It's on, baby: Magnum Thrax FREE Feb 1st to 3rd, 2015

Yeah, baby, yeah! Finally settled on some dates for the Kindle Select freebie days.

There are apparently between 5,000 and 8,000 free ebooks out there every day. Kindle alone has over 3 million books, and given the emphasis on production and churning out novels every other month (see kboards), that number is only going to grow.

The window where getting exposure was easy is over. People don't have to look for free books, they're already buried under an avalanche of prose.

So I've made a cheeky ad campaign (what the heck do I know, haven't done anything like this before, so booyah!), and I'm planning on blowing my marketing budget, micro it may be, all in one three day blitz from February 1st to February 3rd, 2015. During this period, you can download Magnum Thrax and the Amusement Park of Doom, all 500 odd pages of mayhem and madness, for free.

Free, I say!

Because insidious marketing scheme.

The goal is to get a little exposure and some reviews, which are rather difficult to get, positive or negative.

After that, not much else to be done for volume one.

I'll just get back to work on other writing projects, and see what happens.

Monkeys, mutants, and Marxists

The classic twist ending. A post-apocalypse tradition is born.

“Somewhere out there there has to be something better than man.” - Taylor (Charlton Heston)

As if.

For a thoroughly satirical post-apocalypse, look no further than the first two Planet of the Apes pictures.

They're far more than Apes in Spaaaaace.

We're lucky the series got made at all, despite having producer Arthur P. Jacobs leading the charge and Charlton Heston being attached. Studio execs feared the apes would be unconvincing, even laughable, and wouldn't give the green light until makeup tests proved otherwise.

Nor did the script come together easily. Rod Serling spent a year writing thirty drafts before he finally got the script right, and then only with the help of the formerly blacklisted Marxist, Michael Wilson. Wilson is better known for classics like Bridge Over the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia.

Pierre Boule's book La Planéte des Singes, on which the film is based, has little in the way of action or fisticuffs. It also depicts a highly advanced ape society, which the filmmakers did not have enough money to recreate on screen. Due to budget constraints, the films' ape civilization would be much more primitive.

The series opens in the cockpit of a spacecraft, the ultimate antiseptic, finely controlled environment. This is human civilization at its peak. All of the crew are asleep, in cryogenic stasis, save Taylor, the misanthropic captain played by Charlton Heston. He's entering a log, Captain Kirk style, but being considerably more introspective because he's got time to kill and themes to advance:

"Space is boundless. It squashes a man's ego. I feel lonely. That's about it. Tell me though. Does man that marvel of the universe that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars still make war against his brother? Keep his neighbor's children starving?”

That's the set up. High tech ship soaring through the stars, mankind's best aboard, pondering the meaning of life. Mankind is on top and in charge.

All is right with the universe.

Heston and his sleeping beauties.

Then the rug gets yanked out and we enter free fall.

They didn’t have enough money to show the ship crash landing, so they shot it from the ship’s POV, using footage taken by airplane. The camera spins and yaws, then careens down into a lake, pulling the viewer along with it.

It’s a stunning, delirious sequence, born of necessity, but it works fabulously, establishing an eerie, artsy vibe, thanks to the fantastic cinematography, the magnificence of the Arizona desert, and the unnerving score. 

If it weren't for the title, the last thing you'd expect is for the astronauts to run into a bunch of talking gorillas. It starts out posing as fairly Hard SF.

Heston and two bright-eyed, bushy-tailed comrades, Landon and Dodge, escape their sinking spacecraft, but the fourth member of their expedition, a woman who would be the new eve, dies before landing due to a malfunction in her cryotube.

The barren Arizona desert makes for a wonderful alien world. Lifeless from horizon to horizon. The cast is framed against the vast landscape, without a single plant to be seen.

Eventually the stranded astronauts find a weed, which fills the crew with hope, despite Taylor razzing them every step of the way. Soon the wastes give way to lush forest and grassland. They find a pool right out of Doctor Doolittle and jump in, only to have their clothes and equipment mysteriously stolen before they can get out.

They encounter a herd of mute humans, who have been reduced to the level of animal intelligence.

Heston figures they’ll be running the place in short order.

His ambitions are quickly dashed as they hear hunting horns sound.

Because these human beings are being hunted like animals. The pursuers are at first unseen. We catch glimpses of poles thrashing the cornfield, rifles firing, horses charging. Humans are flushed like birds, herded like cattle, shot like dogs.

Finally Heston catches sight of the horsemen and realizes… they're apes!

One of the astronauts is killed, a second captured, and Heston wounded in the throat. 

Smile! Apes proudly pose over fresh trophies. Wait, aren't those... Soylent Green?

As the hunt concludes, trophy photos taken over their corpses. By making apes the oppressors, Serling set into very sharp relief man’s barbarity to man, and comments on racism and colonialism.

Granted, it's pretty obvious what planet this is, as the apes speak perfect English. There was some talk of having the apes speak a kind of gibberish at first, which becomes intelligible (English) as Heston picks up the local language. But this was abandoned as being too complicated for audiences of the time.

Heston is injured and separated from his friends, and gets thrown into the upside down world of ape politics. It’s a simplified mirror of our own world, of course, with ape society broken up into three castes: orangutans are authority figures, gorillas are soldiers and workers (presumably farmers as well), and chimpanzees are the middle class and ineffectual intellectuals.

This class based view of society fits with Wilson's Marxist leanings, and actually enriches the picture, adding further depth to the social messages and sharp witted satire.

In fact, the ape actors so took to their race / class based roles that they all ate by group: gorilla with gorilla, chimp with chimp, orangutan with orangutan.

Heston with his chimpanzee patrons. It's like Uplift, except they dissect you.
So it totally, like, isn't. Never mind.

Taylor is paraded around on a leash, threatened with castration and lobotomy, and kept in a cage. The world is now fully inverted: privileged astronaut and American hero Taylor is now a mere animal. From top to bottom in under thirty minutes.

Due to his throat injury, Taylor cannot speak, and his attempts to try are mocked by apes as mere mimicry.

For such a man as Taylor, the fall could not be greater.

Heston's fellow astronaut, post-brain surgery.

The threat of having his balls lopped off compels Taylor to escape. He leads the apes about in a merry chase around their village and gets pelted with rotten fruit and finally snagged in a net. As the gorilla guards move in to apprehend him, Heston utters the classic line, "Take your paws off me, you damn dirty ape!" 

He's quickly rushed to trial. Dr. Zaius, the orangutan Minister of Science and Defender of the Faith (in a nice satirical touch), is hell bent on having Taylor put down, and his chimp patrons censored.

See no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.
Just a tad on the nose, but it does emphasize the film's satirical intent.

This anti-human attitude just makes Taylor, the devout misanthrope, earnestly wonder why Dr. Zaius fears and hates him so. He should just ask his earlier self.

Taylor views man as weak and pathetic; everything he says about humanity drips with scorn, from his disgust for his fellow astronauts to his sneering contempt for the weakness of a long dead man who once possessed ancient artifacts (a pacemaker, spectacles) that the apes unearth.

Near the end of the film, Cornelius, at the behest of Dr. Zaius, reads from The Sacred Scrolls:

"Beware the beast Man for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair for he is the harbinger of death."

Whereupon Charlton promptly goes out and discovers his destiny, and the truth: he was home all along. Man is indeed the harbinger of death, and by the megaton.

Taylor is an arrogant, smug narcissist. A self-made God. As Grouchy Marx might say, he is someone who 'would never belong to any club that would have him.'

And humanity, ages ago, delivered on Taylor's low expectations.

He ends the film pounding his fist helplessly into the surf, bowed before the crumbling remains of the Statue of Liberty.

It's an image laden with symbolism, and the scene is a slap in the face, a visual scream, a wake-up call for all humanity, demanding us to do better, to not let the writers, and ourselves, down. To prove we're better than what Taylor (and the writers) believe us to be.

That's one hell of a political statement for a mainstream film. Very, very few filmmakers have the guts or the belly fire to try and pull something like that off.

It’s one of the bleakest films in all of Hollywood history, except for its sequel, Beneath Planet of the Apes. Written by screenwriter Paul Dehn of Goldfinger fame, Beneath indulges in the macabre. At one point it even had a bestiality subplot. Compared to Serling, Dehn is lightning fast at laying down prose: he wrote the script for Escape from Planet of the Apes in a mere three weeks.

New York City, above and below. The buildings were made up of torn photos of New York landmarks.
They did this pic on the cheap.

This film is a mixed bag, as the first half recycles the first film with a different cast and lower budget. About half way through, freaky new elements are introduced: mutated humans living under the nuked remnants of New York City, who worship an atomic bomb kept in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Just as the apes are superficially barbaric but underneath like us, the superficially sophisticated mutants turn out to be barbaric. They represent the upper class intelligentsia during The Cold War, mouthing platitudes about peace and non-violence while hiding behind a shield of devastating nuclear weapons capable of annihilating the planet a thousand times over.

Brent, the Charlton Heston lookalike, discovers the truth.
No. That everyone was speaking English was most certainly not enough.

When musicals go bad: the infamous Hello, Dolly
subway station interrogation of Brent by telepathic troglodytes,
 who consider themselves 'the only reality in the universe'.

It’s all explicitly MAD. As the mutant leader and high priest Mendez says, corrupting scripture, "Glory be to the Bomb and to the Holy Fallout. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. World without end. Amen."

They upgraded the Holy Hand Grenade.

The mutants view torturing people with 'psychic deterrents' as acceptable because they aren’t inflicting physical harm. It’s the sort of hair splitting that got the United States into waterboarding.

They’re also terrible singers.

For all their talk about being defenseless and peaceful, the mutants torture someone every couple of minutes.

Mutant reveals her inmost self unto her god, and you kind of wish she didn't.

As one of the mutants declares, "Mr. Taylor, Mr. Brent. We are a peaceful people. We don't kill our enemies. We get our enemies to kill each other.”

And then he pulls the old ‘let’s you and him fight to the death’ while I watch, all morally pure and peaceful like. It's perverted and twisted and deeply hypocritical. It's barbarism meets passive-aggressive narcissism.

Charming.

And the 'true self' they reveal to their A-bomb is grotesque. According to Dehn:

"At first, we were going to have them really mutated with monstrous noses and three eyes, real horror figures, but we didn't think that would have been nice for the children and after a great deal of research, it was the makeup department that came up with the idea that if you had been radiated, all seven layers of your skin would have been destroyed, and all that would be left was this terrible network of veins."

On the other side, gorilla General Ursus delivers gems like ‘The only good human is a dead human!’ to much applause from his troops.

Yeah, totally a show for seven-year-olds. 

Touring the underground sites.

And just in case you missed the other political parallels, there’s a scene where chimpanzee pacifists try and stop the ape army as it marches to battle… with placards and a sit in! The only thing missing is John Lennon in ape makeup singing 'All we are saying is give peace a chance'. The filmmakers couldn’t bash home their point any harder if they waded into the audience armed with two-by-fours.

The oafish, militaristic apes and the insufferably smug mutants naturally come into conflict, and the end result (spoilers) is the end of the world.

Or rather, the end of the post-end world.

Bored of it all, Carlton Heston sets off the doomsday weapon in order to rid himself of the franchise, and the earth is reduced to a cinder hanging in space.

A narrator solemnly intones:

"In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead."

"Screw you guys, I'm off to make The Hawaiians!"

Hard to top when it comes to bleak endings. 

It's one hell of a pointed anti-war statement.

Screenwriter Dehn didn't want to go full nihilist originally (never go The Full Nihilist), preferring a bestiality angle:

"The plot of 'Apes 2' was suggested by the memorable last shot of 'Apes 1': the half-buried Statue of Liberty. This implied that New York itself lay buried beneath what the Apes called 'The Forbidden Zone'. It remained only to people the underground city with Mutants descended from the survivors of a nuclear bomb dropped on New York 2,000 years earlier, and, thus, to motivate a war between expansionist Apes and peaceable but dangerously sophisticated Mutants resulting in the final destruction of Earth… I wanted a more optimistic end to 'Apes 2' than the destruction of Earth by the Doomsday Bomb, but my own end, the birth of a child half-human and half-monkey, proved intractable in terms of make-up, and anyway it was thought that Man-Ape miscegenation might lose us our G certificate!" 

So there you have it: the world was blown up because of the failure of a makeup test.

The executives wanted the whole series killed off: 

"I was under strict orders not to produce a sequel. Fox said there would be no further sequels after this, kindly destroy the entire world and wind up the series. So I duly did this and as you remember at the end the world blew up, the screen went white and the earth was dead."

They came to their senses as soon as they saw the box office returns.

Ironically, the franchise’s success with sequels and merchandising led to more sequels and more movie franchises.

Way to go, Charlton! Total backfire.

It's worth noting that all the authority figures in the film are unsympathetic. Heston takes a pox on all your houses stance, Ursus believes the only human is a dead one, Zaius views man as a pestilence, and Mendez, the leader of the mutants, believes his entire people, 'the only reality in the universe', exist solely to guard an A-bomb.

Apes as universal symbols for class struggle: military, intelligentsia, and bourgeois.
Humans are The Other.

The most sympathetic characters are the chimps Zira and Cornelius. They represent the bourgeois, the decency of the American middle class, sticking up for the little guy while objecting to abuses of power by corrupt higher ups. Even so, Zira works in the zoo, performing Dr. Mengele like experiments on human beings. They are not free of sin, but they are willing to recognize, and work with, The Other.

General Ursus is motivated by more than hatred: drought has brought ape society to the brink of catastrophe. Starvation looms. He intends to conquer The Forbidden Zone in order to expand their food supply, against the objections of Dr. Zaius. It doesn't quite make sense as nothing grows in The Forbidden Zone, but then, no one would accuse Ursus of being brainy, and it does add some nuance to his character.

Zaius is probably the most interesting. He's intelligent and might be willing to negotiate, even cooperate, with humans, save for the secret knowledge he's privy to. Alone among the apes, he knows mankind once ruled the earth and 'made a desert of it'. The vast wastes of The Forbidden Zone are testament to mankind's destructive capability. As such, Zaius distrusts anything to do with us, and believes 'man is capable of nothing but destruction.' 

All things considered, an understandable point of view. Should man get a second chance after nuking the planet the first time around?

Dr. Zaius doesn't think so. He rejects Taylor's pleas at the end of Beneath Planet of the Apes, so the petulant Taylor blows the planet to smithereens. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. So there, you bastages: the refusal of a simple kindness by Dr. Zaius, his unwillingness to empathize with The Other, costs everyone their lives, and the planet to boot.

Another strong statement in a series filled with them.

The series raises the hopes of the audience repeatedly, and then, just when you think a happy ending is nigh, they punch you in the face and deliver the dark.

The characters would have made great contestants on Big Brother, they're so well designed to conflict with each other. Super intelligent mutants clash with jock gorillas, empathic chimps chaff under the rule of overbearing elitist orangutans, and put upon Brent gets razzed by the snarky, misanthropic Taylor.

The rest of the original Ape films rant on about human short-sightedness and stupidity until the studio starved their budget into oblivion. The last film looks like half of it was filmed in a local park, and the other half in the studio basement.

Interspecies romance blossoms.

The series is radical cinema posing as sci-fi pulp. If any filmmaker had decided to cover political issues like slavery as bluntly, at that time, they’d never have gotten their project funded. The studios would have toned it down, smoothed the rough edges, turned it into inoffensive pap and had everyone singing Kumbaya by the closing credits. By setting it in a fictional environment populated with people in ape outfits, they were able to skewer anything they wanted. It's post-apocalyptic South Park. Satire with real bite.

One of the perks of well done science fiction.

Generally regarded as the worst film in the entire ape franchise, save for Battle for Planet of the Apes, it's my second favorite of the original run, primarily because of the funky mutants and their stylish, tonal telepathy. Also, doomsday bomb. KABOOM!

I can live with the first half because the second has the tinnitus inflicting mutants and a cranky hero who blows up the planet in the ultimate 'screw-you-guys-I'm-going-home' moment.

That’s the kind of stuff that fries little kids brains.

It's Marxism meets monkeys, and it all ends with nihilism stomping hope in the face, forever.  

Brrrrr.

The stuff about the dog and cat plague… PFFT! Please. Like we'd really get three hundred pound gorillas as replacement house pets, especially after the visit of three hyper-intelligent apes from a future where humans are hunted for sport.

Seriously, no one could take the hint?

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham is another classic post-apocalyptic look at human intolerance, as human survivors try to wipe out genetically superior successors. Rather bleak Darwinian logic motivates the old paradigm to try and kill off the new, in order to prevent itself from being relegated, in the long term, to extinction. They know that awaits them eventually. It’s a rather zero sum view of the world, but then, over ninety percent of all the species that have ever lived are extinct.

Jack Kirby’s Kamandi, on the other hand, is not particularly political. It’s a fun trip through a wild post-apocalyptic landscape with little in the way of sharp satirical edge, and that’s fine. It’s aimed at a rather young audience, but it's wildly imaginative and filled with non-stop action.

Thundarr Articles from The Long, Long Ago.

To wrap up Thundarr Week, I'm posting some old articles I found online about the series. One is by Adam Eisenberg, and the other by a name you might recognize: Buzz Dixon.

They have great concept art by Alex Toth and Jack Kirby.

Check'em out:

 See the rest of the screenshots over at Branded in the Eighties.

Two more pages over at Branded.

He misses Steve Gerber.

So do I.

Thundarr the Barbarian: Interview with Buzz Dixon Part II

Journey back to 1994, when the world ended. Did you miss it?

An interview with Buzz Dixon, lead writer on Thundarr the Barbarian. See part one here.

Q: Did you pitch show ideas, or did Gerber give you a general scenario to flesh out?

Typically we’d pitch story ideas to Steve, who would take the ones he liked to Joe. Rarely, Joe would have an idea he’d want included so we’d build a story around that.

Q: What episode changed the most drastically during development? Were there any major crisis points for the program during its run?

That’s hard to say at this point; as I said, I’m a forward looking sort and once I’m done with something I tend to put it behind me and move on. The busted pilot certainly had the most stuff cut out for time constraints. Occasional network fiats would cause drastic but pointless re-writes. There were no real crisis points that I recall.

More of Jack Kirby's fantastic concept art.

Q: In 1980, 1995 must have seemed impossibly far away. It’s now almost twenty-years ago, and there’s still no rogue planet. Humanity continues to plod forward, inventing iPods, pants that don’t need ironing, and new TV shows. What odds do you give the survival of human civilization?

Humans are a social species; there will be something that serves as a civilization that will survive as long as we do. Right now I’m afraid we’re entering into a very ugly period in which corporations and individuals who have amassed wealth intend to protect that wealth regardless of what it does to the society around them. I’m less anxious about natural disaster (including global warming, which is going to flood several coastal cities and drive millions of people inland) than I am about the oligarchy creating an ungovernable situation by sabotaging our ability to make long term plans and projections based on pragmatic reasons.

Airport of the future. Flying more fun than ever!

Q) From The White Mountains (Tripods) and Z for Zacharia to The Hunger Games and Divergent, Young Adult fiction is brimming over with tales from the post-apocalypse. Teenagers just devour the genre. What do you think makes it so popular with the age group?

The popular appeal of all post-apocalyptic fiction is roughly akin to desert island stories: The fantasy to start anew and get it right this time without having society (read parents) breathing down our necks.

I’ve got a YA desert island book coming out soon (Poor Banished Children Of Eve) that touches exactly on that: A group of Catholic school girls being evacuated from the Philippines on the eve of WWII are shipwrecked on a desert island while the war rages around them. There is a novice nun among them who tries to keep them in line, but her efforts to keep them “civilized” are undermined by just the basic challenge of staying alive.

Ariel and Ookla ride to town on a 'light highway'.

Where post-apocalyptic stories add to that basic appeal is the ability to add a layer of social criticism or satire to the proceedings. I’m not a huge fan of Steven King’s The Stand, but he clearly suggests that it’s the sheer inertia of the size of our civilization that keeps the worst predators at bay, and once those societal constraints are removed then it becomes a more direct face-to-face challenge between the forces of evil (sociopathy) and virtue (empathy).

Drug use was rampant among writers in the Seventies.

Thundarr the series kept its tongue firmly in its cheek and took delight in sending up contemporary mores and behaviors (viz football as a religion above).

Q: Was Thundarr really cancelled because cynical executives felt children would just as happily watch reruns as new episodes?

Boy howdy!

Cool wizard digs under a busted moon.

Q: You worked during The Golden Age for Saturday Morning Cartoons, an era that saw the creation of classic characters such as Scooby-Doo, which you also worked on. It also saw the introduction of the first television shows based on a toy line. That was a stroke of absolute, almost insidious, marketing genius: not only does the program push the product, but other advertisers paid for commercial slots inside the greater half-hour advertisement. It’s brilliant. You worked on G.I Joe, which many people have fond memories of, and was also a toy line. Was it more difficult to work on such a show, for a writer? On the up side, it would have provided the program with a steady, well funded backer invested in keeping it on the air, meaning more stability in a very unstable industry.

The toy / cartoon connection is a bit convoluted, so let me lay it out:

There had always been a connection between comic strips and later animated cartoons with merchandising. The great newspaper comic strips of the 1920 and 30s were crafted with that merchandising train in mind: The ambition of every struggling cartoonist was to get successful enough to hire somebody else to write and draw the daily strip while they cashed the royalty checks.

The first TV shows based on toys (as opposed to toys being made about TV shows) were in the 1960s. Hot Wheels was the one that got the attention of parents and the Federal Communications Commission. They cooked up a rule that animated shows could not be based on toys or other merchandising but had to be either wholly original content or based on a pre-existing literary or theatrical property.

Smurf tchotckies.

Jump ahead to the late 1970s when the Smurfs were being sold as toys, keyrings, and other tchotckies in the US. People wanted to do a show based on them but were stymied by the FCC ruling.

However, when they learned the Smurfs had originally been a Belgium comic book, that provided Hanna-Barbera with the fig leaf they needed to produce the series.

Soon everybody was rushing to created “literary” precedents to their proposed toy lines. Strawberry Shortcake was the next one out of the chute; she had greeting cards as her pre-existing property. (Dungeons & Dragons got a pass because they were based on games found in books, not toys.) Then Mattel licensed a He-Man comic book mini-series from DC and officially spun the Filmation show off of that (there is virtually no resemblance between the two other than character names and designs). Hasbro followed suite with Transformers and GI Joe by first doing comic books with Marvel then animated series on their own.

At that point the FCC decided syndication did not have to play by the same rules as Saturday morning and even the fig leaf was torn away. With cable and satellite and now Apple Box and Netflix and Hulu, there’s no Saturday morning animation block anymore.

Ruins six pack.

Q: George Lucas once said, “I’m very much akin to a toy-maker. If I wasn’t a film-maker, I’d probably be a toy-maker.” Was merchandising much of a consideration when writing Thundarr, even though no toy line ever emerged? 

I have to explain a bit about the convoluted financial history of Ruby-Spears. Joe and Ken were at one point ABC-TV’s hand picked team of trouble shooting story editors; they would get dropped in on live action shows that were in trouble with instructions to turn them around. ABC was willing to fund them as live action producers but they turned it down, preferring to do cartoons instead (yeah, I know, I asked them if they were crazy, too).

When they started producing TV shows, they were funded by a procedure known as deficit financing. Basically the network would offer them $X to produce a show that cost $2X to make. Most animation companies would acquire the budget by either borrowing (rare) or entering into a business relationship with a distributor or larger studio that would then take a share of the show’s profits if it was successful enough to enter syndication and / or have merchandising appeal (I think only Filmation ever found a way of making their shows cheaply enough to be done without deficit financing, and boy, did they look cheap!).

Filmation characters... standing about. Uncannily like the animated version.
Although I have soft spot for their Flash Gordon...

R-S went through a series of business partners who were having financial problems of their own, and were frequently acquired by entities that assumed they would just be pouring money into their coffers without any effort. As a result, there was never a single business entity toy makers could go to in order to get a quick deal on any of our characters; the best we saw were coloring books based on model sheets that we had produced in house!

Early drawing of Thundarr; note he still has a steel sword.
Emasculating sun sword comes later.

As a result, Joe and Ken could only stand by and watch as the big merchandising trains pulled out of the station. They were offered a chance to do Transformers; they turned it down to do their own teenager-turns-into-a-car show, Turbo Teen. They acquired the rights to various video games to turn them into TV shows then proceeded to abandon everything about the games that made them unique and turn them into knock offs of the Archies and Happy Days and other shows (Gary Greenfield and I did a presentation for Q*Bert that would have used the game’s constantly changing directional orientation to do essentially a 4-D version of the Road Runner and Coyote; Joe literally threw out presentation into the trash unread and told us he wanted to do the show as the Archies).

When they failed to sell any shows on their own, either originals or licensed characters, they had to go begging to Hanna-Barbera to find work just to keep the doors open. They did the dreadful animated Mork & Mindy and Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley TV shows and that pretty much sealed their fate. Hanna-Barbera used them as a stand by shop in case their production arm was over taxed, nobody came to them for new shows, no toy manufacturer wanted to speak to them because Hanna-Barbera would always nix the deal.

A few years ago some collectable toy company made Thundarr, Ariel, and Ookla action figures but these were for older collectors, not rough and tumble actual kid play.

Mindok calmly discusses transplanting his brain into a buff cyborg body.
But you just KNOW he's super excited.

Q: How did the collaboration between the writers and the artists work? Would you describe a monster or environments and then allow them leeway in designing it? Did that then reflect back on the script, inspiring changes?

At the time, writers were expected to hand in precisely written scripts with everything spelled out right down to specific cuts and angles. A 22 minute script typically ran 45 pages or thirty seconds per page (live action scripts would run a minute a page). As a result we did a lot of “directing on paper” in which we broke down each scene shot by shot, calling for close ups, specific angles, etc. (Filmation, on the other hand, would give you a big notebook filed with storyboards of existing stock footage and would tell you to write your script using as many “same as” scenes as possible!)

Thundarr takes on the mutant descendants of the Sons of Anarchy.

Freelance writers tended to write their scripts, drop them off, then go their merry way. Many of the regular staff writers rarely ventured into the artists’ warrens, and so would write stuff that was impossible to animate as written (I went into John Dorman’s office one time to find him and Jim Woodring and Thom Enriquez pounding on their desks and literally cursing the name of a writer who had sent them an impossible draw series of actions for Turbo Teen).

I took the time to get to know the artists, to understand their various specialties and responsibilities, and tried to write my scripts with their requirements in mind. For example, if I knew I wanted my characters to find something hidden in an old suit of armor at the end of the script, I made sure to mention that in the first scene description. If somebody had to make a complex course correction, I’d have them skid off frame then come back in the opposite direction, thus sparing the animators the trouble of having to turn them.

Thundarr kicking-ass in the gladiatorial ring. Ookla hitting other stuff in background.

As a result, not just for Thundarr but the other shows, I’d have artists suggest ideas for gags or bits of business that they knew they could do easily but make look good.

This gave me a bit of an unfair advantage because at R-S the storyboard crew was run by the late John Dorman, a genuine wild man, and the bull pen referred to themselves as The LA Bastards. Nobody else in the studio wanted to deal with them except when absolutely necessary and as a result left them alone, much to everyone’s mutual satisfaction. I was the only writer who took time to get to know them and befriend them and as a result they conferred on me the title of “Honorary Bastard”. Because of this, my scripts were written in a way that they could easily execute them, and as a result of that got more lavish attention than the scripts of others (such as the poor sod who wanted them to draw Turbo Teen climbing a high dive tower, jumping off the diving board, and swimming over to a boat and climbing in while in automobile form).

When studios began to do 85-episode daily syndicated shows, however, the writing and storyboarding jobs changed. As a result the scripts became much shorter and written more like live action scripts: No specific shots or angles, just a master scene that the storyboard artists would then break down.

Giant cyborg wizard Mindok with scientist minions.
Too few super-villains have scientist minions. Has there been degree inflation?

Q: Which industry did you prefer working in: comics or animation?

The most creative control I’ve ever enjoyed was when I was running my own book packaging company and writing scripts for my own line of graphic novels. I could easily write a 90 – 120 page graphic novel script a month, or a regular 22 page monthly comic every week. I’ve never found a market that can keep pace with my output.

Q: Are there programs you find inspirational today, in terms of originality or execution?

I was delightfully astonished at just how well written the Barbie’s Dream House series is. It’s meant for younger girls but the jokes fly so fast and furious that they get a lot of sophisticated material in it. I enjoy a lot of the more character oriented anime series on Netflix, though Kill La Kill is probably the wackiest of the new crop.

Kill La Kill. Note the sword smeared with blood. Now this is a kids show.

But I don’t watch a lot of new TV for the simple reason that I’ve been in the business too long and I see the gears turning. If a character makes a casual reference to a seemingly unimportant item in scene one, I know that’s going to be crucial to the resolution of the story. My wife loves English cozy murder mysteries but I usually have the whole thing solved by the midway point (and on those rare occasions when I’m wrong, my solution is usually better than the one they present).

Lincoln memorial in the far off future of 1994. 

Q: What are you working on now?

Poor Banished Children Of Eve is my YA desert island novel; I describe it as “a WWII Lord Of The Flies with Catholic school girls.”

The Most Dangerous Man In The World: The Lost Classic GI Joe Episode is a upcoming novel based on my version of the origin of Cobra, an episode that had to be scrapped when Hasbro introduced Serpentor, the Cobra emperor.

The Rustlers Of Rimrock is a modern day YA western about four teenage girls saving a herd of wild horses; I’ve finished the first draft and will start soon on the re-write.

The Serenity Christian manga series of stories will be continuing, albeit as prose novels and not graphic novels.

Past that I have a dozen projects in active development, and twice as many more on the back burners. If I never come up with another idea, I’ve still got enough to keep me occupied for the rest of my life!

Off into the sunset...

Thanks so very much for taking a look at these questions. You’re making my inner 10 year old very happy.

I’m glad to hear that, Gene. It means something to us to hear positive feedback from our audiences of long ago!

For more Wisdom of Buzz, check out his website here. 

For more on Thundarr the Barbarian, visit the Thundarr Wiki.

Next week: The Post-Apocalyptic Nostalgia Tour revisits Planet of the Apes. The original! Don't miss it.

Lost was just a great big F.U. to the audience?

"Rick Marshall…
it all makes sense now."

The Independent has an article about Lost: 

"A writer on Lost has revealed what many suspected, that there was never  a plan for how to end the show and each season they would just think of "f*cked up things" to keep it ticking over."

"...How are you going to pay all this stuff off?" And he looked at me and goes, "We’re not." And I go, "What do you mean you’re not?" He said, "We literally just think of the weirdest most f*cked up thing and write it and we’re never going to pay it off." And I look at him and I’m like, "That’s such bullshi*t! You are completely f*cking with the audience."

Figures.

The money quote?

"Nina Hartley [a porn star] jerked people off less than Lost did." 

Sounds so perfect, fits so well, I wonder if the article itself isn't just made up.

The other Lost, the one with the sock puppet dinosaurs, made more sense.

Thundarr the Barbarian: Interview with Buzz Dixon Part I

The opening credits

In the early Eighties, a post-apocalypse children's TV show debuted on the airwaves: Thundarr the Barbarian. He would fight evil wizards, mutants, and robots for two seasons, with the help of his friends Ariel the sorceress and Ookla the Mok:

The year: 1994. From out of space comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, unleashing cosmic destruction! Man's civilization is cast in ruin! Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn. A strange new world rises from the old: a world of savagery, super science and sorcery. But one man bursts his bonds to fight for justice! With his companions Ookla the Mok and Princess Ariel, he pits his strength, his courage, and his fabulous Sunsword against the forces of evil. He is Thundarr, the Barbarian!

Created by Steve Gerber, the show was wildly imaginative and surprisingly dark and atmospheric for Saturday morning TV. Gerber had an eye for talent, and brought in artist Jack Kirby and writer Buzz Dixon to help develop the show.

I interviewed Buzz about his experience working on Thundarr, and he graciously answered my tome of questions. He's as awesome as the show he worked on!

Q: How did you come to be involved in the program?

I had been hired by Ruby-Spears Productions (Joe Ruby & Ken Spears) about a year or so before the Thundarr project began. I wrote a number of short cartoons for them for various programs, typically the back-up segments of shows about various comedic characters. I was during this period that I met Steve Gerber and came to work with him on both the Ruby-Spears shows and on his Destroyer Duck comic.

I forget the exact point of origin of Thundarr as a show, but I know Steve and Joe Ruby had discussed a variety of ideas in the aftermath of a failed attempt to do a Marvel based show (and a good thing it failed, too; it was essentially The Avengers only they were all paired up with funny dogs). I know several other writers had a chance to contribute to the show as well, including Mark Evanier and Marty Pasko (who suggested the name Ookla based on his experience with French college students asking where they could get “Ucla” [i.e., UCLA] shirts).

I was told the show was going into active development and that I would be working on it. The first staff meeting for it was announced, and Steve said he knew a couple of artists whom he thought would be good for the show (Doug Wildey and Alex Toth had already done some basic design work for the presentation; this was to be more along the lines of production art).

Team Thundarr: Ariel, Thundarr, and Ookla

I went into the meeting and arrived before most of the other staff. John Dorman, head of R-S storyboard department was already there talking to an elderly gentleman I’d never seen before. Now, when you hear people say “he had a twinkle in his eye” they typically don’t mean it literally, but in this case the older guy’s eyes literally were sparkling, almost crackling with energy. He was funny and quick and very perceptive and I took an immediate liking to him.

One by one the rest of the staff drifted in and, because they saw me already talking to John and the older man, they assumed we’d been introduced. The meeting started and I was floored by the incredibly sharp imagination the older man had, taking tossed off ideas from us and turning them around and expanding them into something much bigger and cooler. I didn’t know who he was, but I knew he was brilliant and I was delighted to have him on the team with us.

Atmosphere!

He and I struck it off very well at the meeting and began what would later develop into an abiding friendship. When the meeting finally ended his wife came in to pick him up, and he told us he’d get to work drawing some of the ideas we’d discussed. Everyone else went back to their offices.

I went into Steve’s office (he was going to be the story editor on the series) and told him I was really impressed with the older guy but that nobody had ever bothered to introduce us.

“That was Jack Kirby,” he said.

My reaction was something along the lines of “THAT WAS JACK KIRBY?!?!?” Obviously I had heard of him and knew his work, but I had never seen a photo of him before that. Had I known it was him I would have probably been too flabbergasted and tongue-tied to have gotten two coherent syllables out!

So I tell people I was friends with Jack Kirby before I even knew he was Jack Kirby.

Character design by Jack Kirby. Thundarr on the left for size comparison.

Q: Thundarr’s one of the craziest animated shows to come out of the Eighties. It has such a distinctive, atmospheric setting. The Cartoon Network described it as Conan the Barbarian meets Planet of the Apes. Were there other points of inspiration behind the show?

Pretty much anything and everything that wasn’t nailed down. There used to be an ultra-cheap black and white tabloid called The World Weekly News. When other tabloids were reporting about the latest romantic shenanigans of movie and pop stars, they were running articles about mutant bat-boys and pits opening to the gates of hell in Siberia. It was wonderful, wacky stuff and we’d buy an issue each week and pass it around the office to spark story ideas.


Obviously there was a huge sci-fi influences. The Time Machine and World Without End were two movies that helped spark ideas, and I’m pretty sure Logan’s Run was an influencer as well. Joe Ruby and Ken Spears had been story editors on the live action Planet Of The Apes TV series and they had a lot of left over ideas they told us to put in shared with us.

Of course, with people like Jack Kirby and Steve Gerber working on the show (as well as writers like Roy Thomas and Mark Evanier and Marty Pasko and others) plus contributions from R-S own art department (in addition to the aforementioned John Dorman we also had the now legendary Jim Woodring, Thom Enriquez (who helped design Ghostbusters and a host of other movies], and a number of artists well known in the animation field working for us) there was no shortage of ideas flowing in.

Let me give you an example of how creativity works: I’d read a book on the Burgess Shale, a sheet of fossil rock found in Canada that contains thousands of fossilized remains of tiny sea life that has been extinct for over half a billion years. Among these was a little critter called the hallucigenia.

Wizard lair. Looks like the Legion of Doom made it into the future.

We know literally nothing about this organism: Was it plant, animal, something else? We don’t even know which end was up or how it moved (it’s even been suggested that it’s not a whole organism unto itself but rather easy to break off appendages of some other, larger, unknown animal). People have drawn hallucigenia is a variety of angles, and one of those looked to me like an old fashion steam locomotive on stilts.

Well, that got me thinking, and I wondered to myself who in Thundarr’s world would want a train on stilts and why? And that backed me into a story where one of the last old steam locomotives was still being operated, and that backed me into a plot point that could get Ariel, Ookla, and Thundarr involved.

So some little bug 505 million years ago spawned a Thundarr episode.

Hallucigenia: TV show inspiration at its finest.

Q: Thundarr is a barbarian injected with noble ideals set loose on power mad Wizard Warlords. In that sense, his crew is like a post-apocalyptic A-Team, always standing up for the little guy. Wizards are invariably vainglorious, hungry for power and prestige. There’s one episode where a wizard is committing heinous acts specifically to impress The Council of Wizards, an exclusive club to which he’s applying. Thundarr defeats him and the wizard applicant's proud facade is stripped away and his naked want is revealed. Did you try and introduce a moral lesson with each show? Were the wizards meant to represent a particular flaw of character?

All stories have a moral of some sort; they wouldn’t be stories if they didn’t. Writing a story without a theme or moral is just writing a list of events.

Creators can’t help but to put a theme or moral to their story. It will come out in the way they choose to express themselves. R-S did silly short cartoons as well as action adventure shows, and even there you could see the difference in POV between one writer or artist and another.

Insofar as we were doing the show under the watchful eye of the network, and insofar as the network wanted to make sure our episodes espoused some sort of “pro-social value” (to use the phrasing of the time), we tended to have pretty stark right & wrong / good & evil themes.

Every hero has to be captured occasionally. It's the law.

A few years after Thundarr, I wrote an episode of a show called Dungeons & Dragons in which the antagonist, a skeleton-knight, was shown to have a wholly understandable and sympathetic motive that nonetheless put him in direct conflict with the heroes. At the time it was considered somewhat of a breakthrough since he wasn’t depicted as an irredeemable villain but rather a tragic character with flaws.

We occasionally touched on that in Thundarr in episodes where we had antagonists who had been turned into mind-controlled slaves or werewolves, but the big villain was always depicted as evil through and through.

Q: What impact did Jack Kirby, creator of Kamandi, have on its direction?

Huge, huge, and even more huge. With an extra helping of huge on the side. As I said, Jack came in and just started peeling off ideas like a big spender peeling hundreds off his bankroll. More than once we’d toss out a throw away idea or gag, he’s take it, turn it around, expand on it, and hand us back something that we ended up building an entire episode on. (“Treasure Of The Moks” was one incident of that happening; he knocked out a few prop and locale sketches for another story that made us realize we had to do an entire episode set among the Moks.)

On occasion we might have to change something that veered too specifically into Kamandi territory, but that was basically like telling Jack, “make ‘em lizard guys instead of lion guys”. Always a specific visual, never a basic idea.

The only recurring villain in the show: Gemini.
He could turn his head around and be Mr. Nice Guy.

Q: The series is notable for having fun villains, from fire breathing wizards to egomaniacal, disembodied brains, and were occasionally complimented by incidental monsters such as the awesomely silly Grizzly Snake. Which was your favourite?

Though werewolves are an old idea, I think the story we did about a tribe of them preying on other humans was my favorite example of a specific monster I enjoyed writing. (We set the story in the ruins of the nation’s capital as a nod to a low budget horror movies called The Werewolf Of Washington.)

Thundarr as primitive, barbaric werewolf. So the same, but hairier.

Q: The world of Thundarr has always struck me as brimming over with possibilities for adventure, much like Mars in the John Carter books. It’s not as limited as many cartoons of the period were by recurring villains and one static setting. Gerber must have had this in mind when he created the show. Did he also have ideas on where to take the program if it were successful?

We toyed with several ideas that never came to fruition. One was a backdoor pilot in which three young women gain time traveling powers and, after an adventure in Thudarr’s era, go back in time to our era (sorry, can’t remember the episode title right off the top of my head; I’ve written hundreds of scripts and stories and am always thinking ahead to the next one, not the ones I’ve already done). We did an outline for a proposed Thundarr origin movie (the sunsword was a weapon that two galactic civilizations had been fighting over and caused the disaster that destroyed the planet when it fell to Earth; Thundarr eventually acquires it and wields it against all comers).

Possible spin-off characters debut

Joe Ruby asked us to come up with ideas for a future series of Thundarr stories for season three (which we never got to, of course); specifically he wanted to introduce Thundarr’s kids. Steve (IIRC) came up with the idea that Thundarr and Ariel marry and have two children, a tomboy barbarian daughter and a son who follows his mother’s magical inclinations. Three versions of the characters were developed: Toddlers, ten year olds, and young teens.

Joe, typically, could not decide which version to go with. I suggested doing all three versions: Thundarr and Ookla would help Ariel overthrow her evil wizard father, and since she had to stay to run the kingdom, Thundarr reluctantly decides to settle down with her.

Hugs. Thundarr was the Anti-Seinfeld.

The series would be called Thundarr The King, and each episode would open with a scribe recounting a story from some point in Thundarr’s reign. This way we could skip about in the stories, dropping in on the twins when they were little kids or teenagers as the need dictated. Unfortunately, the network opted not to pick up Thundarr for a third season and that was the end of that.

Q: What was in the show’s bible? Did it flesh out the backstory of the characters much? Were there strict rules governing the behaviour or attitude of the main characters?

There was a show bible, but outside of the three characters and the general background of the world, there wasn’t a lot of detail. Doug Wildey, Alex Toth, and of course Jack Kirby did some preliminary art that gave some of the flavor of the show, but past that we were on our own.

Early promotional image for the show. Very John Carter of Mars.

The one consistent thing was that each show had to have some element that kids today could recognize from their world. For example, we turned an aircraft carrier into a floating village by somehow peeling the flight deck off the ship and putting it atop a raft made of huge logs.

Pirate ship of the future: deck of an aircraft carrier, mounted on giant logs.

Q: From an article by Adam Eisenberg: ‘Once a slave, (Thundarr) destroyed the evil sorcerer Sabian and set himself and his fellow men free. Now, in the mixed up world of the future, he travels in search of the other wicked members of the Seven Citadels, hoping to set the humans they too have enslaved free…’ What are ‘The Seven Citadels’?

I think Steve had some background idea of an over-arching series of villain who would have to be encountered and defeated in order for Thundarr to truly be victorious and save the world, but that was Steve’s comic book background. He was constantly thinking ahead, asking himself how we would pay off long running continuities that he’d like to establish.

The truth was, at that time nobody was interested in doing story arcs, much less multi-part stories in Saturday morning. The cartoons could be pre-empted for sports or local programing, when they went into reruns nobody would show them in the original order (not to mention a episode might be delayed because of production problems and so a latter episode moved up).



So while we probably would have come back to Steve’s idea if either the movie or Thundarr The King had gone forward, in the end it turned out to be just one of several hundred (if not thousands!) of ideas generated for the series and put on a back burner.

Let me give you an example of the difference between comic book and Saturday morning thinking: Joe took Steve Gerber with him to pitch the Avengers + funny dogs show to Fred Silverman.* Steve had written short bios of each superhero (including Captain America, Submariner, Thor, Iron Man, Scarlet Witch, Vision), so Joe asked him to describe the characters to Silverman.

Steve decided to start with the one he thought was easiest to explain: Captain America. He started by saying Cappy was a super-soldier in WWII but had been frozen and thawed out only recently, so he was in essence a man out of his time.

Doc Octagon

Silverman looked at him and said, “You know, we ain’t doing Ibsen here.”

* Joe loved dogs, but his parents never let him have one as a kid. He and Ken created Scooby-doo, but after they were forced out at Hanna-Barbera, he spent the rest of his career trying to recreate that success by sticking a dog into everything he did (Ookla may have been a mutt in his mind). Once when his parents came to visit the studio, every writer and artist waited until they had a chance to speak to them alone and each of us asked the same question: “Why didn’t you let him have a dog?!?!?”

UCLA smacks down rat-men. Must be near NYC for rats that big.

Q: Post-apocalyptic fiction often criticizes, or satirizes, our modern day world. I remember watching Planet of the Apes when I was around seven or eight. It started out slow. Then all of a sudden you have half-naked humans being stampeded like animals, being beaten, whipped and shot by gorillas, who only pause to take trophy photos over the human corpses. It was terrifying stuff. As I grew older, I learned that Rod Serling was using the sci-fi format to comment on racism, Colonialism, and man’s general inhumanity to man. It was a very effective lesson. It didn’t traumatize me, but I can tell you I never forgot it. Nothing could justify treating people like that.

And then you have Saturday Morning Cartoons, which weren’t allowed to show someone hitting another person, or even depict a firearm. Indeed, Gerber had some harsh words for the Saturday morning competition: ‘The villains are all very nice people you’d love to have living next door to you, and the heroes themselves are such pansies that it becomes laughable.’ So combat in kids shows was fraught with peril, not for the combatants but for the writers. George Lucas made the villains in The Clone Wars mostly robots so his anti-droidite Jedi Knights could slice and dice them without worrying about censors. Obviously he took the idea from Thundarr, who similarly only cut limbs off robots. Gerber also had to make sure violence in the show was not ‘emulable’, which led to it being scaled up rather than down. Thundarr could throw boulders, for example, but not trip anyone. Yet Gerber intended Thundarr to be grittier than typical Saturday morning fare. Do you think he succeeded, or did the censors ultimately pull the program’s teeth?

It was a constant battle with the suits. When Thundarr was picked up for the second season, the network said they were going to be looking even more closely at the violence in the new shows.

Joe fretted over this since he felt we’d already watered the show down to the point where it was barely exciting. Steve suggested writing a second season opener that would be so violent that even after the network got through with it, we’d have enough left that in all future arguments over violence, we could point to that episode and say, “You let us do that, why not this?”

Ranting studio executive.

Since my episodes had been censored the most for violent content, it was decided I would write the season opener, “Wizard War.” I turned in the most action packed script I could devise. Steve Gerber later told people I was the only person he knew who could write a 45-page fight scene and not repeat himself once. Joe turned green when he saw what I had written, said, “We can’t show that to the network or they’ll cancel us!” and pre-censored the script before it went to them.

They still cut out about 2/3 of what remained but what they did allow gave us precedent for the rest of the season and so we were able to finish the show with the same level of action as before.

Tentacled fortress of Octagon vs...

ABC-TV kept a copy of my script and used it to test new applicants to their Standards & Practices department: If they couldn’t find at least 50 things wrong with it, they didn’t get the job.

I was used as ABC’s official bad example for the next ten years!

...the wizard war machine of Skullus, the disembodied head.
Interstellar Queen, anyone?

Q: I can’t help but note that Ariel would often cast non-violent binding spells around defeated opponents, much the same as Spiderman would wrap his enemies in harmless webbing. Although admittedly Spiderman spent a lot of time clobbering people. Are there a number of common tropes / solutions that writers for children’s shows fall back on to tell their stories without raising censor hackles?

Magic had to be some form of non-supernatural energy that theoretically anybody could use with proper tools and training. No lasting harm on living things (other than vegetation) was permitted. You could harmlessly bind someone, temporarily enslave or transform them, but nothing more than that. Genuine occult symbols and practices were strictly verboten. There were anti-violence censors on one side censoring that, and religious fundamentalists on the other chasing after spooks.

Q: Gerber’s approach to violence seems to occupy a pretty reasonable middle ground: ‘What I would have liked to have seen, however, is a character barbaric enough to be able to defend himself and perhaps even kill when necessary in order to stay alive or to protect his friends from a menace that couldn’t be dealt with any other way. The big thing that we’ve had to overcome is that the censors tend to treat children as if they’re not just morons, but lunatics, potentially dangerous creatures.’

Thundarr necessarily exists in a simplified moral universe. On the other hand, in rewatching Thundarr recently, it was refreshing to root for a hero who had a sense of moral certainty. Someone who wasn’t a narcissistic mobster, Machiavellian bootlegger, amoral drug lord, or constructively directed serial murderer. Has the pendulum swung too far, even when it comes to adult programming?

Weird space gun battery and tiger men.

This is actually a question that leads up to GI Joe, which Steve recruited me to work on. Because of the ridiculous restrictions put on Saturday morning TV, we welcomed the chance to do more hands on action in the Transformers and GI Joe series. We weren’t allowed to actually say we killed anyone in GI Joe, but I made sure in every story I worked on as either a writer or story editor that some main character got seriously hurt and that there was a reference to casualties (which Hasbro never realized referred to both deaths and injuries).

Before working on either Thundarr or GI Joe, I had been a big fan of Japanese animation, in particular the various giant robot shows. They never shied away from killing a character if the story deemed it, and their audiences never seemed unduly traumatized for it.

(Now, as a grandparent, I have to say there is a strong argument to be made for non-violent programming as an option for some kids. We have a granddaughter who has nightmares when she sees Power Rangers, so she can only watch funny non-frightening shows like Lazy Town or Barbie’s Dream House (both of which are surprisingly hip and funny even for adults!). But that is an option, not a mandatory default setting for everyone.)

Converted cruise liner condos.

Perhaps the single silliest example of network thinking re violence occurred not in Thundarr but a show we were developing that wasn’t picked up: Roxie’s Raiders. It was an Indiana Jones rip off inspired story about a young girl running a traveling circus and the various adventures she encountered.

One of the pieces of pre-production art Jack did for this series showed Roxie tied to a stake in waist deep water while the villain unleashed two giant snakes from a cage. The network said there had to be a big rock between the cage and Roxie that blocked the snakes’ vision of her.

See, if the snakes could see Roxie, then the villain was deliberately trying to kill her. But if he just released the snakes in the water and they had to swim around the rock before seeing her, well, that was okay because it wasn’t like he was intending for them to see and kill her…

Roxie menaced by a deadly snake inadvertently unleashed by the well-meaning villain,
who totally didn't know she was there.

Q: Did it strike you as ironic that Thundarr cannot punch anyone in a show that destroys human civilization, killing billions, in the opening credits? Personally I cannot think of a more epic program opening.

“One death is a tragedy, a million is statistics.” -- Josef Stalin

The end of the world... billions die. It's a children's show.

Q: Why the choice to have the world destroyed by a passing planet? At the height of The Cold War, was nuclear war considered too controversial?

Anything related to nuclear energy was verboten: The nuclear industry would complain about anything they perceived as a negative reference while the anti-nuke crowd would complain about what they perceived as a pro-nuclear message.

Clearly, in our minds we saw this as a post-nuclear holocaust world even if we could not say so directly. As mentioned, The Time Machine and World Without End and the Planet Of The Apes movies and TV series plus a host of other movies, novels, and comic books had planted the idea of a post-apocalyptic world in the public mind. The fig leaf we offered the network was that it was a natural disaster and not humans playing with thermonuclear toys that did it.

Q: The show usually starts with Team Thundarr encountering humans being oppressed by an evil wizard and his goons. They drive the villains off temporarily, and the humans explain the reasons they’re being tormented. The team then foils the wizard’s evil plans, freeing the humans to pursue life, liberty, and the post-American way. Did you have tightly structured acts set according to the commercial breaks? How many acts did the show typically have? Did you mix it up?

The network had two commercial breaks in the program, so we naturally fell into a three act structure, each act slightly more than seven minutes (There was about 24 minutes of actual show per half hour, but once opening and closing titles were removed, they left just a little more that 22 minutes of actual story.)

Structurally they were a fairly easy set up, and perhaps we were at fault for not being more conscientious about mixing thing up. The plots pretty much followed the formula you suggest: Introduce set-up, introduce heroes, plot twist that looks bad for heroes at the end of act one; more conflict ending with an even bigger plot twist at the end of act two; hopefully clever resolution of last plot twist followed by our guys triumphant.

We didn’t have that many episodes to do and only had to deliver one a week, so the structure didn’t leap out at us as readily as it did with shows like Transformers where we had to crank out 85 episodes per season and deliver them on a daily basis. With those shows it very quickly became readily apparent when you were repeating yourself too much, thus forcing you to do something different.

Ah, wizard vanity... You just know the license plate reads WIZRD1

Q: Ariel embodies education and sophistication as Thundarr does strength and black and white thinking. Ookla is emotion. Like Chewbacca, he’s a pet dog in humanoid form. Would that be a fair assessment? (TV Tropes is even more specific in identifying Ariel as SuperEgo, Ookla as Id, and Thundarr as Ego, leaving the egomania for the Wizards.) Do you break down characters in most shows along these lines?

I think we instinctively knew that but didn’t particularly over intellectualize it. Thundarr was very much like Conan insofar as Robert E. Howard once described his creation as too stupid to do anything except cut himself clear in the most direct method possible. Had we done either the Thundarr origin movie or the Thundarr The King series, we would have expanded on Ariel’s frustration with Thundarr’s hands on approach to things.

Q: What exactly IS a Mok? A mutated man, animal, or something other?

Ya got me, kiddo. In my mind (and I think Steve’s), Moks were human / animal hybrids created by some wizard. They’re mostly human (say 60%) and the rest is animal of some sort. I’m pretty sure everybody had a different idea, but so long as they remained big strong hairy folk who growled a lot, it didn’t affect the stories.

Q: The show travels all over North America. I believe it even goes as far south as Central America, with one episode featuring Mayan step pyramids. What location did you have the most fun with? Were there any that you wanted to get to but were unable to before cancelation?

It was decided to keep the series in North America since that was the initial audience area. We discussed going overseas but decided it would involve too much travel time. (Not that we would have shown the travel time, but a trip to Paris -- which we once discussed – would have implied a year long journey on foot or horseback.) Yeah, we could have magiced ourselves or used technology to do it, but that kind of went against the grain of what we were trying to do.

Meso-American pyramids doubly abandoned.

I mean, it was a fanciful show, but not that fanciful…

In the end I think it was basically Steve’s reluctance for the characters to travel outside of North America that kept us from using those locations.

Had we done the Thundarr movie, I was going to show football had grown from a sport to a literal religion in Thundarr’s time with a large coliseum turned into a cathedral, referees as priests, and cheerleaders leading cheers with a Gregorian chant cadence (“Rah-rah-sis-boom-bahhhhhh”).

Q: 'Lords of Light' is a catchphrase Thundarr throws around frequently. Was this a reference to Roger Zelazny’s novel “Lord of Light”? In that book, the crew of a spaceship set themselves up as false Gods, until they are eventually overthrown by a rebel named Sam.

Steve came up with that, so I don’t know if he was inspired by Zelazny or not. I tried introducing “By the rancid rubber rectum of Roosevelt!” as an alternative but they rejected that. (You see why I was the most censored writer on the show.)

Guys with guns that don't look like guns. Because censors.

Q: One episode happens at the Alamo, which is put under siege. The human inhabitants have access to powerful technology (very unusual for the progam) which they use to fight off the wizard Crom, who wants it back. They stole it from him when they escaped enslavement at his hands. The episode introduces Time Travel, our modern age, a young girl, an escalator trap, a put upon traffic cop, and a monster snake made out of automobiles. The episode crammed a lot into twenty-four minutes. The pace never lets up. How did you set about plotting these adventures? Were the shows ‘broken’ in the writing room by a group, before you wrote the final draft?

That was the busted pilot, if I recall correctly. I think there was some suggestion given to it being a two-parter but Joe nixed it and we boiled it all down to 22 minutes. It was tough shoehorning everything in, and huge hunks of character development and backstory were wacked off and tossed aside.

The spinoff show trio: Charlie's Post-Apocalypse Angels.

We didn’t have a room in the sense of a sit-com, where one writer or team is assigned the basic chores of writing the script but everyone is expected to contribute ideas, but we frequently kicked ideas back and forth.

Our heroes contemplate the stolen property that defends the Alamo.

Next week: Part II. Buzz Dixon talks about why post-apocalyptic literature is so appealing to young adults, restrictions on TV show merchandising you won't believe, what it's like to work day-to-day on an animated show, and his current projects. 

The man is profilic!