Toy Masters Episode 3 : The Cartoon (and parent protests)

Previously on Toy Masters. Retrace the origins of the toy line at Mattel who wanted to create something in-house to compete with the likes of Star Wars and GI Joe. Two key players who were there at the time both claimed that the idea came from them, preliminary designer Roger Sweet and product designer and artist Mark Taylor. The toys were about to hit the shelves, complete with mini comics and a carefully constructed advertising campaign helmed by Joe Morrison. But what happened next would put he man on the map and solidify his place in pop culture. From the Boys Adventure Club, this is Toy Masters. Here's writer Michael Halperin on how the animated TV show came about. So this friend of mine said, "Want to come on in and talk to the guy who's the head of male action figures at Mattel?" And I did and we made a deal. And the deal was that I would write what essentially became the Bible for Masters of the Universe. Plus, I would also be the creative consultant story editor for the animated show. They were getting phone calls and letters from children, amazingly enough, who said, "We don't know how to play with the toys. We don't know who's good, we don't know who's bad, we don't know what they're supposed to do, we don't know who their enemies are, we don't know who their friends are. So, they felt that they needed something to give to the kids that would provide those answers." Now, the Bible developed over time with the help of other people, probably the key person who was involved in the male storyline in Masters were Paul Cleveland. And we both agreed that the backstory would incorporate children's appeal naturally. But a lot of mythology, and taking the sword and sorcery notion and bringing that into sort of dungeon and drag, as if you will, and bringing it all into the story and creating sort of a duality in the world in which he, man, and the Masters lived. And the duality was, it's an advanced society with high tech equipment, but at the same time has a sort of barbaric look to it. You're about to hear from Michael Reeves, a phenomenal author, a very funny guy, a wonderful person. Michael was struck with an illness that forces him to speak through voice assistance. So anytime you hear something that sounds like a robot or a radiohead track from OK Computer, it's Michael Reeves. "O several of the other writers that I sat through a meeting where he tried to convince us that this was mythic and conbellion. I really don't mean to be snarky, but the show is called "He Man and the Masters of the Universe." "The decline and fall of the Roman Empire." We wound up meeting with and working with Filmmation and Group W and we struck a good deal with Filmmation to do a 65 episode series. Mattel and Group W were both putting up $7 million to produce a 65 episode series for first-run syndication, which had never been done before. There was all the cartoons that were in syndication at the time. For Fred Flintstone, Common Jerry, all the old cartoons that had been run and run and run. And here was a cartoon based on a very successful already toy line that was going to be on five days a week, first-run syndication against all of these old syndicated television shows. The most powerful man in the universe has come into this nation. He man and the masters of the universe. "Lews Shimer at Filmmation was happy to do it. I don't know if he was happy to do it, but he did and he seemed happy to me. I think he was happy because he used to drink long-eye, nice teas by the picture. I know because I should drink them with him." "Lews Shimer was a legend in the field of animation and passed away shortly after our interview. He and his company were also responsible for the Cosby Kids, no judgment, it was a different time. The Real Ghost Busters, Star Trek the animated series, and Brave Star among many others. Lew was my favorite interview. I knew his signature and his filmation logo from every he-man episode that I watched as a kid and I was a gobsmack to be in his house and his office talking to him. He and his daughter, Erica, whom you'll be hearing from later, were incredibly sweet, welcoming and hilariously entertaining. When Lew would go off on a profanity laden tangent, I'd ask Erica afterward if we should make sure that we not include that due to the illness that Lew had at the time or thinking that it may be his medication acting up. She would just smile and say, "No, no, no, no, that's just dad and I love both of them for their spirit and frankness and character." They just cared about selling toys. I don't even make shit about selling toys. I just wanted something that was good stories. They always wanted to get stuff on the air. So they could sell the stuff. I wouldn't use the stuff they wanted to do. Mattel had an unusual contract with Filmation. The contract said that Mattel had the right to approve all stories. But there was nothing in the contract that said we had the right to approve all scripts. So even though we had stories that I might say, "This works, let's go forward with it," they could write any script they wanted. I wouldn't use the toys that I didn't like. They came up with a chest once, hoping up the chest and big things come out. I said, "You show that to a kid, you're going to end up at night screaming. You can't do that." Here's Larry D'Itillo who has also recently passed. Larry was a very sweet guy and he wrote on the "Heman Animated Show" and was instrumental in developing its follow-up, Shira. In one of the meetings that we had at Mattel, somebody said, "Well, we got this new toy and we want to feature it in one of the upcoming scripts." And the toy was kind of like a catapult and it had a big ball on the end of it that would just come over and they said, "And we call it the ballbuster." Now I thought Lou Shimer was going to go skeletor on them. Lou said, "We will put the toy in the show, but there's no way in hell that we are going to call it the ballbuster." This is Animator Tom Sito. Mattel was constantly sending over new designs. After a while, we wondered if those guys were high or something because they just with Sunny's strange characters, they took the "Heman Dawn" and put an "Elephant Head" on it. Then they had the guy with the two big maces for fair and we're like, "Are those guys like Svunk and something?" No, they're like, "It's a really weird stuff coming with it." The toy company always says, and people have said that to my face, "We consider this a 30 minute toy commercial." And I would say right back to their face, "Well, I don't consider it a 30 minute toy commercial. I consider it a 30 minute story that I'm telling." And when your toy becomes, goes on the screen and comes to life, it's no longer a toy, it's now a person. And I have to treat that like it's a real person. No matter how many times you run the toys across the screen, that's not what sells them. What sells them is the fact that the people like the characters and the stories are compelling. And then you sell toys. Lou Shimer's daughter and voice actress on the show, Erica Shimer. Mattel didn't understand the need for humanity. And that's what dad really did. He put humanity in all the shows. One thing Lou, what Lou Shimer and the producers were adamant about was that it all be done in the United States. And Lou was beloved in Hollywood animation for that. The people who went overseas fucked us. Because what they did is they turned around, they got stuff done fast and cheap. Lou Shimer was always very proud of the fact that he was able to keep production in America. So to do that, he had to do a lot of the stock footage that would be done for action sequences with he man. So when he man lifted up a rock, they would do one really good sequence of he man lifting up a rock. Then every time he man needed to lift up a rock, they'd go back and get that same footage. Every storyboard artist was given this pocket pal, which was like this little kind of like Xerox cards of all the different stock scenes. So when he man, you'd have walking from the left, walk from the right. The standing mandate we would give in the story department was 35% of every show had to be reuse. Had to be from other materials. My favorite was stock 16, which was he man laughing. That's what he man goes like this. I think I did one of the last shows, greatest show on Eternia. I tried to put in stock 16 so many times I got annoyed. So like every other shot I had, he man going, and I figured how many times can I do this before people scream? So at this point, animator Tom Sito does a reared back laugh. You can sort of picture it because it's famous to those familiar with internet culture for the popular video of Prince Adam singing What's Up by For non-Blonds. That's what he's doing here. Here is a legendary voice actor Alan Oppenheimer, no connection to the atomic bomb as far as I can tell. Who later did the voice of Falcore in the never ending story? Now we tried to also get interviews with John Irwin, who played he man and Melendi bread who played Sheera. Erwin doesn't like to appear on camera because it feels it takes away from the the famous character that he gave life to and that basically seeing a middle-aged guy would be a disappointment after hearing him as he man. That's disappointing but understandable. As for Brett, Melendi Brett wanted to be paid and at one point even pretended to be her own agent on the phone asking how much we could give her for appearing on camera. She was by the way the only person who we approached who asked to be paid for an interview. Meanwhile the screen actors guild warned us that Alan Oppenheimer, the voice of Skeletor and Man in Arms and all those characters, could only appear if he didn't do any voices. So we made sure that we didn't ask him to do any voices. We were very careful about it. And of course, because he's a cool guy, he just launched right into them, unprompted. He didn't care about being paid as much as the screen actors guild did. So as an aside, the screen actors guild and Melendi Brett can get lost. But I digress. The SIO addition for them as three parts. Skeletor, Man in Arms and Cringer. Holy Shorco, this prison has been magic. Proof. None of your pitiful little smells will work on it. Now if you will excuse me, the general and I have plans to make for the conquest of Etenia. They would show you a sketch of all the characters. And you'd look and you kind of identified with it. It was a very strange. It's extra sensory in a way. Cringer is a, he's a, he's a, he's a cowardly, he's a cowardly. And then I had a ferocious after that. Well Skeletor, if I came up with this voice, I have no idea where it came from this, you know. I don't get you. What's his name? He-man. He-man, thank you. That's the name of it, isn't it? I don't get you, he-man. I have no idea where that came from. Oh, mer-man, yes, that's right. Mer-man, that was like that, he was talking, he got the water, the water, the turn. Some people have to do this with, I just get a lot of stuff about throw and talk like that. Oh, yes, he, man. I did have the three characters and sometimes I played five characters. And it was great fun because I could talk to myself. I was very facile in switching back and forth. In other words, I could do man-it-arms and then I got right into Skeletor and back to man-it-arms. And Shimer was in the booth, I couldn't believe it. I remember the first time I saw ten minutes of human animation on the screen at that filmation. I saw he met on the screen talking and moving as an animated character. And I just said, can you do it again? I was just floored. I knew the stuff we did was good. The people who did it loved doing it. We had a sales projection for a $65 million. The show went on the air in September and we wound up shipping $11 million in 1983. A real breakthrough, dramatically changed kids' television, changed the marketing of boys' toys. The show itself was hugely profitable. On a $7 million investment, the show earned $50 million in the first four years. They made a lot of money. I don't dislike them. They didn't care about kids. That's what pissed me off. The question was always the same. You're just trying to sell toys. I said, we wouldn't survive if we were just trying to sell toys. It has to be successful and entertainment. So here's one of the heaviest hitters that we got to talk to. Jay Michael Strzinski. Frankly, there was no reason why this guy should have even talked to us. He went on to create Babylon 5, wrote some amazing comic book runs, including Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and before Watchmen. He wrote the screenplay for the hit film The Changeling, and he co-wrote World War Z, and wrote the story for Thor, and also appeared in the film. Every time I write him, he gets back to me immediately and is super friendly, despite how intimidating he is in person, which befuddles him when I mention it to him. He crystallizes so many points in the story better than anyone else. So, pay attention. What people love to understand is that he and me created this indicated market, and he and me for the very first time created a half hour of virtual programming at the time when it was dead. And in a way, it's not that unusual a thought. You go back to the early history of television. Many shows were paid for by sponsors, everything from makers of detergents to cars. So it's not that far, you know, a shot away from what was done 50 years ago. There was a real blurring between product and show. What space went through? What do you buy the checkerboard super cereals? They'd actually do commercials in the body of the show for the product, basically having items used in the show that would then be, you know, premiums for if you bought, you know, nestles quick or whatever. And over the years, as we went from the 50s into the 60s, this became extremely found upon this blurring of show and product. You see, in the 1960s, the FCC once used to lay down like solid guidelines about children's toys. There was a show called Linus Delayan-Hearted. They used to put those on the cover of children's cereal, this serial called Alphabet. And the FCC came down on them and said, "You can't have characters and products in the same show. You have to separate." That was 1966. Then in the 80s, Ronald Reagan came in and entore up all the rules, you know, and said, "Do whatever you want." And there was this explosion of merchandise-based programming. Those who say that somehow, Himan was unprecedented in its tie to a sponsor or a merchandise person or a corporation are completely bone-headed when it comes to the history of television. Himan was a star, like a star in kids' life. They wanted to see him. Himan! Himan! Himan! Himan! 14 of their mighty friends and foes come together live for the first time. We went down to Gold's Gym. We made an appointment. So we hired a guy to be Himan. He had a long brown hair. We got him to lighten it a little bit. He made a few appearances for us. They got to where he wanted more money and more money and more money. And we said, "Bye-bye." So we came up with the idea of the rubber suits. The retail merchandise or lady would get her trunk there. She'd hire the college students to wear the costumes. They had, evidently, going out and hired a skinniest speed freak surround and dressed them in what I could only describe as skin suits. It was as if they'd played both characters and put these poor guys in them. It was like a cartoon version of silence of the lambs. She'd rehearse them once and they go off to them all. Or the Toys of Us or wherever it was that they were doing the personal appearance and they were being mobbed. There would be 10,000 cars that have to close the highways. I mean, we got calls from the state troopers down there saying, "What are you guys doing? What's going on? You got to stop this, get, stop this event." Everybody started to try and do it. I mean, it was a phenomenal hit. We met with the group that did, wound up doing thunder cats, which was an imitation. They came down and met with us. We explained what we were doing and what kind of deal we were looking for. They walked out in the parking lot and said, "Hack, we can try and do that ourselves." They went off and did themselves. They went with the thunder cats and a lot of other shows that came on after that. We had quite a number of protests from parents and parent groups. As a result, filmation was very sensitive to this sort of stuff. We had a child psychologist named Dr. Berry. Dr. Berry would look over scripts and look over storyboards and basically would send you these memos on pink paper. We had all these very specific rules about how violent we could get with the show. I had one where he and his attack by some creature. I don't even remember the creature. He pulls a tree out of the ground and beats him with it. Then I get this memo from Dr. Berry saying, "He man cannot kill a tree." The tree was dead. It's a log on the ground. He's picking it up. By doing so, he's recycling and cleaning the environment by beating this thing. We don't want this to be anything a kid can do himself. We don't want anybody jumping off a roof. We don't want anybody shooting at a person. We don't want. There's a whole list of things that you could not do because they were so worried about having something that a kid would do on his own. I think most kids can tell fantasy from reality. There's always a crazy kid out there. There's always one who says, "Oh, I learned how to do it. I learned how to blow up this building from watching the Twilight Zone episode." Well, yeah, but that kid was crazy to begin with. We did have a lot of bad publicity from action for children's television, Peggy Charenes. The group that they were thrown in our side, the minute the show was announced, they promptly denounced it. They said, "Oh, this show is violent and terrible. It's a terrible show for children and it just should not be on the air." Now, no one had seen even a single piece of footage. All this chat about he-man. He-man is going to be this terrible violent show. And we all were like going, "How's anybody seen it?" I mean, it is so not violent. It was really funny at the time because West house owned a filmation and they were getting a bunch of grief about this show. He-Man, you know, and meanwhile they had the MX-7 missiles that they were putting in all the silos and like Dan Richey, the guys going, "Man, this is really crazy. We're getting more trouble from this He-Man show than we are from our missiles." Granted, there was a lot of action in the shows, but you see more violence in a Daffy Duck cartoon from the '40s and the '50s in eight minutes and you will see an entire episode of He-Man. He-Man was in the news, it was a top-rated show. It brought out to cultures, like ACT and the various consultants who came along and used it to exploit the show and the producers and the kids, by the way, for their own purposes. I have nothing but a attempt for them. Joe and I used to do panels and stuff on, you know, the anti-violence people and say, "You're in the middle of wars. You're showing them every night on TV." You know, that's violent. That's real violence. That's harms kids. Their daddies are going overseas to die and fight for stupid reasons. I said, "That's what we should be against." And not silly cartoon stories. These consultants who worked in kids' television got paid a lot of money to give advice, always wrong. The ultimate refuge for cowards is the hide behind the children. Where I say, "I don't like something. I don't think you should be doing that." But I don't say that out loud. I say, "No, for the children, you shouldn't be doing that." Let's protect the children. And this gun was used against us repeatedly by those who had their own personal and political agendas to forward. It was so controversial and ACT was so effective that the Congress called a hearing. Mattel took this dead seriously and we had our Washington lobbyist that I flew to Washington and spent a day prepping for this hearing. And half the time that I would answer a question, I would never get an answer out because we would immediately interrupt it so that the cameras would turn to them and they could proceed to excoriate me and obviously get airtime. As a result of the protests, the FCC passed a regulation saying that if you were going to do a television show based on a toy, you could not embed commercials about the same toy in the show. We did from time to time get letters from people complaining that we were advancing the cause of Satanism. I'm Gary Greenwald and over the past several years, the EGLE's Nest Ministries has exposed certain things like rock and roll music, dungeons and dragons, marijuana and even the new age movement. And now we feel there's another attack upon our society. I am not a card carrying Satanist. I left a group years ago. It's foolishness. Whether it's political religious, there are always those who are the capitalized on a show because it's easier to attack the symbol of a thing than to attack the thing. Take for instance the cartoon like he meant a master's of the universe. We're seeing a vast effect on the whole United States and other countries around the world through these cartoons and toys. Millions of children are watching a cultic cartoons and then going out and buying a cultic toys. I was very upset because everything that we were trying to do from the producers to the writers to the people drawing it was all about upholding values that everyone thought were important family values. So when people said this is a story that's about demons and it's demonic and it's magical and it's frightening. Well if you look at grim story tales, those are some of the best teaching tales in the world about how to treat one another with love and with kindness and compassion and how to deal in a world that is frightening. And if you have to think about what life is like for kids it's very frightening. You have no power over who you are. And that's what they liked about these characters is that they made choices to do something about what they saw was evil in the world. Isn't that the message you want to give your child? I was dating a girl at the time and I went to a party and her ex-husband was there when they found out that I came up with him and they thought that was just terrible because it was demonic. And I said nobody ever gets killed and the good guy always wins. But that wasn't enough for them and this woman's husband verbally attacked me quite heavily. I think they're all wacko, that's what my thoughts are. You know if you look for something to criticize in terms of religion you'll always find something. I think they're crazy those people. It's entertainment. Now no masters of the universe story would be complete without Shira. And this is how all of that came about. In a moment the new voice you'll hear is author Barbara Hambly who will tell us a little bit more about Mattel's legal cunning. Toy companies work in, there's boy toys in this girl toys and never the toy and she'll meet. But we had plenty of female fans, they loved their show. So they said well well, well let's do one for women. Now female toys action toys are hair play. That's what they are. They're all hair play. They don't come with swords, they come with brushes and combs and pretty dresses that you can change. They gave me this group of mainly cheerleaders you know to make a show out of. I wrote a sword and sorcery fantasy novel about a band of women warriors whose leader was named Shira. SHERA, send in the manuscript to Delray Books. They accept it, it goes into production. A week or two after it comes out. I get a letter saying we would like to talk to you about buying the rights to the name Shira. At that time I did not know that the Mattel spin off from he man was going to be Shira princess of power. So Mattel basically wanted to buy the rights to the name Shira from me. I referred them to my agent, she got this watertight contract. It was like meeting for an exchange of hostages. I met with this lawyer at some place up in the valley. I was signing the contract at the exact instant that he was signing a check for $25,000 and we passed them back and forth across the table simultaneously. And the minute we did that I said, "This isn't because you think I'm going to sue you. This is because you think one of your competitors is going to buy it from me and then turn around and sue you." And he said, "That's it." Shira was not in the original Bible. She had no place in it. There was absolutely no mention of her. There was no indication that he had a twin sister. It didn't make sense. I wanted to create a character that could not possibly license or merchandise. I thought it's a beam of light. You cannot possibly make a toy out of a beam of light. So I created the light hope which is the voice of Shira, the voice of wisdom. I like to think that maybe if without Shira there would have been no Zina warrior princess. It seems like everything was going well. But we knew that something happened at some point because the original he-man did certainly die. So what happened? What ended the biggest selling voice toy in history? But that is for next time. Next time on Toy Masters. So we shipped millions and millions of dollars worth of he-man characters into the retail market. They got on the pigs and stopped. They got dusty.