I think it's one of the unbreakable laws of the universe that bringing in fuzzy mascots, adorable kids or Ted McGinley means a TV show has hit bottom and started digging.
Pilot script for the TAS that (thankfully) never was...
- Thread starter Nightowl1701
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But we're talking about Saturday morning cartoons, where kid heroes and animal mascots were pretty routine at the time. Jonny Quest had Bandit; Scooby-Doo had, well, Scooby-Doo; etc. When Filmation adapted Archie to television in 1968, they introduced a dog sidekick, Hot Dog, who was added to the comics in the same year and has been an integral part of the franchise ever since (making him Archie Comics' answer to Harley Quinn or X-23, only decades earlier). That's hardly hitting bottom.
Good point. But I stand by Ted McGinley as the harbinger of doom.
He's the patron saint of Jumping the Shark!
It's odd that that idea ever came along, that his arrival somehow dooms a show. I suppose it comes from the fact that he replaced Ron Howard on Happy Days in its eighth season, but the show lasted four more years with him as a regular. Married... With Children lasted five years with him as the replacement neighbor, almost half the series' run. He was a regular on The Love Boat for its last three seasons out of nine. He was on Dynasty for a bit over a year, part of season 6 and all of 7, and the series went on two more seasons after he left. He was a regular on Hope & Faith throughout its 3-year run.
So, yeah, he has had a tendency to come onboard fairly late in shows that are probably already past their peak popularity, but they usually continue for quite a good while after he joins. So the meme that he "kills" shows is a rather mean-spirited exaggeration.
Well that script was certainly ... something. It's about on par with your average STAR TREK fan film — where Kirk and gang take a back seat to driving the action of the story.
It's not mean-spirited, it's a silly meme that no one actually takes seriously. How is it that Ted McGinley himself has a better sense of humor about this than you do?
Q. Does Ted McGinley know he's the patron saint?
A. Yes, he does...and he has a great sense of humor about it too. We loved him in Nerds and he's a fine actor. Thankfully, Ted remains gainfully employed in the industry and keeps us in business. Remember, it's just business, never personal.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080608004440/http://www.jumptheshark.com/help.jspa
More recently, in 2011, McGinley again made fun of his "shark-jumping" abilities in "Mitefall", the final episode of the Batman: The Brave and the Bold animated series on Cartoon Network. In the episode, Bat-Mite (voiced by Paul Reubens) wants the show cancelled to usher in a new, darker Batman TV show. To that end, he starts replacing aspects of the show, including switching Aquaman's regular voice actor (John DiMaggio) with McGinley. Ambush Bug (voiced by McGinley's Happy Days co-star Henry Winkler) helps to reverse the situation, in part by getting McGinley to break character (and mention his 6-year stint on Married... with Children) and leave, forcing DiMaggio's voice back into Aquaman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_McGinley
Maybe between the series and the films a plague to which the apes were immune ravaged the human population and left them mute and mentally challenged? Giving the apes the cause to banish the 'animals' to the fringes of their civilized world!
The astronauts that Zaius mentioned in the premier episode would have no doubt eventually appeared if the series had of continued but I always think that they were a rescue mission that went in search of Virdon's mission and landed first!
JB
Well, the other astronauts landed sometime before Virdon and Burke's ship, and were killed on Zauis' orders, and the series did not use flashbacks in reference to earlier events in ape history. I think Zauis' story was to let the audience draw a parallel to the movies--that more than one time swept human mission had ended up in that world, and that the apes (with the exception of Galen) were completely hostile to humans, particularly advanced humans.[/QUOTE]
Wow, I could almost buy the concept of a few cadets on board for training, and the idea of the Old Man Alone on a Planet is nothing new (the TNG episode where Deanna was being driven crazy by music jumped to my mind), but then it took a sharp turn into sack-o-crap real quick when Ken and Speck started running amok without supervision.
I did enjoy seeing the editor's notes on the pages though, so my afternoon wasn't totally shot to heck....
I did enjoy seeing the editor's notes on the pages though, so my afternoon wasn't totally shot to heck....
AKA the standard plot for most kids' cartoons. Fiction is generally wish fulfillment, after all, and kids like to fantasize about what they'd get to do if they didn't have grownups constantly cramping their style. We need to keep in mind that this show wouldn't have been meant for audiences of our age.
Logically I know that, but to compare it to the TAS we actually got which managed to do pared down Trek stories that were still pretty good makes me wonder why people hung onto that way of thinking for so long.
Maybe because there's nothing remotely wrong with making television shows for children? Just because something isn't tailored for our own tastes, that doesn't mean it's intrinsically bad or that it shouldn't exist. There should be children's shows on TV alongside shows for adults. I wouldn't say this script was a good one, but that just means the problem with it is that it's bad, not that it's aimed at children. There are plenty of good shows aimed at children, and there absolutely should be.
What's unfortunate for this tale is it's actually a pretty decent story. Get rid of the kids/wish fulfillment aspect, and it could easily be reworked into an episode of TAS that many of us here would have liked. The story isn't that thin, and the revelations about the civilization's homeworld give it a weight that I would have enjoyed.
I think it's actually a pretty silly story, for reasons that have nothing to do with the kid focus (which would've made perfect sense for a show that was designed for children). Their whole planet is dying, and the only thing stopping them is their respect for one guy's property rights? If they were a rapacious enough civilization to exterminate their entire ecosystem, I doubt they'd be so suicidally unwilling to violate one man's rights. Even a reasonable civilization could've invoked eminent domain and the survival of the civilization as reason enough to override this guy's psychotically selfish refusal to help his people avoid extermination. Not to mention that it would've taken generations to get to this extreme in the first place. Was every prior generation equally as inflexible? That's hard to believe. It's also hard to believe that the Federation's records of this system contained no information about another habitable planet when there was a big one sitting right there. I mean, clearly they had advance knowledge about this civilization and its plight, and "vid-tapes" documenting its appearance from orbit. So how is it that their information excluded a reference to the adjacent M-class planet?
Of course, they did simplify the issues a lot because it was tailored for a preteen audience. If they wanted to teach children about environmental responsibility, they had to do it broadly. But that's just why it wouldn't have worked for the older-skewing TAS we got.
