I don't link to a lot of clips of shows I worked on but for some reason, I've recently received a number of questions about The Secret World of Og, a three-part ABC Weekend Special that I wrote back in 1983 or thereabouts…so I'll write about it and let you see a couple minutes. The ABC Weekend Special was that network's capitulation to demands for something "educational" on the Saturday morning schedule. Later, CBS responded to similar demands with a series called CBS Storybreak and I did a mess of them, too, plus I wrote a lot of the host segments for both shows.
Both endeavors usually involved adapting kids' books for animation, the idea being to encourage reading. In some cases, if our adaptation prompted a child to run out and read the book in question, that child must have been somewhat baffled because a lot of those books were changed quite a bit for the screen. In one case, I was tossed (literally) a paperback and told, "Here…we bought the rights to this but just use the title and the character names and make up a new plot." Eventually, we even did one which was created as a TV special…then the studio arranged for a book to be published before the special aired, and we fibbed and claimed the show was adapted from the book, when in fact the opposite was true.
The Secret World of Og was a 1961 book by the prolific Canadian author and TV host, Pierre Berton. An ABC exec actually told me that he was excited by the acquisition because, after all, this was the man who wrote the book on which Planet of the Apes was based. When he told me this, I thought, "That doesn't sound right but I guess he knows." Of course, when I later checked, I discovered the ABC guy didn't know. The ape movie was adapted from a book by Pierre Boulle, not Pierre Berton, and even though I so informed everyone, at least one ABC press release continued that confusion.
Mr. Berton's book was a fantasy about four kids, named after and modelled on his own four children, who were apparently always losing things. In the story, they found a hidden world via a secret tunnel under their playhouse, and there they came across all the things they'd lost in the surface land. ABC paid a bit above their usually rock-bottom fees to acquire the animation rights to the book, so I was told they wanted to get three half-hour episodes out of it. This was good because if I'd had to cram it into one, it would have been corrupted beyond all dimension. Given thrice the space, I was able to do a pretty faithful presentation…one that prompted a lovely "thank you" letter from Mr. Berton. I wrote him back and told him, among other things, of the Planet of the Apes muddle and he replied that it wasn't the first time someone had made that mistake and thanks to ABC, it probably wouldn't be the last.
The one significant change I made from the book, apart from tossing out about half the incidents in it, was because the network folks wanted a clearer moral at the end. They didn't really care what it was, just so long as the kids learned something that was easily summarized. After reading and re-reading the book several times, I decided that only one moral that I could abide flowed logically from this story: Don't read books. Throughout, the kids had been conflating fantasy with reality, and spending too much time living in stories instead of the real world. So I went with that…and no one to this day has ever commented on the fact that though the ABC Weekend Special was intended to promote reading, I wrote one that told kids, "Hey! Stop reading and go outside!" I still think that's not a bad message.
The three parts aired about 8,000 times on ABC, then were edited together into a quasi-movie which has run often on cable and (I'm told) received limited theatrical release in some countries. It's available on this DVD which is currently out of stock on Amazon but they say if you order it, they'll get more. Very young audiences might enjoy it. I'm supposed to somehow get money from its ongoing exploitation but have yet to see a cent. I suppose some day when I'm in my eighties, I'll get one of those checks that's barely worth flipping over to endorse.
Here's the first two minutes of the thing. The animation was done by a company that was then functioning as Hanna-Barbera Australia and I thought they, especially producer-director Steve Lumley, did a very nice job. The mother's voice is Janet Waldo, better known to you all as Judy Jetson and Penelope Pitstop. The two little girls are Noelle North and Brittany Wilson, and the silly green man is the fine impressionist-singer, Fred Travalena. Also in the cast were Hamilton Camp, Peter Cullen, Julie McWhirter, Andre Stojka, Michael Rye, a buncha other folks and the legendary Dick Beals. Here it is…
