In addition to Greatest American Hero, my other earliest childhood television memory is Zoobilee Zoo. Zoobilee Z00 was essentially a half hour of humans dressed as stuffed animals making wild facial expressions and erratic movements whilst singing about problems every human child faces-- like making silly mistakes. Or being an anthropomorphic cockatoo.
I mainly remember Ben Vereen, dressed in what appeared to be a dusty, bedraggled leopard costume stolen from a dumpster behind an off-Broadway production of Cats and one of Prince's least favorite jackets, slinking over the top of a piano while attempting to impart a condescending moral lesson. As always, I turned to YouTube to jog my memory further. I was pleased to find that the voices are badly out of sync with the characters' mouths, and sound as if they were recorded separately using a YakBak.
The characters whine and shriek in infantile voices while capering about an obvious soundstage, scattered with irrelevant props painted in garish day-glo colors. There is a pink thing that looks a lot like a live-action Popple, but is supposedly a kangaroo flautist. There is a beaver who looks like Orville Redenbacher, a Teddy Ruxpin-esque "adventure" bear (whatever that is), an irritating squawking bird with a Chiquita Banana style accent and headress (easily the most believable character), a lion whose interest in art is eclipsed only by his uncanny likeness to Chaka Khan in the "I Feel For You" video, and finally, the most terrifying character, Bravo Fox.
Bravo Fox, I believe, must have been styled heavily after John Worthington Foulfellow, the manipulative fox in Pinocchio, only with a curious middle Atlantic accent that usually sounded like he ran afoul of Betty Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. He is played by a statuesque balding man in a threadbare butler's uniform with orange tufts of "fur" bursting from every seam. Bravo Fox haunted me for years after I stopped watching the show, and was the subject of several recurring nightmares when I was seven. In these nightmares, he was usually a criminal mastermind with supernatural powers. He would send me puzzling letters ala the zodiac killer detailing his evil schemes. I eventually published a book about him and appeared on talk shows to educate the good citizens of our country about the impending danger. This only made him want to kill me, and I'd spend the remainder of the dream seeking protection from the skeptical, unfeeling police department.
Probably the weirdest thing about this show is that it's only weird in retrospect. When I was a kid, I loved it and wanted to be a Zooble.
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