Five of the Most Expensive TV Shows of the 20th Century
In the age of the Cinematic Universe and streaming platforms with unlimited venture capital money to throw around, it’s par for the course for a TV show to cost dozens of millions of dollars per episode. But television used to be a much humbler pursuit — one Stranger Thing could buy you multiple seasons of Cheers.
Here’s a little taste of what was considered a gigantic budget, pre-Y2K…
Thundercats (1985)
1985’s Thundercats didn’t invent the kids’-show-as-commercial approach to television programming, but it did cynically exploit it. He-Man and Transformers had already made millions for their studios and toy companies, and the producers of Thundercats decided to go all-in: They got stations to agree to air it in key timeslots in exchange for a cut of the toy sales.
That’s how they were able to justify a whopping (at the time) $15 million budget for the first season. Consumer advocacy groups tried to get legislation passed that would prevent selling kids toys for 30 straight minutes, but the U.S. government preferred to let Saturday mornings become consumerist bootcamps for children. That’s why the rest of the ‘80s and ‘90s were packed wall-to-wall with schlocky toy ads like…
BraveStarr (1987)
This show may out-‘80s even Thundercats. It’s an “American space western” with characters like Handlebar, Wild Child, Zarko, Deputy Fuzz and Outlaw Skuzz. The tragedy is that this show had a lot of heart, and was created by a talented showrunner, but corporate greediness gave it the indelible stink of a cash grab.
The show’s big bad, Tex Hex, originally came from a Ghostbuster brainstorm, but producer Lou Scheimer plucked him from the lineup and spun up an entire new franchise around him. He’d developed 65 episodes and a feature-length film, but Mattel, which was looking for their next Barbie, pulled the trigger way too early. Scheimer says this ultimately doomed the show — Mattel released a line of toys a full year before the show even aired, causing people to assume the show was a hasty ripoff of the toy line.
It cost $20 million to produce the show, but there was a lot more money wrapped up in it. Mattel promised to buy half of the show’s ad space, and shipped $15 million worth of tie-in toys, waiting on a $200 million payday that never came.
Tiny Toon Adventures (1990)
Tiny Toon Adventures was like if Looney Tunes made a MADtv that was about 85 percent less racist. Tiny Toon Adventures relied on an absurd, acerbic comedy style that’s every bit as responsible for the Millennial cringe epidemic as the likes of Jim Carrey. The point of the show was to introduce a whole new cast of characters under the literal tutelage of the Looney Tunes mainstays — the new crew were students at a school for goofiness taught by Bugs, Sylvester and the rest. It’s what Scrubs tried to do with their last season, just without the fatal dose of Franco.
It was originally conceived as a Steven Spielberg-helmed feature film, but even when it was scaled back to TV show, Warner Bros. spared no expense. At the time, the standard rate was 10,000 cels per episode of an animation, but this production upped it to 25,000, with a 100-person production staff to support those efforts. That’s how you wind up with a $25 million kids’ show in 1990.
Peter Benchley’s Amazon (1999)
This show is basically just Lost, but the big bad was a Canadian lady and they never had the opportunity to stretch one good season’s worth of plot into six. A plane crash-lands in the Amazon rainforest, and the survivors have to navigate a hostile indigenous tribe called the Fierce Ones, a hostile group of colonizers called the Chosen and the aforementioned cannibalistic Canuck.
They originally wanted to shoot on location in the Amazon freaking rainforest, but decided instead to spend $1.2 million per episode recreating rainforest flora and fauna in Canada. The total budget was $26 million, much of which was spent on 3.5 acres of fake plants, a human-made river and a crocodile that once escaped into said river for two weeks. And, of course, pig dentures to turn a common sow into a vicious wild boar.
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992-1996)
In a valiant effort to fill adolescent minds with anything other than made-up languages and midi-chlorians, George Lucas attempted to spin the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark into an educational TV show. Unfortunately, it had almost nothing in common with the wildly popular film franchise: It featured a doddering 93-year-old Indie stumbling around New York City, cornering the locals into long-winded stories of his youth.
Each episode flashes back to either a child or teenaged Indie interacting with a historical figure. The figures and events young Indie inserted himself into happened all over the world, and Lucas insisted on filming on location. Carting a whole production crew and a tween star to Egypt, Germany, Africa — even braving the wilds of New Jersey — was an incredibly expensive endeavor, costing $27 million for two seasons.
