It’s 1975 and I’m standing in a room filled with high-level creative executives, pitching what I think is an excellent television series. It’s got something for everybody: music, adventure, comedy, action and it’s high concept! Here’s my pitch: It’s an animated comedy / action / adventure series (with an emphasis on comedy) for kids 8-11, about a group of amateur, teenaged detectives who solve crimes, while traveling in a band, on tour, in the future, under water, and their sidekick is a talking shark that sounds like Curly from The Three Stooges. I pause for a moment and let it all sink in. My genius never more apparent to these awestruck executives.

Guess what? It’s a sale! A total greenlight. And since it’s got a little bit of everything, my 22-minute underwater hijinks, mystery and music romp appeals to even the finickiest 8-11 year old demographic. Indeed, fun will be had as they eat their Saturday morning bowl of Lucky Charms.

Would you believe that such an idea would speak to modern audiences and generations to come with its busy, eclectic and broad comedic plots? It did. In fact it was not me pitching this little golden nugget, but rather it was Ruby and Spears for Hannah-Barbera’s Jabberjaw; my favorite “Kitchen Sink Show,” nuk nuk nuk.

Everyone knows the phrase “everything, but the kitchen sink.” Well, in television there are programs that are everything and the kitchen sink. A “Kitchen Sink Show” is a series concept that is so broad that it encompasses every plot and any idea the creators can think of to fill the allotted time.

Take your most basic of plots, (teenagers solving crime), tack on a suspiciously large laundry list of unnecessary, yet bizarrely colorful elements (in space, in a hot air balloon, in a band, speaks like Don Knotts, on unicycles that talk) and add one more for good measure, (the teenagers are all coconuts) and you’ve got yourself a “Kitchen Sink Show.”

As the sole story analyst for Warner Bros. Animation, I read hundreds of scripts. In the true spirit of the original Hannah-Barbera cartoons, almost every submission I read was a “Kitchen Sink Show.” Somehow, it seemed, each writer was merely lazily throwing in every element, character, and quirky ingredient they could think of in a haphazard manner. I soon came to realize, it wasn’t really laziness, but a loving yet misguided homage to the “Kitchen Sink Show” of yesteryear.

The “Kitchen Sink Show” emerged to satisfy two basic market needs: 1) Staying current with modern children’s interests. And; and, 2) Consistently churning out properties, on the cheap, with the least amount of effort.

Regardless of generation, children’s interests generally remain the same and it is this consistency that helps broadcasters choose their programming. They want it to appeal to the greatest number of eyeballs, so, they take an amalgam of “everything kid” and turn it into a show. Kids are into silly comedy. They enjoy action and potential romance, so we have those three elements. Kids also want to see teenagers fighting crime, because it’s aspirational. So, now the characters are detectives. They’re into music, so the show’s heroes are in a band. And then, you add in a funny fourth thing, something quirky to wrap it all up in a seemingly shiny new, if not oddly familiar bow. Et, voilà, you have a “Kitchen Sink Show.”

During the 60’s and 70’s Hannah-Barbera was responsible for an awesome percentage of the on-air children’s Saturday morning programming. They had to think outside of the box and frugally, to get programs to air. Like environmentalists before their time, they knew they must reuse and recycle… character design, concept and premise if they were going to be able to churn out property after property, and the most cost-effective way, is to cannibalize your own properties. They knew, if you paint the kitchen sink, you wind up with a brand new “Kitchen Sink Show!” You go Hannah and Barbera, for being just that clever! It’s a little bit of genius really. They reinvented their properties over and over again, twisting minor details, changing locations, shrewdly disguising that it really was just the same “Kitchen Sink Show,” swaddled in new clothing. And they made a fortune doing it.

Speed Buggy was a show about a group of teenaged detectives, who look alarmingly and suspiciously, exactly like a certain gang from Scooby Doo. They drive around in a busted car, fighting evil forces, solving crime, and the Jalopy transforms into a magical talking race car that can help the kids accomplish their crime solving goals. It’s basically Scooby Doo only sub a talking car for a talking dog, and Hannah-Barbera didn’t even bother to really adjust the character design. They just added a few extra elements to freshen it up.

Today, if you gather a room full of old time animators, they’ll tell you about the grand old days of animation. It was a golden era, where the cartoons were classic. Understand me, I am not advocating that you, as a writer, go and write a “Kitchen Sink Show” and try to pitch it. “Kitchen Sink Shows” are mostly terrible. But they are also a significant piece of television history and are revered for their nostalgic charm. While today, a series like Captain Caveman probably would be incarnated as a poorly dubbed Japanese import, its charm, its personality and the peaceful simplistic story telling would be lost to flashing lights, obnoxious dialogue and bad design.

Where it used to simply take moxie to break into animation, now it requires a team of assassin-like agents, a library to rival Shakespeare’s, a high-concept premise, and Carl Lewis’ track record just to get a meeting. And the saddest part is, that for sentimentality, the “Kitchen Sink Show” is no more.

But it’s funny, after listing what it takes to break into animation writing, I realized I just created my own “Kitchen Sink Show.” It’s called Xandy and the Screenwriting Squad. It’s a futuristic romp, where a modern screenwriter goes back in time to the animation heyday. Armed with my library rivaling Shakespeare’s, my team of assassin-like agents, my moxie, my all-girl rock band (made up of said agents), plus my ability to run track like a god. We write cartoons and solve minor yet eccentrically complex crimes, while running super fast, and then celebrate with a song and a shared chuckle as the episode ends. What do you think? Greenlight? Nuk, nuk, nuk.

With contributions by Merrel Davis (www.merreldavis.com)