Of the four freshman series produced by Filmation in 1973, Mission: Magic! was the weakest of the lot.
Australian singer-actor Rick Springfield had made his debut on the US charts a year earlier, and his handlers were hoping to promote him as a teen idol, figuring that even though the bubblegum pop craze of the late 60's-early 70's was dying out, only to return just three years later, the teenagers would watch the show with their younger sibs.
Nope. Mission was cancelled after 1 season, replaced by The New Adventures of Gilligan.
It wasn't Springfield's fault. The writing was, at best, mediocre. The background score by Ray Ellis (credited as Yvette Blais & Jeff Michael for the balance of the decade) recycled cues from the Archie cartoons, among other places. No originality in the music, save for Springfield's own compositions, which were released on LP in his native Australia before the end of the season, and later imported to the US.
In the series opener, Ms. Tickle (Lola Fisher) and the Adventurers Club (Ericka & Lane Scheimer, also heard on My Favorite Martians, The Brady Kids, & Lassie's Rescue Rangers, and Howard Morris) enter a backward dimension. Literally.
2 comments:
I saw one episode of Mission Magic when I was a kid. I would always have to tell my friends and cousins that this was a real show. It seemed like my twin brother and I were the only two people on the planet who saw Mission Magic.
I'm embarrassed to admit that just a few years ago, I finally got the joke on the teacher's name; her name was Miss Tickle, a play on the word "Mystical".
I've seen a few episodes, too, in first run, but ABC kinda fumbled the ball on this show.
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