“Seth” — who I assume has a last name but he didn’t tell me what it is — wrote to ask…
I also watched the Pee Wee documentary this weekend, and reading your thoughts got me thinking about two questions for you:
1) The recollections on the doc about how Saturday mornings were the “wild west” and that they could get away with so much material seem very different from your own battles with Standards and Practices. Any thoughts about why the Playhouse team had such a different experience?
2) Thinking about Gary Panter and the 80’s-90’s underground comics (comix?) movement, that isn’t an area that you write a whole lot about. Were you interested in those books at all? Any favorites? Anything you currently read?
Peewee’s Playhouse was on CBS for 45 episodes that aired between September of 1986 and November of 1990. Overlapping those years, I wrote, voice-directed and co-produced 121 half-hours of Garfield and Friends for the same folks at the same network. I had — and I am stating this clearly and with no ambiguity — absolutely no real problems with the network or the Broadcast Standards ‘n’ Practices people. I heard from the BS&P department maybe twice a season, always about something minor, always about something that was fixable in two or three minutes of unheated discussion.
For example, I once had a joke about a character eating something doused in Tabasco Sauce and the Standards guy called up and said, “That’s a brand name. Could you change it to ‘hot sauce?'” Fine. I changed it. I know writers who feel compelled to die on every hill for every battle but my attitude is “Save your ammo for when it really matters” and that never became necessary on that show.
The changes they requested were few, far-between and no more injurious than that. Once in a while, there was a problem because a storyboard artist would put in something as a joke to amuse others in the office. He knew it would be cut out but the crew at BS&P called to make sure. (And I know this will sound like a George Carlin joke but I kept thinking that “BS&P” were two things you couldn’t have characters doing on a show for kids.)
So the answer to your question is that the people in charge at CBS then were smart and reasonable and courageous and I’d like to think that had a lot to do with some very high ratings for most of their programming then.
I did have problems galore with the “standards” people at NBC and ABC. I think I’ve told some tales here about a lady at ABC who felt it was her mission in life to remove everything funny and the whole concept of kids thinking for themselves from Children’s Programming. I also came to realize that some of the hassles I was having on shows were the fault of the animation studios that employed me.
They were often too quick to give in to network demands. At one point, I was simultaneously story-editing an ABC Saturday morning series and writing for an ABC prime time series. On the latter, when BS&P demanded changes, I could usually talk them out of 90% of those demands. I could talk them out of their demands on the cartoon show too but then I’d discover that a producer who shall remain nameless (it was Bill Hanna) had already made the cuts and changes for which they’d asked.
That did not happen on any show I did for CBS after around 1983. It didn’t happen with Dungeons & Dragons. It didn’t happen with The Wuzzles. It didn’t happen with Mother Goose & Grimm. It didn’t happen with Pryor’s Place or all those CBS Storybreaks or a few other shows I worked on for CBS. So there’s your answer: Smart people at the network. I know it sometimes may not seem like there are such human beings but there are. Sometimes.
As for underground comix: I have crates of ’em from back when they started. Liked some, didn’t like others…which, of course, was just about everyone’s reaction. A lot of them, I think were very much products of the time in which they were done, which is not a real negative. I just haven’t been tempted to reopen those crates for a couple o’ decades.
I don’t know that the term “underground” applies today because we no longer have the situation where a couple of publishers — DC, Marvel, Harvey, etc. — have the stranglehold those firms then had on the marketplace. Nowadays, there are countless publishers putting out graphic novels and comics that present individual, personal statements by individual writers and artists…and to me, that’s all underground comics ever were: A marketplace via which people could write and draw freely without conforming to someone else’s idea of what they should write and how they should draw — and they could even retain some or all ownership of their work. And today, I like some and don’t like others…which is how it always works.
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