Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Saturday Morning's Forgotten Heroes: The Wild West C.O.W-Boys of Moo Mesa (1992)

ABC was looking for a new hit series as the centerpiece of their Saturday morning lineup in 1992. Scooby-Doo had left the network a year earlier after being a cornerstone for most of the previous 15 years. The Real Ghostbusters had solved their last TV case after a 5 year run. Attempting to replace them with Hammerman, among others, ended in abject failure, so now it was time to look in another direction. In this case, the Old West.

The Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa, which merged old school Western adventure with the trendy animal mutations popularized by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, among others, nearly a decade earlier, seemed to fill the bill. Co-produced by King World (now part of CBS-Paramount) and Greengrass Productions, along with independent producer Gunther-Wahl (ex-Marvel & DFE exec Lee Gunther had formed his own production company) for the first season and Ruby-Spears for year two, the C.O.W.-Boys were paired with the animated revival of The Addams Family to give ABC the centerpiece they'd been waiting for. Advanteege uploaded the open.



The series made the transition to comics in 2 three-issue runs published by Archie, which was producing a book based on the Ninja Turtles' animated series, which, oh by the way, aired opposite Moo Mesa, if my memory serves me correctly. What resulted was that the COW-Boys & Turtles would meet in the pages of one of the Turtles' books on a number of different occasions. Unfortunately, no one has the stones to put the show back on the air to mark its 20th anniversary this year. Disney held the rights, last anyone knew, but it's been sitting in their vaults for almost a decade now.

Rating: None. Never saw the show.

No comments: