HOW IMAGE MAKERS SHAPE KIDS’ TV : Q5 Firm Advises ABC on the Look and Style of Cartoon Shows; Some Writers Call It Intru

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-09-03-ca-5843-story.html

The Q5 debate is at its hottest on “The Real Ghostbusters,” a show that was dramatically altered based on input from both Q5 and ABC.

Last season, Janine, the secretary on “The Real Ghostbusters,” produced for ABC by DIC Enterprises in association with Columbia Pictures Television, was a sharp-edged, miniskirted wisecracker with pointed glasses, dangling bracelets and a fountain of spiky hair. As a result of Q5’s input, she will have softer features, smoother hair, big round glasses and no jewelry. ABC will complete the package with a demure knee-length skirt.

ABC and Q5 believe that the new slant will make the show more accessible to children, especially to little girls who might find the new Janine more appealing. Q5’s work with writers included a separate seminar on the little-girl audience. “The fact that she is now warmer I think is fine,” Trias said.

The story editors for these new episodes, Chuck Menville and Len Janson, agree with Trias (the two also developed another ABC show for fall, “Little Wizards”). “When these people (Q5) started talking, 80% of what they had to say jibed with what we were already thinking, " he said. “They never forced anything down our throats.”

J. Michael Straczynski, a story editor on numerous episodes of last season’s “The Real Ghostbusters,” disagrees. Straczynski, who read Q5’s reports on the cartoon series and participated in a Q5 seminar, will write several episodes of “The Real Ghostbusters” for ABC this season but has recently done more extensive work for a new syndicated version of “The Real Ghostbusters"--which, ironically, will continue to feature the “old” Janine.

“They (Q5) wanted us to knock off all the corners,” he said. “Janine was a strong, vibrant character. They wanted her to be more feminine, more maternal, more nurturing, like every other female on television.”

Straczynski expressed the highest regard for Trias and ABC, but he said that he believes “network paranoia” has led them to use Q5. “It is a truly insidious organization, I make no bones about it at all. A lot of their research and theories are strictly from voodoo,” Straczynski continued. “I think they reinforce stereotypes--sexist and racist. I think they are not helping television, they are diminishing it.”

Said Q5’s Heinz: “It (the change of Janine) was not done on anyone’s gut feeling about what’s creative and what’s not creative, or what’s sexist and what’s not sexist. It’s back to how we can involve more girls when we have primarily men characters. The female was not working for the female target, and we’re sorry she’s not the way she was originally designed, but she’s not.”

In addition to Janine’s new look, described in notes on one DIC character drawing as “generally less harsh & ‘slutty,’ ” she will have a warmer, more nurturing relationship with Slimer, a childlike comic character who sometimes dissolves into slime.

The show also will contain less satire and less subtle, sophisticated verbal humor. “I’ve written a few shows for this season, and they weren’t as much fun as last season,” lamented “Real Ghostbusters” writer Michael Reaves.

As one of numerous examples of this change, the Q5 report notes that some jokes that writers had included about college days and “no intelligent life in New Jersey” would go over the heads of young children. A phrase such as “create the proper ambiance,” the report suggests, could be phrased more simply: “Make this room look like a little boy’s.”

Reaves objected most strongly to a Q5 suggestion that one of the main characters, Ray, the naive nerd played by Dan Aykroyd in the movie “Ghostbusters,” be “selected out” of the show, because he “does not appear to serve to benefit the program.”

“That’s like ‘terminate with extreme prejudice,’ ” Reaves said. “Ray is the dreamer, the idealist; he’s very useful as a foil. They could not find any reason at all for this to be necessary.”

When such changes were discussed at a meeting with Q5, both Straczynski and Reaves were appalled. “I sat there in dumbstruck shock at what they were saying,” Straczynski said. “We (Straczynski and Reaves) just looked at each other and started laughing. We couldn’t deal with it anymore; it had gone so far into the realm of the absurd.”

But Ray will appear in new “Real Ghostbusters” episodes anyway, Menville pointed out. “Once we said we didn’t agree with that, nobody said another word about it,” he said.

Psychologist Corinne Rupert, former vice president of children’s entertainment for Q5, described some “Real Ghostbusters” writers and producers as “resistant to how their work impacts young children and ways in which they can maximize the entertainment value.”

She added that they may be lashing out at Q5 for the many constraints under which the commercial television writer works. “It is a collaborative medium, and that is the reality of the business,” she said.