Emergency +4 - Toonstalgia

Emergency!'s Adaptation into a Kid's Cartoon

I never heard of Emergency until quarantine. My mom likes the show. She started watching twice a day on Cozi Tv. One day, I was doing a quiz on the best cartoon lineups of the 1970s. I recognized some of the titles from repeats from when I was little (mostly Scooby Doo). When I got to 1973, I saw "Emergency +4" and I knew research was required. Oh boy did I get some joy sparking.

The show has a motive, to teach kids lessons about dealing with emergencies. It is a pretty accurate adaptation of the show. There are key differences like the rescues tend to focus less on their work with emergency rescues and less on their paramedic work. There's also the four children, the monkey, the dog and the bird that's described as a myna bird in my research but looks like a falcon to me.

Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tighe reprise their roles as Johnny Gage and Roy DeSoto from Emergency! The characters look like them. It's nice to hear them and see them look like the characters I am so accustomed to.

The show operates on the amateur detective show rule of causality. Wherever Desoto and Gage go, accidents just happen. Just accident after accident.

The episodes of the show I've been able to source don't focus on the kids over the adults or the adults over the kids. The actors providing the voices for the kids do a very good job. The voice for Jason Phillips is the most recognizable actor out of the four. He has had an impressive voice over career. His most recognizable character is probably Goldie Wilson from Back to the Future. The voice for Carol, Sarah Kennedy, was in an episode of Barnaby Jones which makes me laugh because of my nascent fixation on that show. She was also in Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In's sixth season. The sixth season had a little kid and a ventriloquist and Richard Dawson.

The kids can vacillate between hypercompetency and spontaneous irresponsibility. It wouldn't be hard to believe they would go on thin ice if their actions the rest of the time didn't make it so clear they would know better. I love the characterization of Carol, the distaff of the team, as mechanical. She fixes a generator in one episode. She secures a ceiling against collapse in another.

You cannot miss the first two minutes of the show because something major happens in the beginning of the episodes. An avalanche, a nearly deadly accident, a volcanic eruption and more before the first commercial break. Sometimes the first two minutes feature a catastrophe they are managing for the rest of the episode. This is fine in an era with the pause button. But I expect this was a bit of a stress when you had to get there on time. For me, there are shows like Bump in the Night that I watched every single time they came on but still didn't see some episodes till I got the DVDs because I slept in a lot on Saturday mornings and often without meaning to.

Fred Calvert caught my eye in the credit. I racked my brain to remember why I knew that name. Then I looked it up. Fred Calvert got the Thief and the Cobbler to the finish line. But that's a story for another day.

This was happy discovery was the lucky highlight of my week. Arguably that says more about my week than the show but I still really enjoyed the watch.