Wednesday, March 02, 2022
Firsts and Lasts: Robotman Debuts
Robotman, debuting on February 18 1985, was intended to be nothing more than a coldly calculated money-grubbing tie-in to a music-playing plush toy. Kenner got together with United Feature to do the cross-marketing strip with no goal in mind except to stimulate toy sales. But what they hadn't counted on was that in tapping young cartoonist Jim Meddick to draw the strip, they'd inadvertently created a spin-off that was far greater than the toy they were trying to hawk.
Robotman the toy came and went pretty quickly, a marketing scheme that quickly fizzled, but the Robotman strip was good enough to find a decent client list (though assuredly nowhere near the 250-paper debut they claimed). Meddick was eventually left alone by the corporate suits at Kenner and the strip blossomed. He reshaped the strip, dumped the silly robot with the heart emblem on its chest, and renamed the strip in honor of its new human star, Monty. He created memorable new characters like Fleshy the hairless cat, Monty's buddy Moondog, and my personal favorite, the spoiled rich kid Sedgwick Nuttingham III. The strip turned into something quite wonderful that has now endured and become the classic that it is today.
For more on Jim Meddick and Robotman, check out this interview from Hogan's Alley.
Above, the first week of dailies of Robotman, showing little hint of the great strip it would one day become.
Labels: Firsts and Lasts
UFS originally urged Bill Waterson to include Robotman into a Clavin & Hobbes storyline, which he resisted, which lead to the decision to launch a seperate strip by Jim Meddick.
Meddich could finally ease Robotman from the strip and change it over to star his own character Monty in 2001, long after the Robotman toy was discontinued,a year after the Kenner Toys company was merged into oblivion, and one might guess, the Trade Mark for Robotman expired.
: 3/02/2022 8:03 AM Robotman debris: Long ago I turned on the TV before work one morning, and instead of the usual syndicated cartoon series there was "Robotman & Friends", evidently an unsold series pilot. It felt like another Care Bears clone, surrounding Robotman with marketable robot buddies and syrupy cuteness (Hearts! Rainbows! Love!). The human characters were realistically drawn, and there was zero connection with the strip. All in all a typical DIC production.
You'll find it on YouTube broken into pieces. No better than what I remembered.
While poking around also found a Robotman & Friends Move and Match game on eBay, plus a references to a Robotman float in the 1985 Macy's Thanksgiving Parade. Since it looked like big money was being spent, one wonders that there wasn't more effort to pull everything together. Even Carl Barks's epic adventures stayed true to the design and character of Donald Duck, grounding him in what felt like the world seen in the animated shorts.
