Behind-The-Scenes Stories From Nostalgic Fantasy TV Shows
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It's easy to forget in the age of mega-budget epics like Game of Thrones and Rings of Power, but the world enjoyed numerous fantasy television series throughout the 1980s and '90s. Were they a little cheesy? Sure. But for lovers of sword-and-sorcery and all things magical, they were a balm in a TV landscape saturated with family sitcoms and cop procedurals.
There were series for adults like Xena: Warrior Princess and plenty of shows for children, including hits like Fraggle Rock and Dungeons & Dragons. And as always, for every show that fans embraced, there are behind-the-scenes stories of the struggle to put it on the screen.
Here are some of the more interesting behind-the-scenes stories from some of the most popular fantasy TV shows. Read on, and be sure to upvote the items that surprise or intrigue you.
- Photo: CBS
If there's one thing fans know about Ron Perlman, it's that he doesn't have a problem sitting in a makeup chair for hours on end. Throughout his career, he's shown up in numerous TV series and films with layers of makeup and prosthetics – from an early human in 1981's Quest for Fire to a demonic superhero in 2004's Hellboy. So it's no surprise to learn that he was top of mind when casting began for Beauty and the Beast.
Casting began shortly after The Name of the Rose, in which Perlman was a supporting actor, hit theaters in 1986. Rick Baker, the special effects wizard behind An American Werewolf in London and other classics, had a thought, as shared by Perlman in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter:
They were on the search for who was going to play Vincent in Beauty and the Beast. Rick Baker, who had already been hired to create the Beast makeup, said “there’s this guy who’s done all this work in masks, and he’s comfortable working that way, and he doesn’t mind the four hours sitting in the chair.” So he recommended me to the producers and the rest, as they say, is history.
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Lucy Lawless’s ‘Xena’ Hair Color Was Inspired By A Tennis Star
Xena: The Warrior Princess came about via the character's popularity as played by Lucy Lawless on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Lawless was cast as the character for a three-episode arc on Hercules despite having already appeared in an earlier episode as a different character.
When she was cast, she went to hair and makeup, and a discussion was had about how the character should look. Initially, they wanted to dye Lawless's hair blonde, but she wasn't excited about the potential prospect of her hair falling out due to the stress the bleaching process would have on her hair. As she recalls:
I was in Auckland, getting my hair dyed and freaking out, by the way. It was the biggest deal ever for me. At first, they thought that they would dye my hair, they would go blonde, and I thought at the time, Gabriela Sabatini was the big noise in tennis, and I was like, “what about her? Like those bulls in Madrid – you know, she’s big and bronze and dark-haired,” and fortunately, they went that way because my hair would have fallen out if they tried to keep it blonde.
- Photo: Showtime
Fairie Tale Theatre is a live-action anthology series created by Shelley Duvall. The series aired for five years in the 1980s and includes depictions of classic fairy tales from the likes of Hans Christian Andersen, The Brothers Grimm, and Charles Perrault, to name a few.
The series lured top actors like Jeff Bridges, Liza Minelli, Billy Crystal, and Carrie Fisher. Paul “Pee-wee Herman” Reubens even did a turn as Pinocchio.
Duvall came up with the idea for the series while filming Popeye with Robin Williams. She read a book of fairy tales in her spare time and got it in her head that Williams would make a great Frog Prince in an adaptation of The Tale of the Frog Prince. Williams was game to try.
Duvall got the concept together, and two years later, it was given the green light at Showtime. True to his word, Williams took the part and appeared in the premiere episode, “The Tale of the Frog Prince,” which aired on September 11, 1982. The show was a hit, and continued for six seasons.
- Photo: HBO4227 VOTES
Fraggle Rock was another production from Jim Henson's studio, which blended live actors, Muppets, and songs in a fantastical setting. One thing the series did differently from similar series was that it was intended for international markets from the beginning.
As such, there was a lot of thought and effort put into making the show appealing to children all over the world, which meant that some tweaks had to be made for foreign distribution.
The series features a human “Doc and Sprocket” sequence, but depending on where it aired, it could have been one of four different sequences. The Muppet voices were done in a way that made it possible to dub them in any language.
In England, Doc is a lighthouse keeper featured on an entirely different set. In France, he's a chef, and Sprocket's name is “Croquet.” In Germany, Doc is an inventor (as he is in the original American version) but played by a different actor in German.
- Photo: NBC
The Storyteller was a fun children's fantasy show that hit the airwaves in 1987, thanks to the inimitable Jim Henson and his love of blending Muppets and actors. John Hurt plays the eponymous storyteller, and he's joined by his trusty talking dog. Hurt retells European folk and fairy tales, and the series was widely beloved. The series was even given new life decades later, thanks to a rebooted AR experience.
Henson got the idea for The Storyteller from his oldest daughter, Lisa. She attended Harvard University and took a folklore class, which fascinated the famous puppeteer. He and his daughter worked on the concept, which brought to life authentic multicultural folktales via the brilliant Jim Henson's Creature Shop. The Creature Shop developed the series and its many Muppets, including the animatronic talking dog.
- Photo: NBC
Amazing Stories was an anthology fantasy series created by none other than Steven Spielberg. The show ran for a couple of years in the mid-1980s and featured a wide array of popular actors in various vignettes ranging from fantasy to science fiction and everything else in between. It proved a showcase for top directors, including Spielberg himself, as well as Martin Scorsese, Robert Zemeckis, and Clint Eastwood.
The show was popular, and many actors wanted to get involved, including Mark Hamill. Though best known for Star Wars, Hamill has spent most of his career voicing animated characters, as well as acting in theater, television, and video games.
In an interview with IGN, he was asked if he was cast for the Amazing Stories episode “Gather Ye Acorns” because he was a fan of comic books:
That was a coincidence, really. They offered me Amazing Stories only after Timothy Hutton turned it down. But it was Amazing Stories! It was Steven Spielberg, and I said, "I'd love to – can I see a script?" And they said, "No! It's all locked down." It's the only thing where I just said, "I'll do it," without even knowing what it was. When I read it, I tell you, I was like, "What an amazing coincidence!" This was a love letter to pack rats and fans who save everything, and it's telling them that it's all right to do that. That was a complete coincidence. A lot of people say, "You must've been influential in the storyline." Like I said, I just couldn't believe it.
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A Final Episode Of ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Was Written But Never Produced
Back in 1983, children got a chance to dive into the world of TSR's Dungeons & Dragons without having to break out any dice. That's the year TSR and Marvel Comics got together and produced the Dungeons & Dragons animated series. A mainstay of the Saturday morning cartoon lineup, it ran for three seasons, consisting of 27 episodes - but it nearly had a 28th.
The executives at CBS asked the writers to create a final episode for the third season to close out the season's events. It was to be titled “Requiem,” and series writer Michael Reaves got to work:
I wanted to call it Redemption, but CBS felt that that title gave too much away… [and] should end on a note that was both ambiguous and triumphant to cover all bets.
The idea was to use the episode as a springboard, so the six main characters would become more self-reliant moving into the subsequent season. That was the plan, but it never came to fruition. The fourth season of Dungeons & Dragons wasn't picked up, and “Requiem” was never produced. Sadly, that means there are no animation or storyboards for fans to enjoy.
While that's certainly not good news for the fans, there is still a way to enjoy the unproduced episode. Reaves released the script he wrote, which you can read here.
- Photo: CBS8208 VOTES
Ron Perlman Compared George R.R. Martin’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ Writing To ‘John Coltrane On Acid’
While he's best known these days for writing the many books that make up Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, George R.R. Martin has had a varied career, writing short stories, teaching, and script writing for television.
In addition to work on the 1980s incarnation of The Twilight Zone, and having prose work adapted for the 1990s Outer Limits series, Martin was a writer on Beauty and the Beast. He also acted on the show (as an extra) and produced some of the 13 episodes he wrote.
Ron Perlman commented on Martin's writing in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter:
[Ron] Koslow wrote beautifully. He wrote like no one else wrote. I’m a big jazz guy. I would compare his scripts to Miles Davis. The following week you’d get the next episode, which was written by George R. R. Martin, and I would compare his scripts to John Coltrane on acid (which Coltrane was on for the last two years of his life). George wrote bestially and primally but with incredible elegance and sophistication — a very different color palette from Ron, who wrote more lyrically.
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The Most Annoying Character In ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Was There To Promote Conformity As A Value
The Dungeons & Dragons animated TV series centers around six children: Hank, Eric, Diana, Presto, Sheila, and Bobby. They are all transported to the world of D&D, and must work together to find a way home while taking part in adventures and quests. Each has different traits, making them best suited for their class: ranger, acrobat, magician, thief, barbarian, and cavalier.
While each character had good traits, one stood out as a whiner: Eric. Mark Evanier developed the series, and he wasn't a huge fan of Eric, so fans likely wonder why he kept him in the series. The short answer is he had to:
As you may know, there are those out there who attempt to influence the content of childrens' television. We call them “parents groups.”
We, the folks who were writing cartoons, were ordered to include certain "pro-social" morals in our shows. At the time, the dominant "pro-social" moral was as follows: The group is always right… the complainer is always wrong.
We were forced to insert this "lesson" in D&D, which is why Eric was always saying, "I don't want to do that," and paying for his social recalcitrance. I thought it was forced and repetitive, but I especially objected to the lesson.
- Photo: ABC10114 VOTES
In many ways, Thundarr the Barbarian is the ideal fantasy series for children. The show is set around the year 3994, two thousand years after Earth was devastated by a passing rogue planet. Amid a post-apocalyptic landscape where science and magic coexist, mighty Thundarr and his allies fight for good.
It's a great premise, but it's also one that requires a lot of action. Despite taking place in the far future, Thundarr is a fantasy series, so there's plenty of swordplay, sorcery, and violence. As a result, the animators and writers constantly worried about the network censors messing with their series.
In an interview with writer Buzz Dixon, the question arose about the censors and their impact on the series, which Buzz answered, saying the following:
It was a constant battle with the suits. When Thundarr was picked up for the second season, the network said they were going to be looking even more closely at the violence in the new shows.
Joe [Ruby] fretted over this since he felt we’d already watered the show down to the point where it was barely exciting. Steve [Gerber] suggested writing a second season opener that would be so violent that even after the network got through with it, we’d have enough left that in all future arguments over violence, we could point to that episode and say, “You let us do that, why not this?”
Since my episodes had been censored the most for violent content, it was decided I would write the season opener, “Wizard War.” I turned in the most action-packed script I could devise. Steve Gerber later told people I was the only person he knew who could write a 45-page fight scene and not repeat himself once. Joe turned green when he saw what I had written, said, “We can’t show that to the network, or they’ll cancel us!” and pre-censored the script before it went to them.
They still cut out about 2/3 of what remained, but what they did allow gave us precedent for the rest of the season, and so we were able to finish the show with the same level of action as before.
- Photo: CBS11182 VOTES
Linda Hamilton Enjoyed The ‘Forced Intimacy’ Of The ‘Beauty and the Beast’ Set
While Linda Hamilton is probably best known for playing Sarah Connor in The Terminator franchise, she's worked in many other franchises. She was in King Kong Lives in 1986, Children of the Corn, and much more. She was also the actor tapped to play Catherine (AKA “Beauty” in Beauty and the Beast).
In an interview with Den of Geek about her career, she discussed how, at the end of a long week of shooting, “three costume girls are lying on the bed, and you’re lying on the floor, and two other people are lying next to you, and there’s a person in the chair, and you’re all like [snores]. You know, that kind of intimacy, the forced intimacy, all of those things I remember. Isn’t that glamorous!” Still, despite the lack of glamour, Hamilton enjoyed it:
But that, to me, embodies filmmaking. It’s just a whole bunch of strangers that, by the end of the show, have become more than… closer than family and the teamwork that it takes, and standing there trying to remember the lines that you learned thirty hours before, the night before, and haven’t had a chance to look at again, because you’ve been doing scenes all day.
And they’re spraying you with body makeup and doing your hair, and someone’s putting the dress on you while you’re running lines and the panic! You have to learn to be a sort of the calm, in the center of that and to never let it show. And because you’ll never get it if you’re panicking, to just be the calm with everything going around you.
Those moments are… you wouldn’t trade them for the world. And you just go, “How am I doing this!? How am I doing this!?” and when you surprise yourself like that, those are the days you remember, you know it’s the human stuff.
- Photo: ABC12144 VOTES
The ‘Thundarr The Barbarian’ Writers Took Inspiration From The ‘Weekly World News’ Tabloid
Thundarr the Barbarian's setting allowed writers to do all manner of nutty things with the series, and there's little holding back. If you've watched an episode or two and wondered how the writers came up with the show's various characters, settings, and plot elements, there is an answer: The Weekly World News.
During an interview with the series writer Buzz Dixon, he was asked what inspired a series many described as Conan the Barbarian meets Planet of the Apes, and he pointed to the popular tabloid newspaper:
There used to be an ultra-cheap black-and-white tabloid called The Weekly World News. When other tabloids were reporting about the latest romantic shenanigans of movie and pop stars, they were running articles about mutant bat-boys and pits opening to the gates of hell in Siberia. It was wonderful, wacky stuff, and we’d buy an issue each week and pass it around the office to spark story ideas.
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys was an insanely popular fantasy series from the mid-1990s that made Kevin Sorbo into a star. The series followed the titular character's adventures as a continuation of five preceding television movies that set up the show.
The series passed Baywatch at one point as the most popular syndicated series – no small feat. In an interview, Sorbo discussed the show's popularity:
We passed Baywatch as the most-watched show in the world, and we were in 176 countries; It was insane…. The combination of the action, the beautiful women – we showed a lot of cleavage – I call it “Baywatch BC;” it was that kind of a show.
- Photo: NBC
Land of the Lost was a popular series in the 1970s featuring the Marshall family, who become trapped in a time warp to a past or alternate timeline filled with dinosaurs, a primitive race of humans, and humanoid lizards called Sleestak. The series ran for a few years, ending in December 1976.
The dinosaurs were all created using stop-motion animation, which was blended with the live-action actors – fairly sophisticated for TV fare of the era. The effects were created by Harry Walton and Gene Warren Jr. Walton explained how he almost found himself on the set of Star Wars but turned it down to continue working on the TV series:
Dennis calls me up when I was at Excelsior; this was like 1976, “Hey, Harry, you wanna come work on this movie called Star Wars?” … And he said, “you know it might only be two or three months work, and then you might be finished, you know?” And I said, “Well Dennis, I’m not going to leave my job at Excelsior that I've been at for like six years to work on some science fiction movie – I've never heard of the guy – who the director is, you know, and then I'll be out of work in three months,” so I said, no.
As it happens, he was approached a second time to work on The Empire Strikes Back but had to pass on that as well because of prior commitments.
- Photo: ABC15108 VOTES
One Episode Of ‘Thundarr The Barbarian’ Was Inspired By A 500-Million-Year-Old Fossil
Thundarr the Barbarian took inspiration from “[p]retty much anything and everything that wasn't nailed down,” said series writer Buzz Dixon. He wasn't kidding. Supermarket tabloids were just one of the eclectic sources mined for ideas.
During an interview, Buzz was asked about some of his genuinely unique sources of inspiration, and he recalled the episode “Last Train to Doomsday,” which features an unusual locomotive:
Let me give you an example of how creativity works: I’d read a book on the Burgess Shale, a sheet of fossil rock found in Canada that contains thousands of fossilized remains of tiny sea life that has been extinct for over half a billion years. Among these was a little critter called the hallucigenia.
We know literally nothing about this organism: Was it plant, animal, something else? We don’t even know which end was up or how it moved (it’s even been suggested that it’s not a whole organism unto itself but rather easy to break off appendages of some other, larger, unknown animal). People have drawn hallucigenia in a variety of angles, and one of those looked to me like an old fashion steam locomotive on stilts.
Well, that got me thinking, and I wondered to myself, who in Thundarr’s world would want a train on stilts and why? And that backed me into a story where one of the last old steam locomotives was still being operated, and that backed me into a plot point that could get Ariel, Ookla, and Thundarr involved.
So some little bug 505 million years ago spawned a Thundarr episode.
- Photo: CBS
Wizards and Warriors was a short-lived series on CBS that takes place in the realm of Aperans. The backstory featured a standard-issue rivalry between kingdoms, an evil prince, lots of magic, and everything else you should expect in a fantasy TV series – including sparks flying whenever swords clash.
To be clear, that's not something that happens in real life, but it looks great. Each episode features a sword fight between Prince Erik Greystone and Prince Dirk Blackpool, and their swords spark thanks to being wired with electricity.
If that sounds dangerous, well, it can be. As Jeff Conaway (Prince Erik) explained in an interview:
It's scary, but it's also exciting because we don't hold back. Duncan [Regehr] and I trust each other and hope the swords will be in the right places. It's got to look real because it's a matter of Good against Evil! Sometimes it's too real. At one point, Duncan didn't parry when I lunged, and I touched his arm. Suddenly, there was a shower of sparks, and he jumped ten feet in the air! I could feel the current pulsing through my blade. It was a tense 30 seconds; he wasn't hurt, but he definitely knew he had been zapped.
