Hot Hero Sandwich

This much-hyped Saturday show (airing usually around the noon hour) was created by Bruce and Carole Hart who helped assemble Sesame Street, and was intended as a kind of SNL+American Bandstand+Phil Donahue for the 10-to-13-year-old set. If good intentions were the only important criteria, Hot Hero Sandwich would have been the greatest children's show ever.

But the show never really clicked (a TV Guide post-mortem was headlined, HOT HERO SANDWICH: THE AUDIENCE DIDN'T BITE). Simply put, the show's producers fatally underestimated the savviness of its audience. With Sesame Street, a three-year-old might easily confuse an alphabet cartoon for a TV commercial or pop song. A 12-year-old Hot Hero viewer, on the other hand, had no difficulty watching an SNL-like skit about playing hooky and IMMEDIATELY recognizing its self-congratulatory stay-in-school message. 6th and 7th graders have finely-honed BS detectors. They know when they're being talked down to.

That being said, the series had its pluses: excellent production values, a slew of top guest stars/music performers, and a decent regular ensemble (Denny Dillon, in fact, graduated to SNL in the fall of 1980, and has had a solid career as a comedic character actress). And when the show wasn't full of its pro-social pretensions, quite a few of the sketches were genuinely funny (writer Andy Breckman went on to SNL, the early years of Late Night with David Letterman and Monk). Hot Hero Sandwich was very much a series of its time, when networks were scrambling to provide "pro-social entertainment" for kids. If they'd only focused on the "entertainment" portion of the equation, the series might well have lasted.

I was just entering my teen years and my mother told there was a new show coming on. So I checked it out. Loved it from day one. One of my favorite scenes was Captain Hero. I have tried to find a video of it on the web but no luck. Throughout my adult life the theme song to it will pop up in my head....

Faster than a rock... Stronger than a sock... Smarter than a piece of pie... What a guy... Captain hero

Would love to see those shows again.

I found the cast & the hot hero band to be great. The worst part of the show was always Dr. Tom Cottle & his psychiatric advice. If they would have left out the educational aspect of the show then it would have ran longer.

It is a shame that more people didn't catch this show as it is one of the overlooked gems of television. As a kid, my parents just got me my first bass guitar for Christmas the year this came out and I was self-taught by playing along with the music from this and other television concert shows. It was really exciting for me, in the day and age before MTV, to be able to see the bands you liked playing great music. But it was also fun to have skits that were very much like Saturday Night Live, but without the heavy political and underground overtones. I would wake up Saturday mornings, plug my beginner bass into my homemade amp...waiting for that tell-tale electronics buzz to let me know I had power...and I would patiently wait for the theme song to start. I would play along with the theme song, the house band, and the musical acts like a kid possessed, not really knowing how to play music yet but doing my best to keep up! Of course, not all the bits were winners, but that could be said of any original musical/comedy/variety show, right?

Cool Rock Music. A sick House Band. Hot Females. Hot Hero Sandwich was the ultimate show for a boy just fixing to get his pubes. they had some pointless comedy, but most of the sketches and songs had some valuable lessons on growing up; a favorite of mine was the song "Puberty", sang by the hilarious Puberty Fairy, an extremely hairy man dressed in a sparkly female fairy outfit, complete with star-tipped magic wand. ("This could be your lucky day ...PYEWW- BERRR- TEE!") seriously, it ruled when I was eleven, and I was so mad when 1981 rolled around and IT WAS GONE!!!!!!!!! My little sister used to make fun of the silly little grin that'd come across my face when the theme song played. First the drums "Bam-boom-Bam! Bam-boo-boom-Bam!" Then the "A" note on the bass "BomBomBomBom..." Then the hook "Yoooooou are my hero!" It's kinda sad that so few people remember it, but after all, it was just a stupid show, and there's more to life than TV. But as TV shows go, this was one of my favorites in my adolescent years, when everything else Saturday Morning had to offer seemed so "gay".

I ain't forgot "Hot Hero", the butt-kicking-est band of 1980 next to the Knack!