Gravedale High
Pass the Moranis, please.
Ep. 006 is live!
For better or worse, vertical integration and cross market promotion was a standard of the 1980’s. Simply put, if it was something that worked as a cartoon, a toy, a comic book, AND could be slapped on a lunch box...then execs were going to push a creative team to roll with an idea. Sometimes, these properties were so well conceived and executed that they never left our hearts and minds, and find themselves being revisited even to this day. Other times, they were so poorly done that they remain camped out on the outer edges of our childhood memories. This is the story about one of those properties.
Gravedale High premiered on NBC for their fall line up on September 8 of 1990, and only ran for a mere 13 episodes. The genesis for the show was to create something to draft off of the success Rick Moranis had seen throughout the 80s, especially with Honey I Shrunk the Kids. The premise saw Moranis as fish out of water teacher Max Schneider acting as the Mr. Kotter to a monstrous version of the Sweathogs; As opposed to teaching rambunctious and unruly humans, Max would be teaching at a gruesome high school that educated teenaged updates of classic movie monsters. The designs for all the characters were not bad at all, Gill Waterman & Duzer were personal favorites. Moranis was supported by a truly all-star cast of voice acting royalty, including Frank Welker & Tim Curry. NBC had strong marketing for their Saturday Morning Line-up, and there was a McDonald’s Happy Meal tie in. So what happened?
The problem, when it comes to these celebrity driven projects, is that they are often too derivative and disingenuous. Now, can a celebrity based cartoon/saturday morning show work? Absolutely! On the live action side of things, two shows that stand out that were very well done were Pee-Wee’s Play House and Hey Vern, It’s Ernest. I know Ernest only had one season to entertain us on saturday mornings, but it always seemed CBS was kind of a mess back then when it came to programming. And Ernest did get an Emmy, so I don’t know how one argues with that sort of result. Pee-Wee was obviously very successful, likely due to Paul Reubens keeping a fair amount of creative control and his dedication to making it a quality show for kids that combined the surreal and wacky with lessons as well. Cartoons that come to mind with a successful track record in the 80’s and 90s were Camp Candy, Bobby’s World, and Life with Louie. Additional busts that joined the ranks of Gravedale High included ABC’s Little Rosie and NBC’s The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley...yep, that’s a thing that got made. What’s the difference between these properties? Integrity & Originality, that’s what.
Camp Candy, Life with Louie, and Bobby’s World had genuine lessons, thought out storytelling, and it didn’t patronize kids; Gen-X, if you haven’t figured it out...is kind of a cynical bunch. Rather, we’re a generation that learned to be skeptical and shrewd very early. If a cartoon or show seemed like a rip off or talked down to us? Yea, we were out, toot sweet. Gravedale, Little Rosie, and that damn Ed Grimley cartoon show...they just didn’t hit with us. These were three cartoons trying to appeal to kids by using actors that not many kids were familiar with or, at the very least, could give two shakes of a rat’s ass about an animated adventure featuring said actor. Rosie did at least have some adventure and fantasy to it, but Ed Grimley...still not sure how that got made. Gravedale though, should have hit as it seemingly had all the right parts, didn’t it? Well, it may have had many of the right parts, but the end result was a damn homunculus that made Frankentot look like Zach Morris.
In my opinion, Gravedale had three major factors acting as a deficit for the series. One, even with name recognition, it was still very difficult to get eyes on your show; it had to stand out and there needed to be a physical product to aid kids in building a connection with a property. Secondly, parents were starting to get pissed at Saturday morning cartoons. The writing was being written on the wall that these shows we all loved had been functioning as thirty-minute commercials. Change was in the air, to say the least. Finally, this show was derivative and talked down to us; the characters weren’t just archetypes, they were tropes and existing characters reskinned, basically. For me, the greatest afront was Frankentyke. The character comes across as a perfect example of a decision by committee, the result of an exec looking at Frank Welker and saying “yea, do Bart Simpson! Kids love Bart Simpsons, maybe say something like eat my bolts, man...damn that's a good idea.” Needless to say, the lack of originality is likely what did this show in, which is sad; the show had a banger of a theme song, and the character designs were not bad at all.
Though I hate this word, it is applicable: toyetic...the show was toyetic. Just picture it in your mind’s eye...Blister cards with amazing cross sell pics on the back...rushing down the toy aisle to see if they still had Gill, Duzer, or Vinnie. Unfortunately, we never got such a thing. Which is amazing when you consider that two, TWO, Kevin Kostner movies got action figure lines in the 90s. There were, however, the aforementioned Happy Meal toys and complete sets can be found on eBay for next to nothing. No movement has happened with the property...it remains a vague memory occasionally stumbled upon, usually only being thought of when a Happy Meal toy is discovered at a garage sale, or when a forty-something does an episode about it for a podcast.
That’s going to wrap it up for this week’s write up. I hope you enjoy the episode. Please, engage with me and the show, and as always...Thanks, and enjoy!
-Derek
