Tiffany Brissette, the 9-year-old who was cast as Vicki, once had trouble breathing after she had a green stocking pulled over her head her mother had to tell them to stop. Green screen shots were performed on Thursdays, with the cast having to come in early. It did little to contribute to special effects for Vicki’s feats-spinning her head 360 degrees or picking up a refrigerator. Metromedia committed to 13 episodes with a budget of $300,000 each, which Leeds believed to be the lowest of any sitcom on television. She later figured out they were all Chinese tourists who didn’t speak English. I didn’t think anyone would even see it.” During one taping, Pennington-Rowan was distraught that no one in the audience was laughing. (A character, the writers lamented, so thinly-drawn they usually introduced her chopping carrots.) “Syndication was not well-known. “Honestly, the whole thing sounded sketchy,” says Marla Pennington-Rowan, who played Mrs. If nothing else, Small Wonder was something different. Instead of airing expensive episodes of old hit shows, stations were looking for fresh (and cheaper) material. Leeds showed it to NBC, where he had a deal when they passed, Leeds bought it back from them and sold it to Metromedia, a company that was trying to break in to the first-run syndication market. In the early 1980s, Leeds came up with an idea about a child robot who slowly adopts human traits, which he intended to be broadly written and performed for his intended audience of children.
He co-created Silver Spoons and worked on Diff’rent Strokes as well as the 1960s series My Living Doll, which featured a pre-Catwoman Julie Newmar as an android trying to blend in with society. Small Wonder ’s lack of subtlety is usually laid at the feet of Howard Leeds, a former child actor himself who had gone on to a successful television writing career. “You,” a stranger once told Webster, “were on the worst show in the history of television.” Nearly 35 years after its debut, the show is simultaneously remembered with fondness and outright scorn. Small Wonder was a syndicated hit two years before Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered, but its reputation is that of filmed tedium. So did sci-fi clubs, which frequently wrote in to analyze the suspect logic of artificial intelligence but were nonetheless delighted such a thing as a “sci-fi sitcom” existed. Instead of selling his innovation for billions, Lawson squirrels her away in a cabinet Vicki would go on to spend four seasons and 96 episodes antagonizing the Lawson family (and television critics) with her literal-mindedness, super-strength, and monotone voice.Ĭhildren loved the show. Tiffany Brissette, Jerry Supiran, and Emily Webster star in Small Wonder. Vicki), explaining to people she was adopted after her parents were killed in an accident. He dubs his creation VICI (Voice Input Child Identicant, a.k.a.
One of the earliest half-hour shows to originate in syndication, it was an objectively banal sitcom about an engineer named Ted Lawson who fabricates a robot to resemble a 9-year-old girl. With a modest budget, Small Wonder was in no position to pay someone just to come to the set and chuckle. Lou laughed on command because he was already on set as a stand-in for the child actors.
“A little disconcerting for a 6-year-old.”
When Webster, who played Harriet, and the rest of the cast rehearsed their lines, Lou would stand in the darkness behind the camera and laugh so they’d know where to pause for the studio audience: Ha, ha, ha, ha! Lou was a little person in his 50s who drove a Cadillac with foot pedals and had a grey handlebar mustache that drooped over his face. Emily Webster only remembers so much from her time on Small Wonder, but she definitely remembers Lou.