Mixels Wiki:Creative Corner/Mixels (1961 TV series)

Mixels is a 1960s American animated television series, spearheaded by Garrett Bishop, Merle Moss, Woodrow Olson, Hap Shaughnessy, and William Dozier. It featured stories revolving around the Mixels. The main antagonists were the Nixels. It aired on the ABC network for three seasons from January 11, 1961, to March 10, 1963. The show was aired twice weekly on Wednesday and Thursday nights for its first two seasons and weekly on Sunday nights for the third, with a total of 120 episodes produced during its run. The program was known for its upbeat theme music and camp moral lessons among children, which included championing the importance of doing homework and eating fruits and vegetables, most often with the Fang Gang and Frosticons.

Teasers
The typical story begins with a Nixel villain (often one of a short list of recurring Nixel villains, including Muscle Nixel, Boomerang Nixel and Flyswatter Nixel) committing a crime, such as stealing a fabulous gem or taking over the Mixel Land. This was followed by a scene inside a control room cave beneath the Magma Wastelands, where Flain would deduce which Nixel was responsible. Flain would then pull out a sheet with a list of every Mixel, pick two random ones, and then speak through two intercom speakers connected to the homes of the two Mixels (unless Flain chose himself as one of the two, then he would only speak through one). The scene would then cut to a split-screen scene, with each side featuring the two character's homes, where the two would answer the intercom, which sat like a normal everyday radio on a table. Frequently, the tribal members would be found talking with the other two members of their respective tribes, but they would then excuse themselves to go to their intercoms. Upon learning from Flain which Nixel they would face, they would dash to their front doors and walk out. When the doors closed, the title sequence often began.

The title sequence began with another split-screen, this time with eight scenes, each with all three members of eight of the tribes (minus the Infernites) riding on something specific to their tribes or running towards the side of screen, this was then followed by a scene with the Infernites running towards right of screen. Flain would stop, turn towards camera, and point up, and the camera pans up and reveals the Mixels logo. It then cross-fades to scenes of various Mixes fighting an assortment of Nixels, including Major Nixel.

Plot
The two main Mixels of the two-parter would meet up with each other. While the episode credits are shown, they would then be summoned to the Magma Wastelands control room by the intercoms. Flain would them hand the two a package of five Cubits with their tribe's colors, then the initial discussion of the crime usually led to the two Mixels conducting their investigation alone. This investigation usually resulted in a meeting with the villain, with the heroes using a Cubit to Mix, or, if all three tribal members were involved, Max, and then started attacking the villain's Nixel minions, and the villain getting away, leaving a series of unlikely clues for the two to investigate. Later, they would face the villain's minions again, and he would then de-Mix both Mixels, even going as far as to force them to Murp in a few instances. Major Nixel then arrived, captured one or both of the heroes and placed them in a deathtrap leading to a cliffhanger ending, which was usually resolved in the first few minutes of the next episode.

After the cliffhanger
The second part of the episode (until late in Season Two) would begin with a brief recap of part one. After the title sequence, the cliffhanger was resolved.

The same pattern of plot was repeated in the following episode until the villain and Major Nixel were defeated by the re-Mixed heroes in a major fight.

The series utilized a narrator (Flain) who parodied both the breathless narration style of the 1940s Batman serials and Walter Winchell's narration of The Untouchables. He would end many of the cliffhanger episoes by intoning, "Tune in tomorrow -- same rad-time, same Mixel-channel!"

Season 1
Season 1 begins with the two-parter, "A Hot Nixel!"/"Fighting Fire with Fire", which features Balk and Hoogi as the main Mixels and Fire Nixel as the villain.

Season 2
In Season 2, the show featured repetition of its characters and its formula. Shaughnessy's non-voice-acting participation in the series decreased significantly.

According to a 1997 Chicago Sun-Times interview given by Olson, that when beginning work on the second season, Dozier, his immediate deputy Moss, and the rest of the cast and crew rushed their preparation for the second season, failing to give themselves enough time to determine what they wanted to do with the series during that season. This explains why the animation of season 2 episodes is slightly choppier.

Season 3
Major changes took place in Season 3.

Ratings were falling and the future of the series seemed uncertain. To attract new viewers, Dozier and Bishop opted to introduce two entirely new tribes, the Orbitons and the Glowkies, plus three new Infernites (Burnard, Meltus and Flamzer) and expand the main Mixel number from two to four (the extra two consisting entirely of Orbitons and Glowkies members). To convince ABC executives to introduce the total of nine new characters as regulars on the show, a promotional short where the nine mix and combine to fight Boomerang Nixel and Major Nixel was produced and released to theaters. The show was reduced to once a week and moved from its successful 7:00 time slots on Wednesday and Thursday to Sunday 7:00 to be used as a lead-in to new animated series The Jetsons (and allowed affiliates to resume syndicated or local programming in the 7:00 Wednesday and Thursday slots), with mostly self-contained episodes, although the following week's Nixel would be in a tag at the end of the episode, similar to a soap opera. Accordingly, the narrator's cliffhanger phrases were eliminated, with most of the episodes ending with him saying something to encourage viewers to watch the next episode.

Virtually the entire writing staff, except for Bishop, Olson, Moss, and Dozier, was fired after season 2, and replaced with newcomers. The nature of the scripts and animation started to enter into the realm of surrealism, and the third season was much more topical, with references to current events of late 1962 and early 1963, which the previous two seasons had avoided.

Season 3 was also the first season to be aired in color (in contrast, even though the entire series has always been produced in color, it originally aired in black and white almost everywhere except in Detroit, where then-ABC-owned-and-operated station WXYZ-TV broadcast the show in color from the beginning), though only a handful of ABC affiliates were capable of airing programs in color in the early 1960s.

Cancellation
Near the end of the third season, ratings had dropped significantly, and ABC cancelled the show. Dozier would later take several ideas from Mixels and use it in the Batman TV series, which also ran on ABC from 1966 to 1968. Chicago station WFLD aired two back-to-back reruns of Mixels weekdays during its 6-7 PM time slot since the station's 1966 sign-on. This unprecedented run ended on September 4, 2012, when WFLD ceased airing the show. It continued to be aired on WPWR-TV, the sister station to WFLD, in the 8 AM time slot through September 12, 2014. After then-owner Field Communications acquired Kaiser Broadcasting in 1977, Field expanded this tradition to former Kaiser stations in San Francisco, Boston, Detroit and Philadelphia. When Field Communications itself was dissolved in 1983, all but WFLD stopped airing Mixels. Reruns of the series have been seen on a regular basis in the United States and much of the world since 1963, and are currently shown on the classic cartoon network Boomerang on Saturday nights.

Pre-production
In 1959, Savannah, Georgia electrician Garrett Bishop contacted close friend Merle Moss, a high-school basketball coach at a New York City high school, with the idea of producing an action-packed hour-long primetime television series. Bishop and Moss then came across Woodrow Olson, an usher at a Chicago theater. Olson had himself decided to come up with an idea for a cartoon series that would feature a new concept involving small, unique creatures, based on what he had worked on in elementary school. The three then decided to merge both concepts into one and presented it to ABC executives Hap Shaughnessy and Thomas W. Moore, both of whom were planning on developing a television series based on small creatures themselves. In November 1959, the five then suggested locations and characters and in January 1960, had finished developing ideas for a television series based on small, unique creatures, the "Mixels," which would be the main characters of the show, which would be a comedy show that would satirize the superhero, crime-fighting and action genres, similar to Get Smart, which premiered two years after Mixels' cancellation. In March 1960, Bishop, Olson and Shaughnessy formed an animated studio, Bilsonessy Productions, in a Los Angeles hotel room, that would produce the series. Olson also hired actor William Dozier as the program's executive producer.

In April 1960, Bishop, Dozier, Olson and Shaughnessy began writing storylines for and animating an abbreviated first season, which was scheduled for a January 1961 premiere, where it would be used to complement the network's already succesful animated primetime show The Flintstones. Originally intended as a one-hour show, ABC found out that the only way the show was going to work was if it was split into two parts, airing twice a week in half-hour installments with a cliffhanger, thus connecting the two episodes together. This was because ABC only had two vacant early-evening timeslots where the show would air.

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