Hot Hero Sandwich

I remember this show on Saturday morning! I remember it for 2 things: 1. I really remember Denny Dillon being on this show (go figure...) 2. I was just learning about girls and urges and how I wanted them. I really hadn't really determined what I wanted them for, though. Around that time it was just non-french pecks on the lips...didn't even know what french kissing was.

Anyhoo, in an interview section of the show, they cut back and forth to several different taped interview snippets of celebrities talking about different adolescent/puberty experiences. During this, Marlo Thomas pops up as one of the segments. In retrospect, she was such a strange choice for a show geared to 12-13 year-olds on so many levels (Wasn't "That Girl" in the late 60's early 70's? Sidenote for the youngsters reading: she played Jennifer Aniston's mom on "Friends").

So, she's on the screen and at this point and Ms. Thomas proceeds to describe the time when her mother first told her about sex. After learning the 'truth' about the deed, she mentions that she was amazed and quite flabbergasted that, as she put it, "...people actually took off their clothes and did this." Immediately, my ears among other things perked up. I thoughtfully mused, "Take off their clothes? Hmmm...that's it!" So launching me into the preliminary stages of the life long quest for sex (tongue firmly in cheek...sort of...'cause it really kinda did).

It so intrigued me at the time that she would say that right there on Saturday Morning TV! Implied nakedness!...Between a guy and a girl?!...and 'something' happens?! Me and my urges were like, "I gotta find what that something is!"

Yes...it's true...Marlo Thomas taught me my first inklings of sex!

The funniest thing was what she ended this recollection of this mother/daughter sex conversation with as she chuckled; the caper, "...and my mom said my father was really pretty good at it, too!"

Now, that's classic TV!...What's funny to me is that because of this, I still to this day have some sort of crush on Marlo Thomas...go figure.

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.

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.

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!

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?