SUPERTED, Episodes 1 – 3 (5 out of 10) –Created by Mike Young; Starring Derek Griffiths and Jon Pertwee; Originally aired October 10, 1983.
Doing this column every Saturday means that I have to find a new cartoon to watch every week. I haven’t yet exhausted all of the cartoons I’m familiar with from my youth but I try to mix it up with stuff I’ve never heard of. Sometimes that means that I find undiscovered gems like “Count Duckula” or “BattleTech,” and sometimes I find “SuperTed.”
Let me be clear, “SuperTed” is not the worst cartoon I’ve come across during my adventures in animation, that honor probably goes to “The Legend of Zelda” but it is one of the weirdest. The opening sequence explains Ted’s origin; he was created in a Teddy Bear factory but was singled out as anomalous and faulty, and subsequently discarded to a dusty storage room. There he was discovered by a spotted alien (Jon Pertwee) who brings the previously inanimate stuffed toy to life using “cosmic dust” (Thank Crom he didn’t waste a regeneration on this). The alien then takes Ted to a magical cloud where Mother Nature, an embodied being, gives him a spoonful of some bubbly concoction imbuing him with super powers, including, apparently, the ability to remove his skin revealing a super suit underneath along with a second skin. I told you it was weird, and that’s just the opening sequence.
In each episode Ted fights for what’s right against his nemesis Texas Pete and his gang, an idiot and a skeleton. The episodes are only seven minutes long, at first I thought I’d give myself a pass and do a short episode this week but then I got sucked in and had to watch three in order to give you all a fair assessment. Spoiler alert: it stays weird.
In the first episode, titled “SuperTed and the Inca Treasure” Ted and Spotty investigate an Incan temple in order to protect its sacred treasures from the villainous hands of Texas Pete and his nefarious band. I’ll just let you watch it to get a feel for its particular brand of strange.
The series was created by Mike Young who created the characters as stories to tell his son in an effort to help him get through his fear of the dark. Those stories became a book series and eventually the cartoon I present to you here.
Helping your kid get over their fear is an admirable goal but I can’t help wondering if that kid was left with more questions than answers like, why is the spotted alien, the overweight guy, and the skeleton called Spotty, Bulk, and Skeleton respectively? That’s essentially like calling someone Red Skin or Blackie, which just feels racist no matter what planet or plane of existence you hail from. I mean at least make it across the board and call their leader Texas Chin since, in this world, names apparently come from someone’s most obvious visual feature.
In “SuperTed and the Pearl Fishers” Texas Chin is back with Lard-o and Bones to steal pearls from the hard working indigenous folks off the coast of a chain of islands. Remember how I mentioned in the last paragraph that certain elements of this show seem racists… yeah.
Also, what seems to be the obsession with aggressive apes, maybe there’s something there.
Finally I’ll leave you with “SuperTed and the Stolen Rocket Ship” wherein Bear and Blotch chase Marrow, Fatso, and The Mandible in a stolen rocket ship on their way to Andromeda. This episode poses important questions like, does a skeleton need a space suit to survive the vacuum of space? Or, is it ethical to cut off a person’s air supply and send them flying off into the abyss?
How is it that these people were able to construct an interstellar space craft but have no security protocols to prevent its theft?
Also, what exactly was wrong with Teddy? Was it that he can rip his skin off? And what the hell is his secret magic word, he keeps saying he’s going to say it but never does, not so much as a whisper. Perhaps Mother Nature gave him the power of ventriloquism, ya know… right after the skin thing. And while we’re on the skin, we always see him zip it off but never see it put back on, are there just piles of discarded fluffy skins laying all around this world marking the territory of one magical bear like a super creepy trail of bed crumbs? We may never know. It’s probably best not to think about it.