The Walt Disney Company
It’s a slim week for new TV series premieres but 1954 did see the entry of Walt Disney onto the television landscape with the debut of a series that would run for decades on different networks and with different titles. This week also saw the premieres of three moderately successful animated series in three different decades, four short-lived reality series, two even more short-lived sitcoms, and a Hallmark Christmas movie. Scroll down to see the shows, and movie, that premiered this week and tell us if you remember any of them.
1954
- October 27 – Walt Disney’s Disneyland (ABC, Four seasons, 99 episodes)
- November 1 – The Ilona Massey Show (Dumont Television Network, One season, 10 episodes)
Walt Disney’s Disneyland was created as a way for Disney to raise funds for his theme park Disneyland. Episodes of the series would be set in one of the park’s lands: Adventureland, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland and Frontierland. The program spawned the Davy Crockett craze of 1955 with five episodes — not shown weekly — starring Fess Parker. The theme song became a hit, and millions of dollars of Crockett merchandise, including the famous coonskin cap, was sold. The episodes were later re-edited into two theatrical films.
As with most DuMont Network series, no episodes of The Ilona Massey Show are known to exist.
1964
- No new series premiered this week in 1964.
1974
- No new series premiered this week in 1974.
1984
- No new series premiered this week in 1984.
1994
Klasky Csupo
- October 29 – Aaahh!!! Real Monsters (Nickelodeon, Four seasons, 52 episodes)
Aaahh!!! Real Monsters was the third series produced by Klasky Csupo, which also created Rugrats and Duckman. It took more than five years to settle on a title, with working titles that included Monsters and Real Monsters. The series earned a Daytime Emmy nomination in 1995 for Outstanding Achievement in Animation but lost to Rugrats.
2004
Double Hemm
- October 27 – Center of the Universe (CBS, One season, 15 episodes, 5 unaired)
- October 27 – Drawn Together (Comedy Central, Three seasons, 36 episodes)
Center of the Universe starred John Goodman, Jean Smart, Spencer Breslin, Olympia Dukakis, Diedrich Bader, Melinda McGraw and Ed Asner.
Drawn Together was an animated parody of house-based reality shows like The Real World, The Surreal Life and Big Brother. The characters parody the sterotypical contestants seen on those shows, and in some episodes the characters compete in challenges but the premise was basically dropped in later episodes. A 2010 direct-to-video film, The Drawn Together Movie: The Movie!, served as the series finale, even though the third season finale was promoted and referenced as a series finale. The characters acknowledge within the show that they are cartoons, caricatures of more well-known (and copyrighted) characters, and are drawn in the style of the characters they represent. Some characters have four fingers, some have five, some have dark outlines, some are softer (representing the Disney style), and the character of Toot, a parody of Betty Boop, is in grainy black-and-white.
2014
Warner Bros. Animation
- October 27 – Mike Tyson Mysteries (Adult Swim, Four seasons, 70 episodes)
- October 27 – Hair Jacked (TruTV, One season, 17 episodes)
- October 27 – Fake Off (TruTV, Two seasons, 32 episodes)
- October 28 – How to Be a Grown Up (TruTV, Two seasons, 28 episodes)
- October 28 – Friends of the People (TruTV, Two seasons, 18 episodes)
- October 28 – Benched (USA, One season, 12 episodes)
- October 30 – The McCarthys (CBS, One season, 15 episodes)
- November 1 – One Starry Christmas (Hallmark Channel, TV movie)
Hair Jacked was a game show in which contestants in a hair salon had to answer questions or play mini-games to win the episode, while the loser went home with the outrageous Do of the Day. Jon Gabrus hosted.
The McCarthys was cancelled after 11 episodes on February 3, 2015. The remaining four episodes were burned off on July 4 and July 11, 2015. The main cast included Tyler Ritter, Joey McIntyre, Jack McGee and Laurie Metcalf. Guest stars included Alyson Hannigan, John Ratzenberger, Jane Kaczmarek, Rick Fox, Jean Smart and David Alan Grier.
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