Starting next week, MeTV Toons is running the 1979 Plastic Man cartoon show produced by the Ruby-Spears animation studio, which was then the newest cartoon maker in the business. I wrote several episodes including the first one MeTV Toons is airing — "The Weed," which according to my schedule, will air Tuesday morning, February 18 at 2:30 AM. That sounds like the perfect time slot for it. You won't be up watching and I won't be up watching.
I do not remember much about writing that episode except that I'm pretty certain no one mentioned any connection between a super-villain called The Weed and marijuana. I think (I'm not 100% positive) that I invented and named the character and I know (I'm 100% positive) the drug reference never dawned on me. As you may know, in my almost-73 years of life, I've never even experience first-hand tobacco.
I was not involved in the development of the show that took Jack Cole's popular comic book character and changed an awful lot of things about him. And to be accurate, I believe the character was only popular when Jack Cole drew him and apparently had some input into the scripts. This would be from the time of the character's creation in Police Comics #1 — cover-dated August of 1941 — until sometime later that decade when Mr. Cole handed it off to others. There have been many versions of the character since then in comics and animation and I don't think any of them have wowed anybody that much. The cartoon show Ruby-Spears did for two seasons starting in '79 certainly didn't.
The development was mainly done by Norman Maurer, a former comic book artist himself. Norman was then a TV and movie producer and the manager of The Three Stooges — Moe was in his father-in-law — and a much in-demand guy in the field of Saturday morning cartoons. I worked with him on Richie Rich at Hanna-Barbera and ABC loved him for that series. And like I said, I was not around when they decided Plastic Man should operate in a different world and format than he'd had in any of his comics.
A lot of it, I heard, had to do with the demands of the Standards and Practices Department at ABC and a lady there who felt cartoons for kids needed to be uplifting and clean and above all, free from violence. She hated the Super Friends show the network was then airing and I believe one of the reasons she was okay with Plastic Man was that the nature of his powers meant that he couldn't engage much in anything that fit her silly definition of "violence." It was pretty much anything you or I or a sane person would call "action."
So they put Plastic Man into this odd format of taking his marching orders from a sultry boss lady named The Chief. Then "Plas" would travel the world in a jet along with a lady named Penny and a sidekick named Hula-Hula. I wrote about Hula-Hula in this blog post here. As for Plastic Man himself, it's not how I would have handled the character but it's how we all had to handle the character. I wrote a few episodes and I also wrote the opening narration for each episode.
I am not recommending you watch this show. Just telling you what I know about its history.
It did pretty well ratings-wise for a while but back in those days of Saturday Morning Kidvid, the measure of a show was not how well it ran but how well it reran. They made 13 episodes per season (occasionally, a few more than that) and many a show would do well the first time they ran the thirteen, less well when they ran them the second time, even less well when they ran them the third time…and that series would probably be marked for cancellation before they could run them the fourth time.
Years later when I did the Garfield and Friends show, the episodes did well on first run, better on their second run and when they started doing even better on their third run, CBS decided to make the show an hour for its second season and renew it through its third. That was how the game was played.
Plastic Man's numbers went slowly in the opposite direction and eventually reached the level where ABC was unsure if they wanted to renew it for a second year. They said to Joe Ruby — the "Ruby" in "Ruby-Spears" — "We'll pick it up if you add some element to make the show new and different." My pal Steve Gerber, who was also writing episodes, and I went to Joe and suggested making it less like a super-hero show and more like a Jack Cole comic book.
That turned out to be exactly what ABC didn't want so Joe came up with the idea of having Plastic Man and Penny marry and have a baby with the powers of his father. I think I only wrote one episode with "Baby Plas" and that was under light duress. There was no third season.
I thought the first season was…well, better than a lot of what was then on Saturday A.M. teevee. It just wasn't Plastic Man. If you're up at 2:30 AM next week, you can probably find something better to watch…but if you give it a try, you might enjoy it more than you expect. Note that I said "might."