1980's Saturday Morning Historical Preservation Society

As I'm sure you've all heard by now (mainly because of all your personal messages to me asking if I would post about it here in the 1980's Saturday Morning Historical Reenactment Society community), Filmation cartoon producer Lou Scheimer died earlier this week at the age of 84.

SHORT LIST OF WHAT YOU KNOW HIM FROM: Fat Albert, Star Trek The Animated Series, He-Man, Archie, The New Adventures of Batman, Gilligan's Planet... so many more.

Meeting Mr. Scheimer was one of the low points in my early days of animation fandom, one that I've tried to just block out and put behind me but I'll recount it here for all y'all as best as I remember.

It was the early 90's and i was living (temporarily) in Anaheim California with my Brother and his wife. I had just graduated high school so OF COURSE i knew EVERYTHING and my opinions were MUCH more valid and important than those of anyone else (I was SUCH an ASS). My Brother and his wife were very heavy in to the (then recent) hobby of "Animation Artwork Investment" - they bought a lot of animation cells and, as a result, were invited to all sorts of Gallery Events that I had no interest in because they were usually 1960's Warner Brothers stuff (Bugs Bunny and the likes), which I had NO interest in because I was much more sophisticated than that and only collected Super Hero things. One day they were invited to a Filmation Animation Sale preview gallery showing and I tagged along because I hoped to see some of those early DC Comics cels they had made back in the 60's.

We got there and I complained the whole time I was there. "Filmation cartoons are the WORST!" and "Ugh who would make stuff like this ON PURPOSE?" and other vitally important opinions of mine were expressed loudly and to anyone who would pause near me long enough for me to speak. One of the people I forced my opinions on to just shrugged at me and said "Hey, we did the best we could with the money we had" and then a large man in a very nice suit asked me to please leave. I tried to ignore him, the large man then put his hand on my shoulder and said "C'mon, buddy, let's go" and I was escorted out of the building.

The large man informed me that THAT was mister Scheimer and how he was a saint of a man and they didn't need this kind of grief at their Gallery Showing and a bunch of other stuff that I ignored and argued against because I was 18 and stupid and vain and ignorant and AAAAAARGH!!!! I HATE THIS STORY SO MUCH!!!

So over the years my appreciation for Animation History grew, and through all my research that ever crossed over in to Filmation History the facts remained the same - Filmation could - and WOULD - make cartoons cheaper than anybody else, and would keep the jobs (or at least the majority of them) here in the USA using all the master animators that had become unemployed thanks to the other animation studios shipping all their jobs overseas. He was a master of "Making it up on the back-end" - making the cartoon at a loss so he could get a piece of the merchandising action and then using those profits to pay all those animators who needed work.

So there's my story. Please feel free to leave your own remembrances, thoughts and whatnot in the comments below :)

Gilligan's Planet was on your local CBS affiliate at 10:30 in 1982 (and at Noon in the Spring of 1983) that featured nearly the entire cast of the original 1964 sit-com "Gilligan's Island", the only exception being Tina "Ginger" Louise, who even after nearly 20 year was still upset at having been "tricked" in to taking the roll on the original show (luckily, Dawn "Mary-Ann" Wells was able to fill in and provide the voices for both roles).

Much like the original Gilligan' Island theme song had done, the intro to this cartoon summed up the entire back-story and plot in one compact snippet. They're castaways on an island, they build a rocket, they're now stranded in space.

Produced by Filmation (in conjunction with MGM/United Artists), Gilligan's Planet was the last cartoon series that Filmation produced for Saturday mornings. After this point, it's all syndicated stuff. It was also the first Filmation series to feature the Lou Scheimer "signature" credit (as opposed to the rotating Lou Scheimer/Norm Prescott "wheel" credit which had been used since 1969).

And of course, it was directed by my close personal friend, Hal Sutherland (and by "Close Personal Friend", I mean "I bought an animation cell of Orco from him at a comic book convention and had him sign it for me")

First, the straight data. The Kid Super Power Hour With Shazam was a live-action/animated comedy/action/cartoon show that aired at 9:30 on NBC starting in 1981, and was produced by Filmation. The live-action segments were your standard vaudeville jokes and skits performed by attractive people in spandex super hero suits. The animated segments were of either "Hero High" (animated versions of the live-action spandex vaudeville folk) or "SHAZAM!" (animated adventures of the famous Superman knock-off of the 1930's). How many episodes were there? Good question...

See, this show is one of my favorites AND one of my most frustrating.

One of the first bootlegs I tracked down when I got in to "Tape Trading" (VHS tapes) back in the late 80's was Hero High. I paid $30 for 3 video tapes full of The Kid Super Power Hour With Shazam, which the seller swore were the only 9 episodes that were ever made.

When The Internet happened, I discovered that the order from NBC was for at least 13 episodes - four more than what I had paid for.

Since then, in my attempts to find the entire series, I have heard people claim that there are as many as THIRTY-EIGHT EPISODES of this show - and INSANE amount of episodes for a weekly Saturday morning cartoon!

I know for a fact that there were only 12 8-minute SHAZAM! cartoons produced, and the rights to them are owned by Warner Brothers who has no plans to ever make an official release.

I know for a fact that there were 26 8-minute Hero High cartoon segments produced, and they are available on DVD.

Combining those two might get us to the fabled 38 episodes, but since this was an hour long "block" of cartoons that regularly showed 4 or 5 cartoon segments along with the live-action vaudeville, I'm assuming that my 9 episodes are closer to the true number of episodes than 38 ever could be.

Wish I still had those tapes, even if they WERE on Betamax tapes :(

Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids was a Filmation animated series created, produced, and hosted (in live action bookends) by comedian Bill Cosby, who also did a huge chunk of the voices for the show (including Fat Albert himself). The show premiered in 1972 and *kind of* ran until 1985... See, up till 1983 they had been doing short-order seasons of the show - 6 to 8 new episodes per season - but then between 1984 and 1985 the cranked out some FIFTY NEW EPISODES of the cheaper, lower-quality "The Adventures of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids".

It should also be noted that this was the year that they replaced the "Junkyard Rock Band" segments of the show with Fat Albert and the gang rushing to their clubhouse to watch the latest episode of "The Brown Hornet" (Also voiced by Cosby).

What do you think? Have any good memories or thoughts to share about Fat Albert and the gang? Come at me with comments and fun, and if you're not careful you might just learn something before we're done. So let's get ready, okay? Hey, hey, HEY!

Jason of Star Command (the only Filmation Live Action show of the "Super 7" line-up) was actually a spin-off of an earlier show called "Space Academy". If you love cheesy 1980's sci-fi that is themed firmly somewhere between Gil Gerard's "Buck Rogers" and Martin Landau's "Space: 1999", do yourself the favor of watching these two shows!!!

The original series, "Space Academy", featured Johnathan Harris ("Doctor Smith" of the 1960's sci-fi show "Lost In Space". The first season of Jason Of Star Command featured James Doohan ("Scotty" from "Star Trek").

But the season we're talking about here, the season that was a part of Batman And The Super 7, featured none of those. Just the outer-space adventures of a guy named Jason, his super-fast Space Ship, and his HAND-HELD COMPUTER NAMED WIKI That's right... this show was the origin of WIKIPEDIA!!!

In The New Adventures of Batman & Robin, the "Dynamic Duo" fights crime in Gotham City, encountering the classic Batman rogues gallery as well as some original villains. Complicating matters is Bat-Mite, a well-meaning imp from another dimension called Ergo, who considers himself Batman's biggest fan. As a result, he wears a variant of Batman’s costume and attempts to help him, only to often create more problems (although he is occasionally an asset). Missing is Alfred, the faithful butler of Batman's alter ego Bruce Wayne; also notable in this series are the inverted colors of the "R" on Robin's costume.

This was an excellent Filmation cartoon from 1977 featuring the voices of Adam West and Burt Ward (the live-action Batman & Robin from the 1960's Batman TV show). This cartoon stayed closer to the more serious Batman comics that were being published by DC Comics at the time, with the glaring exception of BAT-MITE (who is an honorary member of the Scrappy-Doo Club).

Only one season of this show was ever made, and it was then re-packaged over and over again till some undetermined year of the early 80's.

Once they figured that they could shuffle the episodes in to the Super 7, they kind of abused it and over-ran the show. Still awesome, though!

Batman & The Super 7, Saturday mornings at 11am on NBC in 1980. Sorry that the quality is so lame, but this is a kind of rare opening to find...

This show was like a Lego Set of re-runs that they just kept reconstructing over and over again.

It all started in 1976 with the Filmation animated series "Tarzan, Lord Of The Jungle" and 1977 with "The New Adventures of Batman & Robin".

In the short season between 1977 and 1978, they slapped reruns of those two shows together and called it "The Tarzan/Batman Adventure Hour". No new content, and they only ran for a fistful of episodes before becoming "Tarzan & The Super 7" in 1978. And then in 1980, by changing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BUT THE OPENING CREDITS by the SLIGHTEST BIT, the show became "Batman & The Super 7".

"The Super 7" where just seemingly random episodes of Tarzan and Batman, mixed in with some new cartoons that nobody had every heard of before or ever would hear from again except for in the future Lego Set incarnations of this show over the next few years (each of these other cartoons will be getting it's own entry in our archives this week).

This is going to be really fun to follow the genealogy of... it's all very exciting :)

(Cross-Posted from Tumblr)
Going to start chronologically here, for posterity sake! If you were to go ahead and wake up bright-n-early at 8am Saturday morning in 1980 and tune in to your local CBS affiliate, odds are you would have seen 'The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle' produced by Filmation, and aired from 1979 to 1981 on CBS with over 32 episodes produced. These cartoons were, quite frankly, terrible. They were part of a glut of revived classic cartoon characters that included the likes of Tom & Jerry with “Adventures” that were so over-censored that they were barely watchable.