the buzz created by mystery box classic Lost saw twenty million viewers tune in for its finale. CBS still ruled the roost, however, with the juggernaut that was CSI: Crime Scene Investigation showing no signs of slowing down, backed by spin-off CSI: Miami, another police procedural in Without a Trace, and reality show Survivor. American Idol secured two places in the top three for Fox, while NBC continued to struggle, the days of Must See TV fading fast in the wake of Friends and Seinfeld ending; ER, its highest rating show, could claim only the number twelve spot.

There were plenty of new arrivals to keep the ABC blockbuster trio company, though, with Boston Legal doing well on ABC, CSI: New York joining the CBS CSI family, and Family Guy spin-off American Dad debuting on Fox. NBC tried out a spin-off of their own in Joey, which didn’t do well, but Medium and The Office were more successful. Offbeat detective action could be found on UPN as Veronica Mars sought to solve the mystery of her murdered classmate, HBO premiered both Deadwood and Entourage, and genre fans were well-catered for with The 4400 on the USA Network and Stargate Atlantis on Sci-Fi. Those were all shows for adults, though; what about ones aimed at (but not necessarily exclusively watched by) kids? This is the story of 2004’s new cartoons…

Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! (Jetix on ABC Family): The glut of shows that arrived with the fragmentation of children’s television in the twenty-first century has meant that even some shows that lasted for years have failed to make the transfer from popular culture’s short to long term memory. A perfect example is Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!, which lasted four seasons and over fifty episodes, but barely registers on the zeitgeist scale, despite its notable position as the first original programming created for Disney’s Jetix block. Jetix launched on ABC Family in February 2004 to compete with Cartoon Network’s Toonami strand as a showcase for superhero, anime, and adventure shows.

Although it wasn’t part of the Toonami block, Cartoon Network had a hit in the Summer of 2003 with Teen Titans, an anime-inspired cartoon based on DC Comics’ long-running adolescent superhero team. One the team behind teen Titans was Ciro Nieli, a graduate of Philadelphia’s University of the Arts who had joined Warner Bros. Animation in 2000, and alongside his work on Teen Titans, Nieli was developing his own show, which he pitched to Disney executives in 2003. Even more than Teen Titans, Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! took its inspiration from classic anime such as Astro Boy and Speed Racer, but also added in elements of Star Trek, Star Wars, and the Super Sentai series. Nieli also brought in Lynne Naylor and Chris Reccardi, who had just finished up on Samurai Jack, alongside Darkwing Duck‘s Tad Stones and Gargoyles creator Greg Weisman.

The show’s main protagonist is Chiro, a young boy who finds an abandoned giant robot while out exploring the overgrown outskirts of Shuggazoom City, close to The Zone of Wasted Years. Inside the robot, he finds and accidentally awakens five robotic monkeys, the process also imbuing him with the energy of the Power Primate, enabling him to transform into a stronger, braver fighter. With his new abilities, Chiro becomes the leader of the Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce, teaming with Antauri, Gibson, Nova, Otto, and Sparx to save Shuggazoom City from the evil Skeleton King, the very menace the Hyperforce was created to combat all those years ago.

With a voice cast that included Clancy Brown, Greg Cipes (Teen Titans’ Beast Boy), Corey Feldman, Spongebob Squarepants’s Tom Kenny, Kevin Michael Richardson, and Mark Hammill as the Skeleton King, Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! debuted on September 18^th 2004 with a thirteen-episode season that quickly won over critics and viewers. Further seasons – also of thirteen episodes each – arrived in February 2005, October 2005, and September 2006, and Nieli had plans for a fifth, but ratings and merchandise sales had declined to a point where Disney pulled the plug, despite season four ending on a terrific cliffhanger. Nieli, who went on to work on Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot, has always stated his intention to complete the story, but there has been no news on that front since Cipes shared some shared pre-production sketches in June 2018.

Phil of the Future (Disney Channel): Douglas Tuber and Tim Maile met when they were both part of the writing team for Nickelodeon’s camp-based sitcom, Salute Your Shorts. It was Tuber’s first scriptwriting gig, but Maile had written for the USA Network’s Friday night talk show Camp Midnite and its predecessor What a Week before joining the Salute Your Shorts crew. Forming a writing partnership, the pair worked on Armageddon comedy Woops!, Herman’s Head, and Margaret Cho vehicle All-American Girl, where they also acted a producers. Life’s Work and child prodigy sitcom Smart Guy followed before they were given the job of shepherding Lizzie McGuire from its high concept creation to the show that appeared on the Disney Channel in January 2001.

Tuber and Maile stayed with the show until disagreements between Disney and star Hilary Duff brought it to and end after two seasons. Their work had not gone unnoticed, though, and they were given the chance to create their own show. Their brainstorming sessions were inspired by a song, Elvis Costello’s “Man Out of Time” from his 1982 album Imperial Bedroom, but rather than follow the song’s theme of a man running out of time, they focussed on a person being out of their time period. Further inspired by the Zager and Evans classic “In the Year 2525,” they came up with the idea of a family of time travellers from the far future stuck in our time.

Taking a lead from Disney’s other shows, the pilot script had a working title of Girl from the Future, but the channel felt they needed a show featuring a male lead. Disney also wanted to age the main character down from thirteen or fourteen to nine or ten, but Tuber and Maile stood firm, feeling that they’d already seen the perfect candidates to play their lead and his female best friend (who they knew from the start would turn out to be something more than that). Now titled Phil of the Future, the show centred around Phil Diffy (Raviv “Ricky” Ullman in his first starring role) and his younger sister Pim (a sparky Amy Bruckner), the children of Lloyd (Lizzie McGuire‘s Craig Anton) and Barbara Diffy (Lise Simms from The Young and the Restless), time travellers from the year 2121 who are stuck in modern day Los Angeles when their time machine breaks down.

The pilot (and some scenes in subsequent episodes that were cut) established that Barbara had an artificial body and would relax by removing her head, but after the beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl during the Gulf War, it was not overtly mentioned again. Other elements from the pilot, such as Pim’s aloof demeanour towards the “primitive” people of the twenty-first century, and Phil’s friendship with gal pal Keely (newcomer Aly Michalka) were retained, though, with the first episode of the series debuting on June 18^th 2004 with the Diffy’s already integrated into the local community.

The show’s main antagonist was HG Wells High School Vice-Principal Neil Hackett (ER’s Dr Dustin Crenshaw, JP Manoux), who is convinced there is something strange about Phil and Pim, at first thinking they are aliens. Keeping their secret becomes even tougher for the family when they discover a caveman (also played by Manoux) stowed away on their time machine when they visited prehistoric times and they must pretend he is Phil’s uncle Curtis while he, too, learns to live in the modern day.

The show’s first season did well enough that it was renewed for a second, although Tuber and Maile were not involved save for directing the episode “It’s a Wonder-Phil Life,” and there were changes made to the supporting cast. Kelly’s best friend switched from rich girl Tia to English rose Via when the actress playing Tia (Brenda Song) was cast on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, with Phil’s nerdy pal Seth switched out for laid-back Owen. Pim’s reluctant best friend Debbie (whose brain she swapped with that of a chicken in the pilot) was also gone, replaced by Li’l Danny Dawkins, and Spencer Locke came in as mean girl Candida as a replacement for her rival Bradley. A new member of staff was also added, in the shape of Joel Messerschmitt (Six Feet Under‘s Joel Brooks, who also plays Messerschmitt’s similarly moustachioed sister, Bettina).

Season two debuted on June 25^th 2005 with an episode where Phil and Pim are forced to live in each other’s bodies for a day, and Phil and Keely grew gradually closer throughout the season until they finally admit their feelings for each other when they are voted Cutest Couple ahead of the school dance. Unfortunately, that coincides with Lloyd’s announcement that he has fixed the time machine – although it has been fixed for some time and he was reluctant to interrupt his family’s happy life in this time – and the two have a heartbreaking parting. Until that is, Phil returns for one last kiss and a promise he’ll wait for Keely (the logistics of which don’t bear thinking about); the family return to 2121, only realising too late that they’ve left Curtis behind.

Ratings were strong enough that Phil of the Future should have received a third season but Disney were faced with a choice between that and funding a new show, Hannah Montana, for Miley Cyrus. Hindsight reveals they made the right decision. Tuber and Maile continued to work together, creating Darcy’s Wild Life for Discovery Kids and developing an animated Famous Five series for Disney, as well as working as writer-producers on Jessie, Littlest Pet Shop: A World of Our Own, and Mira, Royal Detective, all for the Disney Channel. Of the cast, Ullman largely quit acting after appearing in sitcom Rita Rocks in 2009 and now plays music, while Bruckner also left the business behind for a career in law. Michalka formed a singing duo with younger sister AJ (also a Disney Channel star) and had leading roles in Hellcats and iZombie, but now restricts herself to guest roles as she raises her son.

Da Boom Crew (Kids WB): Although it’s commonplace for sitcoms and dramas on the adult schedules to be pulled from the air after just a handful of episodes have been shown, it’s very rare that a children’s show meets the same fate. It happened in 2004, though, and to a show from a creator with a solid pedigree to boot. Bruce W Smith graduated from the CalArts in 1981 and got his first job in animation working on the Garfield in the Rough TV special. He joined Disney, where he worked on Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and was selected by writer Reginald Hudlin to direct an animated film aimed at a black audience, Bebe’s Kids. The movie, based on the stand-up comedy of Robin Harris, flopped but Smith co-directed the more successful Space Jam before returning to Disney, where he worked on Tarzan and The Emperor’s New Groove.

Smith’s experiences making Bebe’s Kids – and the general lack of animation aimed at black children – stuck with him and when he founded Jambalaya Studios in 1999 with a mission of bringing more “racially and ethnically” diverse animated projects to television, movies, and the internet. Its first project was The Proud Family, an animated sitcom for the Disney Channel that debuted in September 2001 and ran for sixty-two episodes, finishing with a TV movie in August 2005.

In 2004, while working as a supervising animator on Disney’s Home on the Range, he developed a second show for Jambalaya and The WB with Texan brothers John Patrick and Stiles White. Da Boom Crew featured four orphans who create their own video game featuring heroes based on themselves fighting space terrorists. One day, while playing the game, a portal opens above the orphanage and sucks them into a fantasy world exactly like the one in their game. Finding themselves with the abilities of the characters they created, they must find the cartridges they used to store the game – now transformed into glowing, energy-filled “Boom Carts” – before they fall into the hands of emperor Zorch, who wants to extinguish all light in the universe.

With a voice cast that included Jordan Francis (who would later star in Camp Rock and its sequel), Melanie Tonello, Jascha Washington, Walter Borden as Zorch, and Morris Day from The Time as Zorch’s henchman Hedlok, Da Boom Crew debuted on September 11^th 2004, one of two new shows on The WB’s Saturday morning block Kids WB alongside The Batman. A month later, viewers tuning in for episode five of the show were presented with a re-run of Pokémon instead. Smith doesn’t talk about the show in interviews and so popular wisdom has it that ratings and a negative audience reaction caused the cancellation, and the collapse of Jambalaya Studios, but when Cartoon Network – who had the rights in the UK – launched the show, a press release reported it was one of Kids WB’s biggest debuts in its timeslot. Whatever the truth, all thirteen episodes were shown in the UK and are available to stream on Tubi.

Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi (Cartoon Network): Ami Onuki and Yumi Yoshimura were both struggling as solo artists within the Sony organisation when they met by chance at the label’s offices in Tokyo. Although Onuki had already recorded an album with another singer, Unicorn frontman Tamio Okuda, she requested that Sony pair her with Yoshimura, and Okuda stayed on to produce their first sessions, alongside friend and former Jellyfish frontman Andy Sturmer. Sturmer christened the pair PUFFY and their debut single – “Asia no Junshin” (“True Asia”) – was released in May 1996. It sparked a craze known as “PUFFY-mania,” with debut album AmiYumi hitting number three on the Japanese album charts when it was released two months later. They were a constant presence in the top twenty over the next two years and even had their own variety show, Papa Papa PUFFY, on TV Asahi, which ran for almost five years until March 2002.

They also started to look at breaking into the US market, making their debut at the SXSW Festival in 2000, after which they were served with a legal notice from attorneys representing Sean “Puffy” Combs. Changing their name to Puffy AmiYumi for the US, they embarked on a tour once Papa Papa PUFFY finished and were picked to record the theme tune to Cartoon Network’s animated Teen Titans series, written for them by Sturmer.

Teen Titans had been the brainchild of Cartoon Network vice-president Sam Register, who was a long-time fan of the DC Comics team. It was Register who chose Puffy AmiYumi to do the theme after seeing them perform in Japan and becoming a big fan. He decided to pitch a Puffy AmiYumi series to his bosses, ordering a pilot from Renegade Animation, a Californian studio who had been unsuccessful with two pitches of their own, but had impressed Register with their footage. Lynne Naylor – who also worked on The Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends – provided character designs and Cartoon Network were happy enough with the pilot that a series was announced at the channel’s upfronts in February 2004.

Although the band sang their own songs, which were interspersed throughout the action, Captain Planet and the Planeteers‘s Janice Kawaye and Grey DeLisle (Mandy in Billy & Mandy) provided the voices for Ami and Yumi on the show, with animation veteran (and one of those faces you know from guest-starring in everything) Keone Young voicing their manager Kaz. Additional voices were provided by Corey Burton, Nathan Carlson, and Rob Paulsen, and although the characters spoke English, their vocabulary was often sprinkled with Japanese words.

Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi debuted on November 19^th 2004, two weeks earlier than planned, and featured three short stories per episode. The first saw the pair have to deal with a contest winning fan who will not leave them alone, Ami become obsessed with collecting cereal toys, and Yumi hire a monkey to train her to become a ninja. Subsequent adventures featured goth vampires, a rival duo who are actual babies, lookalike robots on the rampage, a Yu-Gi-Oh! duel for the attentions of a boy, and a parody of Teen Titans, and the thirteen-episode series became a smash among the 6-11 demographic, producing double-digit increases in girls watching, and also becoming a cult hit amongst teenagers, Japanophiles, and fans of Puffy AmiYumi’s music. One segment went unaired, though, as it featured a giant wave and was due to air shortly after the tsunami that killed an estimated 227,898 people in fourteen countries across the Indian Ocean.

Puffy AmiYumi’s eighth album, 59, had been released six months before the animated series hit, with work already underway on the follow-up. A second season of Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi debuted on April 22^nd 2005, again with three segments per episode, and this time the pair find an all-knowing Koi carp, Yumi enter a tofu-dog eating contest, Kaz throw a party without them, Ami get kidnapped by Bigfoot, and travel to the year 3,000, where the whole world is dedicated to them. Ratings were again good, especially with young girls, and the success of the cartoon led to other opportunities, with an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! followed by their participation in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, the first Japanese act to do so, with a float in the shape of the tour bus from the cartoon.

Cartoon Network renewed Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi for a third season, which premiered on February 17^th 2006 with an episode that has them go to camp, Yumi need a new guitar, and find the man who sold them the tour bus is living in its carburettor. In the middle of the season, ninth album Splurge was released, giving the band a number nine hit on the Billboard World Music Album Charts. It was the band’s first on the Kloon Music imprint rather than Epic, a result of a shake-up at Sony’s subsidiary labels, and another management shake-up was on the horizon in the US as Sam Register left the channel over disagreements about upcoming projects. This, along with Ben 10 and My Gym Partner’s a Monkey overtaking the show in the ratings, led to season three being the last for the girls, although the show never really ended as such, and we can presume their adventures continued off-screen.

Back in Japan, 2006 marked the tenth anniversary of the band’s formation and they were made goodwill ambassadors by the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism. A tenth album, Honeycreeper, was released in 2007, with Bring It! And Thank You following in 2009 and 2011, respectively, and the duo are still very much an ongoing project for Onuki and Yoshimura, although they haven’t released any since 2021’s THE PUFFY, their first album for Warner Music Japan. Issued as part of a twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, the festivities also saw a limited edition boxset of their previous albums released by Sony. Register returned to Cartoon Network in 2020 but is yet to greenlight a revival of his pet project, despite online campaigns for its return.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: we make our final stop, hitting 1993 where Shatner and Space Ghosts await…

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: pre-1965 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 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: 1972 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)