3 out of 5

Created By: Mike Young

This oddball little Welsh creation is 100% harmless if you can accept “he’s black, he must be from Africa” logic and an effeminate skeleton who appreciates jewelry and showtunes.  I promise you it’s ridiculously innocent.  I realize it doesn’t make potential offenses any less offensive, but I think that’s where we forget how simple a kids world is sometimes, and that’s exactly – exactly – what SuperTed taps into.  It’s just a skeleton (named, creatively, Skeleton), and maybe when its 1983 in Wales, black people do tend to be exclusively from Africa.

Anyhow, here’s your awesome setup, based around super teddybear SuperTed (it’s not a Ted who becomes super, his name is SuperTed), created by Mike Young to help his kid overcome a fear of the dark (according to wiki) – that an assembly line bear was CAST ASIDE LIKE RUBBISH thanks to some unseen defect.  A SPOTTY MAN (…named Spotty… and voiced by Doctor Who’s John Pertwee) happens to fly by the, uh, defective toys depot in his rocket ship and totes decides to sprinkle some cosmic dust on that teddybear, bringing him to life.  Then, of course, it’s off to Mother Nature’s cloud for her to give our bear a MAGIC WORD that allows him to TEAR OFF HIS SKIN AND REVEAL A SUPERSUIT UNDERNEATH… WITH… WITH ROCKET BOOTS.  He’s now SuperTed.  We learn in a later episode that you only need to know the magic word to be able to rip off your skin and be super, no spotty cosmic dust required.

Plenty of kid’s cartoons thrive on these bonkers setups that are just meant to be swallowed wholesale, but there’s something just so embracingly imaginatively open about SuperTed that you don’t have to be in the single-digit age range to appreciate the appeal.

The structure of almost every episode is similar: Spotty and SuperTed are hanging out either in their Bear spaceship, Spotty’s spaceship, or their Bear treehouse, and a fuzzy communication from just about anyone will come over the wire asking for ST’s help.  My friend is trapped; someone’s stealing something; or a combination of the two – my friend has gone missing.  So off the two go, generally running into Tex – an American cowboy stereotype – and his two cronies, the hefty and dumb bulk, and Skeleton.  Sometimes Tex and crew are tied into the crime, sometimes it’s just fate that brings ’em all together.  But he’s unquestionably up to no good each time, even though ‘no good’ is often hilariously random and without reason, like just to steal something because it’s important.  Again, kid logic.  It’s awesome.

The first season, scripted by Young, is unique in that SuperTed doesn’t always directly save the day.  He’ll normally witness Tex’s downfall and get a good punch in or two (Tex is always left tied up or knocked out after each ten minute episode, only to return with new devious plans next week), but the bad guy will just as often get tripped up by his own machinations or cronies.  The second and third season find Robin Lyons stepping in to script, who expands on the concept a bit – we get backstories, we get some semblance of explanations and some two-part episodes – but Lyons maintains the innocence, which is hard to avoid with Derek Griffiths incredibly wholesome voicing of our lead character.

The show never quite passes that mark where it suddenly develops into something more, but it does have a pleasant little home-brewed flavor (Young wanting to keep the production in Wales) and never betrays its established vibe without, at the same time, ever pandering to or talking down to its viewer.