When the
single "
Jessie's Girl" climbed the
charts in
1981, the name
Rick Springfield resonated with me, and it was not because of his
role as Dr. Noah Drake on the
soap opera General Hospital. Nor was the familiarity due to his various
television appearances on shows like
The Incredible Hulk and
Battlestar Galactica.
I asked my classmates if they remembered an animated Saturday morning cartoon that featured Rick Springfield and his pet owl taking kids on adventures through their chalkboard. Friends were dubious, and my research at the local library on the history of animation wasn't helpful.
I would have to wait nearly two decades before the IMDB and the Yesterdayland Web site could verify my memory.
Mission: Magic! was indeed, a Saturday morning cartoon series, starring the animated likeness and actual voice and songs of Australian born pop star Rick Springfield. The show ran from 1973-1974 for 13 episodes on ABC. It was created by Filmation, the brainchild of Lou Scheimer and Norm Prescott, as a spinoff from their previous season's The Brady Kids.
The plot centered around a group of high school students (Franklin, Vinnie, Kim, Carol, Harvey, and Socks) , known as the "Adventurers Club." Their classroom teacher, Miss Tickle, who had arcane powers, would occasionally receive a call for help from Rick Springfield and his owl Tolamy in some alternate universe. She would draw a door on the blackboard with chalk, and use her familiar, Tut-Tut (a live cat in that other universe, a cat statue in this one), to open a rainbow colored portal to his world. The class would go and help Rick and Tolamy solve their troubles, and at the end of each show, or course, Rick would break into song.