It’s interesting to see which 80’s toy properties get picked up from the dustbin of history, brushed off, and turned into popular remakes. On the surface, at least, there’s no obvious reason why Transformers gets turned into massive blockbusters while G.I. Joe gets a couple of middling films. Why did a She-Ra remake get so much more cultural attention than a couple of He-Man series? Obviously, a lot of the relative success of some of these properties go into the individual creatives behind the push, I think Michael Bay has a bit more going for him as a director than … (checks IMDB) oh, really, Stephen Summers? That’s a shame. But then Kevin Smith was behind the He-Man remake for Netflix and he’s much more known than Nate Stevenson. It’s not always as obvious as it seems.
Which brings us to The Glo Friends, a line of glowing bugs and assorted other toys put out by Hasbro subsidiary Playskool. The original glow-in-the-dark cute little worm was put out in 1982, became something of a phenomenon, and was followed by a bunch of other insects and animals collectively known as The Glo Friends. As seems to have been the practice, a holiday cartoon special was produced to advertise the existence of the toys, after which a series of cartoon episodes were produced. In this case they were fifteen-minute segments paired with an existing cartoon series, ‘My Little Pony ‘n Friends,’ in 1986. The My Little Pony cartoons were also fifteen minutes in length and were previously paired with the series ‘MoonDreamers’ and ‘Potato Head Kids,’ all lines of Hasbro toys. Interestingly the Glo Friends had the occasional ongoing storylines that threaded through multiple episodes, such as the 10-part storyline ‘The Quest’ and the 4-part ‘Glo Friends Meet the Glo Wees.’
I’m not going to go into the various histories of My Little Pony and the explosion in popularity its modern remake has caused because it would take over the entire review, but we again have an example where there’s no obvious reason why one continues to be a cultural touchstone but the other has been almost completely forgotten. Both feature large named casts which existed in toy form, eminently collectible in nature, both star slightly anthropomorphized creatures, and both are Hasbro toys lines. I would argue that the difference comes down to My Little Pony targeting a more specific, slightly older demographic, namely girls from roughly five to twelve, while the Glo Friends topped out at just above toddler level, and that also horses are much more appealing than insects that, while cute, are still insects. Also, never underestimate the fervor and intensity of horse girls.
The production team was made up of some heavy hitters. The American side was handled by the partnership of Sunbow Productions and Marvel Productions. They collaborated through much of the 80’s on properties such as the aforementioned ‘Transformers’ and ‘G.I. Joe: a Real American Hero’ cartoons, ‘Jem and the Holograms,’ and others right up until ‘The Tick’ in the 90’s, after which Sunbow’s ownership shuffled around a few too many times and it got included in a bankruptcy filing. Marvel’s done all right for itself since then. A lot of what we consider to be the 80’s look of animation was established by either this company or Filmation. The Japanese production side, the part the produced a lot of the actual animation, was done by a little company called Toei Animation, who’s done a few things of note. I like to think that animators wrapped up work on the last episode of ‘The Glo Friends’ and then shifted over to work on this hot new thing they just started called ‘Dragon Ball.’
Terry Lennon is listed as the ‘supervising director,’ which must have some technical meaning I’m unfamiliar with, and his name is all over the rest of Sunbeam Productions’ series, as well as some Warner Bros. stuff in the late 80’s and early 90’s. The writer is George Arthur Bloom, who started way back, writing for variety shows and specials in the 60’s and 70’s before shifting over to cartoons in the early 80’s. It’s nice to see a list of credits diverse enough to include both ‘The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast of Sammy Davis Jr.’ and ‘Curious George.’
The voice cast is where the big names are. The secondary cast is played by the usual murderer’s row of vocal talent, with The Moose being played by Lorenzo Music, Frank Welker as Glo Sluggerbug, and Pat Fraley as Glo Worm. The two leads, proudly displayed during the opening credits, are Carol O’Connor as Santa Claus and Sally Struthers as Blanche, the Wicked Witch of the North Pole. O’Connor had wrapped up fifteen years of playing Archie Bunker just two years before and wouldn’t start his lengthy run heading ‘In the Heat of the Night’ for another two. His former castmate Sally Struthers had also wrapped up her stint as Gloria Bunker Stivic in her own short-lived spinoff ‘Gloria’ in 1983, so this was something of an ‘All in the Family’ reunion. O’Connor plays a fairly sleepy Santa but Struthers really throws herself into character as Blanche, screeching and hamming it right up.
For better and for worse we’re back in the territory of fluffy little nothings stretched out to twenty-three-and-a-bit minutes. We’ve got a Santa, we’ve got a Snow Witch, we’ve got little cute aminals who want to save the former from the latter. There are some slight variations on the usual themes but I don’t have to worry about stray humans interacting with supernatural forces, overly complicated plans that make no sense, or conflicts between a simplistic morality tale and the events we watch with our own eyes, so on the whole I have very few complaints. This was meant for five-year-olds and has no ambitions above its station.
The biggest takeaway I had from this special is that there was probably only one directive handed down from on high by Hasbro and that was to include as many characters as possible. The ending credits don’t break down exactly what characters appear in the cartoon but at any given time there are at least three and up to twelve named characters on screen. They move en masse and even when they split up there are at least six of them wandering about and talking to each other. Unless you’re intimately familiar with Glo Friends lore they’re just going to meld into one mass of characters, not only defeating the marketing intentions of making you want any one of them in toy form but also sapping any tension or interest out of the special because you don’t have any attachment to any of the characters. They’re all just vague bugs and worms, so the only ones who really stand out are the big flying moth one and the turtle, and that just made me wonder why they had a glowing turtle wandering around their insect village. Terrapins are not naturally phosphorescent, which makes me wonder how many of his fellow Friends the turtle had to eat to earn his Glo.
There is exactly one character with something resembling an arc and it’s the moose voiced by Lorenzo Music. We’re introduced to him standing alongside Blanche as she watches Santa preparing to set off to deliver toys and listens as she seethes in jealousy. He offers mild pushback to her wild plans of revenge against Santa for daring to be more well-known than she. Her entire villain backstory is that she’s just jealous that he’s more popular, which is absolutely fine as a motive of the bad guy in a Glo Friends special. The witch tries to get the moose on her side by pointing out that Santa turned down his application to pull the sleigh because he gets lost too easily, and this seems to work for a while because she rides him through the air as they pursue and eventually ground Santa and his reindeer, trapping them in an ice prison in the middle of a raging river. It finally seems to occur to the moose that he's palling around with the bad guy, which her openly stated plans of revenge had not previously made clear to him, so he turns on her and she magically tosses him through the air to be later befriended by the Glo Friends, assist them in rescuing Santa, and complete his journey to being a good guy.
The only mild bit of confusion in the special was trying to figure out what the moose’s deal was. He’s introduced in the company of the witch, does what she tells him, and in fact is key to her temporary success against the forces of Santa. But when he finally turns on her their dialogue seems to indicate they haven’t really known each other very long, so did they literally just meet? She knows he applied to Team Santa and got denied so that seems unlikely, but he’s also continually surprised that she does the things she explicitly states she’s going to do, so who knows. He also seems to lose his flying powers after he turns on the witch, so does he only get to fly when the witch is riding him? There wasn’t a whole lot else going on with the special, so I spent way too much time puzzling over this.
There was one actual neat idea in the special: the witch’s mink stole is as actual live mink, who’s just as evil as she is and chimes in as a kind of hype man to her evil plans. Every once in awhile she gets mad at it and throws it to the ground, and then it just claws back up her and re-encircles her neck. They exit the special bickering together, it’s not a bad running gag.
This is a completely inessential and inoffensive Christmas special. It may have been equally as mercenary as the Wacky Wall Walkers but it really helped that there were already multiple named characters that were then adapted into a special and that it required far less backstory than “aliens who saw the Christmas star and travelled for 2,000 to get taught lessons by orphans.” This was issued on VHS, like just about everything was, but has long since fallen out of print. It’s not available on any of the streaming services but grabbable at the usual places. If you’ve got a four-year-old who’s really into 80’s cartoons and has made it through most of the other ones this is a perfectly acceptable way to distract them for a bit under half an hour.
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