W. Watts Biggers
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
W. Watts Biggers (aka Buck Biggers) is an American novelist, producer and composer, best known as the co-creator of the Underdog animated TV series.
Born in Avondale Estates, Georgia, Biggers went to Avondale High where he was member of a debating team which won the state championship. Skipping his senior year of high school, he edited the school newspaper at North Georgia Military College and went on to Emory University Law School. At age 20, he headed for New York City where he struggled unsuccessfully as a pianist and vocalist, singing his own original songs.
At the advertising agency Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, he began as a mailroom trainee and rose to the position of VP Account Supervisor on General Mills and Corn Products/Best Foods accounts, handling millions in billing. At Dancer Fitzgerald Sample in 1960, Biggers teamed with Chester Stover, Treadwell D. Covington and artist Joseph Harris to create TV animation in formats devised to sell General Mills breakfast cereals.
Leaving Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, Biggers relocated to Cape Cod to form his company, Total TeleVision (TTV), with animation produced at Gamma Studios in Mexico. TTV created and produced a variety of animated TV series, including King Leonardo and his Short Subjects, The Hunter, Tooter Turtle, Tennessee Tuxedo and his Tales, Go Go Gophers, The World of Commander McBragg, Klondike Kat and Underdog. For these series, Biggers co-wrote more than 500 scripts and composed all theme songs, words and music. The highly successful Underdog originally was telecast on NBC from 1964 to 1966, followed by a run on CBS (1966-68) and a return to NBC (1968-70 and 1972-73).
Total TeleVision folded when General Mills dropped out as the sponsor in 1969. Biggers moved back to New York as VP Promotion and Creative Services for NBC, heading a 90-person department for five years. He returned to Cape Cod for a 12-year career as a freelance writer, contributing to TV Guide, Family Circle and Reader's Digest. His column TV Tinderbox ran in 200 newspapers, syndicated by the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News and later by Dallas' Tel-Aire Syndicate.
In 1995, Biggers, Stover, Covington and Harris negotiated a sale of their creations to Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels, who later sold the rights to Little Golden Books, resulting in the book Underdog and the Disappearing Ice Cream. For BearManor Media, Biggers co-authored How Underdog Was Born (2005).
Biggers' allegorical novel Man Inside, a 1967 Ballantine paperback original, was reissued by Bamberger Books as a 1999 hardcover. Recently, it was optioned for a feature film by One Brick Films and featured March 27, 2006 on the MySpace website. One Brick's synopsis:
- Caro, an adolescent amnesiac orphan, is mysteriously dropped off at a Rhode Island Boy’s School in the fall of 1965. He becomes the obsession of Miss Wills, a devout former student of the famous psychologist Dr. Greeb. Miss Wills begins a controversial treatment, and, at the brink of curing him, Caro is devastated by a horrible dream and flees, penniless, to New York City. Embarking on a new journey, Caro finds a job, a place to live and an obsession: His Purpose. Before he knows it, he is married to sinister Faye, has a baby on the way and has an eminent catastrophe awaiting him. Broken and busted, Caro flees again in search of new meaning in his life. When he is repeatedly enslaved by a small time Mafioso in rural Kentucky, he gives up. Can Dr. Greeb help pull Caro back from his edge of madness?
Biggers is the co-scripter of an original screenplay, A Woman Called Job, also scheduled for filming by One Brick. He co-authored (with Dr. Joseph I. Goodman) Diabetes Without Fear, revised as the paperback The New Diabetes Without Fear, published by Avon in 1995. His novel Hold Back the Tide was published February, 2001, as a 1st Books Library ebook. As a ghostwriter, he did two books, Obsessive Compulsive Disorders (Warner Books) and A Crisis of Conscience (Birch Lane Press).
Widowed with two grown children, Watts Jr. and Victoria, Biggers is VP of the Boston-based Victory Over Violence, Inc., a national organization "dedicated to creating a positive force in the media to offset the cynicism and negativity, which create a climate of violence." Biggers co-founded this non-profit organization in 1996 with seminar leader Nancy Purbeck, host of the Boston cable TV series, Positive People. Two years later, Biggers and Purbeck launched their annual Positive People Day, urging people "to smile and reach out to others with a friendly hello all day." Positive People Day has been celebrated annually on October 29th since 1998, as proclaimed by Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino.
In 1999, Biggers created a new episode of Underdog as a half-hour radio show, narrated by veteran Boston newsman Tom Ellis with new original music composed by Biggers. Radio stations were asked to participate in Victory Over Violence by airing the adventure in which the evil Simon Bar Sinister develops a Switchpitch baseball to turn positive people negative. His attempt to become king of Boston is foiled by Underdog (played by Biggers) and Sweet Polly Purebred (portrayed by Purbeck).
