Seriously, now …

Back in the mid-1980's, my then-collaborator dragged me kicking and screaming into writing animation for the tube. I was a book guy, not interested in television, but he convinced me it would be 1) Fun 2) Interesting and 3) Lucrative, and on balance, it turned out he was more or less right.

I took the big metal bird to L.A. and went into a meeting with a bunch of other writers, a cattle-call, wherein we were given the bible and basic information at Ruby-Spears, for a syndicated show called Centurions.

There were times when it wasn't as much fun, nor really interesting, but the money, which, by the by, is considered chump-change in LaLaLand, where animation is the salt mines of TV, was good for how much work you had to do. Scripts ranged from a couple thousand bucks on the bottom, up to three or four, sometimes more for 22-minutes–half hour show, with eight minutes for commercials. Once you got into the flow, it took all of two or three days to do one. There were a few I did in one day, and a couple-three or four grand for one afternoon in front of the word processor was more than I could make doing honest work ...

And I actually sent them in electronically, which, in 1986, was a big deal. This was before the web, and when email ran at speeds of 300 baud–about as fast as I am typing this ...

You kids today don't know how good you've got it. You have more memory in your cell phone than all of us who wrote for that show had in all our computers combined. 

That first meeting was hilarious. They had mock-ups of the toys, kind of like G.I. Joe, in their spiffy sci fi costumes, with guns, and helicopter attachments and the like. Jake, Ace, and Max were the heroes. The funny sidekick was a female orangutan,

There we were, grown-ups, listening as the showrunners, babbled on about which way Jake's chest-mounted Gatling gun rotated. This was not amusing, this was a matter of gravity, serious stuff here. Nothing funny about it, thank you.

Come again, was that clockwise on Jake's cannon? Thanks, I'll make a note of that ...

It was funny, and I'm not now, nor have I ever been known for controlling my laughter. 

I sat across from another writer, Michael Cassutt, who went on to bigger and better things in live TV, and he was grinning at me, doing that thing my little brother used to do at the supper table when my father was irritated at us, trying to make me laugh. He didn't have far to go to achieve that.

If I laughed at supper as a kid when I was told to sit still and be quiet, I was gonna get whacked; and if I laughed at that TV meeting, I wasn't gonna get the work, and having been tempted by the Hollywood Satan, I wanted that money. I had to look away and bite my lip. 

It is a fond memory. 

These days, I will sometimes pick up on a media conversation wherein people are speaking with great gravity and seriousness about a comic book character’s quirk — What is Thor’s favorite drink? How many push-ups can Captain America do? Does Wonder Woman get PMS? and find myself remembering Jake’s rotating chest-cannon.

Yeah, the important things in life …