The Golden Ashtray
Animation 1983—Ruby-Spears
Spring 1983
Before I started working at Ruby-Spears, Joe Ruby (co-creator of Scooby-Doo) had coined the term for a mythical object in the network animation business in those days called the “golden ashtray.” Harriet said it happened in New York after meeting with Erno Rubik to talk about Rubik’s Cube. The golden ashtray was whatever huge license was out there that everybody wanted. Pac-Man had been a golden ashtray a couple of years earlier. ET and Star Wars were golden ashtrays, but they were unattainable. That year, Marvel went in with Dungeons & Dragons and we went in with Q*Bert (a video game).
Mr. T. was a person, but he was also a golden ashtray. He is a giant African-American guy with a mohawk and gold chains who said things like “I pity the fool who…” followed by an action that Mr. T does not want the person to take. He’d been introduced to the world in Rocky III as the self-made hard counterpart contrast with Rocky, who was going soft because of his fame and money. Apollo Creed had to train Rocky to beat this monster. Mr. T then took his image to The A-Team, an action-comedy show.
Our mission was to turn him into a cartoon show. I had little or nothing to do with the early development of the show, but I was very much involved with the execution. I think it was Steve and Marty who developed it, but I could be wrong. Maybe it was Cliff and Elana. Maybe it was everybody.
The premise of Mister T was that Mr. T was a gymnastics coach who traveled around with a bunch of teen gymnasts, a bulldog with a mohawk, and an old lady, and they solved mysteries using their wits and gymnastic skills. It was like Scooby-Doo with Mr. T. in a gymnastics world. It sounds more incongruous than it really is.
Joe Ruby assigned me to the show, and I was invited to my first big meeting in the entertainment business. To this day, I’m not sure I’ve been at a bigger meeting. There were at least fifty people around a giant conference table at the Universal Sheraton. As I recall, there were six writers: me, Steve, Buzz, Cliff, Elana, and Marty. Joe was there. Harriet might have been there, but as a businessperson, she would have been in the “adult area” of the meeting. Phyllis Tucker-Vinson and Winifred Hyde-White ran NBC Saturday Morning. They each had an assistant. Then there were panels of three people representing every ethnic group in the show, whose job it was to read the scripts and look at the art and make sure we weren’t doing anything racist and were providing “positive role models.”
Our show included a Hispanic character, a Native American character, a couple black characters, and an Asian character. Each week our “A” story was solving a mystery and our “B” story was one of the characters learning a moral lesson. Point is, we had fifteen people reading the script to make sure nobody did anything offensive and we were sending the “right messages.”
There was also the “violence” group. That accounted for nine or ten more people in the meeting. Violence divided into two groups. One group concerned itself with imitatable action—that is, preventing a kid from putting a towel around his neck while pretending to be Superman and jumping off his garage roof. The other was generally morally opposed to violence and didn’t want to have anybody, including our villains, do anything to intentionally harm another person. In other words, a character could not throw a chair at another character, but if a character were fleeing, they could knock it in such a way that the other character might be impeded by it and have to use their gymnastic skills to get around it.
It’s obvious that there were good intentions behind this, but once this type of doctrine is actually enforced by humans, it can get increasingly silly and frustrating. Gordon Kent used to tell a story about a script he was working on that involved a pirate ship. Broadcast Standards and Practices (BSP) at the network told him that could not have both a cannon and a cannonball. It was too violent. It’s hard to see how any of this really changed the world for the better. Steve Gerber put it another way: “It’s like they think kids are completely stupid and are all Charles Mansons in training.” Joe Ruby was more practical: “It’s hard to do action and adventure when you can’t have action and adventure.”
The Network Violence Count System worked something like this: You got forty points of violence. Guns, knives, etc. were out of the question. Slamming a door was three or four violence points, getting hit by a wave was one point. Getting hit by a big wave was two to five, raising your voice was a couple points, and so on. Most importantly, as Cliff Ruby explained to me, “You can’t save it all up for a disemboweling.”
Navigating BSP was like a game, but it wasn’t a fun one. The fear object here was a show called Rickety Rocket, which had come out a couple years earlier. Rickety Rocket was basically a parody of Star Trek where everybody was stupid. At the last minute, they decided to make it an African American show, using African American voice talent. The mix was toxic, and the result was extremely racist by all accounts. Interestingly, there was no record of anybody complaining, but Phyllis, who had been an executive on Rickety Rocket, didn’t want to take any chance of that ever happening again.
So, in all fairness, there are no bad guys in the BSP story. There are people with different concerns and agendas that struggled every day to find a middle ground. The problem is that, looking back thirty years later, almost none of the Saturday morning shows of this period (note the word “almost”) left any cultural ripple. Sure, people remember them, but you never see them at cons. Nobody talks about Mister T or The Puppy’s Further Adventures. They came and went and hardly left a skeleton because, at a certain level, they weren’t really about anything. And the more they tried to be about something, the more they were really about nothing.
The eighties, for all of their wonder, were the real dawn of political correctness at exactly the same moment the Baby Boomers were having children. It was called the “baby boom echo,” and there was particular attention to this huge demographic bulge of the children of hippies and yuppies passing through the cultural system. Mommy and Daddy wanted a safe world for their kids, and there was no shortage of pressure groups. Peggy Charren had a group called Action for Children’s Television that focused on this issue.2
And no discussion of eighties censorship is complete without mention of Dr. Thomas Radecki.
2 At one point, Joe Ruby asked Peggy Charren if she’d stop if she got what she wanted. She said yes. And, indeed, she actually did shut down Action for Children’s Television when she got what she wanted.