Animation Therapy - Turbo Teen (1984)

Turbo Teen (1984; ABC Network)

Sometimes there’s a show that is both very easy to describe yet impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t seen it.  That said, I cannot fathom a scenario where the people behind Turbo Teen weren’t met with either uproarious mocking laughter, or an irritated slap to the face.  A lot of the shows I really got into were from the late 80’s, so this was just shy of that period for me, and it was too big of a failure to really maintain any post-run momentum in syndication or home video that I recall.  Now, even as a kid I was very picky and didn’t like a lot of the shows my friends did either because of the way the characters looked, or because of the show’s pacing or tone (not that I really understood what that meant back then, but it’s a quality that is often recognized without definition).  So, I guess even then I was sort of a jerk when it comes to entertainment (wink).  That begs the question: Do I regret watching an episode now?  Nope!  Because this is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen in my life!

The awesomely stupid premise for Turbo Teen is as follows: Brett Matthews is a teen driving home from work in his sports car when a tree is struck by lightning, forcing him to swerve and sending him flying off the road, over a cliff and into the side of a secret lab where he crashes right into the path of a ray that merges the molecules of Brett’s body with those of the machine’s, giving the teen the power to transform into his car.  When exposed to heat (hot water, food, ect.) Brett uncontrollably takes the form of his car where cold then turns him back (Where have I heard a similar premise before..?)  Together with his friends Patti and Alex (who have skills of their own) and Comic-Relief-Dog, Brett goes on crime-fighting adventures against powerful enemies.  Yes!  This exists!!!  I am SO happy about this!

In the 80’s there was no absence of bad animated series.  Really, the quality spike didn’t peak until the late 80’s when Disney Animation Studios started hitting their stride and series like Transformers and G.I. Joe reached their pinnacle.  Things will stay good for a while until the airwaves became flooded with bad knockoffs and celebrity-themed animated shows like Wishkid (THAT damn show’s day is coming…).  Before that, there is this strange dead zone filled with bland animated tripe from Hanna-Barbera Productions (who were already starting to fade in quality by that point) and a few other companies like Dic, for instance.  Turbo Teen lands somewhere in-between debuting in 1984 and lasting just one season.  It never really gained an audience, probably because it is such a ludicrous premise that a kid may find it more stupid than anything.  It takes a few years (or decades) for a show like this to re-emerge and become a sort of cult favorite.  I think, from what I’ve seen, Turbo Teen is ripe for that sort of cult rebirth.

Now, as out-there as the show’s premise is, knowing the episode I saw as a jumping-off point will make things even more enticing.  The episode is entitled “Video Venger” and opens on the teens playing an arcade game but when Brett has a piece of pizza land on his face he transforms into his car right there in the Pizza parlor while playing the game.  Still wanting to beat Alex’s highscore, Brett has his friend plug him into the arcade cabinet via a universal cable in his dashboard so he can control the game as a car.  This causes a military insurgent group monitoring the game to unleash an army of robots onto the city resembling enemies from the game and only the Turbo Teen and his friends can save the day.  This episode ends with the group saving the President by having two ice-firing tanks crossfire into each other through some Turbo-Teen-Trickery right in the White House… driveway..?  Ultimately the President awards them with medals.  

Okay, so if I missed anything it could be that while watching this I was mesmerized by its existence and was also somewhat distracted with bouts of hysterical laughter.  There is so much stupid in that last paragraph that I can understand you wondering why I would recommend this to anyone.  All I will say is, if you’re a fan of over-the-top, so-bad-it’s-good entertainment, and are just in awe by really, really awesomely bad TV in-general, you will probably love this show.  If you go in with the right attitude, you may be surprised by how much enjoyment you get out of it.  I went in expecting it to be one of the worst shows of the decade by reputation.  It isn’t.  The worst animation from the 80’s-90’s is either boring, a cheap cash-in, or is MEANT to be funny but isn’t.  This is none of those things.  It’s too insane to be boring, there really isn’t much like it (unless you pick out parts from about six different shows), and it isn’t really meant to be a comedy.  It’s an action show.  Sure there are gags in it but for the most part it was played straight.  I love so-bad-it’s-good stuff and this is up there for me.  I enjoyed the Hell out of Turbo Teen!

Watch Turbo Teen: Video Venger in Cartoon | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

TV Pilot Hell: Bubsy (1993)

NOTE: When I wrote the first draft for this it was nine paragraphs and two-and-a-half pages long!  I did my best to edit it down as much as possible.

 

 

The 90’s was a great decade for animation.  Batman, Animaniacs, Daria… The list goes on and on and honestly, even the laziest, stupidest series from that decade seem to have their fair share of fans.  However, there has always been one medium that has failed to create a real lasting success in animation: Video Games.  Sure, there were moderate successes like The Super Mario Bros. Super Show and Sonic Sat. A.M., but these were mostly short-lived and more reflected the popularity of their source material than any actual objective quality.  So, given the (at best) mediocre standards of video games-to-animation, where does Bubsy fit on that scale?

Well, first, a little backstory: Bubsy was a mascot game created for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis in the early 90’s.  It was an effort by the fledgling studio Accolade to create a lasting series and, surprisingly, it kind of worked.  The few games in the series were spread across the SNES, Genesis, Jaguar and the Playstation and Bubsy 3D, released on Sony’s flagship console, is ranked among the worst video games ever made.  So, in a nutshell, Bubsy was an attempt by a B-studio to put out a game that will be their Mario or Sonic.  Accolade was banking so hard on this that they actually commissioned to have an animation group work on a tie-in for their game.  The company of choice was a small studio called Calico Creations.  Never heard of them?  Well, how couldn’t you!? I mean they are only the masters who brought us the majestic Denver the Last Dinosaur and Widget the World Watcher!  I mean, come on!  (No… Seriously, these guys were bad…. Very bad.)

On paper, there is one promising credit: Rob Paulsen, who did the voice for Bubsy in the games and is back for the TV show.  Paulsen is a tremendously-accomplished voice actor who worked on just about every animated series of note from the past thirty years.  He’s a highly-regarded talent and hearing his voice in this show is like if Peter O’Toole interrupted one of Michael Bay and Ehren Kruger's comic relief moments to give a resounding monologue.  They must have been desperate and paid him a ton in hopes that this series would catch on.  As with most animated tie-ins from its time, Bubsy was an attempt to expand name recognition and popularity.  It didn’t work… at all…

That was a lot of setup to cover and for that, I apologize.  Still, even knowing myself the ill fate of this franchise going in, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.  The pilot for Bubsy is entitled “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” (Which was also the title character’s uninspired catch phrase), and follows Bubsy, his friend Arnold (voiced by another talented voice performer in Pat Fraley), and a couple of obnoxious twins as Bubsy volunteers to be the guinea pig for a powerful piece of technology created by doctor Virgil (...ugh) Reality.  The device is a helmet that can harness the imagination of its wearer and conjure it into reality.  So, essentially it’s Anthony from Twilight Zone: The Movie… except more overblown and stupid.  The rest of the episode involves all of the characters, and a team of villains led by a spoiled, fat, female cat, battling for control over the helmet.  It’s all a device to create a bunch of slapstick animated set pieces to sell the show, and boy does it fail.

The problem with Bubsy as a character is, even in the video games, he was essentially a Sonic rip-off with greatly-inferior level design and there simply isn’t much you can do with this premise.  At least with Sonic going in there actual characters and a plot that felt like it could be fleshed out in some way, but Bubsy was never that interesting to begin with.  It would be like making Frogger into an animated series (Oh!  WAIT!!!  They actually DID that!)  A result of this lack of personality is a lead character that is forced and over-confident as to be completely stupid.  This has worked in the past with some characters (Bugs Bunny, for instance) but here, it just feels like Bubsy suffers from some sort of chemical imbalance that leaves him completely incapable of expressing any emotion outside of “Ohhhhh yeaaaah!”.

Now, to talk about the actual quality of the episode.  A common problem with a lot of animated series is the writers and animators go in wanting their show to be for kids and simply try to make it as flashy and noisy as they can to keep their interest, forgetting that even silly shows like Animaniacs had a fair share of quieter character moments.  When the show is just noise and grunting from start to finish “exhausting” doesn’t even begin to describe it.  There is not one moment for the audience to breathe here.  Either Bubsy is fast-talking and spouting out his catch phrase for the tenth time or Arnold is grunting and growling after every line.  Every character has one joke that is driven in over and over for the entire episode and the animation is lackluster and lazy, with most scenes just showing the characters in one frame posing or falling on a moving background.  This show is scene-to-scene just noise and flashing lights.  It has no substance and not even one joke lands, it’s all wrong.

I find it interesting that Obvious Villain Cat character (I can’t be bothered to look her up name again) uses nails on a chalkboard to torture her minions because this show felt like someone was doing that for twenty minutes.  It’s loud, stupid, unfunny and really just boring.  As bad as this is, and as shocked as I was watching it, I will likely not even remember seeing this before too long.  It just was not interesting enough to care about and it doesn’t surprise me that it wasn’t picked up to series.  It was further proof that a show that is clumsily thrown together as an advertisement for a brand most people were already indifferent about just doesn’t work.  Still, that hasn’t kept studios from trying over and over again.

"Know" More Pop-Culture - What Happened With 'Turn-On'?

Turn-On's TV Title Card (ABC Television; 1969)

In February of 1969, a notorious TV pilot would air that would shock many and become notorious as one of the biggest television disasters in history.  I mean, the events of that fateful night make the trainwreck that was Joanie Loves Chachi look like Cheers by comparison.  So, what happened?

ABC led up to Turn-On with a lot of promotional hype.  It was the brainchild of the previous year’s big hit Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In’s executive producer George Schlatter, and the network was ready to set it up for a full twelve-episode first season before the pilot even aired.  Turn-On premiered on February 5th, 1969 at the 8:30pm time slot.  All seemed innocuous enough on the surface and with popular McHale’s Navy-star Tim Conway guest-hosting, people tuned in to see what ABC had been selling them for months.

Turn-On Promo;
TV Guide Clipping

Reactions to the show were immediate and visceral.  The Cleveland, OH ABC affiliate refused to continue airing the show after the first commercial break and Denver’s local producers refused to air the show at all after the network screening.  The show was described as “crass” and “blue”, bombarding the sensitive 1969 American audience with fast and not-so-subtle sex jokes.  A second episode was recorded in full, but was never released, with only a few very brief scenes clipped in as part of a documentary for BBC Channel-4 in the UK.  It is incredibly difficult to find footage of this show, but the few scenes I have seen indicate this show’s cancellation was not a tragic loss by any stretch.

Most of the show had slapdash sketches and quick stingers filmed in front of a blank white stage backdrop.  There would be props and some set dressing for certain sketches, but it was all actually pretty plain.  This was likely an artistic choice as the very funny piece of TV psychedelia that was Laugh-In came from the same producers and it had more quality in its production design.  Some complained that the show was unwatchable due to the hyper-kinetic editing which, mixed with the white background, reportedly caused some viewers to become “physically ill”, though, I do not know how true this actually is.  In reality, Turn-On was likely just too much for the audiences of its time.  The sex references and the very direct jabs at public figures like Richard M. Nixon really put people off of the show.  A number of affiliates issued complaints their local customers made, and the show was killed for good a few days after its debut.  

The notorious pilot didn’t do much for the cast, either.  The lovely Teresa Graves would go on to join Laugh-In that year, but only for one season.  She would then appear in a few blaxploitation films (most notably the Fred Williamson vehicle That Man Bolt) and would get her own short-lived show Get Christie Love! in the mid 70’s.  She then would retire from acting shortly thereafter and would focus primarily on philanthropy.  Tim Conway kept doing his thing, and remained successful in-spite of this disaster.  He later spoke about it, not really showing any regrets.  In-fact, he was in good spirits about it, but Conway was already a TV veteran by 1969, so he’d seen the worst come and go.

By most accounts, Turn-On was simply ahead of its time.  It was too much for the period in which it aired and it would be more than six years before SNL would piss off half the country in 1975, but it just did it a lot better.  A large factor that arguably led to the show’s abrupt end was that it just wasn’t that funny.  It was all edge and no wit.  Carol Burnett put TV comedy over the edge in the 60’s and 70’s but inspite of all of her controversies in her time, she was a well-loved and respected woman, but most of all she was just very, very talented.  Not to discount Tim Conway in any respect, but even his chops weren’t enough to keep Turn-On… Turned on… (Sorry I couldn’t resist… it was too easy)

TV Pilot Hell - Turner & Hooch (1990)

The dreaded one-joke premise.  It’s a nearly guaranteed show-killer and here, we have an absolutely braindead TV sitcom based on a pretty bad police comedy.  Quality TV series based on movie franchises are extremely rare and this is an example of how to take a movie that was already pretty unfunny and drive its single joke right into the ground.  The first ten minutes of this TV series seems like an hour, and it doesn’t get any better.

In 1990, Tom Hanks was already too hot a commodity to appear in low-grade crap like this, so instead we get B-list actor Thomas F. Wilson as Det. Scott Turner, who most probably remember best as Biff Tannen from the Back to the Future movies, or as Coach Fredricks from Freaks & Geeks.  He’s not a bad performer when he’s playing off of better actors, but here he is just awful.  He is not leading-man-material, and he spends every scene struggling through his lines.  However, as much as I complain about Wilson’s performance, the supporting cast is far worse.  This film even goes so far as to add an obnoxious delinquent kid to the mix, making what is already a really lazy and dull comedy into something that is nothing short of unwatchable.  He is far, far worse than Kid from Dick Tracy, another legendarily bad child performance from around that time, and like Hooch, he has one character trait: He gets into trouble!  Oh… how zany…  To top it all off, this show ends with a pillow fight between the kid and Turner complete with period-appropriate sax solo and a freeze frame on Hooch.  I wish I were making this up…

The rest of the supporting cast includes Wendee Pratt as Mrs. Turner.  She had a few roles after this but is mostly known for her brief run on the soap opera One Life to Live.  The rest of the characters just show up then disappear, having no real effect on the show, existing only to set up the next scene.  Comic Relief Cop (his name is ‘Boney’... Because he’s fat..?) appears to tell Det. Turner what the next act of the show is and sends him on his way, and the show has a brief appearance by a lively chef who knows Turner, and I am assuming he is meant to be a recurring character but here he only exists to facilitate the introduction of that damn kid.

This show is written in cliches.  This is common in sitcoms, but here everything has been done over and over again and Turner & Hooch goes the extra mile by taking those cliches and just replaying them ad-nauseum during its 23 minute run.  The kid is a runaway thief who ends up in the care of the unwilling cop.  The wife is a goody-goody who wants to help the “misunderstood” kid, only existing in the entire show to make sure Turner is stuck with Hooch and an aggravating child actor (Det. Turner really needs to get a divorce).  There are no other cops of consequence and imagine my surprise when the titular cop wasn’t called in to get chewed out by his tightly-wound and heavily-caffeinated chief.

All of those complaints aside, the episode is just a mess.  Scenes bounce between each other so fast it is actually a little disorienting and I have a sinking feeling this was meant to be a one-hour block but was cut in half after producers saw the finished product.  I make that assumption based on the fact that it feels like chunks of the show are missing.  Character introductions are fast and short and never really establish any sort of relationship.  The marriage between Det. Turner and his wife feels more like the relationship between a homeowner and a maid.  The kid in the show is bad, sure, but he seems like he was born ready to wind up in the care of a cop, never showing any resistance or surprise about anything.  Ultimately, nothing comes together.  There are sections of the story that feel lost and there is zero, ZERO character development.  The only thing we get is Hooch running into things, knocking people over and simply just causing a ruckus so we can get a zany jazz solo followed by a soul-crushingly-bad reaction shot from Thomas Wilson, who acted like he just didn’t want to be there at all.

Turner & Hooch aired on NBC in the Summer of 1990.  A Summer premiere (especially pre-2000) is usually a bad sign anyway, but hoooo-boy!  1990 was a bad, BAAAAD year for television.  To give you an idea of how awful this year was, Turner & Hooch, as stillborn and bland as it is, is not the worst cop-with-a-dog comedy series of that Summer!  The problem with Turner & Hooch is it’s just boring and lazy.  Outside of some of the performances, there isn’t really anything painful about it, and I can honestly see myself forgetting this show even exists.  At least with famously bad shows like Small Wonder you remember why it was bad.  Less than an hour after sitting through this snore-fest I was only thinking about what I wanted for lunch.