Saturday Morning's Forgotten Heroes: Earth Corps (Inhumanoids, 1986)

It's safe to say that the success of GI Joe & Transformers gave Hasbro, Sunbow, & Marvel Productions a false sense of security in thinking that anything that could be adapted for television would succeed. Unfortunately, that was proven incorrect, as the new ideas that Hasbro put forth were met with indifference from consumers/viewers, who voted with their wallets on the toys, and their remotes on the cartoons.

Inhumanoids was one such concept that died a quick death. Introduced as a series of short, serialized chapters on a half-hour anthology series, Super Sunday (or Super Saturday, depending on where you lived), then graduated to its own stand-alone half-hour series (the only other entry from the anthology to be treated thus was Jem, which we previously covered) in 1986. The series told the story of the efforts of Earth Corps, a team of research scientists who tracked and tried to capture the titular monsters. Marvel published a comic book version of the series, but that got a quick hook after just 4 issues under the Star Comics imprint without proper resolution.

I never watched the show, so I can't rate, but after reading about its poor performance on the air, I must assume that the kids who were targeted either didn't want to learn anything about real science, and the monsters were too gruesome to their liking.

Here's the intro:



Would Hasbro try again today, since they have their own network as an outlet? As I wrote regarding Visionaries the other day, it would not be a high priority right now.