I have to ask because, looking over your career, all those shows you wrote for … I mean, this was my childhood. “Laff-A-Lympics,” “Captain Caveman,” “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo,” “Knight Rider,” “Riptide,” “A-Team…”
“Sheriff Lobo,” I love that show.
I was going to ask if you have a favorite? How was “Sheriff Lobo”?
That was my first [live-action] show. Glen A. Larson, who created “Magnum P.I.”, “Battlestar Galactica,” and “The Fall Guy” … I worked on a lot of his shows. He brought me in and put me on “Sheriff Lobo,” which had comedy elements in it. I came from animation, so he said, “I need a funny guy.” I met him through a friend. He read a script and said, “Come on staff.”
I was on “The A-Team” with Frank Lupo and Stephen J. Cannell, and that was great because it was a number one show. I did a lot of those and was a story editor on it. I don’t have a favorite, but my first prime time job was “Sheriff Lobo,” so it’s a little special to me. I had fun doing TV, but really, directing was the most fun. That’s why I got into features.
On “The A-Team,” very few people ever died on the show. The A-Team didn’t kill anyone. Was that a discussion? Was there ever a time where it was like, “Okay, we’re going to have to kill someone in this episode”?
Here was the deal: It was NBC and it was eight o’clock. Brandon Tartikoff bought the show that Frank and Steve created. And they said, “We need these guys to have guns and machine guns and all that stuff.” It was different times in the ’80s. They said, “Okay, we’ll let you have all the shooting and all the explosions, but you can’t kill anybody.” So if you notice, they would shoot and the car would flip over and then they’d always cut to the guys crawling out because they didn’t want anybody to die. It was kind of funny. It was a live-action cartoon. No one died, and that was because NBC said, “The only way you can have shooting at eight o’clock is you can’t kill anybody.”
All eight “Leprechaun” movies are currently available to stream on Hulu.