Lost forever or simply stuck in deep space?
B.R.A.T.S. of the Lost Nebula is perhaps one of the least remembered Saturday morning tragedies ever. Created by Dan Clark, B.R.A.T.S. was (at least in spirit) a self-described “hybrid of Thunderbirds and Jim Henson’s Storyteller series” that featured the sci-fi adventures of 5 orphaned aliens (Zadam, Triply, Duncan, Ryle, and Lavana) who are on a mission to save their parents from the evil Shock Warriors– living weapons of mass destruction that can fly, burn, blast through anything.
Featuring live action puppets by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and digital effects courtesy of C.O.R.E. Digital Effects, the show made its stateside premiere on the WB in October of 1998 alongside similarly ill-fated shows like The Legend of Calamity Jane and prime time cartoon Invasion America. It should have been a hit… but it wasn’t and the WB ended up pulling the plug after only the third episode.
The reasons for the snub has never really been discussed openly, though we can assume that it had to do with ratings. However the full 13 episodes did live on in Canada courtesy of YTV and apparently they even ordered a second season of the show, but I was unable to find any footage or information on it. In fact, it’s incredibly hard to find any sort of info on the show beyond a few scant details on the Muppet Wiki and Wikipedia. Playback, a Canadian entertainment news portal, had a pretty good write-up of how some of the show was created behind-the-scenes back in 1999, but aside from that it’s like the show never existed. There was some hope according to this post by The Dan Clark Company in 2007, but it looks like this is one Lost Signal that’s unfortunately lost forever.
UPDATE 8/09/2011 – From Dan Clark:
Brats is owned by JHC, but they deem it too expensive to release on DVD for a smorgasbord of biz reasons. They approached us about doing a re-boot of whole series but we passed. We have some new shows in development with FremantleMedia in London that marry creatures, puppetry and CGI in cool new ways, so we felt like going back to the Lost Nebula was a stale choice.
Regarding why the show was killed so swiftly in the US: our numbers were low, but the WB’s numbers were low across the whole block at the time – they panicked. The 1st thing a channel does when the whole block is underperforming is cancel the shows they don’t own – this is so they can focus all their air time on fixing their owned and controlled assets. Brats and that UFO animated show (forgot it’s name) were the two shows they didn’t own that year. And yes, our numbers where great in Canada and YTV did order a 2nd season, but they couldn’t afford to pay for the whole series as it was rather pricey to make and the list of partners involved in the show believed that without a US platform for the series we’d not be able to sell it around the world. For example, we had toys being developed at Hasbro, they killed the toy deal as soon as WB killed the show.
But the project was a f*cking blast to make.
