Saturday Morning Cult-TV Blogging: Bigfoot and Wildboy: "White Wolf"

In “White Wolf,” a sneaky veterinarian’s assistant, Tom (Brian Farrell) concocts a spray that can control animals and people.

He tests it on an old white wolf, Smoky, who then bites a local teen, Doug (Christopher Knight).

Soon, Doug begins transforming into a werewolf, showing the same signs of aggression infecting Smoky. 

Bigfoot and Little Boy team up with Dr. Stewart (Ed Peaker) to reverse the effects of the formula…

Here’s another strange and yet wholly enjoyable episode of Bigfoot and Wildboy. In “White Wolf,” Peter from The Brady Bunch (1969 – 1973) -- Christopher Knight -- gets infected by a wolf-bite and becomes an angry werewolf boy. 

The only problem is that there are virtually no make-up effects to chart his transformation. Instead, Knight's Doug simply grows hairy hands, or paws. 

And we all know why a guy grows hair on his hands, right?

The cool part of this story, however, is watching a Brady Bunch kid armed with the equivalent of bionic powers. Doug picks up a boulder in slow motion photograph, for example, and so there’s the inescapable feel here of The Brady Bunch meets The Six Million Dollar Man by way of Sid and Marty Krofft…and, naturally, on the cheap.

Also quite strange here is the nature of the weekly villain. A meek vet’s assistant -- the anonymous sounding Tom -- creates a formula to bend animals to his will, all while working at a little local office in the woods near Bigfoot and Wild Boy. 

I guess even evil geniuses have to start somewhere.

Alas, there are no further complete episodes of Bigfoot and Wildboy currently available for review, so this retrospective is complete, for the time being, after just four episodes (“Abominable Snowman,” “Amazon Contest,” Prisoner from Space” and “White Wolf.”) 

Based on these episodes, Bigfoot and Wildboy is cheaply-made, strange, and a heck of a lot of fun.  I’d love to see the whole series released on DVD or blu-ray. Some episodes, like “Amazon Contest” and “Prisoner from Space,” in particular, are really inventive and bizarre.

Next week, I’ll veer over to cover one episode of Mystery Island (1977)…again, the only one available.

The following week, I’ll begin reviewing the extant episodes of a childhood favorite: Run Joe Run (1974 - 1976). Once more, only about four episodes are available for review, but hopefully the series – basically The Fugitive with a German shepherd -- will be worth a re-visit.

Saturday Morning Cult-TV Blogging: Bigfoot and Wildboy: "Prisoner from Space"

In “Prisoner from Space,” two scientists follow the trajectory of an alien spaceship as it lands in the Southwest. 

A dome-headed extraterrestrial being with monstrous abilities -- including paralysis rays -- disembarks from the craft and sets out for a nearby nuclear power plant to recharge himself.

Bigfoot and Wildboy realize the being is a prisoner has escaped from captivity and that he will be unstoppable on Earth if he absorbs the power he needs…

Bigfoot and Wildboy go up against another colorful villain on this week’s episode of the 1970s Sid and Marty Krofft Saturday morning program.  The alien prisoner here looks a lot like a Newcomer from the 1980s sci-fi franchise Alien Nation, and wears a vampire cape to boot, which grants him a sense of menace. 

This alien can also shoot eye-drop like “paralysis” or freeze beams from his eyes.  His victims “freeze” when the editor freezes the film.

Where other Saturday morning superheroes such as Isis and Shazam grow tiring after a time because they live in such mundane reality, Bigfoot and Wildboy is more entertaining and ingenious, though authentically weird at times. 

This episode, while not as far out as “Amazon Contest,” is nonetheless a strange one.  The evil alien bellows “I must have more power,” at one point, for instance, and the camp factor is high.  Later, an adolescent Wildboy -- not yet of driving age, I would wager -- takes over steering a car at one point, pushing aside a more experienced female scientist driver in the process.  Did Bigfoot teach him how to drive?  Now that’s a scene I would have loved to see depicted.

At the very least, this entry (from the 1979 independent series and not the Krofft Show omnibus) features some new or different footage of Bigfoot jumping into the air and sticking his landing.  Additionally, it appears that the series received a budget boost when it broke loose from the omnibus, because one scene actually depicts Bigfoot jumping up to the girders of a high (real life) tower to rescue Wild Boy, and then jumping down.  That’s a new wrinkle.

Finally, there’s a nifty little concept at the heart of this one, that aliens jettison their prisoners into space capsules, getting rid of the problem for their species, but causing lots of problems for the unlucky destination cultures.

Saturday Morning Cult-TV Blogging: Bigfoot and Wildboy: "Amazon Contest"

In “Amazon Contest,” three Amazonian women from a domed city of the future arrive in the 1970s Southwest and make plans to enslave men, and use them as gladiators.  Queen Kyra (Cynthia Sikes) sets her sights on a lumberjack named Bert (Rick Beckner), a friend of Wild Boy and Bigfoot.

Another woman from the same future, Deeda (Dee Wallace) claims that she has been deposed, and is the rightful ruler of the domed city. She thus recruits Bigfoot and Wild Boy to help her retrieve her magical mind control scepter, now in Kyra’s possession.

When Kyra lays her eyes on the “giant” Bigfoot, however, she decides he must be her new gladiatorial champion…

Okay, first things first: in nearly 20 years of writing books and ten years of blogging, I have rarely written a synopses as strange as the one featured above.

One quality that differentiates this Sid and Marty Krofft series, Bigfoot and Wildboy, from Filmation fare is its willingness to tell bizarre fantasy stories.  Isis and Shazam are grounded, in some sense, in reality, with superheroes interfacing with normal people, in normal 1970s environs.  Bigfoot and Wildboy had absolutely none of that. The episode stories are absolutely wacko, and then, oddly a “lesson” is thrown in at the last second, like an afterthought.

Case in point is “Amazon Contest,” a two-part episode from the series’ span as an element in The Krofft Supershow omnibus. Here, sexy women from a dystopian future teleport to the seventies, attempt to control men’s minds, and battle against Bigfoot. When Bert the lumberjack is enslaved, a pink rubber band materializes around his hair-line.  The pink means he’s under the control of women, right?

Indeed, there’s just some real kink underlining this one.  The women, in sheer white dresses and short skirts arrive, and lord it over the men, saying things like “kneel before the queen.” Then, the women ooh and ah when they see the hunky men of this time, and worse, Bigfoot.  It’s just so strange, and perverse.

I try to explain Saturday morning television of the 1970s to my son, Joel, but sometimes, there’s just no adequate explanation.  “You see, Joel, three Amazon women from the future come back in time to steal men to fight in gladiatorial games. But Bigfoot stops them!” 

I can hardly type those words with a straight face, let alone say them aloud.  And yet, truth be told, “Amazon Contest,” for all its weirdness, is extremely entertaining.  I may be biased, I’ll admit it. I was thrilled to see Dee Wallace in this episode. I didn’t realize she had ever appeared on Bigfoot and Wildboy. I met her at a convention here in Charlotte three years ago and she was so nice and friendly. She talked to Joel on the day he came to see me, and was just generally very open and warm with us.  She also looked like she hadn’t aged for the last thirty years.  Anyway, Wallace does her best here with the material, but honestly, I don’t know how she kept a straight face.

Otherwise, Bigfoot and Wildboy possesses the same creative deficits I noted in my review of “Abominable Snowman” last week.  A considerable amount of time in the episode consists of Bigfoot and Wildboy running around in slow-motion. We see it straight on. We see it from a tilted angle.  We see it straight on again.  We also see Bigfoot make the exact same “bionic” jump three times in just one twenty minute segment. 

Sheesh.  It’s pretty clear that the effort here was to ape, completely, The Six Million Dollar Man’s Sasquatch.

Also, the low-budget shows.  “Amazon contest” culminates at the exact same abandoned ghost town where Dr. Porthos was operating in “Abominable Snowman.”

Saturday Morning Cult-TV Blogging: Bigfoot and Wildboy (1976 - 1979): "The Abominable Snowman"

The production team of Sid and Marty Krofft, and creators Joe Ruby and Ken Spears bring us our next Saturday morning series here on the blog: Bigfoot and Wildboy (1976 – 1979).  

This unusual series aired on ABC, first as part of the 90-minute The Krofft Supershow and then in its own time slot for a season in 1979.

Originally, The Krofft Supershow was a kind of compendium or anthology of series. Each week, Captain Kool (Michael Lembeck) and the Kongs would introduce episodes of Dr. Shrinker, Electra-Woman and Dyna-Girl and Wonderbug.

In the second season, Dr. Shrinker was dropped in favor of Magic Mongo and Electra-Woman and Dyna-Girl was traded for Bigfoot and Wildboy.

As I’ve written here and in other venues, Bigfoot was a major “thing” in the 1970s, explored in documentaries, and imagined on such series as The Six Million Dollar Man (1973 – 1978) and The Bionic Woman (1976 – 1978).  So, a Saturday morning series about Sasquatch must have seemed like a slam dunk.

In Bigfoot and Wildboy, Ray Butcher stars as Bigfoot, an intelligent (if hairy…) creature who, eight years before the start of the series, befriends a child and raises him in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. 

This child becomes Wildboy, Bigfoot's sidekick and friend. In the first year of the series, Wildboy is often accompanied by a Native American girl, Susie (Monika Ramirez), on their adventures.

It is plain from a screening of a few episodes that The Six Million Dollar Man’s Bigfoot is a significant and important inspiration for this series. We see several shots, for example, in each episode, of Bigfoot running and jumping in slow-motion, to strange “whooshing” sounds.

In fact, “The Abominable Snowman,” an episode aired in two fifteen minute parts, features a lot of filler, and that filler consists of Bigfoot running through the countryside, and jumping.  

The special effects look impressive in a seventies kind of way, in the same way as the effects do on the aforementioned bionic series.  But too much of anything -- even Bigfoot running and jumping -- gets old quick.  These scenes are repetitive and sort of dull, today.

In “The Abominable Snowman,” an evil scientist, Dr. Porthos (David Hurst), plans to intercept an important U.S. weather satellite from his base in a ghost town in the Pacific Northwest. He deploys his robotic Abominable Snowman to keep strangers at bay.

A young man named Toby (Christopher Braun) returns to the town to visit his father, but is accosted by the Yeti robot.  Before long, Wild-Boy, Bigfoot and Susie come to his aid, and attempt to stop the robot, and prevent Dr. Porthos from interfering in the launch.

During the course of the episode, Bigfoot gets locked in a vault, but fights his way out, and ultimately saves the weather rocket/satellite. He also defeats the shaggy-looking Abominable Snowbot.

This isn’t a Filmation series, so Bigfoot and Wildboy goes light -- at least here -- on the preachy moralizing. Instead, this is a straight-up adventure show, with an unusual set of superheroes.  It’s a little strange watching the first episode because nobody considers it strange to see Bigfoot for the first time. Instead, characters just accept that he’s there, and committed to helping out.

I’d have to stop and think for a minute.  Wow, Bigfoot is real.  And he can talk. And he can raise human children….

The writing is pretty shallow here, truth be told, and Dr. Porthos boasts no real motive for wanting to control the government’s new weather satellite.  

Also, it isn’t clear why he would not build a Bigfoot robot, rather than a Yeti-bot, given the part of the world where his HQ is located.

In short, “Abominable Snowman” -- and indeed Bigfoot and Wildboy itself -- helps to explain why the seventies were so weird.  How do you explain a show like this today?  A leaping, racing (in slow mo) Sasquatch and his teenage ward fight criminals in the Pacific Northwest, and nobody thinks that’s weird?

Yup, it was the seventies all right.  I loved growing up there.