Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Sport Billy" in English language version.
Replacing "Bullwinkle" us an animated show called "Sport Billy," which will have a six-week run on NBC. A network press release says "Sport Billy" promotes "good sportsmanship and physical fitness." This sounds well intentioned, but look at it this way: If you were stranded on a desert island, would you rather be accompanied by someone who could do 100 pushups or someone who could tell you a lot of funny jokes?
In late June, Sports Billy Productions, a company in Stuttgart, West Germany, began their push in licensing the character of Sports Billy worldwide. The concept behind Sports Billy was to utilize young Billy and Susy, two sports-loving youths, as mascots in America; they were already popular in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and were the mascots tor FIFA, the world soccer federation, and the 1978 World Cup tournament. The first stop on their plans to win over America was to make a deal with Filmation, to do an animated series and to help them license and merchandise their brand in the United States.
A week later we announced that we had a firm deal with Sport Billy Productions to produce at least 16 half-hour cartoons, with an option to do ten more if things worked out. Our plan was to debut the first of the toons at the Marche International de Producteurs conference (MIPCOM) in April at Cannes, which meant we were working on them in the off-season when the fall 1979 shows were finishing up, but before the fall 1980 shows were starting.
Although preliminary development had begun in 1979, we didn't animate Sport Billy until 1980, and the show was first broadcast in Germany that year. We made the deal with this German group, and we had no ownership in the show as I recall; we produced the show, and they sold it all over the world themselves. We did make a royalty profit from it past the initial production fees of $200,000 per episode, for a total of $5,200,000. The biggest reason we took it was so that I could keep my animators working during the off-season. The Germans didn't have the same kind of delivery time for the fall that the U.S. networks did, so it enabled me to give more work to the people working at Filmation. I guess it was the opposite of "runaway production", as we were bringing work to the United Slates instead of taking it away like other studios. The Sport Billy character was already really popular throughout Europe and South America in comic books and toys, mainly connected to soccer, but we knew that the character needed to be broadened out, so we brought in all sorts of other sports that he got involved in. And we could teach fair play, teamwork, sportsmanship, and healthy concepts to kids watching. I don't remember how much of the backstory came from the comics, if any of it did, but the initial early concepts were by Rolf Deyhle. We had a twin planet for Earth called Olympus that rotated on the opposite side of the sun from Earth, so we never saw it. That's where all the god-like beings from mythology were from. And Billy came to Earth, along with a little girl named Lilly and a talking dog named Willy, to promote sportsmanship and the other values I mentioned. They travelled around in a spaceship that looked like a giant wind-up clock, and it could also travel through time, so we could go to different time periods. We also went to many different countries on the show, including Spain, Japan, Mexico, China, Norway, the Middle East, Peru, Russia, and all over Europe. Billy carried a magical bag with him called the Omni-Sack, which looked like an ordinary gym bag, but from which he could pull all sorts of wondrous things if they needed them on their adventures. He would pull out a miniature car or helicopter or baseball bat and they would grow to full size for him to use. And because every hero needed an adversary, they had an evil witch chasing them around who hated fairness. She was Queen Vanda from Vandalusia, and she had a groveling little henchman named Sipe. The head guy from Olympus was named President Sportikus XI. The shows were generally dubbed, though sometimes they were subtitled. The English language voices were my son Lane Scheimer as Sport Billy; Joyce Bulifant as Lilly, Queen Vanda and Sportikus' wife, Pandusa; and the great Frank Welker as Willy, Sipe and Sportikus. I did the voice of the Olympian Computer. There were also songs that ended each episode about the theme of the show.
Sport Billy was a big hit in Germany, so they picked us up for the second season very quickly, ordering the remaining ten episodes. The series was aired eventually in England, Spain, Italy, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Greece, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Portugal, and a bunch of other places. It eventually aired in the United States in syndication and on NBC in the summer of 1982, though it took them forever to make that deal. The Sports Billy group had their own salespeople, although it was mainly dealt with by a Swiss guy named Pierre Rochat, who worked for the German gentleman, Wolfgang Stein, who put up the money for the series.
The show did indeed end up a feature, with an extremely limited airing on Showtime or HBO. They redubbed all the voices with new actors to fit in a new script for linking the episodes together. The movie was released split in parts as "episodes" on VHS in the UK.
