The Glo Friends Save Christmas (1985)

              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.

Lollipop Dragon: The Great Christmas Race

              Humans generally have a hard time understanding long stretches of time.  There’s the fairly common frustration as the years seem to fly by the older you get and the corresponding nostalgia at how eventful your childhood seems to have been in contrast.  There’s the moment where you realize that by any kind of measure you’re no longer young and Grandpa Simpson starts to make a disturbing amount of sense.  This also translates over to our use of technology: the cars have different switches, the televisions have different options, and home media formats improve resolutions at a pace where eventually your eyes can’t keep up and you have to tap out of future upgrades.  At a certain point in your life what is normal technology got set in stone and it becomes harder and harder to shift expectations.  To me cassettes still seem completely reasonable.

              This means that there’s an increasingly large wake of technological detritus left in the wake of progress.  Best case scenario they get turned into nostalgic little ‘remember when’ specials on basic cable channels, or get lengthy YouTube memorials arguing that maybe there was something worthwhile about the original series iPod.  Most of it, though, gets forgotten about, or if it is remembered compared completely unfavorably with the things that replaced it.  Vinyl records might stubbornly stick around for decades but nobody is pining after dot-matrix printers.

              Which brings us to educational filmstrips and the records that accompanied them.  Despite being underfunded and undervalued the teaching profession is as quick as any to latch on to new technology to trick kids into learning something.  For a good chunk of the 40’s to the 80’s the cutting edge of educational science was the filmstrip.  They were simply short 35mm strips of film designed to be projected one after the other to the amazement of the watching classroom.  They were accompanied first by written scripts, then later by vinyl records or cassettes.  Even though it was on film, since it wasn’t being fed through a projector at 24 frames a second the audio couldn’t be included on the strip itself, necessitating the extra equipment.  The step up to cassettes greatly increased their utility since it was much easier to pause and restart the audio with those than it was with records, which required the careful raising and setting down of the needle to halt the sound. 

              While a student at Cheshire Academy in Connecticut Roger Himmel had the idea for the Lollipop Dragon while walking home from a screening of the 1962 film ‘The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.’  He would later describe fondly thinking of the scene where comedian Buddy Hackett fought a dragon, thought he’d like to write something like that, and jotted down the phrase “lollipop dragon.”  Later on he would remember the idea and publish a story in the Cheshire Academy literary journal, which he edited.  He later attended Kent State in the late 60’s pursuing a degree in children’s education.  He collaborated with husband-and-wife duo Luther Peters and Connie Ross in developing a children’s book, which they then shopped around to the Society for Visual Education, Inc., which produced exactly what their name states.  An order was placed, and they incorporated under the company name Lollipop Dragon Productions, Inc. in the state of Ohio, producing a number of educational film strips starring the titular dragon.  Himmel would go off to join the Army and on his return would write several accompanying books through the 70’s before they eventually renegotiated the contract with SVE to merely license the property.  While generally overseeing the various directions the property took he became less hands on, busying himself with merchandising rights, culminating in the Lollipop Dragon being named the 1980 Marine Corps Toys for Tots mascot.

              I’d like to point out that all of that very specific information comes from an article Himmel wrote himself for the July-August 2020 edition of the magazine Scottish Rite Journal of Freemasonry (“Serving the Scottish Rite Since 1904”).  Sometimes the internet truly is a thing of wonder.

              As befits something springing from the educational side of children’s entertainment, the Lollipop Dragon was originally meant to teach simple morals to children.  Film strips and books would teach things like how to be polite, why you should pick up litter, form orderly queues, and listen to your parents, that sort of thing.  Eventually it was established that the dragon lived in the TumTum Kingdom, ruled by a good king and queen, with Princess Gwendolyn and Prince Hubert and a random little four-armed furry thing that’s apparently the court musician.  Despite originally being deliberately sedate and free of antagonists the narrative needs of actual animated specials led to the creation of a villain in the form of Baron Bad Blood and his nameless assistant.  He’s a be-goateed generic villain who lives in a castle, presumably also in the kingdom, and his reason for being evil is refreshingly simple: he has bad blood in him.  Sometimes it’s nice to have a villain who’s just a villain.

              The special itself seems to have come from thin air, though that’s mostly a result of the only existing rip I can find coming from a repackaged version of the special from Blair Entertainment and thus missing a lot of production details.  In addition to adding a slightly creepy live action intro of a smiling kid explaining the concept of VCR tracking, Blair Entertainment seem to have excised the original end credits and replaced them with new ones due to the rights changing hands.  The director, Guy R. Mazzeo, would only direct this and the following year’s special, ‘Lollipop Dragon: The Magic Lollipop Adventure.’   The credited writers are Roger Himmel himself and the same husband and wife duo who illustrated the original books, Luther Peters and Connie Ross.  The replacement titles are suspiciously short on production information, such as listing any animators or production companies, which might not be the biggest loss for those involved since the animation, while not abysmal, does not impress.

              The story itself is paper-thin and just a stretched-out variation on Wacky Races.  The titular Christmas race is one announced by the king as a competition among his subjects for the prize of having a lollipop made in their image with a flavor of their choosing that will be delivered to all the kids of the world that year by Santa.  These subjects all seem to also be workers in a giant lollypop factory.  I’m sure there are supplemental materials assuring us that the king and queen are just and fair rulers and that everyone is happy to work in such a wonderful place as a lollipop factory and working conditions are good and they’re treated well and any rumors of being paid in company scrip and the subsequent plague of scurvy and rickets due to malnourishment from only being fed lollipops and never being allowed outside the confines of the factors are totally false.  The announcement is greeted with general applause by the workers and dragons and with scorn by the evil Baron Bad Blood, who’s spying on the announcement by way of magic mirror.  The power set of the Baron is very ill-defined, he seems to have access to both magic and advanced technology depending on the needs of any given scene.

              On the day of the race the Baron shows up and is booed by the crowd until the Lollipop Dragon himself agrees that the king said anyone could join the race, and they’re off.  Of course the Baron immediately starts cheating, but this is more than offset by the other contestants doing their own set of questionable maneuvers, such as taking shortcuts or combining forces to increase speed.  Refreshingly nobody really complains that the Baron is cheating, apparently that’s just the price you pay for not being specific in your race announcements. 

              In true cartoon style the villains could have easily won if they’d just kept racing while they were way out ahead, but they stop to sabotage the rest of the racers, causing Mr. Lollilop to go full dragon and unleash his fiery hellbreath to demolish the ice boulder the Baron dropped on them.  Near the end of the race the Baron’s evil assistant gets distracted by the crowd throwing snowballs at them and stops to yell at them, eventually getting so angry he rips the steering wheel from their rocket sled, causing the entire thing to explode.  Everyone else has joined forces due to the Baron’s machinations and cross the line together, rather negating the entire point of having this kind of competition, but the bad guys lost so it’s apparently ok.

              The king and queen announce that everyone’s a winner except the bad guys, who are losers, so unveil an eight-headed lollipop monstrosity with everyone’s faces on their own lollipops, presumably with everyone’s favorite flavors regardless of whether or not they work together, thus making the candy completely inedible and far too big to feasibly eat.  If I was the Baron I’d take that as a qualified win.  Everyone is happy and singing and dancing and then they loop the dancing animation under the new credits and it’s over.

              There may be a moral in there somewhere but I really can’t seem to find it.  The major takeaway seems to be not to be evil, which is fair enough for a kid’s cartoon.  Despite starting with such educational goals by this time in the lifecycle of the IP it seems to have basically devolved into something kids recognized and thus able to be sold to their parents.  The subsequent 1986 special seems to have been the last developed Lollipop Dragon product that I can find evidence of and the books are all out of print.  From the way he talked in 2020 Roger Himmel is still very proud of his achievement, and that’s hard to argue with.  An entire generation had to squirm in their seats while waiting for the series of beeps and still frames to be over and that’s the kind of memory that follows people their entire lives.  The cartoon is harmless enough but seems to have been lost to the tides of time and I can’t muster a very strong argument against that fate.