Back when Joe Barbera passed away, I posted the following anecdote about him...
One day, Barbera was in a network meeting proposing idea after idea for specials, tossing out jokes and concepts and ideas with machine-gun precision. Finally, as the hour grew late, the network guy said, "Okay, we'll buy two hours," and Barbera quickly left. That's how you sell. When they say yes, you get the hell out before they have time to think it over and take it back. So J.B. got the hell out and an hour or two later, the guys from the network called over to H-B and said, "Uh, this is embarrassing and we are going to honor the commitment — but there were so many ideas flying around that room. Just what was it we agreed to buy?" And of course, the punch line was that Barbera wasn't sure, either.
A reader of this site named Joe Wilson, who I assume is not the one wed to Valerie Plame, wrote to ask if I knew what the two shows were that resulted from that pitch session. I do. They were two live-action super-hero comedy specials that ran on NBC in 1979. They were done while I was working for the studio but I had nothing to do with them except that Mr. B., aware that I knew a little about the comics, occasionally stopped me in the hall to say, "Wait'll you see the costumes." I did glimpse the gent in the Hawkman suit one day as he posed for photos in the parking lot and it was pretty darn impressive, at least in person.
Actually, some of the casting was rather amusing. Howie Morris (under tons of make-up) was an inspired choice to play Dr. Sivana, the arch-nemesis of Captain Marvel...and I thought it was funny that Charlie Callas so closely resembled the Green Lantern villain, Sinestro, but without any make-up. The performance of Frank Gorshin, re-creating his role as The Riddler, affords a very nice example of what actors sometimes call "subtext." In this case, the subtext of what Gorshin did would be something like, "Just give me my check and get me out of this mess." And that's my friend Jeff Altman playing The Weather Wizard and Gary Owens doing the narration.
The first of the two specials had the super-villains running around, trying to kill the super-heroes, and it first aired on January 18. 1979. Here we have ten minutes from that special, which is probably all you need to see...
The second special, which was shot at the same time as the first, aired a week later...on January 25, 1979. It was hosted by Ed McMahon in a "roast" format, not unlike what Dean Martin was then doing. It's at least weirder than the previous entry so that may make it more enjoyable to some, I don't know. This excerpt gives you a little more than seven minutes from that show, but the first two minutes are substantially the same as the above clip...
These shows make the rounds in bootleg videos but pristine file copies probably still exist somewhere in the Time-Warner vaults. If you ever hear that they're putting them out on DVD, you'll know that absolutely everything else in the Time-Warner vaults that could possibly be released on home video is already out and they got desperate for New Product.
