For about eight hours now, I've been playing with Pioneer's combination TiVo and DVD burner. This is a wonderful invention that will record a show off the air just like a plain ol' TiVo but it will also copy that show to a DVD-R or DVD-RW disc. You can also take your old tapes, import them into the TiVo and then copy them onto a DVD. I have a lot of old 3/4" U-Matic videotapes of TV shows I wrote in the seventies and eighties and I've started dubbing them over to DVDs since the tapes are starting to rot, plus they take up a lot of room. I also have a few things that are on Beta that I want to keep — and who knows how much longer my Betamax will hold out? So this is a cool thing.
Rummaging through my shelves, I just found a show I totally forgot I'd written. It was an episode of the Plastic Man cartoon show that only aired once — in prime-time on a Sunday night, opposite 60 Minutes and some blockbuster event on NBC. Our show was a preview of the new ABC Saturday morning cartoon lineup for 1979, co-starring an animated Plastic Man and an equally-realistic gent named Michael Young, who was then hosting a Sunday morning show called Kids Are People, Too. Plastic Man has an adventure which gets interrupted as Young introduces clips of that year's new ABC cartoon shows. There's also a long plug for a prime-time sitcom called Out of the Blue, which starred Jimmy Brogan and was cancelled around halfway through the first episode. The only thing I remember about the special I wrote is that its Nielsen rating was close to a negative number and at the time, I felt like the only human being on the planet who'd seen it. I may now be the only person in the world who has a copy of it, at least on DVD. Or wants one.