PLUME: How palpable was the pressure from the companies to make them toy commercials? I’m assuming you would get script notes saying to drop a certain character in, since he’ll be out in the 4th quarter…
STRACZYNKSKI: Oh yeah, and I would just fight those tooth and nail. Sometimes I would win, and sometimes the producers above me would just drop the character in – just “global search and replace”. That became difficult and, after a while, He-Man ended. Then came She-Ra, which is a show I left on a different kind of principle. My associate Larry DiTillio and I were both doing story editor work and were not being credited as such. I said, “This is wrong. We can’t keep doing this.” I convinced Larry that we both had to take a stand and say that they had to give us the credit we’d earned or we’re leaving. They didn’t and we did.
PLUME: Was that a difficult decision?
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah, because it was the first real job I ever had, and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get another one. I remember that Larry said to me at the time that, “If we leave this show and I don’t work again, I’m going to kill you.” He was Italian and I believed him.
PLUME: It wasn’t an idle threat…
STRACZYNKSKI: Oh no, not from Larry…
PLUME: So that was the first real job you’d quit… The rest had been freelance positions, right?
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah, for the most part. When I was working for Time, Inc. I was called a “Special Correspondent”, which means I was somewhat regularly gainfully employed, but it was still pocket change.
PLUME: Did you entertain any notion that you might not work again after that?
STRACZYNKSKI: Oh yeah. I think that any time you leave a job as a writer or finish a job, you’re totally sure that you’ll never work again. That’s just part of the territory, but we went very quickly from there to a show called Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors over at DIC entertainment for about a year. Then along came The Real Ghostbusters. I loved the movie enormously, and I met with the producers – who also worked on the film – and they said, “We want to do the movie. We don’t want to cheapen it. We don’t want to bring it down in quality. We want this to be as good as the movie was and as sophisticated in its storytelling.” Which was music to my ears, and I signed on to do that. I story edited 78 episodes, of which I wrote something like 15-20.
PLUME: Did you enjoy the process of writing for that show… For those characters?
STRACZYNKSKI: It was great… I loved it enormously, because it was really an opportunity to cut loose and be very obscure, to bring all the classics of science fiction, fantasy, and horror to a genre for kids. I mean, when you can call a show “The Collect Call of Cthulhu”… When you can drag out all the horror clichés and turn them on their heads and just be totally obscure. There was one episode where we have our characters in Alaska and they need to find Eskimos to take part in a ceremony – we referred to it as an “Inuit Minyan”. And never explained it. Five people in the world got that, but that’s okay, because we were free to be obscure. I did stories about child abuse, and more serious stories about older characters – it was great. It was a great opportunity.
PLUME: Did it surprise you that you had so much freedom in an animated Saturday morning show during that first season?
STRACZYNKSKI: Absolutely. Having always had to fight to get what I wanted to go through, it was the first time I’d had the producers saying, “Just do what you do. We’ve got no problem with it. Go as far as you want.” I took that and went as far as I humanly could, because it was a great opportunity.
PLUME: And, in hindsight, that first season is dramatically different than ensuing seasons…
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah, because the network got consultants involved who wanted to “help” the show, and their idea of helping, for instance, was that they said, “Well, Janine has these sharp glasses and kids are frightened by sharp objects, so we want to make them round.” They said that Janine, who was the secretary – and you’ll recall from the movie that Janine’s character was feisty and her own person -needs to be the mother of the group, so make her more feminine and take away those aspects of her personality that make her not a mother. Give each of them identifiable roles, so that Peter is the con-man, Egon is the brains, Ray is the builder, and they said, “Make Winston the driver.” Winston being the black guy.
PLUME: And this was the kind of enlightened information the consultants brought to the table…
STRACZYNKSKI: Exactly. I said, “You’re out of your mind. I will not do that, and if you try and push that through, I will leave. Given that this was ABC’s number one rated animated series, they said, “Well, Joe won’t really go.” I always tell people that when I work for them, I have very few rules: I don’t lie, I don’t bullshit, and I never ever bluff. If I say I’m going to go, I’m going to go. And I went. Oddly enough, it was leaving there that opened up the door to go with live action with Captain Power, where they wanted to do a live action science-fiction series with some toy component, but nothing that touched the story. I did that and made it an adult science-fiction show which has a large fan base to this day. I did the first season on that, and then – of course – left when they tried to make it more toy-controlled.
PLUME: Which seems, at that point, to almost be a running gag in regards to the jobs you’d had up till that point.
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah.
Continued below…
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