Mark Rouleau wants to know…well, here. Read it for yourself…
I was a big fan of The Plastic Man Comedy Adventure Show. (Why not? I was 7 or 8 at the time …) And I understand why they gave him a girlfriend, and I understand why they gave him a baby, but I never could figure out why they changed the Woozy Winks character to "Hula Hula." Especially as the two characters are similar enough to be long lost cousins. Did somebody at S&P not like the word "woozy"? Were the rights to the character in limbo due to a big budget Woozy Winks movie that was in development?
I'm hoping since you wrote some of the episodes you might have some insight, as my Google-fu is failing me, although I suspect the answer might be "that's showbiz."
Two reasons, Mark. One was that everyone involved with the show's development — the studio, the network, the writer and even the folks then running DC Comics — thought the Woozy Winks character from the original Jack Cole comics was old-fashioned and outta date and a relic of the past. Plastic Man, they thought, could be brought into the present day but Woozy…? Nope.
Oh, and I should mention that contrary to what a couple of folks on the never-inaccurate Internet have said, I was not the writer who developed the property for television. That was Norman Maurer, who I've mentioned on this blog before and will mention again shortly. Norman was a former comic book artist, the manager of The Three Stooges, the son-in-law of Moe and a very clever, nice man. He was then among the favorite writers of the folks at ABC who programmed kids' shows.
As it was explained to me, none of them were mad about Woozy…and they weren't really trying to adapt the old Jack Cole comics for television. The mission was to take the idea of this guy named Plastic Man and find a new, modern-day context in which he could operate. I doubt anyone even looked much at the old comics.
So that was one reason Mr. Winks was in absentia. Another was that ABC, respecting certain urgings of parents' groups, then had all sorts of rules about the content of their Saturday morning shows that involved inserting "educational" content and certain pro-social values. And yes, "respecting" is a euphemism for "fearing."
Among the pro-social requirements at that moment was that every show that particular year had to have minority representation. Someone in it had to not be a white guy.
As it was explained to me, Standards and Practices at ABC had made up a list of racial and ethnic minorities and it was kind of like "Pick one." Joe Ruby, one of the producers of the show, looked it over and picked "Hawaiian." He and Norman had previously invented a sidekick for Plas who had perpetual bad luck and whose voice would be based somewhat on Lou Costello's.
They had the fine animation designer (and producer of the show) Jerry Eisenberg convert that character's look to Hawaiian and named him Coconut. Around or about the last minute, someone heard that was an ethnic slur so he was renamed Hula-Hula.
If my Plastic Man history is correct, Hula-Hula's constant bad luck made him even less like Woozy, who in his earliest appearances had constant good luck. Woozy had encountered some sort of wizard who cast a spell that gave it to him…but I think the folks writing Plastic Man comics eventually forgot about that and I'm fairly sure Joe and Norman didn't know about it.
Also, I should mention that one of the other Standards/Practices rules at that moment (this kind of thing was constantly changing) was that every show had to have a female character who was assertive and/or in a position of authority instead of just tagging along as the male characters drove the story forward. That explains why Plastic Man's boss was a lady.
I was not hugely involved with the Plastic Man cartoons. I wrote several episodes, rewrote someone else on a few more, recommended my pal Steve Gerber to write a few, and also wrote the speech that the announcer read over the opening titles. I don't think the cartoons stand up all that well today but at the time, I felt it was much better than a lot of then-current shows produced under the same restrictions of time, budgets and network constraints.
