Television Oddities: Inner Tube (1987)

 

Television Oddities title card

Okay! So, my series Cartoon Stars Re-Animated continues apace. But it seems that there's a real lack of variety on this blog. So, I have an idea. Why don't we have a series about TV shows that never happened?! Thanks to the wonders of the internet, we now have access to many things that either were shown only once or weren't meant to be seen at all. By that, I mean failed pilots and pitch reels. Here I will draw attention to the existence of such things, talk about them and give my two cents on why they might have failed to become a series. And I call this series (for lack of a better name): Television Oddities.

I thought I'd start with something fairly safe and familiar . . .

Actually, no, I'm starting off with something that may be one of the strangest things you've seen on YouTube in a good, long while.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jim Henson's Inner Tube.

Inner Tube started as an idea titled In-TV. The basic idea was meant to be an update of the Muppet variety show concept, but with some parody and satire of the then-current state of cable television (it was 1987). The idea is that instead of being on a vaudeville-esque show with a bunch of oddballs, the guest star would get sucked into the TV and would then have to traverse from channel to channel in order to eventually get out. And it would be as they jumped from channel to channel that they would find themselves in the various sketches and musical acts. At the center of the show would be two characters, mechanics Henry and Jake who run their own fly-by-night cable channel out of the back of an electronics shop.

Jake and Henry from "Inner Tube"

A script for a pilot was written by David Misch with John Candy written in as a possible first guest star (no guest star actually appeared, though). Jim Henson had issues with the original script, though. And creative consultant Larry Mirkin called the original pilot “consistently dark, victimized and pessimisstic” and emphasized that it also seemed unfunny. But Jim Henson thought it still had potential and cut down the script to a ten minute pitch reel which was filmed to be shopped around to different networks.

The pitch reel itself establishes the satirical tone right off with an introduction of the “Inner Tube System” by Kermit the Frog (who assumedly would not be in the regular show), selling us the idea that Inner Tube would have “1500 channels so you can find the right channel to match your mood, your IQ, your income bracket and your clothes”. We're also introduced to the mechanics Henry and Jake. The former a younger, thinner, less savvy fellow and the latter older, fatter, mustachioed and with more of a grasp of the situation they're in. There's also a band of characters playing a wonderfully late-80s song which I'd assume is the theme song. And there are three antagonistic characters introduced. One is Crasher, a violent, punked-out fellow who channels his frustration at not being able to star in every show by jumping from channel to channel and literally crashing their shows. Another is Glitch, a msichevious animated glob-like thing that runs from channel to channel and which Henry and Jake seem very concerned with catching (I'm not sure why). And last was Zaloom, a “channel pirate” played by a human actor (or at least his head and hands), who takes over channels to spread his message about the dangers of technology through unusual means (fun fact: Zaloom is actually played by Paul Zaloom, who went on to play Beakman in the kids' science show Beakman's World).

Glitch

One thing I can't help noticing is that with Kermit's whole spiel and Henry and Jake's whole channel-hopping escapade to catch Glitch, the premise of the pitch reel seems to vary from the confirmed premise that's been chronicled online. Instead of two mechanics running a public access channel out of the back of their shop, Henry and Jake seem more like two technicians for the whole Inner Tube System. Perhaps the change came with Jim Henson's tweaking of the pilot into a pitch reel.

The show itself never came to pass. It was pitched to networks like NBC and nobody bit. Henson gave it one last go, pitching it as part of The Jim Henson Hour, now with the name changed from Inner Tube to Lead Free TV. Still didn't happen. The blue screen graphic of the main setting with all the TV screens would be reused for the MuppeTelevision portions of TheJim Henson Hour, and the band's keyboardist Digit would also appear on the show as a supporting player. But that's it.

Digit.  Originally created for Inner Tube, but officially from The Jim Henson Hour

Why did networks pass on it? I don't know for sure, but I can take a coupld of guesses.  For one, a television series that actively makes fun of your product was going to be a hard sell. Even if he only shopped it around to networks like ABC, CBS and NBC, most people were now accessing those channels through cable packages and the networks were benefitting from it. There have been episodes of TV shows that have poked fun at cable, certainly. But an entire series playing off the notion of “cable TV is weird and kind of excessive” probably wasn't going to fly.

Also, well, you've seen what the puppets on this show looked like. One of the unfortunate things about puppets is that they generally seem to fall into the categories of either “cute” or “creepy” with little space in between. And the more human you try to make the puppets, the creepier they seem. These are definitely falling more into the creepy category.

Still, if you can get past that, the pitch reel is an interesting snapshot of a specific time in media technology. The days when cable was king. Nowadays, the common criticism is now that “everyone has a streaming service”. But even before streaming, many of the jokes presented in the pitch reel became outmoded. For example, one of the main jokes seems to be how amazingly specific each channel has to be to justify its existence. But I remember a time in the late '90s or early 2000s when that hyper-specificity was starting to be done away with as cable channels started focusing more on demographic rather than genre. I remember when Cartoon Network started playing live action shows. I remember when the Sci-Fi Channel (later SyFy) started playing non-science fiction programs like the WWE. I remember when American Movie Classics (AMC) stopped focusing on airing classic movies. The days of a channel being focused on something like science fiction are now long gone in favor of being a channel focused on adult males aged 18-35.

Anyway, that's it for the first episode of Television Oddities. I have some idea of what I'd like to do for the next installment. But if anyone knows of a failed pilot or pitch for me to check out, please let me know in the comments.

Next time: more cartoons.