Fox Goes in High Gear with ACTION MAN

Plus: WB Picks up PJs.

By Steve Fritz     September 04, 2000

There's an old formula in Hollywood: 'If something's successful, do it again.'

That can be applied to the creative team behind Fox Kids' new hit series ACTION MAN. It all goes back to BEAST MACHINES: TRANSFORMERS, which means it all goes back to Hasbro. Hasbro was exceedingly pleased with the sales performance of its toy line based on the BEAST MACHINES and previous BEAST WARS animated series. They called the animation studio that produced both those shows, Mainframe Entertainment.

'So they called Dan DiDeo [Vice President of Licensing and Merchandising] at Mainframe and asked if he could get writers as good as Bob and I,' Marty Isenberg recalls. 'Dan turned around and said, 'Why not just get them?''

The Bob in question is Bob Skir, Isenberg's longtime partner. Not only have the two worked on the Transformers properties, but also the animated versions of X-MEN, GODZILLA, and MEN IN BLACK among many others. Over the decade the duo have developed a reputation for producing incredible amounts of high level animation. No small wonder DiDeo thinks so highly of them.

Another factor was that being a successful partnership allowed them to produce a lot more work than the average single story editor. Hasbro had no problem hiring the two for ACTION MAN, whose origins were very similar to the Transformers to begin with.

'Basically they had picked up the rights to this European toy line, and wanted to see what could be done with it,' says Isenberg. 'Personally, I was fascinated by it. Apparently ACTION MAN is the #1 selling action figure over there, beating out STAR WARS, POKEMON and the POWER RANGERS.

'Hasbro had a basic idea of an extreme sports athlete. Also, they had this idea about someone who had this strange power, which they couldn't quite define. They didn't even have a name for it. At the time, they were calling it the P-Factor, for Probability Factor. They had this evil man called Doctor X, who was out to take over the world, like most such evil men. So they asked Bob and I to better define the Action Manwhat his powers are and such.'

Isenberg and Skir brainstormed with Mainframe and DiDeo for a while. To better handle the workload, Skir took full rein on BEAST MACHINES while ACTION MAN primarily became Isenberg's baby.

'So I started coming up with a back story, developing supporting characters as well as a number of stock things we could expect,' says Isenberg. 'It took several incarnations before we came up with a final outline of Alex Mann and his crew. We also defined his powers as the ability to deduct all the probabilities of doing an incredible feat of action.'

The 'good guys,' as it were, became the following:

Alexander Mann: 'He's the type of person that you wouldn't mind hanging around with,' says Isenberg. 'With his friends he's generous and a lot of fun. He's a winner, but he's not ego-driven. He's never let it go to his head. Most people should hate a guy like that, but he's so relaxed about it you just can't hate him. He also cares about his friend. What we felt was important to establish in the pilot is he would also go a long way in helping anybody. He risked his life saving Brandon. Now Brandon is a fellow competitor and Alex is friendly with him, but they're not friends.'

Fidget: 'Bob came up with Fidget,' Isenberg admits. 'Fidget started male but ended up female. There was a lot of ideas going around the table when it came to her. Ricky actually started as Fidget, but we turned him into the business agent. Fidget's going to be the real break out character. She is wild, uncontrollable, and has such a big mouth on her. Visually she is also the most striking. She's also not afraid of anybody, even Dr. X. She is a very strong female character that I don't think too many other cartoon shows provide.'

Grinder: 'Grinder is totally level-headed, calm and serene to the point of absurdity. He's totally unflappable,' says Isenberg about the character who appears to cross Ringo Starr and Bob Marley. 'Basically, he strikes me as the perfect Gen X-type personality, which is actually very laid back unless you cross it. In doing my research I met a lot of these Gen X extreme sport daredevils and they all had a lot of Grinder in them.'

Ricky St. Clair: 'Now while Grinder is in total control, Fidget is having the time of her life and Alex is the total professional, Ricky is the normal person,' says Isenberg. 'He would react to situations the way we would react. Believe me when I say that if you were in a lot of the situations we will be putting him in, you would panic too. Then again, if you're life is constantly being threatened, you would be panic-prone too. Also though, he always manages to get the best product placement for any licensing deal he's arranged for Alex. In fact, that answers the question of why Ricky keeps on coming back for more; in the ACTION MAN world, Ricky is representing the equivalent of Michael Jordan. The come uppance of Ricky is he's not going to give such a good business thing up.'

From there, Isenberg and Skir got down to the fundamental storyline, the still-undefined power as well as worked with Mainframe on the design. The basic premise is that Alexander Mann, a.k.a. the 'Action Man,' is the top extreme athlete in the world. His main competition, Brandon, starts to exhibit unusual abilities, finally turning into a completely out-of-control metal-skinned monster. With his life being threatened by his former friend, Mann also begins displaying unusual skills of his own. Numbers start flashing in his head, calculating the odds of him doing out-of-the-ordinary stunts. Then he turns around and actually the superhuman feat.

'We will learn over time that there's a lot more to this power than we've initially seen,' Isenberg comments. 'At present, we're leaving it still pretty nebulous. In fact, I doubt that it will ever get fully explained. We will give enough that people will be able to say 'OK, I get the idea behind the show.''

As it currently stands, viewers are being left with the impression that both Mann and Brandon's abilities are due to the aforementioned Dr. X as well as Mann's former high school coach, Mr. Grey. 'Actually, they're two different things,' Isenberg corrects. 'Brandon's powers come from the interference of Dr. X. Alex's comes from somewhere else, but Dr. X knows about it. The other one who knows about it is Alex's old high school coach, Mr. Grey. We'll learn more as the season goes on. We don't want to give away the farm.'

As it stands, X has employed a top-flight assassin to take Mann and his pit crew out. At the same time, Grey has started intimating to Mann he wasdesigned to be a lot more than just the best extreme athlete in the world.

Still, when it comes to an animated series, it takes a lot more than just a good storyline to make the show a hit. The animation is equally, if not even more, important. Fortunately for Isenberg, Skir and Mainframe, the world of extreme athletics gave them a lot of choice grist for their mill.

'The colors of the toy line are also very bright, and it was nearly impossible not to use them,' Isenberg concedes. 'A lot of the background also just comes from the styles of extreme sports, which are very vibrant and sexy. We spent a lot of time going through extreme sports magazines to get the color palette of the world. It really sets the story much more than the writing or anything else about the show.'

The end result is probably the most colorful and high-action series Mainframe has produced since its very first series, REBOOT.

From there, Isenberg, Skir and Mainframe got to work and produced a pilot one-hour special. Aired last May, it did so well it beat all the competition, including going head-to-head against the Kids WB!'s POKEMON. It seems the old Hollywood of doing the same successful thing over again isn't too far off.

According to Isenberg, Mainframe got a contract to produce 26 episodes for the first season. There's also the possibility the series can be picked up for more episodes. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if ACTION MAN does go on for a number of seasons to come. Hasbro, Mainframe, Skir and Isenberg are a very successful team, so there's no reason why not.

WB PICKS UP PJ'S

For those who didn't see the cliffhanger ending of this season's THE PJ'S, don't be too hard on yourself. I nearly missed it too. In what strikes me as a case of total programming pettiness, my local prime time Fox outlet preempted the Eddie Murphy/Will Vernon animated series to air some god-awful teenaged award show which I skipped entirely. If I wasn't up at 1:00 a.m. that following morning (which is when it did air), I would have missed that episode completely. As it was I was channel surfing and missed half the episode anyway.

What I nearly missed was such prime characters as Melvin and Juicy having their own Blair Witch-type experience inside the Chicago tenement building all the characters reside in. The cop Walter and crack addict Smokey were out to trap a group of gangsters, only to have the tableand gunsturned on them. Haiti Lady and Ramon attempted to marry each other in order to stay in the U.S., only to find out neither had a green card. Finally, our star, Thurgood Stubbs, was in a whole lot of domestic grief when his sister-in-law, Bebe, claimed he was the father of a child she was carrying...which didn't sit well with Thurgood's wife, Muriel.

I'll even leak two resolutions to this episode. The first is Smokey, suffering from crack withdrawal symptoms, got so out of hand that he managed to beat up that entire gang as well as their arsenal. The clinic doctor informed Thurgood, Muriel and Bebe that the pregnancy was a false one, but the last scene shows Bebe is pregnant and guess who's the daddy...

The good news is you will see the resolution to all these plot threads. The thing is you aren't going to see them on Fox. The WB Network announced it has gotten the rights to air THE PJ's, and the series will make its debut starting on Friday, September 8 at 8:00 p.m. I don't know about you, but that's the best launch I've heard this series get since its inception two years ago.

And to be quite frank, this series deserves a good air time. Conceived by Eddie Murphy (who also voices Thurgood), this series is one of the most sharp-witted, funny--animated or otherwise--series on television, period. It also includes some of the best stop-action foamation from Vernon (best known for his work on The California Raisins commercials).

By all means, check this series out if you haven't already. It's well worth your time.