Anthony Escartin sent me the following about a cartoon series called The Wuzzles which was part of the CBS Saturday morning schedule for one year commencing in September of 1985. We'll do this in two parts…
While you've been sharing a lot of your thoughts on the creation process and creator credits on the blog lately, may I please pick your brain on The Wuzzles, the cartoon you worked on in the 80's for Disney? Among the few articles on the blog that you've written about the show, you write that you "developed" it. I'd love to hear more details about that process. Was it a daily writer's room thing? How was the rest of the crew who developed it?
I don't know who worked on it before I was called in but I wrote the bible and the pilot by myself. CBS was not happy with whatever had been done up to that point and "suggested" they hire me. I put that word in quotes because while I don't know precisely what they told the folks at Disney, it was obvious that the subtext of what they said was "…or we won't buy the show."
I was handed a bunch of character sketches and a few notes but no actual storylines as I recall. Some of the drawings were done by Disney artists and some by folks at Hasbro Toys. I did a lot of simplifying and rearranging and inventing personalities for characters who up to that point just existed as drawings and prototypes of plush toys. I was also loaned "for inspiration" — under penalty of death if I did not return them, which I of course did — a few of those prototype toys.
The premise of the show was said to have begun with an idea from Disney Head Honcho Michael Eisner. It was about an island someplace where every creature was an amalgam of two different animals familiar to us. Bumblelion, for instance, was half-lion, half-bumblebee. Butterbear was half-butterfly, half-bear.
They also had in the regular cast, Eleroo (elephant/kangaroo), Moosel (moose/seal), Rhinokey (rhinoceros/monkey), Hoppopotamus (hippo/rabbit) and some villainous Wuzzles. Every episode would have some other mash-ups. In the pilot script, I had a Brahman Bullfinch — half-bull, half-finch.
It was one of the more challenging "developments" I did, in part because of what seemed to be an unofficial rule at Disney at the time. Or least it felt that way on several projects I wrote for various TV divisions there in the eighties. I am told it's no longer like this but here's how it went, at least with me…
A lot of different people at Disney would read what you handed in and critique it. There seemed to be an infinite supply of them and each time I took a meeting there, there would be some of the same folks but also some new people I'd never seen before and would never see again, all acting like I was reporting to them. Over at CBS, there were only two executives I had to please to get the network to buy the show. They liked what I wrote and bought the series.
But on the Disney lot, I had to please about two dozen transient bosses, some even after CBS had given The Wuzzles the green light. As was occasionally the case over at Hanna-Barbera, I felt that what I should do was to agree to write the script for nothing but to charge them for each person who gave me notes on it and insisted I change things their way. And I should charge double when, as was often the case, the notes one person gave me were the exact opposite of the notes someone else there had given me the day before. Here were just two of the many battles we had about the show — one that I lost and one that I won…
AN EXAMPLE OF ONE I LOST: All of the main Wuzzles had wings. I said, "Okay, I understand that a character who is half-bee or half-butterfly might have wings. But Eleroo is half-elephant, half-kangaroo. Did he get his wings from his elephant side or his kangaroo side?" Same with Hoppopotamus, Moosel and Rhinokey. That kind of goes against the premise here. And also, you want these characters to get in danger in every episode. If they have wings, the viewers are going to presume they can all fly and it's real hard to put a character in danger if they can just fly away."
HOW I LOST THAT ONE: I was told, "Hasbro did test-marketing and decided the toys would sell better if the characters had wings. End of discussion." And that, by God, was that.
AN EXAMPLE OF ONE I WON: I wanted to insert a narrator into the show. The guy in charge at that moment then said with a kind of "I have the final say" swagger, "Narrators are old-fashioned. They slow down the action. Kids hate narrators. The narrator is out."
HOW I WON THAT ONE: I said, "Okay…these adventures take place on an island where every single creature is half one-thing and half-another. Let's say in one episode, we want to have a Mockingbirddog. Who's going to explain to the viewers that a Mockingbirddog is half-mockingbird, half-dog? Or that a Brahman Bullfinch is half-bull, half-finch? The characters in this world can't say that. They live in a world with no mockingbirds, dogs, bulls or finches." He didn't have an answer for that so my narrator stayed in.
Here's the rest of Anthony's e-mail…
I like that the voice cast of the show reads like a list of all the performers you admired as a young person. I'm pretty sure you had a big hand in casting them. Was finding the voice talent part of the job description? Did you attend the recording sessions? A cursory glance on the internet says the show was created by Fred Wolf, and you wrote three episodes. I was wondering, should you have had a "developed by" credit to your name? Or are you happy with the way things are?
I did not attend recording sessions. I did make suggestions for voices, some of which were followed — Stan Freberg as The Narrator, Henry Gibson as Eleroo, Joanne Worley as Hoppopotamus. I suggested a certain voice of Bill Scott's for Rhinokey but while he was in auditioning for that role, they also had him read for Moosel and he got that part instead. Alan Oppenheimer became Rhinokey, Brian Cummings played Bumblelion and Kathleen Helppie-Shipley was Butterbear. (Freberg, by the way, was very happy with his job as The Narrator but pissed that Hasbro never put out a Narrator doll.)
Actually, I left the show after the pilot. CBS wanted me to story-edit the series and write episodes but my agent quoted Disney my established price for those duties and they offered a lot less on a "take it or leave it" basis. We left it so I went and did other things and they went through a couple of different story editors and tossed out a couple of scripts they paid for and production hit a major logjam. Finally though, they hired two very bright gents named Ken Koonce and David Weimers to story-edit.
Ken and David made the show work quite well, I thought, but everything was dangerously behind schedule before they signed on. To get on schedule, a Disney exec called me one Monday and said they'd pay my price for two scripts if I could write one of them by Wednesday and the other by the following Monday. I did and that's how I wrote two more of the thirteen episodes that CBS ordered.
Later, when there was talk of picking up the show for a second season, I was called into a meeting at CBS about revamping the series a bit and maybe being the showrunner. I heard a couple of different reasons why there ultimately wasn't a Year Two but apparently it was a joint decision by CBS and Disney and maybe Hasbro.
Disney refused to give me a "Developed for television by…" credit for that first season claiming it was against some company policy. I was not happy about that but sometimes in life you take a deal you aren't completely happy with.
I never heard of Fred Wolf being considered the creator of the series but I'm not saying he might not deserve that. Fred produced and often directed the show but we had little contact and like I said, I have no idea who did what before I was hired and very little sense of who did what after I declined the staff position. I dealt mainly with two wise men, Gary Krisel and Michael Webster, who seemed to be very much in charge but whose names appeared nowhere in the show's credits.
And that's all I remember and way more than you wanted to know. It didn't come out quite the way I wanted but I thought it was still a fun show and it was a tremendous hit in many countries. Alas, it was not in this one but I think it could have been if Disney had assigned about nineteen fewer people to think they were in charge of it. I later took my name off another Disney show I worked on that suffered from overexecutiving and I'm happy (and envious) when I hear that it ain't like that there these days.
