The Adventures of Superpup

Year: 1958
Seasons: None
Episodes: 1 unaired pilot
Created By: Whitney Ellsworth

Main Cast

Billy Curtis as Bark Bent/Superpup
Ruth Delfino as Pamela Poodle
Angelo Rossitto as Terry Bite
Harry Monty as Professor Sheepdip
Frank Delfino as Sergeant Beagle
Sadie Delfino as Wolfingham/Montgomery Mouse

Quick, what do you do when the star of your superhero TV show commits suicide, eliminating the most recognizable and famous face for the title character? If your answer is, “replace the cast with midgets wearing gigantic dog heads and load it up with humor even a five year old would find unsophisticated,” congratulations. You’re qualified to be a TV producer, if the unaired pilot for The Adventures of Superpup is any indication.

This odd concept for a TV show was done in a rush after the unfortunate suicide of the first famous Superman actor, George Reeves. Because Superman has always appealed to kids, the producers decided to make Superman even more kid-friendly by changing the entire cast with dogs and giving them dog names. Therefore, Clark Kent is now Bark Bent, Lois Lane is now Pamela Poodle, and The Daily Planet is now The Daily Bugle (I’ve heard good things about their photographer, though the anti-superhero slant of their stories is troubling, to say the least). Because regular-sized people wearing oversized dog heads would look ridiculous, the producers opted for a cast of midgets for all the roles, leading to strange sights like Bent’s boss Terry Bite climbing on top of his desk to talk to Bark and Pamela. If this wasn’t enough, a really horrendous-looking mouse puppet lives in Bark’s desk, and his purpose in the show is to both tell the viewer what’s going on and to occasionally make bad jokes. The unaired pilot that I saw is included on the amazingly comprehensive DVD set Superman Ultimate Collector’s Edition, and is half color, half black and white. I’m not too sure why only half is in color, but I like to imagine that the producers knew they had a piece of shit on their hands and just said “fuck it” in the middle of colorizing the damn thing.

The story starts out in the office of the Daily Bugle, with Bark Bent, Pamela Poodle, and their boss Terry Bite talking about how great Superpup is. The plot proper involves the evil Professor Sheepdip escaping from jail via a hacksaw. His bumbling partner somehow has the keys for the outer door and after a painfully long gag of him not being able to find the right key, lets him out. This kickstarts a drawn-out race between Sergeant Beagle and the evil duo. When they finally get back to Sheepdip’s lair he pours some green food coloring and Alka-Seltzer to a glass of water, which creates an atomic explosion when a paper airplane gets dipped in it and chucked out a window. This potion is then carelessly poured into a bottle with a fuse, and is then given to the dumbass sidekick to sneak into the Daily Bugle using a grandfather clock as a disguise. Because everyone is wearing oversized dog heads, no one much notices or cares when the walking clock comes in. It’s so brazen about it’s entry that it doesn’t even bother trying to sneak it, rather, it uses the main entrance. It moseys around the Daily Bugle until it’s sitting directly in front of Terry Bite’s desk. After fucking around trying to find a light for the fuse, dumbass sidekick gets out of the clock and asks Terry for a light, which Terry grumblingly provides. Realizing that he just got “tricked,” he calls for Bark Bent to come in and get rid of the clock (why would a reporter be called in to do such a job?). Bent then springs into action and becomes Superpup! After chucking a bunch of random crap out the window for comedic effect, he finally realizes that the huge, inappropriately-placed grandfather clock may be the danger, so he grabs it and flies out the window. Superpup then tricks the dumbass sidekick into giving him his address by asking him for his address, and once given that information proceeds to drop the entire clock on Sheepdip’s HQ. The bottle of colored water that previously caused an atomic blast with a ridiculously small amount now only has the power to blast open the clock and leave both Sheepdip and dumbass sidekick laying on their backs, confused and sad.



Onto Plan B. Sheepdip decides to kidnap Pamela Poodle by inviting her over for tea. She comes over and is promptly jostled about by the nefarious criminals. They then tie her up to a rocket pointed at the moon and light the fuse, since they’re dicks and just like fucking with people for no reason (they don’t ask for a ransom or anything, so “they’re just dicks” seems like the only explanation for this scheme). Superpup arrives, unties Pamela, and instead of breaking the fuse or somehow stopping the rocket from going off, he just leaves. The rocket then “shoots” into the air, and remains stationary on a gray background while sparks shoot out the end. To indicate that it’s actually flying and in the air, the rocket sometimes turns creakily downwards on a slant. For some reason, the rocket smashes into the bad guy’s getaway car, once again leaving them dazed and sad. This time Sergeant Beagle shows up and arrests them, Superpup flies off, Pamela fawns over how awesome he is, and Terry just kinda stands around looking pissed. The announcer promises further awesomeness with the following message: “be with us again next week when your product, the best of it’s kind in the world, presents Superpup!”

If the plot summary didn’t make it clear, this pilot sucks ass, and is only worth watching if you’re a fan of “so bad it’s good” entertainment. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it falls into that category, but it certainly was an interesting experience. The cheapness of everything is pretty glorious, and the way the dog heads remain expressionless does a great job of preventing the viewer from forming any kind of attachment to these characters. The humor is pretty dismal, but there was one scene that I thought was legitimately funny. The bad guys are driving away after lighting the rocket, and the desk mouse pops up to explain why the car they’re using now is different from their getaway mobile. According to the mouse, it’s because they didn’t want to mess up their nice car. I thought this was a clever nod at how cheap this pilot was, so I have to give the producers credit for it.

Could it have been successful? The early years of television actually had quite a bit of creepy kids shows, and if I look at Superpup in the context of Clutch Cargo and those fucking marionettes that kept swinging around in various children’s programing, it doesn’t seem that out of place. I don’t imagine the scripts would have gotten any better, and the humor would probably have stayed at the same idiotic level as it was in the pilot. Thus, if the show actually made it on the air and became a hit, it probably would enjoy a cult following today among fans of creepy kids shows. I think the show works best in its current form, as an incomplete non-starter. It was painful enough just watching one of these fucking things. I don’t think I could stand an entire season of it.

Recommended for: Diehard Superman fans, midget acting aficionados, dog lovers, parents who hate their children.

Star Trek: The Original Series

Years: 1966 - 1969
Seasons: 3
Episodes: 79 (Or were there 72? Or 73?)
Created By: Gene Roddenberry (and uncredited others)

Main Cast:

William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk
Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock
DeForest Kelley as Leonard “Bones” McCoy
James Doohan as Montgomery “Scotty” Scott
Nichelle Nichols as Uhura
George Takei as Sulu
Walter Koenig as Chekov
Majel Barrett as Nurse Chapel

Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) is to canceled TV shows what Hebrew is to dying languages: the One Example that brings hope, since both were brought back from the dead and eventually flourished (though in different ways, obviously). It almost seems pointless to recap the phenomenal story of how Trek was resurrected, but the keypoints boil down to the following:

Star Trek was pretty much on the verge of cancelation from the get-go.
It was saved for another season by intense fan interest and letter writing campaigns.
When the show was finally yanked off the air, it became a huge success through syndication.
This success led to eleven films, five additional TV series, countless novels, games, and other tie-ins, as well as becoming such a part of pop culture that everyone knows what “beaming up” means and what a Vulcan’s ears look like.

The plot of the show is simple enough: A group of explorers (mainly human but with an alien aboard) led by the fearless Captain James T. Kirk travel the galaxy, hopping from planet to planet looking for unknown life forms. Every single time they find new life, and even times when they don’t, disaster strikes and the crew of the Starship Enterprise must defeat the alien menace or solve the problem. That’s pretty much it. The alien on the crew is Mr. Spock, a half human/half Vulcan with pointy ears who prides himself on his lack of emotion and dependence on logic. This leads to the exceedingly annoying part of the show where various members of the crew (especially the ship’s doctor, Leonard “Bones” McCoy) bitch him out for not letting his emotions dictate life or death situations. Also aboard is Chief Engineer and Scottish stereotype Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, glamorized secretary and token hot black girl Uhura, Helmsmen and token hot Asian Hikaru Sulu, and navigator with a shitty wig and embarrassing fake Russian accent Pavel Chekov. Another cast member is Nurse Chapel, notable because her credentials for getting aboard the Enterprise consist of her getting her Tribble pounded by Trek-creator Gene Roddenberry, and that’s about it.

Though Captain Kirk is now synonymous with Star Trek, in the original pilot there was a different captain named Christopher Pike. The pilot was titled The Cage and involved Pike getting kidnapped by some androgynous aliens with gigantic veiny heads called The Talosians. Apparently the networked bitched about the pilot being “too cerebral,” but they liked the idea enough to order a second pilot. This pilot, called Where No Man Has Gone Before, took care of many of the issues the network had with The Cage. It had more action, Spock fixed that fucked-up hairstyle he used to have, and Pike was replaced with Kirk. In a delicious bit of recycling, The Cage was chopped up and turned into a two-parter called The Menagerie, which accomplished the impossible by turning this blatant example of penny-pinching into a classic sci fi story.

Because of the nerd stigma surrounding all things Trek, I didn’t know how to approach this show. I decided to watch them in order, wrongly assuming that there was a ton of information that would slowly be revealed over the course of the show that would make watching future episodes a more rewarding experience. As it turns out, you can randomly watch any episode of TOS and not worry about having missed some crucial bit of information. In fact, it almost seems like the show goes out of it’s way to tell you what you need to know in every episode. I mentioned how the crew frequently bitches Spock out for relying on logic over emotion. This is annoying, but it makes it easy for a first-time viewer to tune in and understand that this character operates differently from others. You don’t need to know about his half human status, the rituals of his home planet, or his previous relationships. Because TOS had no season-long story arcs, every episode starts from scratch. A forced cease-fire between the Federation and the Klingons (who at this point were just a bunch of angry black guys with goatees) is promptly ignored in future episodes when the Klingons start up their shit again. As someone who loves story arcs, this aspect of TOS makes it somewhat less great than its reputation suggests.

That’s not to say the show is bad. The first two seasons are full of great sci fi stories that still work. The slow, talky aspect of the show makes the decisions more important, and it goes a long way towards giving the show an environment that feels real to the viewer. When compared to the even slower and more cerebral The Next Generation, TOS sometimes feels like a Michael Bay production, but it is still a fantastic show with a lot of heavy-handed philosophy and social commentary, which I always enjoy in a show. And when they come, the action scenes are a lot of fun. There are fewer things more enjoyable that Kirk getting into a fight by diving at the enemy doing his ridiculous two-handed punch, and randomly doing a roll on the ground while trying to dodge an enemy’s phaser. Plus, even though the cast absolutely detested Shatner, there’s still a real sense of camaraderie and friendship among the crew. That makes all the technobabble about warp drives and matter/antimatter and whatnot go down a lot easier.

So we have a well-written original sci fi show with a great cast and interesting characters. The only thing it was missing was viewers. The ratings for the first season were average at best, even though it was the number one color program on TV. The financial concerns led to the threat of dropping one of the most popular characters from the show: Mr. Spock. He wanted an increase in pay due to the popularity of his character, and since the show was barely getting by as it was, this lead the producers to consider replacing the character, possibly with another Vulcan. However, the network demanded that Spock stayed on the show, since nearly half of the fan mail that they received was for that character. Women loved him, and nerds wanted to be him.



However, the ratings for the second season didn’t improve, and the network began doubting the commercial viability of letting nerds dictate their programing. In a fantastically effective move by Roddenberry, he got in touch with a couple of fans and secretly began a letter-writing campaign to save the show. The silent minority of geeks began flooding the network with mail, and it worked. Trek was renewed for a third season, and the world shown the surprising power of nerd outrage. That victory came at a cost, though. Three things happened with the third season that finally got Trek out of NBC’s hair for good:

First, the show was moved to the Friday night death slot, which is the TV equivalent to driving a pet dog you no longer want into a far away place and kicking it out of your car. The people who would want to watch this show, teens and college students, were out of the house actually doing things, leaving it up to the die-hards to tune in every night to keep the ratings up.

Second, the budget was slashed, causing a bunch of the episodes to look shitty. The “strange new worlds” explored by the enterprise were reduced to a bunch of styrofoam rocks that got more airtime than Sulu, and variously-colored backgrounds. The difference between each planet was even less significant than Clark Kent yanking off his glasses and adding some bass to his voice. Also, even basic things started looking “off.” The most egregious was Spock’s ears, which by season three started to look like something a kid would pay a dime for at the toy store.

Third, because of the show being moved to the death slot, Roddenberry pulled the ultimate douche move and decided to ditch the show, basically telling the dedicated fan base that busted it’s ass to save his show to go fuck themselves. Possibly as a result of this, the quality control of the new episodes seemed “lax,” to put it nicely. To put it less nicely, the show turned into a retarded fucking joke, pumping out a shocking amount of horrible bullshit that made the show even harder for the fans to defend. The opening to each episode became increasingly ridiculous, always ending with the same idiotic “dramatic” music before the title credits began. The plots focused more and more on planets that have environments “remarkably similar to our own!” Further, the writers didn’t even seem to be trying anymore. The biggest example of this is the embarrassing Spock’s Brain episode, where aliens steal Spock’s brain, which is then somehow able to talk to Captain Kirk and his crew, while a brainless Zombie Spock shuffles around looking like he’s about to say “time for go to bed!” at any minute. Mercifully, TOS was finally canceled after the third season, preventing it from getting even worse.

This is one of the times where getting canceled was a blessing for a show. Season three was the shark-jumping season, and the absolute best time for it to die. If it stayed on the air, the only thing that would have allowed it to rise to its previous heights would be pumping the budget back up for each episode and putting it back on a time slot where people would be home to see it. Roddenberry would then scoop the sand out of his vagina and get back to work, and we’d potentially have some more classic episodes. As it happened, viewers got to see classic episodes in syndication, and the injustice of it being canceled helped fuel the mystique behind the show. The fan base steadily began growing, conventions started popping up, and it all culminated in a film franchise, which was successful enough to spawn spin-offs which took the promise of TOS and made it even better than it ever was before. There has never been a more successful failure in the history of television.

Recommended for: Sci Fi fans, people who really like heavy-handed social commentary and philosophy, closet nerds, regular nerds, fans of bad stunt-doubles, women who masturbate to emotionally distant men.

Introduction

It's a bitch of a job to try to appeal to the tastes of tens of millions of people. You have to figure out what kind of show will grab the largest number of viewers in the shortest amount of time, and there are very few second chances for a show that doesn't pull in respectable ratings immediately. There is little room of subtly or nuance in those first few episodes, because basic information needs to be conveyed quickly to the audience so that they have some kind of stake in the fates of these characters. And unless the budget is low enough that the station isn't losing too much money gambling on a new show, very few will risk a slot to let an audience build. That's one of the reasons why there's so much dreadful bullshit on TV. The stakes are too high to experiment.

There have been many oddities to slip through, however. If you look through the graveyard of canceled TV shows, amidst the typical crap you'll find some strangeness that somehow got on the air. It's not that the concepts themselves were odd (though that certainly is the case with a show like Toxic Crusaders), it's how they were handled. And no matter how critically-acclaimed a show is, if it doesn't hit with Middle America and the average Joe, it's gone. Thus, shows like Arrested Development and Freaks and Geeks get the ax, while According to Jim gets eight seasons. This can't just be chalked up to the masses having shit taste and no willingness to try something different. A show like Lost can be a huge hit and have smoke monsters, a complex flash forward/flashback/present time structure, and moral ambiguity. Also, something like Twin Peaks was (briefly) a big hit, which showed that a large audience sometimes wants to see the bizarre.

I was inspired to do this after watching Twin Peaks, hence the name of this blog. It stood out to me as a show that was both brilliant and shitty, hitting amazing highs and depressing lows. I started thinking of other canceled shows, and decided to start going through them, since it wouldn't take that much time (for some shows, that is) and because it's also interesting to see what kind of shows viewers don't warm up to. I honestly have no clue why audiences across America rejected a show like Freaks and Geeks, but they did. Meanwhile, like I said, fucking According to Jim...

Here are some rules I set up in order to do this:
The show had to last three seasons or under.
The show had to be canceled, not voluntarily ended by the creators. Hence, The State doesn't count, because even though it was immediately canceled before it even began airing on CBS, the creators ended it's run on MTV. So a non-starter doesn't count.
Also, I'm trying to decide on how many episodes a show should have before deciding that it's too much. The 60s Batman show lasted three seasons, but because it aired twice a week it has over 100 episodes. It's no wonder viewer fatigue eventually set in.

An exception is made for shows where several episodes are created, but only a handful ever make the air. Some shows that never even debuted but still managed to get a DVD release will be featured, since that's even more interesting.

Boring bullshit like a 90's Friends knock-off that was quickly canned will be ignored. I have no desire to watch a shitty version of a show I never liked to begin with. This blog is just going to be my selections based on what I either find interesting or just want to watch. I might make exceptions for shows such as Margaret Cho's All American Girl, since she actually developed health problems because of this show, and also because I went to both elementary school and junior high with the kid who plays her younger brother. It's doubtful that anyone else aside from Cho fanatics would want to see this watered-down version of her stand up act, but there you go.

Sadly, because of the very nature of this blog, some shows won't get covered mainly because I have no way of obtaining copies of the show. Fox's embarrassing fat girl sitcom Babes will not get a post until the time when someone, somewhere decides to either upload the entire series online, or Fox decides that there's an audience that wants to buy it. Since people don't even remember this show anymore, that seems highly unlikely.

Here's a tentative list of what I plan on watching and reviewing at some point. I'm coming to these shows with no previous exposure to them, so I'm not one of the people who watched Firefly and then bitched loudly to everyone near me about it getting canned. Same with Arrested Development and other shows that the internet mourns. My idea is to come to these shows as a random viewer flipping through channels and stumbling across them.

Animation:

The Ripping Friends
The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse
The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat
Clerks
The Goode Family
The Critic
Toxic Crusaders
The Maxx
The Head
The Brothers Grunt
Liquid Television
Ren & Stimpy “Adult Party Cartoon”
Aeon Flux

Sci Fi and Horror:

War of the Worlds
Friday the 13th The Series
Freddy’s Nightmares
Star Trek
Firefly
The Outer Limits

Superhero:

The Flash
The Tick
The Adventures of Superpup
Batgirl

Misc:

The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
Max Headroom
Twin Peaks
On the Air
Get a Life
Andy Richter Controls the Universe
Andy Barker PI
Ben Stiller Show
Undeclared
Freaks and Geeks
Arrested Development
My So-Called Life
Police Squad
That’s My Bush!
Heil Honey I’m Home!
Carnivale
Deadwood
Dark Angel

So there you go. Let's hope this doesn't prove to be too much of a waste of time.