Monday, April 08, 2024
Obscurity of the Day: The Vidiots
As we've discussed many times before, TV listing pages, with their acres of boring tables, were ripe targets for a cartoon series to brighten things up. By the 1980s, though, the TV-centric gag panels (they were almost all panels) were very much on the wane. Why that is I cannot figure, because this was the decade in which cable TV blossomed, making those listings take up far more room than in the old days of three networks and a local station or two. Apparently the equation that more boring type implies more need for brighteners does not actually compute, though.
Into this bear market came Ken Bowser, who was at the time working on staff at the Orlando Sentinel-Star. He created The Vidiots for his paper, debuting there as a daily on August 13 1981*. Bowser's work was familiar to Orlandoans and he was already well-known for his repulsive toad-like characters, now institutionalized in The Vidiots.
Because the Sentinel-Star was owned by the Chicago Tribune, Bowser had a well-oiled pipeline for submitting to their syndicate. About a year and a half after the feature started as a local feature it was picked up for syndication, first appearing with a syndicate stamp on January 3 1983.
The Vidiots never had more than a modest list of clients, and I think most of them were probably likewise Chicago Tribune owned papers. It was a pretty funny panel, but newspapers generally just didn't seem interested in TV page brighteners anymore. Bowser stuck with the feature for four years, finally giving it up on February 14 1987.
*Source: All dates from Orlando Sentinel-Star.
Labels: Obscurities
