Better It Befall Q*bert Than Optimus Prime

In 1983 Joe Ruby assigned Gary Greenfield and me the task of developing Q*bert as an animated series.

We retreated to Gary’s office wondering how in the hell we were going to do it.

If you’re not old enough to recall, Q*Bert was a popular video game of the era with a unique feature: Based on an optical illusion, the background could suddenly shift orientation, so what was once “up” was now at a 90° angle to either side, and if a character didn’t shift along with it they would fall off the screen.

It finally dawned on us that the video game -- in which the eponymous Q*bert is pursued by hopping coiled snakes -- was basically the same situation as Road Runner vs. Coyote.  Once we cracked that, the rest came easy.  The series would be silent, set in an ever shifting 4-D environment.  We did a four page presentation including plenty of plot ideas and sight gag suggestions so anybody coming after us to work on the show would have a plethora of examples to spark ideas.

We typed it up and walked in to present it to Joe.

Joe took it from our hands and literally tossed it in his trash can unread, saying, “I wanna do Q*bert as Happy Days.”

It may be a good thing Joe
never took the Transformers
when they were offered to him.

I’ve told that story before:
Basically Hasbro walked into the Ruby-Spears offices with a suitcase filled with transforming robot toys, wanting to make a TV series based on them.

I was the giant robot advocate back in those days and it was all I could do to keep myself contained.  As soon as the Hasbro team left, I told Joe, “We have got to do this show!  It’s going to be huge!”

“Nah,” said Joe, “I’ve got a better idea:  We’re gonna do a show about a teenage boy who turns into a car.”

…and thus Turbo Teen was born.

Not long after that I left Ruby-Spears and wound up with many other R-S alumni at Sunbow Productions, working on Transformers and G.I. Joe and many, many others.

Ruby-Spears began a slow spiral into the ground (and to be totally fair, the whole animation industry took a decade long spiral as the syndication market collapsed and a new business model needed to be found).

What would have happened if Joe had produced Transformers?

Good question.

Before going further, let me say everybody who worked for Joe and Ken Spears loved them.  Ruby-Spears was a wonderful place to work and where I made many lifelong friends.  Both Joe and Ken were decent, patient men who were very supportive of their team.

No complaints on that score.

But the company was marked by Joe’s own particular / peculiar creative sensibilities, and the thing was that without Ken in the room to counterbalance him, Joe could get some PrEtTy FnCkInG wEiRd IdEaS.

(And folks, if Buzz Dixon says you have PrEtTy FnCkInG wEiRd IdEaS, you have PrEtTy FnCkInG wEiRd IdEaS!)

The way Joe & Ken worked as a writing team was that Joe would spout off one idea after another and Ken would jot them down, occasionally throwing in suggestions of his own.  When Joe was done, Ken would type up their notes in a coherent form, polishing and editing them so they didn’t seem so totally random.

And hey -- it worked!  Joe & Ken are the guys who co-created Scooby-doo, which simultaneously doomed them at Hanna-Barbera (because no way was Bill Hanna going to tolerate a couple of potential rivals on his staff) and groomed them to run their own studio.  They had the chops to do the job.

But the thing was, they worked best as a creative team.

When they got Ruby-Spears Productions up and running, one of them had to be the business guy, keeping an eye on production schedules and budgets while the other handled the creative end.

If Ken had been the creative producer, he would have done a fine job.  Ken was ever sharp, always insightful, great at breaking creative log jams with remarkable clarity.

But that would have meant putting Joe in charge of the business end and ye gods, if they had done that there would be a still smoking crater where Ruby-Spears once stood.

This is not to say Ken had no input in the creative end, but once where he’d been an effective governor on Joe’s ever racing imagination, now he was reduced to occasionally holding up a “CAUTION” sign and hoping his partner noticed.

The two most popular series Ruby-Spears produced were Thundarr The Barbarian and The Puppy’s Further Adventures.

They were also the two shows where Joe allowed his creative staff the most direct input.

Joe was a bottomless fount of oddball ideas.  Rickety Rocket was a sci-fi comedy that was less Fat Albert and more Amos ‘n’ Andy in space, Mighty Man & Yukk featured a canine so ugly he needed to wear a doghouse on his head lest he cause horrific disaster, while Dingbat & The Creeps featured a trio of monsters based on the 3 Stooges with the Curly-character a fat skeleton!

And don’t get me started on Goldie Gold & Action Jack…

After I left Ruby-Spears, Joe & Ken got involved with some toy based syndicated shows but never enjoyed the same success there they’d found when the company was doing Thundarr and Puppy.

I can’t and won’t pass judgment on those individual series because I never watched most of them and of those I did, only a few episodes, not enough to make a valid observation on the overall quality.

But I have to wonder how much influence Joe tried to have on concepts brought to him by toy companies, and whether Ken was able to steer Joe in the direction the companies wanted to go.

Hasbro, frustrated that most animation studios turned down Transformers (all except Hanna-Barbera, who flat out ripped them off with GoBots), started Sunbow, their own animation company.

We on the Sunbow creative staff knew we weren’t getting any filtered or contradictory instructions from on high:  If our bosses said it, we did it.

And Hasbro, realizing they were now operating in an area where they had no emotional stake in the creative process but had hired (if I say so myself) some of the best talents then available, essentially said as long as the episodes presented the toys in a positive manner, we could do pretty much whatever we wanted.

Holy shamolley -- was that ever liberating!

Could an alliance with Ruby-Spears have worked if Joe insisted on putting his mark on Transformers?

Great question, and I have no hard and fast answer.

I strongly suspect Joe would have pushed for more stories based on the supporting human cast rather than the Autobot heroes.  From prior experience, the shows would be filled with more random bits of business and non sequitors.

That can work with pure comedy, not so much with action / adventure (which is not to say Thundarr lacked random weirdness, but on that show it was easier to blend in).

Would Joe have been able to work smoothly enough with Hasbro for them to do several seasons, or would they have found someone else after season one -- or even the first mini-series?

We’ll never know.

If Joe let his creators have as much input as he did on Thundarr and Puppy there might have been a chance.

…but if not, well, look at Turbo Teen.

Joe and Ken, I love you guys and miss you terribly, but this is one project I’m glad we didn’t end up doing together…

© Buzz Dixon