Take It And Like It:
The Transcendent World Of Mr. T — The Animated Series
Dan Budnik , 02.18.10
A NOTE FROM DAN!
Hello, everyone. A little explanation regarding what you're about to read is in order. Normally, our articles are well thought out pieces that we spend some time mulling over, writing and re-writing. This article is not one of those. I thought of it on February 7th. I spent the 7th-12th watching all 30 episodes of Mr. T — The Animated Series. And, I wrote 95% of it on the morning of the 13th in, about, three hours. It's something I'm calling an "Instant Article" or a "Blab". It's more of a series of ideas and thoughts thrown down on the page. And, it is something I plan on doing some more of in the future. Not really reviews, not quite articles. I hope you enjoy it.
I watched so many shows on Saturday morning when I was a child. What year do/ did kids stop getting up for the Saturday morning good-time cartoons? 10 or 11? I think I stopped around 11 or so. I say that because I remember watching Starcade and Mr. T — The Animated Series, which both began around 1983. And, just possibly, those two shows represented the glory of Saturday Morning for me more than any others.
I loved game shows. Starcade was a game show directed specifically to me. Kids (and adults) played video games to win...video games! A dream comes true! I was never that great at video games. I'm better on my Atari 2600 now than I was 27 years ago. (And, I have a better collection. When the cartridges are $3.00 a piece on Ebay, it's easier to amass a collection.) But, I would watch and enjoy. Starcade is another article, though. This is all about Mr. T — The Animated Series.
Rocky III was my first exposure to Mr. T...and, My God, wasn't he fascinating. Possibly it was the hair and the gold chains that really grabbed my attention. Everything about him just seemed so odd to me. I wanted to see what T would get up to next. The "next" was The A-Team, which I never liked.
Every guy in grammar school loved The A-Team, maybe every kid did, I don't know. But, I never got into it. It must have been on opposite something I really loved. Two years on, I would have taped one and watched the other. In '83-'84, I wasn't doing that yet. So, The A-Team fell by the wayside.
(I just looked it up: The A-Team was up against Happy Days and Foul Ups, Bleeps & Blunders. That explains everything.)
The one time I watched it, I wasn't impressed. A lot of explosions and shooting but no one getting hurt. It didn't appeal. Today, I might find it charming. But, I have other shows to watch, like Mr. T — The Animated Series. The wonderful adventures of Mr. T and his Gymnastics Team. They travel in a bus with a lady named Miss Bisby and a dog with a mohawk. And, they consistently get into crazy-ass adventures.
The concept is as elementary as Mr. T cereal. You sit down on Saturday morning and spend a half hour with our favorite big guy and a cereal that he is all over. The rush you get from the sugar in the cereal is matched by the rush you get from the insanity that is the series.
I do remember watching this as a child. In the same way I remember watching the Pac Man animated series or the series with Gary Coleman as an angel or the one with the Super Harlem Globetrotters. All of them, if I use Mr. T as a base, had that strange 80s attitude of "They'll take what they get and they like it." The plots were all the same. The jokes were awful. The characterization changed from week to week to fit the plotlines. And, the animation could sometimes be a bit on the lazy side.
But, they kept us thrilled for many mornings. You know what? I never noticed that the Super Friends never actually got into fights. I just enjoyed it. I never noticed that the cartoons that were supposed to be funny rarely (if ever) made me laugh. I was a kid. It was a ritual. I enjoyed it, which makes it tricky when you return at a later age.
Well, it turns out that Mr. T was the perfect show for kids who were hopped on three bowls of sugar cereal. It is fast paced. It is action packed. It is loud. And, every episode is similar enough and at the same level of quality that they could repeat them endlessly and it would take some time before a kid could really pin down a specific one.
The Agony Booth reminded me of this series. Dredged it up from the recesses of my mind...and their website contains quite a few detailed reviews of individual episodes. In fact, they say a lot of the things that I think when I watch the show. Hop on over there and check some of their stuff out. I read their reviews when I'm on the bike at the gym.
Mr. T — The Animated Series is a (possibly) cheaply made kid's shows from the mid 80s that was really not meant to be preserved and watched, and then rewatched, later. I have a DVD-R set consisting of 3 discs that contain all 30 episodes. And, I can't imagine the people making it at the time wishing hard that this show would receive any sort of analysis years later. Mr. T, more or less, was kind of a fad. And, his show was riding the coattails of that fad.
My one wish would be to stand alongside the creators when they whipped up the premise. It seems so strange. Was it T's idea? I suppose, thought, if you have young gymnasts as your secondary characters they can act like kids but flip around like superheroes do. Still, ...gymnastics? Did any prior portion of the Mr. T legacy include gymnastics? It sure may have. I don't know and I think it would ruin my flow to look it up. Of course, Dozer, the dog with the mohawk is just natural...Why wouldn't he be there?
There's no back-story to the episodes. What is just is...
At some point in Mr. T's life, he is in charge of this wily band of gymnasts.
Jeff: White guy. Blowhard. Really loves himself. Learns a lesson about always leaving a note in one episode.
Kim: The Asian gal with the photographic memory. She learns a lesson about too much dieting when she almost costs the team their collective lives in one episode. She also has "The Anti-Grav Skirt". If you watch a random episode, you'll see what I mean.
Woody: The black guy. A bit of a sleuth with a touch of Nerdlinger thrown in there. Learns a lesson about taking things that aren't yours. (The lesson? Don't do it.)
Woody not only learns some lesson but he is the crux of a lesson learned. In the very first episode, The Mystery of the Golden Medallions, he is the new kid on the team and everyone discounts him...until the lesson is learned.
Miss Bisby: The white lady who drives the bus. She never learns a lesson. But, she does almost jump off the Statue of Liberty.
Spike: Robin's little brother. Wants to be Mr. T. Talks like Mr. T a lot. But, he's, sadly, kind of dumb. He's not a gymnast and gets mad when the others do gymnast things. And, he doesn't read very well. Hilarious and annoying at the same time.
Dozer: Dog with a mohawk. T's best friend. No lessons to be learned.
There are a few other gymnasts who float in and out:
Courtney: The black gal who has high aspirations for herself that keep causing lessons to be learned.
Garcia Lopez: He's Mexican. He learns a lesson about quitting. The lesson: Quitting only makes things worse. He gets infected by a virus that may wipe out everyone in the continental United States. In the end, he's fine.
Sky: She's Native American. She tries to pull a fast one on the team and learns a lesson about not pulling fast ones on people.
There are a few more white guys but I don't remember their names. One of them has a really annoying Italian NYC accent and the other one used to be a gang member.
I don't know if you noticed this but lessons are a large part of the Mr. T — The Animated Series. They are. And, they are Live Action Lessons. At the start of each episode, Mr. T appears in the flesh. In the early episodes, he's alone. But, as the series progresses, he is out in the park with a bunch of kids. We catch him at the point in their afternoons when some kid is stealing, throwing out good food or having trouble seeing or reading...These things inspire Mr. T to turn to us and introduce the animated portion of the episode. I am guessing that the animated portion is from earlier in his life and isn't occurring contemporaneously with his intro. I can't imagine the park full of kids all standing there as T goes on an animated adventure and then returns with the rest of the lesson. At the end of the episode, we return to T and he verifies the lesson we've learned and throws a parting nugget of wisdom at us. (I was just thinking of Mr. T stepping from the park into an animated world, a la "Take On Me" by a-ha. Kind of sultry but with more yellow sweat pants involved — tight around the crotch.)
Occasionally, as in The Hundred Year Mystery, he has no lesson. He just tells us to try to solve the mystery. And, in The Mystery of The Silver Swan, there is no lesson in the opening but there is one in the closing. So, he pulls a fast one on us...but it is a Mr. T Fast One...Not one that deserves a lesson. And, any man who punches out sharks and spins alligators while treading water has learned every lesson he needs and is on a different plane then us.
Of course...You can see now exactly why the show works and why it is timeless.
Mr. T is a Bodhisattva. A Buddha living on earth. He is one who has rejected Nirvana to stay with the humans and help us out. The kids are Buddhas-in-training. They have powers that regular humans do not. They can defy gravity and bend the laws of physics. They attract evil to them and never lose. And, the truly important part: they constantly learn lessons. With each lesson, they move closer to achieving the loss of fear and desire and choosing to ascend to the Heavens or staying on with T to teach. That is why Courtney, Sky and Garcia vanish after a few episodes: We meet them at the end of their journey.
Strange then, that Mr. T never says something like "After Garcia learned to be friends with his brother, his body glowed a bright golden hue and ascended to the sky with Sky and that one kid who you sometimes see in the credits but can't really place." Maybe he's not allowed to.
If all this is true, then who is the show for? The average kid is, let's be honest, kind of a jerk. He or she is so far from being able to ascend to Heaven for learning to eat his vegetables that this show must not be for him. It makes me feel the same way I did whenever I watched The Smurfs. I always felt like it had been made for somebody else. The Care Bears? That was for me. The Smurfs...I don't know. In Belgium (or possibly dubbed in its original French), they may refer to the Human Condition in beautiful and relatable ways. But, I always felt like I'd wondered into someone else's Saturday Morning schedule.
I do feel a kinship with Mr. T — The Animated Series, though. It's wonderfully blurred plotting always appeals. Many of the episodes present themselves as mysteries, which might be true. But, mostly isn't because the solutions are either too obvious or completely unguessable until the very end. I love the way the episodes just keep moving. They keep ending up in the most terrible danger again and again. All the criminals seem to have the same two or three "tough guy" voices. Mr. T becomes more and more super...doing things that are frankly insane...my favorite? Holding up an enormous collapsing bleacher at a Stunt Show so people can file off. And, it is a loud show. Turn up the volume and it is a 20-odd minute constant buzz of music, dialog and action sound effects.
The show appeals to me. Unlike many shows from my childhood, I can watch more than one episode in a sitting and it isn't kind of painful. (Hi, Batman! Beautiful show but more than one episode in a day can make you OD on camp.) I could (and have) watched Mr. T all day.
What was this article/ blab about? I don't know. Kind of an explosion of Mr. T thoughts but there is so much I've left out...Did you know that in almost every episode they are in a different place? All over the U.S., Mexico and Canada. They wind up in Africa in the well-intentioned Mission of Mercy. They may be in the city, on a train, in the desert, in the mountains...But, they've always got that darn bus. They're always going to where the action is...Makes me think...
Is Mr. T like Jon Mikl-Thor in Rock ën' Roll Nightmare? The Intercessor knows that demons are trying to enter our world at a certain point...So, he arranges for a fake band to meet there and draw the evil out...then he defeats it. Mr. T knows where criminal behavior is so he conjures up a gymnastics meet so he and his team of Buddhas-in-training will be there. Let me be honest...There's rarely a lot of gymnastic related-intrigue in this show. Mostly it happens outside of the competitions. Did Mr. T make these kids gymnasts? It seems oddly coincidental that they would all be gymnasts and so close to Heaven. But, then, how can I understand Mr. T?
This has been a brief appreciation of a show that has transcended its pop culture status and become a wonderful example of nuttiness for children: Mr. T — The Animated Series. If you want subtlety, try The Fonz & The Happy Days Gang cartoon. That's the one where The Fonz, Richie, Ralph, the Fonz's dog (Mr. Cool) and a chick from the future named Cupcake travel around in a time machine. That's awesome, too.
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