90s TV Spinoffs

With all the movie remakes currently in the works, it's not a stretch to wonder if we've just plain run out of ideas. The Karate Kid and The Never-Ending Story are just a few decades young and already they're being treated like golden oldies in need of revamping for the new millennium. To dismiss this generation of hangers-on as a new fleeting phenomenon would be dishonest, though. Our coming-of-age era entertainment was equally if not more guilty of the same abhorrent offenses. We didn't call them rip-offs back then, though. We called them spin-offs.

A spin-off is an admittedly lazy creative process of launching a new program. Relying on the popularity of an already successful show, spin-off creators simply take existing characters and separate them from their natural habitat in an established program. The moment audiences respond remotely positively to a secondary character, producers often jumped on the spin-off bandwagon. The theory was, you liked seeing them on this show for five minutes, why not thirty? It seemed a logical leap, and certainly easier than coming up with an original idea.

In reality, some spin-offs work better than others. There's a fragile balance to keep: true enough to the original characters to ride the wave of the established show's popularity, but original enough not to appear a complete facsimile of the first show. Most of the successful spinoffs relied on repackaging standby semi-major characters, though some managed to coast on showcasing minor or one-time guests. The best of them went on to outstrip the fame of the show from which they were spawned. The worst faded into obscurity as poorly thought-out network schemes to milk a show's popularity for all it was worth.

There were many, many spin-offs in the 90s, but let's take a look at a few of the most-watched:

Cheers-->Frasier



Here's an incidence of a seriously popular spin-off. It ran eleven seasons, the same as its predecessor, Cheers. The show followed regular Cheers patron Dr. Frasier Crane as he hosts a pop psychology call-in radio show. His brother is also a psychiatrist, and a very neurotic one at that. Frasier takes in his aging father and his full-time character, and hilarious, toned-down subdued antics ensue. The show was witty and didn't talk down to its audience, which was always a refreshing notion for a sitcom. Though it wavered a bit in its final years, it remains one of the most successful spin-offs to date.



Perfect Strangers-->Family Matters



Perfect Strangers: two wacky mismatched cousin roommates with differing nationalities. Family Matters: charming middle-class black family. Tough to see the connection, right? Winslow matriarch Hariette Winslow started as a character on Perfect Stranger and was deemed worthy of further exploration. Of course, then they brought in Urkel and everything changed plot focus-wise, but it was a decent staple of the popular TGIF lineup. Not too shabby for a spin-off.



Buffy the Vampire Slayer-->Angel



If you think vampires are the hot new thing, you're probably suffering from acute memory loss. I'd get that checked out if I were you. In the 90s, it was all about Buffy. Her vampires didn't need skin sparkling gimmicks, just her pure ass-kicking finesse. The show spun off Angel in 1999, featuring Buffy regular David Boreanaz as its title character. Angel was a vampire cursed with the restoration of his human soul, thus racking him with guilt and internal struggle. It was a little hokey, but if you're into that kind of thing, it was a pretty for Buffy seconds.




Golden Girls-->Empty Nest-->Nurses + Golden Girls-->The Golden Palace

Talk about a strangled route on this one. The Golden Girls actually split into two separate spin-off tracks, one focusing on a once-featured neighbor couple and the other rebranding the original as a Bea Arthur-less project. None of them assumed the level of popular of Golden Girls, but they did reasonably well for spin-offs.

On track one, we had Empty Nest, a project that had a bumpy road to production. Originally intended to spin from the GG episode Empty Nests about a neighbor couple whose children had all flown the coop. Unluckily for producers, the characters bombed, so they brought in entirely new characters with a different premise altogether: a widower whose post-college aged daughters come back to live with them. They still called it Empty Nest, which of course makes no sense. It was a full nest. The hen was gone, but all the chicks were there. Sounds full to me. Guess they just wanted to spare themselves the embarrassment of admitting they had to can the original concept altogether.



Remarkably, Empty Nest also managed to spurn a spin-off, Nurses. The Nurses in question worked at the same hospital as Dr. Harry Weston of Empty Nest. The show was okay, but the first-season ratings were in a bit of a slump. In response, show writers played all sorts of cheap tricks including like adding new characters and completely changing existing ones. Regardless, the show lasted 3 seasons, so they must have been doing something right.



Meanwhile, on track two we had the McLanahan/White/Getty vehicle, The Golden Palace, in which Don Cheadle gives his second best performance as a hotel manager. Throw in Cheech Marin, and you've got yourself a zany bunch of hotel proprietors. That was the idea, at least. The theme song was a cheesy musakified version of The Golden Girls' "Thank You For Being a Friend". It only lasted one season, partially because of its terrible time slot and partially because it wasn't all that great.





Animaniacs-->Pinky and the Brain



After seeing them on Animaniacs, how could you not give these little lab mice their own half hour to shine? If nothing else, I'm sold on theme song alone. It's so straightforward. One is a genius, the other's insane. So incredibly simple, yet so humorous. Well played, Warner Bros.



Beavis and Butthead-->Daria

This is the first half of the first episode...intrigued? They're all up there. On YouTube. Just don't tell the authorities. They've been uploaded backwards. Ingenius, no? Now go watch them before they're gone.

Here's a case in which the spin-off was entirely different from the series from which it originated. Daria had none of Beavis and Butthead's bonehead humor. It was smart, sarcastic, quick-witted, and hilarious. It was as sharp as B&B was dumb. Our protagonist Daria was something of a social outcast, giving voice to misfits and brains everywhere. The show so perfectly captured the stereotypes of high school, though it treated its subjects with kindness even while mocking them. It had heart, but just when you thought they were going in for the kill on an aww moment, they triggered back with a biting retort.



Party of Five-->Time of Your Life



Another one-seasoner, Time of Your Life was meant to launch Jennifer Love Hewitt's character from Party of Five character into her own series as she tackled New York City. It didn't even make it all the way through its first season before cancellation, if that gives you any hints to the critical reception. It was really pretty terrible.



90210-->Melrose Place-->Models, INC



Melrose Place was intended as an expansion of the 90210 franchise to reach out to the twenty-something demographic. The Jake Hanson character originally appeared on 90210 as a bad-boy biker hired to do some construction for Kelly's family. The two engage in a brief tryst, which was conveniently resolved in time to transfer Jake to the MP apartment complex setting. The show went on to establish its own following and featured much darker storylines than its after-school-special-leaning predecessor.




I'm going to open myself to mockery and admit that as a child, I was a shameless Models, Inc. fan. Really, it was awful, but I was probably among the only disappointed people upon news of the cancellation following the first season. I mean, they ended it with To Be Continued... I heard they eventually aired the continuation on E!, but obviously I missed it. I may never know these answers.


The Tracey Ullman Show-->The Simpsons



You have to give some credit to the longest running sitcom of all time, especially considering it's a cartoon. The Simpsons premiered as animated shorts on the Tracey Ullman Show, featuring a dysfunctional family and their humorous episodic experiences. It may not still be up to its original quick-witted standards, but they do still have their original cast. That's almost as good.


Good Morning Miss Bliss-->Saved By the Bell-->Saved by the Bell: The College Years-->Saved by the Bell: The New Class

How many times can you repackage a franchise? That's the question Saved By the Bell producers must have asked themselves, obviously putting faith in the answer "a whole lot". The original Disney Series centering around junior high students and their teacher played by Hayley Mills was cute enough, but nothing cult fanship worthy. Producers tweaked the shows into the California-based Saved by the Bell and launched a franchise that begot awesome product tie ins like my previously mentioned Zackberry flavored shampoo. The show wasn't really one for continuity, but it made its shaky way to graduation and we assumed they'd all call it a day.

Not so. Featuring a distinctly huskier Zack Morris and some god-awful 90s flannel getups, Saved by the Bell: The College Years, ran one lone season from 1994-1995. It was an effort, sure, but not a particularly valiant one.



Oh, and there was an even worse but far longer-running spin-off, Saved by the Bell: The New Class, retaining only Screech and Mr Belding from the original. And really, I doubt those two were swatting away dozens of projects. They needed the work.

A few of the originals drop by The New Class

Spin-offs can obviously be very hit or miss. Some characters have the potential to carry their own series, while others are better left fading into the background. One thing's for sure, though: if you can grind a franchise into the ground, you might as well give it your best shot. You might get a Frasier, you might get a Time of Your Life, but the odds seem pretty well-stacked in your favor.

The Golden Girls

It might be hard to fathom that a show detailing the daily lives of the elderly could be racy and envelope pushing. When we think of older people, many of us are apt to imagine hearty, wholesome, grandparent-like characters. We don't, generally speaking, think of promiscuous 50-something Southern belles and wisecracking Sicilian grannies. It's just not in the repertoire.

When it premiered in the mid-80s, The Golden Girls was like of the Sex and the City of senior citizenry. Granted, it was preachier than SATC, particularly in later seasons, but they always padded those movie-of-the-week themed episodes with enough good laughs to keep us watching. It was edgy and controversial, portraying older women in a light not usually cast on them by popular media. They were the ultimate hip grannies. They were up on all the issues, the popular crazes, fashion--well, 80s and early 90s fashion. You have to give them a pass on that one, it was a dark time for the fashion industry, a desolate landscape littered with shoulder pads and oversized sweaters.

While this would be pretty tame for SATC, this type of thing was all but unheard of in the 80s and early 90s

This is probably as good a point as any to offer a caveat to my readers: I am something of a Golden Girls fanatic. I mean, I wrote an angry letter to Lifetime after they sold the syndicated reruns to WE and Oxygen, asking why they couldn't keep my favorite show on a channel I get on the TV in my bedroom? That's borderline cat-lady behavior, I know, but I just need to get my fix. I've seen every episode dozens of times, I could probably recite the jokes right along with Dorothy, Blanche, Sophia, and Rose. There's a sort of timeless quality about the humor that can draw you in again and again, even if it may not be enough to impel you to write an angry letter to the proprietors of a popular women's TV network. That's reserved for the loyalest of us Goldies.


That's not to say the show wasn't without its pitfalls. Golden Girls, throughout its 7-year run, was chock-full of cheap tricks. I've never seen a program with more clip shows. It's almost as if at the laziest point of a season, the writers would spin the giant wheel o' arbitrary themes, dig up archive footage, and throw together a half-assed episode with all of seven minutes of new material. There were even two-part clip shows, which really was pushing it. How long can Blanche deliberate over selling her house to a Japanese businessman before they run out of wistful household memories to reminisce over? Apparently an entire hour, which in TV time is equivalent to something like a month.

Really, the light premises of these clip shows are borderline absurd

And like any good comic writers, Golden Girls' staff never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Continuity was at best an afterthought and at worst completely abandoned. The principals all had pretty shaky backstories subject to change for the sake of a particularly potent joke. Their children, ex-husbands, and current beaus were generally interchangeable. The major components of their life stories usually remained intact, but these secondary characters were often portrayed by different actors in different episodes.

Worse yet was the recycling of the same actors to play two completely different roles, as was the case with Harold Gould, who played both an early-season date to Rose named Arnie and her later long-term boyfriend Miles. We can only assume there are only so many old people with a sense of humor out there, we had to keep cycling the same ones through to get a laugh.

The characters were simultaneously multifaceted and cartoony. Each with their specific stereotyped character traits and everyone played the butt of a joke as a one-note player, but each got a fair amount of additional development that still allowed us to feel empathy for them. Yes, we had the dumb blonde, the smart sarcastic one, the maneater, and the wise old firecracker, yet we often got to see other sides of each character. For the most part, though, they were at their funniest when they played it straight in their preassigned roles. Our major players are:

Dorothy Zbornak (Bea Arthur), a divorced substitute teacher with a biting wit and penchant for sarcastic humor. Growing up, she was my humor icon. She's quick-witted, sharp, and has impeccable timing. Even with all this stacked in her favor, she doesn't quite have it all together. She got pregnant out of wedlock after her prom and married the guy, Stan, who her mother Sophia appropriately dubbed a yutz. He cheated on her, they got divorced, and she works as a substitute teacher. It's not exactly the stuff childhood dreams are made of. You have to admit though, she has the best one liners:



Rose Nylund (Betty White), a proud St. Olaf native and recent widow. She's the epitome of the dumb blonde, with charming naivete and gullibility. Rose is the queen of long-winded, non-sensical stories brimming with Nordic charm, or as it's known to all you non-Minnesotans out there, craziness. She's good-hearted and relentlessly upbeat, which is almost enough to make you forgive her for the god-awful stories. Almost.



Blanche Devereux (Rue McClanahan), an Atlanta transplant who, ahem, enjoys the company of men. Or, as Sophia might say, she's a total slut. Blanche is the original Samantha. She's a sex-crazed older woman generally uninterested in being tied down. Well, not in that way. In one episode, I heard she's got handcuffs. By the way, if you've never read McLanahan's My First Five Husbands and the One That Got Away, I highly recommend it. You can borrow my copy.



Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty), Dorothy's elderly mother who previously suffered a stroke and managed to escape her "imprisonment" in the Shady Pines retirement home to come and live with her daughter and friends. Sophia is full of old-world charm, a Sicilian with all sorts of cockamamie stories that begin with, "Picture it: Sicily." Her Italian language skills are pretty suspect for someone who allegedly grew up in the old country, but it all boils down the tried-and-true Hollywood formula of treating real-life Jews and Italians as interchangeable casting-wise.

The show initially blamed her lack of filter to her stroke, but it was obviously just an excuse to let an 80-year old get away with absolute ridiculousness. Granted, Getty was actually younger than Arthur, who played her daughter on the show, but they made her up fairly convincingly. In the later seasons, at least.



The show had scandalousness and hilarious wit, so its no surprise two of its writers went on to create Desperate Housewives (Marc Cherry) and Arrested Development (Mitchell Hurwitz). More than that, though, it wasn't afraid to tackle issues. Golden Girls took on HIV, the importance of safe sex, sexual harassment, drug abuse, homelessness, teenage pregnancy, and when they ran out of high-caliber issues, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

It all sounds pretty heavy for a comedy, and it was. The show hit that unique balance of humorous irreverence and substantive issue exploration that made it a pioneering comedy for its time. I can almost guarantee that if you saw it as a child, most of the jokes went totally over your head. Lucky for you, it remains on constant rerun. Or, you could come over and watch the episodes my DVR is currently 74% full of. Take your pick.

Celebrity Deathmatch

If you were ever looking for a show that was simultaneously enticing and repugnant, here it is. Parents hated this show, meaning as kids it was our antagonistic duty to like it regardless of its nausea-inducing violence. It could be sharp and witty, yes, but more often that sharpness led to puncture wounds. Very, very bloody ones.

In the days before MTV poured their limited resources into the Guidoful Jersey Shore, they had a few satirical animated shows in their lineup. Amongst these shows, Celebrity Deathmatch was undoubtedly the sickest and most twisted. The 90s were a pioneering time for adult-targeted cartoons. In a time before animated program blocks like Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, it was still a relatively novel concept to develop an animated program that was at best completely unsuitable for children.



Of course, Celebrity Deathmatch was not just animated. It was claymated, which has been scientifically proven to be the most nightmare-causing form of animation. Granted, this conclusive analysis is from my own research as a sleepless eight year old scared silly by a Gumby cartoon, but I stand behind my contention. Claymation is inherently disturbing, second only to Tim Burton-style stop-motion animation. It just leaves you with a bad aftertaste.

The show poked fun at both individual celebrities and the ridiculousness of professional wrestling, all in a convenient 30-minute format. As the name clearly states, the program showcased satirical fight-to-the-death matches between popular celebrities. Each episode usually featured three separate deathmatches, most of which culminated in the gruesome, bloody death of one of the participants. What, that doesn't sound like a comedy to you?

Whenever I saw the show as a kid I always had a distinct uneasy feeling that this was something I was not supposed to be watching. It was excessively violent, used crude humor, and was generally unsettling. It was certainly not meant for child audiences, as it usually aired in the later evening lineup. There were, however, occasional daytime repeats that led to my unending pondering of such deep questions as "Who would win in a fight for their life? Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera?" The question haunts me to this day. I don't think I ever caught the ending.

A short version of the show premiered in the late 90s on MTV's Cartoon Sushi, featuring a deathmatch between Marilyn Manson and Charles Manson. The concept was revived for the 1998 MTV Super Bowl Halftime show, featuring pressing real-life questions such as "Who is a more annoying band--Hanson or Spice Girls?"

Hanson vs. The Spice Girls. - kewego
The brothers Hanson take on The Spice Girls for the title of "Most annoying band in the world!", also featuring Marylin Manson.

Parole chiave:girls manson celebrity deathmatch celebrity marylin spice deathmatch hanson

Video de cdmfanman6

In this warped reality, a deranged Marilyn Manson (is there any other kind?) cut the light rigging off the ceiling and wiped out both bands in one fell swoop. Tragedy or triumph? The quality of your music taste decides.


Following their Super Bowl appearance, Celebrity Deathmatch was soon picked up as a full series. The first full episode premiered in May of 1998 featuring the following 3 shorts:

Hilary Clinton vs. Monica Lewinsky


clinton_vs_lewinsky - MyVideo

It seems MTV used to be into topical political humor as opposed to simply scripting the dating of moms. This was a cheap and easy shot, of course, but it does get bonus points for referencing the Gennifer Flowers scandal as well.

Jim Carrey vs. Mariah Carey



I assume these two were judged fit opponents on the basis of their shared surname alone. As you can judge from the above video, the voices weren't always spot on but the show managed to capture the stars' most irritating mannerisms and tics. In the case of Jim Carrey, it didn't take much to expose these irritating mannerisms. The talking-through-the-butt gag is pretty straightforward. In a surprise twist, however, Mariah high-notes Jim to death. Didn't see that one coming.

Jerry Seinfeld vs. Tim Allen

Jerry Seinfeld vs. Tim Allen - kewego
Time for some ferocious funny buisness!

Keywords: tim seinfeld celebrity deathmatch celebrity allen jerry deathmatch

Video from cdmfanman6

Our premiere ended with a clash of the sitcom titans, pitting Jerry Seinfeld against Tim Allen. Neither of them shows an especially impressive command of deathmatch prowess, so the rest of the Seinfeld gang swoops in to finish the job. On Jerry, that is. Canceling the show obviously really got to these clay facsimiles of his costars.


The show was moderated by fictitious announcers Johnny Gomez and Nick Diamond, whose deadpan commentary almost made these ridiculous scenarios seem plausible. You know, if they weren't claymation. Mills Lane reprised his real-life role as boxing referee in the show, shouting his signature "Let's Get it On!" at the outset of each show. Creator Eric Fogel and team worked to make the play-by-plays as realistic as possible, save for actual subject matter. Shows contained a pregame show, postgame shows, interviews, and even press conferences.

It's certainly not a show to be taken seriously, though I imagine many parent watchdog groups were quick to voice their discontent. The brutal, consequence-free violence wasn't exactly appropriate for young viewers, but then again neither is alleged "real life" professional wrestling. True, it probably hurts less to beam someone with a folding chair than a blowtorch, but the premise wasn't all that difference. At least in this version, we know it's fake. I don't know how figured it out, but the clay mation tipped me off.

By the way, if you were wondering who won in the Britney vs. Christina showdown, you're in luck. Here's your chance to find out. Spoiler alert: it was inconclusive. They got pretty tangled up there in the Ponytail of Death.