Why Gremlin
He was the ruin of the second season. Why did the producers think he was a good idea?
shareThey felt the need to compete with the cute factor of other cartoons. Gremlin was awful and killed the series for good. As far as I am concerned, they made a big mistake by making the stories eleven to twelve minutes long as well. Who thought that was a good idea? I can sort of understand the desire to not continue the cliff-hangers, seeing that it is easy to get lost on what is going on when aired once a week, but to reduce the series to goofy mini-adventures? It's plain weird.
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OK, so what's the speed of dark?
Actually it wasn't Filmation's fault at all - they would've happily continued adapting Alex Raymond's work in the second season and beyond.
Unfortunately, the executives at NBC didn't like that the first season was a serialized story as it made syndication difficult. And sadly for us, NBC ordered that significant format changes occur - NBC wanted the goofy animal character since that worked so well with HB's Scooby-Doo and instead using more of Raymonds great work the episodes were split into to 10/11 minute cartoons.
It's still a bizarre choice. I can understand the cliffhanger format being problematic, but to rob us of goo 25 minute stories was ridiculous. Also, adding cuts stupid little characters showed just how out of touch network execs were with what kids wanted.
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If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?
That was also right about the same time Scrappy-Doo was injected into Scooby's show on ABC. Yes, the brunt of the blame lies with the networks for completely ruining both shows, but the networks were under pressure from parents organizations to clean up Saturday mornings. Throughout the '70s, there were countless sci-fi/superhero action shows. The big parents group (I forget the name) decided that there was way too much violence on Saturday mornings, so they demanded the networks sanitize their shows. By the early '80s the networks completely buckled and started dishing out The Smurfs, The Shirt Tales, The Get-Along Gang, Strawberry Shortcake and a variety of other overly moral, goody-goody shows. Flash Gordon hardly fit into that sort of lineup, so they created Gremlin and significantly dumbed it down.
Just speculation here, but I'm guessing the reason they did two episodes per half hour in season 2 is because of the problems they had rerunning season 1. If an episode of a show got good ratings, they'd rerun it more often (a luxury they never had with season 1). With two episodes per half hour, they could mix and match the more popular segments. I know ABC did that with some of the later Scooby shows; don't remember if NBC did that with Flash or not.