This home page's dedicated to the Small Wonder company, including crusty crafty Howard, suave Don, Five-Iron Dick, foxy Marla, carrot-top Emily, slick Paul, pert Jerry, and most of all starry Tiffany, tiny only in size, who took the most difficult role one could demand of any actor and made it click. As contributing technical story consultant, I'm happy to have worked besides them and to present their stories, frustrations, show techniques and secrets, and most of all, the unsung story behind one of the most ground-breaking shows on television. Many of you are scratching heads as how a sitcom about a tiny pretty robot could ever be considered ground-breaking. Well, Small Wonder was, for had it failed, the dare and incentive to produce early non-network sitcoms and adventure shows such as Married...with Children, Out of this World, Nine to Five, Super Force, and many others -- perhaps even Star Trek:The Next Generation itself -- would've been pushed back years. In fact, Small Wonder was Fox Broadcasting's first show and toehold into networkhood via adoption from its Metromedia acquisition.
How did little Vicki do all this?...
In early 1984 a group of broadcasting companies (Taft, Gannett, Hearst, Storer), desiring to beat the rates of network production and exercise more creative program control, joined forces with Metromedia Producers to form a joint-venture consortium known as the New Program Group (NPG) to produce and distribute new first-run TV programs. Why is this important? In the early eighties an average network sitcom cost roughly $600,000 per episode, costs which moved studios and networks to keep bland tried-and-true plot formulas than risk taking a bath on bombed untried concepts. Naturally this stifles creativity, but happily, greater rewards go to those who take risks.
Those risks of experimenting with a non-network production were indeed high, what with a splintered syndicated market and a splattering of independent TV stations and network affiliates nationwide which longed to call the shots at programming themselves rather than a network. The experimental show was budgeted for $300,000 per 22-minute episode, a fraction of a network's cost. The show that took the first plunge would have a lot riding on it, so much so that skittish advertisers nipped baits of generous ad time and a dozen concepts submitted by many top TV producers were culled and surveyed for the best possible target audience. After much debate, pondering and market research, on September 12, 1984, NPG formally announced that its debut pioneering program would be Small Wonder, a series "portraying the complications that befall a suburban family when the inventor father creates a robot in the lifelike form of a 10-year-old girl and tries to keep her real identity a secret."
Small Wonder is the brainchild of executive producer Howard Leeds. Leeds is a crisp 30-year veteran writer whose former creative credits are television legends: The Brady Bunch, Diff'rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, Silver Spoons, and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir among many others. Leeds was already toying with a robot-in-the-family concept in 1983 when he was fascinated by how young people took to personal computers, video games and early domestic robots. Leeds intuitively knew that even intelligent and capable household robots wouldn't make any inroads until they stopped looking like intimidating metallic octopuses -- not until they started looking innocuous, family-friendly, and even ... cute. And what's cuter or more charming than a little girl? Leeds' network track record and his modern concept was intriguing enough for NPG's gamble. Pilot production began September 17, 1984 for at least 90 episodes, with release aimed in April 1985. Curiously, during the months prior while Small Wonder was being decided, the concept leaked to spawn a quickie movie, D.A.R.Y.L., about a robot boy. After a year of haggling advertisers and recruiting skittish independent stations, Small Wonder was finally released nationwide on the week of September 16, 1985.
In its first few weeks Small Wonder hit an 8 rating: a runaway hit for any non-game syndicated show, and the first for an independently produced non-network series. And it kept respectable ratings throughout its designated run of 96 episodes and survived a flood of quickie first-runs jumping on the bandwagon. So chagrined was TV Guide at Small Wonder's success in the face of its derision that the magazine never granted the show or its stars a feature. Stations and advertisers were sold on the concept that an independently produced sitcom without any track on the networks can be profitably produced; had Small Wonder been made for a network, each episode would've cost well upwards of $400,000 rather than the $300,000 it scraped by on. Above-line costs were a third less, meaning salaries of directors, actors, and us (poorer) writers were about a third less than those on network shows. It was also the first TV show to exclusively employ personal computers (Amiga 1000s) for economical in-house optical and titling effects (although Macintoshes replaced them and carried on in the latter two seasons due to Commodore's gross tech support and PR mishandlings). Though our checks were smaller, cast and crew made professionalism premium throughout the production, and was a friendlier and warmer family by it. Dick Christie, Marla Pennington, Jerry Supiran, Paul C. Scott, and Emily Schulman put in 200%, and particularly bright, beautiful and plucky Tiffany Brissette, whose multi-faceted talents risked career-killing typecasting and future roles by saddling a unique and difficult role so deadpan that it makes Mr. Spock and Commander Data look like Cheech & Chong.
After story technical consultants gleaned computer specialists, electronics companies, market researchers and venture capitalists and academicians for a creative backdrop, keeping Vicki's technical fidelity with the Small Wonder tech bible was a perilious balancing acting between comedic demands, economics, time, and willing personalities. Much was altered from the bible's idealized Vicki concept, which can be appreciated in the Vicki Debuts on Dunahue feature. The show also required unique devices uncommon other sitcoms. Vicki's "mini maid" effect in a lacy red pinafore, Mary Jane pumps, white knee socks and bobbed ponytail was lifted from children in Norman Rockwell paintings. A pageboy coiffure was tested on Brissette prior to Vicki's bobbed ponytail, but she looked too "teenish" instead of the doll-like little girl Leeds intended. The lacy cotton pinafore costumes were crafted around the peculiar plug accesses and placement of Vicki's main show gimmick, the robotics access panel or lightbox, whose location was repeatably shoved from front to back until the dorsal position was settled for more out of "discretion" for the actress's personal modesty than practicality. Most all sci-fi fans note the curious fact that gynoids (female androids) tend to have dorsal panels than ventral ones up front like most all ("male") androids of fiction tend to possess. (Also see Props and Gadgets)
The naming of the characters was just as novel as the show. Ted Lawson was the name of a character in the 1944 movie Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, for which Leeds had great regard. Jamie was given an androgynous name because a female sibling to Vicki wasn't out of the question to the last minute for an assortment of unique mixed relationship reasons. Voice Input Child Identicant was Leeds' bad attempt at a sensible engineering acronym to name his fresh robotic creation after his grandchildren's home computer at the time, the Commodore VIC-20. It's notable that in the Small Wonder audition, the producers found themselves in a racial bind; some viewing segments might not take too humorously an obedient robot maid played by a black or Asian child. A pioneer at multi-ethnic family shows, Leeds considered a "poly-racial" Vicki to represent all types, and a pretty Eurasian girl nearly made it before being eclipsed by Brissette. On casting Brissette, the production staff debated whether the then tiny 9-year-old ought to play a 7-year-old girl robot should the pilot be picked up. Though some had reservations whether the show would have legs after the premiere, there was the chance of a long run, and pushing the robot gags into enticing teen years caused not a few apprehensions: There were tacit misgivings enough about storing an anatomically correct girl robot in a cabinet in a boy's room.
Small Wonder was a first break for many writers who went on to The Twilight Zone, Amazing Stories, Star Trek: TNG, Quantum Leap, and many others. Indeed, many technical and story ideas on developing Vicki's character dropped as being incongruous with a sitcom format reflect in more than a few episodes of Trek's Commander Data. It had more than its share of roughhouse and infighting and bitter disappointments. Most disappointing was that the series, originally conceived as a young audience light fantasy along the lines of Bewitched and My Favorite Martian, unwittingly attracted a legion of science fiction fans and computer techies who demanded that the show become a sci-fi Family Ties, delving into the novel sociological and personal implications of an android servant in a family: a situation that certainly will be realized in the coming century. It was a tantalizing potential that was never realized, much to the sober regret of many writers and fans in a sterling example of quality and innovative scripts vs. quirky program policy, internal politics and lots of egos.
But the most rewarding feedback of all was fan mail from campuses and computer clubs to nursing homes, whose audience proof surprised the market research people as well as the production. Or, in a nutshell, the advertisers went from selling corn chips and toys Small Wonder's first season to cars and airlines and cosmetics by the third.
So for all you closet Small Wonder fans out there, here's Vicki!!
