The Fonz, Rambo, The Brady Kids and More: Classic TV and Movies That Became the Craziest Cartoons

‘Happy Days’ Became ‘The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang’

Get ready for a wacky series premise (first of many, collect them all). Happy Days, of course, was the ’50s set hit ABC sitcom that ran longer than a decade (11 years, in fact) from 1974 to 1984. In this spinoff from the show (1980-82), Fonzie (voiced by Henry Winkler) helps fix the time machine of a traveler from the future, but (oh, no!) something goes wrong. Then the Fonz, Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard), and Ralph Malph (Donny Most) find themselves traveling to a different time period every week while they search for a way home. Sounds like Quantum Leap, but in leather. Ayyyy!

Duane Poole reflects, “Happy Days was a challenge, because of the group of kids on it and just that the nature of the show didn’t seem like it was going to lend itself to animation. So we took to the idea of time travel, Mr. Cool, the dog with Fonzie; and ways to really utilize the whole animation process and make the shows bigger than they were comically. It was not easy, I’ll be very clear on that, but it was a good challenge and it was fun to work with all those people.

“With the Fonz,” he continues, “we felt they’d go for it, because it gave those characters a chance to be in so many different time periods and we could just expand it so far out of their prime time situation. We had our pick of the characters, so obviously we wanted Fonzie and Richie, so Henry Winkler and Ron Howard. To keep it small enough, we took one more character, and Donny Most’s Ralph Malph was the best suited. If you remember Dr. Smith on Lost in Space, Ralph could be the kind of conniving one who was always out for himself or looking for an angle that would suit him. Those three worked really well together.”

‘Gilligan’s Island’ Spawned ‘The New Adventures of Gilligan’ and ‘Gilligan’s Planet’

Those seven stranded castaways certainly got around. Not only did they have three seasons of their live-action show from 1964-67, but they had a trio of TV movies and, in between, two animated shows. The first, The New Adventures of Gilligan (1974-75) could easily be considered the fourth season of the original. Same island, same actors voicing their characters (Bob Denver and Alan Hale Jr. among them), and same silly situations as Gilligan inadvertently messes things up for the others while they work on a way of getting off the island. Give it up, dudes.

Or maybe we spoke too soon because Gilligan’s Planet debuted he very next season. In it, the Professor manages to build a rocket ship(?) to get everyone off the island, but, instead of heading to the mainland, they soar through the stratosphere and end up crashing on an alien planet. So they’re stranded there, encountering the locals and working to get back home.

Tom Ruegger, one of the creative forces behind shows like Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, and Pinky and the Brain, says, “‘Journey to the Center of Gilligan’s Planet’ was the last script I wrote at Filmation. The show’s strengths were its voice cast of original actors from the series. The weakness was the intensely limited animation dictated by the Filmation production process that had virtually every comic action take place off screen and handled by off screen sound effects and close up reaction shots.”

Veteran comic book and animation writer Paul Dini says of the show, “It was an assignment and I tried my best on it. It was one of my very first jobs, when I was 22 and working writing anything I could at Filmation. Lou Scheimer asked if I had ever watched Gilligan’s Island. I said, ‘Sure,’ and he said, ‘Fantastic. You’re writing this episode.’ I had four days. There was a monster in it. That’s about all I remember. Didn’t have any interaction with the cast, or know why CBS bought it other than it was a cartoon redo of a live series they owned that kids liked.”

Adds editor Joe Gall, “At first I thought it was a silly idea — I mean, they couldn’t build a boat to get off the island, but they could build a spaceship? — but then I saw the concepts and designs and I thought it could be cute. After all, cartoons are made for shows like this. The real strength of the show  was our ability to get most of the original cast — all except Tina Louise. Their line readings were consistently flat, but they were the genuine article. It worked in the sense that it accomplished exactly what it set out to do. It successfully recreated Gilligan’s Island on a different world with similar plots to the original, and all using extremely limited animation. It was a nice, harmless diversion for the very young and it kept a lot of people employed at a time when most animation was being shipped overseas. I’d say it worked.”

‘The Odd Couple’ became ‘The Oddball Couple’

Can two divorced men share an apartment without driving each other crazy? If you ever caught an episode of Garry Marshall‘s The Odd Couple (1970-75, from the Neil Simon play of the same name), you know the answer. But then there was The Oddball Couple (1975-76), which followed the live-action version which had just gone off the air.  The show was about a dog named Fleabag and cat named Spiffy who live together and are — well, you guessed it — total opposites. The live action show was amazing, this version… not so much.

‘The Partridge Family’ goes to the future with ‘Partridge Family 2200 A.D.’

You know the song: Danny got Ruben to hear their songs, and it really came together when mom sang along! David Cassidy, Shirley Jones, and Susan Dey brought The Partridge Family to life from 1970 to 1974, and Partridge Family 2200 A.D. had a single season from 1974-75. It started off as a sequel to The Jetsons with George and Jane Jetson’s kids Elroy and Judy being all grown up, but somewhere along the way it got turned into this idea. In it, the family Partridge propelled centuries into the future. Honestly, somehow we can’t rationalize this one. What were they thinking?

‘Laverne & Shirley’ enlist and become ‘Laverne & Shirley in the Army’

Imagine The Odd Couple, but with ladies, and set in the 1950s, and you might get a sense of the setup for Laverne & Shirley, the spinoff from Happy Days starring Penny Marshall as Laverne DeFazio and Cindy Williams as Shirley Feeney. Both provide their voices in this series series as the characters are serving in the U.S. Army as privates, where they get involved in misadventures. All the while they do their best not to get reported by their superior, Sgt. Squealy — who, for some reason that boggles the mind, is a pig. He’s voiced by Ron Palillo, Arnold Horshack on Welcome Back Kotter.

“We wrote the pilot and it had the pig in it,” says writer Duane Poole. “They liked that enough, that was going to be a one shot as I recall, but it was so popular that it became a running character and a running situation for them. We thought it was insane, but the whole idea of doing these prime time shows as animation seemed kind of outrageous to us.

“The nice thing is that Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams enjoyed the first few scripts of Laverne & Shirley so much that they asked us to come and be story editors on their primetime series, which was a great kick. We passed on it for another project, but that was when things were kind of falling apart over there. We had heard it wasn’t the most pleasant set to be on.

“But they really enjoyed the freedom that animation gave them, and and they were great,” Duane notes. “They just threw themselves into these voices. And let’s face it: on the live show they rarely had a chance to mix with aliens and rocket ships and a talking pig, so it was fun.”

‘The Brady Bunch’ gives us ‘The Brady Kids’

You all know the story of the lovely lady and and the man named Brady, and we’re confident that you’re familiar with their kids as well. But, did you know that those kids (and the actors who played them) were the stars of their own Saturday morning animated series? Produced while The Brady Bunch was still in the middle of its original 1969-74 run, The Brady Kids aired on ABC from 1972-73.

Over the course of the show’s 22 episodes, the wholesome sixsome got in all sorts of adventures, which included a mynah bird named Marlon, who spoke and happened to be a wizard (don’t ask us); their dog Mop Top (which raised the question of what had happened to their live-action dog, Tiger, who mysteriously disappeared), and a pair of panda cubs named Ping and Pong. In three separate episodes, they met Superman, Wonder Woman, and The Lone Ranger; while in others they dealt with aliens, robots, and traveled back in time. The ’70s was a strange time.

“That was goofy,” Barry Williams, who voiced Greg, sighs. “Looked a lot like The Archies, didn’t it? Do you know why? It was the same company, it was the same wardrobe, and the same figures with our heads stuck on them.”

‘I Dream of Jeannie’ is shortened to ‘Jeannie’ and completely changed

We love the I Dream of Jeannie series starring Barbara Eden, Larry Hagman, and Bill Daily, which ran on NBC from 1965-70. And with the show booming in reruns, CBS decided to produce an animated series that had a very short run from September to December 1973. We still remember our serious disappointment upon discovering that this wasn’t really based on the live action TV series I Dream of Jeannie, but we’ve gotten over it. It’s been 45 years, so we better had! The characters here are all younger, with Jeannie voiced by Julie McWhirter and Tony Nelson nowhere to be found. Instead, her love interest is Luke Skywalker… actually Corey Anders, who happens to have been voiced by Mark Hamill. Popping in at the most inopportune times is Babu (voiced by Joe Besser of The Three Stooges), a bumbling genie being trained by Jeannie.

‘My Favorite Martian’ goes plural with ‘My Favorite Martians’

A martian (Ray Walston as “Uncle Martin”) is stranded on Earth and befriended by reporter Tim O’Hara (Bill Bixby), and the resulting series follows the comedic chaos that erupts from that premise. My Favorite Martian ran on CBS from 1963-66. This animated version was truly designed to pick up where that show had left off. It even went so far as to use scripts that had been written for a proposed fourth season. One difference between the shows is that the cartoon, to be more kid friendly, added a young martian to the mix.

‘Star Trek’: The name stayed the same from live-action to animation

C’mon, you know the original 1966-69 Star Trek: the Enterprise, Kirk, Spock, McCoy, going where no man has gone before, yadda, yadda, yadda. The animated show, which ran from 1973-75, was largely the same, with the cast reprising their roles and many writers of the live-action show tackling scripts.

Explains story editor Dorothy Fontana, “We did not write our scripts as kiddie shows. We were writing for the Star Trek audience, and we did not think they were twelve-year-olds, so we tried to keep the quality of the show. I went to the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto and I had a reel of the opening of the Enterprise flyby. There were skeptics, but when we ran the reel, the fans cheered. From that little clip, they realized it was really going to be Star Trek. It was a triumphant moment after months of hearing it wouldn’t be any good.”

‘Ace Ventura: Pet Detective’, the name remains the same

Jim Carrey‘s Ace Ventura is a detective who manages to retrieve tame or captive animals (though he does have to recover a missing bottle nose dolphin in the film). He also has a tendency to bend over and talk through his butt. Doesn’t exactly scream Saturday morning cartoon, but it became one. And a pretty successful one at that. The film was released in 1994, and CBS debuted the animated version the following year, running it until 1997. From there, a third season was run on Nickelodeon. Ace was voiced by Michael Daingerfield, and Family Guy and The Orville creator Seth MacFarlane was one of the writers.

‘RoboCop’ — how exactly did this become a cartoon?

Here’s what Wikipedia says about the original 1987 movie: “Themes that make up the basis of RoboCop include media influence, gentrification, corruption, authoritarianism, greed, privatization, capitalism, identity, dystopia, and human nature.” And then there’s the plot: street cop Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is pretty much blown apart in an ambush by the bad guys. His brain and what’s left of his body is placed in a robotic outfit, he’s given the name RoboCop and starts fighting violence with violence — though despite their best efforts to wipe his memory, fragments are coming back and he starts to yearn for his former life.

So how’s that for an animated series? Well, in 1988 it became one for a dozen episodes. Changes were made, including giving Alex Murphy (voiced by Robert Bockstael) laser guns rather than bullets, and the setting and plots are a bit more sci-fi. Despite our initial snarkiness, they actually managed to maintain a fair amount of elements from the film (minus the extreme violence).

From ‘Rambo’ to ‘Rambo: The Force of Freedom’

This is another one of those, “How exactly are they turning this into a kid’s show?” Sylvester Stallone had his first non-Rocky hit with 1982’s First Blood, which introduced Vietnam vet John Rambo, who, when pushed too far, begins waging a war at home against his oppressors. He became much more of a superhero in 1985’s Rambo: First Blood Part II, which this show took some of its inspiration from. Debuting a year later, Rambo (voiced by Neil Ross) is part of The Force of Freedom team, which travels around the world attempting to take down the terrorist organization S.A.V.A.G.E. In some ways it’s similar to the G.I. Joe animated series, as the good guys battled agents of COBRA. Thankfully, between the mayhem, we got to see Rambo pet deer and feed bunnies.

Writer Jack Bornoff, who scripted over a dozen episodes of the series, explains, “Before we started writing episodes, [producer] Joe Ruby asked me to go watch all the G.I. Joe cartoons and keep track of the violence in those shows and how it was portrayed. For example, a helicopter goes down and, let’s say, it’s behind a rock and smoke comes out. Do they show the pilot of the helicopter emerging or do they cut to something else? Because if they don’t, the assumption is he’s been injured or killed.

“At the end of each show,” he adds, “we had to put a tag on it with Rambo talking to a kid about an example of what would be non-violent, exemplary behavior. Something that was a positive reflection on how children should behave. Rambo was socializing kids.”

Needless to say, Rambo was a tough transition to handle from the big screen to the small, but, truth be told, we need crazy shows like this one if for no other reason than to keep certain franchises alive in the imagination of fans, and maybe bringing along new ones as well. Oh, and they keep our snark sharp.