If someone asked me what the 1980’s looked like, I’d bypass every music video ever made during the decade and show them the opening credit sequence of the first season of “KIDS Incorporated.” The neon signs, the red and purple outfits, the sparkles, the headbands and the leg warmers. In my minds eye this is how I remember the decade looking like. Of course, the world “KIDS Incorporated” was creating was a hyper stylized version of the 80’s, and in actuality, real life 1980’s looked a lot more like an early episode of “Degrassi Junior High.” Instead, “KIDS Incorporated” was mythologizing the “decade of decadence” in real time, and despite the program disappearing from the forefront of pop culture, its vivid iconography has still managed to burn vivid memories of early Saturday morning rock n’ roll fun onto an entire generation of gen-xers.
I’ll admit that I haven’t spent a ton of time over the past thirty or more years thinking about “KIDS Incorporated,” but for some reason my social media algorithms has been full of clips and reels of the program’s musical sequence lately, which obviously has continued due to me taking the bait and clicking on them. I was nine years old when “KIDS Incorporated” made its debut in syndication on Saturday morning television, and while it was not my personal gateway into music, it surely helped amplify my love for pop music. I was the perfect age of the series and already completely invested in the MTV phenomena, I knew the songs and the stars via watching music videos every day after school. “KIDS Incorporated” was a Saturday morning bonus that not only featured my favorite songs, but likeable characters in a half hour drama aired just before the network cartoons broadcast.
But when putting “KIDS Incorporated” into a historical perspective, what seems to often go overlooked is that the show was a landmark series, not only for giving future pop culture stars their first show business exposure, but for becoming the blueprint to the way tween television would eventually look like.
My sudden fascination with “KIDS Incorporated” had me rummaging through my small but unique children’s vinyl collection, which is awkwardly stored in our home office on a high shelf, away from the bulk of my collection due to them rarely getting played. A number of years ago I had purchased a “KIDS Incorporated” album as part of a private sale, but I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. I don’t even know if it’s ever been played. But when locating it, I came to discover that the “KIDS Incorporated” album I own is actually a fascinating vinyl document of an early version of “KIDS Incorporated” created before anybody even knew what the final product was going to look like. The first of four “KIDS Incorporated” albums to be released between 1984 and 1986, this “KIDS Incorporated” album contains all of the performances from the series’ pilot, which was filmed a year before “KIDS Incorporated” made it’s syndicated debut, and while it did feature musical performances by the majority of the show’s eventual cast, it also featured music by kids and characters who would never be heard from again. As a result, although the album has the earliest recordings from some future heavy hitters in the music industry their names and faces become buried in what was unfortunately marketed as a generic kid’s album.
But before we get to the “KIDS Incorporated” pilot and the album it spawned, lets go back to the show’s origins.
“KIDS Incorporated” was created by Thomas W. Lynch, who would go on to have a successful career with the tween genre by creating future shows such as “The Secret Life of Alex Mack” and “Caitlin’s Way.” In 1983, Lynch and business partner Gary Biller created and produced the music video block “Night Tracks” for TBS. After the success of MTV’s historical launch in 1981, music video programs became a new television genre created so that other networks would be able to broadcast music videos to the basic populace (such as my family) which weren’t paying extra money for what were considered a premier channel. “Night Tracks” was a unique program which ran on Friday and Saturday nights, with the broadcast starting just after midnight, and running the latest music videos until 6 am. Through his involvement in “Night Tracks,” Lynch discovered firsthand the powerful connection that 80’s music was having within the cultural landscape, and especially the impact that it was having on youth culture.
Now the idea of kids emulating their favorite pop stars on television wasn’t a new idea. The concept had already been done in Britian with “Mini-Popa” in 1983 with disastrous results, and I doubt Lynch wasn’t aware of the controversy and fall-out of the doomed series (for more on that, read our Vinyl Story “The Mini-Pops – Mini-Pops (1981)”). The Mini-Pops fiasco happened in March 1983, which would have been at the same time that Lynch was developing KIDS Incorporated. I can’t find any information on Lynch’s creative process, or if “Mini-Pops” had been any sort of influence on “KIDS Incorporated” or not. However, in all the ways that “Mini-Pops” got it wrong, “KIDS Incorporated” got it right. Instead of just having tykes emulate pop stars on TV, as a series “KIDS Incorporated” would be a much higher concept. The show would have a set cast, with regular characters and episodic plots. Although storylines would not carry over from episode to episode, there would be life lessons and age-appropriate morals and commentary. Furthermore, “KIDS Incorporated” would feature slightly older children than “Mini-Pops,” ranging from eight to fourteen years old. But most of all, “KIDS Incorporated” would feature kids with some sort of professional background, eliminating the wobbly voiced and potentially off-tune performances that was tragically common on “Mini-Pops.”
The “KIDS Incorporated” pilot was filmed in August 1983, and the producers basically threw everything they had at the wall to see what would stick. As a result, by the time the show aired as a regular series it had maintained the pilot’s brightest talents and drastically tightening up the production value of the series. To see the pilot for yourself, it’s available in its entirety at YouTube. Taking the time to watch it for the first time in forty years, I was fascinated not only with how much I remembered from seeing it only once before, but also to see an earlier draft of the series including what the producers kept and what they discarded in the process of creating a final product.
The “KIDS Incorporated’s” pilot had a minimalistic plot, but was ambitiously music heavy, which would actually be reversed when the show was turned into a regular series. In the opening moments of the show the audience is introduced to the series’ original primary heroine Gloria (played by Marta Marrero) who is urged by her best friend Renee (Renee Sands) to blow off her piano practice to attend the auditions for the new “permanent band “spot that is being hired at the local teenage hangout. Gloria is pessimistic because she doesn’t sing in a band, and she believes that local rock idol Mickey (Jerry Sharell) and his friends have the most popular band in the neighbourhood, but Micky won’t let any girls sing in the band. Anyhow, after a batch of musical performances, melodies and side plots, including some zippy comedic moments featuring Renee’s spunky kid sister Stacey (Stacey Ferguson), at the end of the show Micky and his group take the stage at the final moments of the audition competition and perform Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl,” only to have Gloria to jump on stage with them to perform Pat Benetard’s “Heartbreaker.” Both a heated rivalry mixed with potential romantic tension seems to be bubbling between Mickey and Gloria, who continue the performance adding Sammy Hagar’s “I’ve Done Everything For You,” Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” and Springfield’s “Don’t Talk to Strangers.” Finishing the impromptu, but expertly performed medley, the crowd goes wild and Mickey and Gloria are announced the winner. The hang out’s soda jerk calls KIDS Incorporated the winner and all the kids filter into the street for a big song and dance performance of the show’s only original number which would become their eventual earworm of a theme song (“We’re KIDS Incorporated/K-I-D-S, YEAH!) and Gloria gets home before her piano practice is finished.
While the pilot managed to introduce the concept of the show as well as the program’s principal characters, the pilot also included other kids with their own plot points which might have continued in the eventual series, but were dropped by the time the series was green lit. For instance, a duo called Jenneifer and Danny, who do a medley of Olivia Newton John and Hall and Oats songs are introduced with Jennifer being a rival for Gloria, while Danny is set up as a potential love interest. An older boy named Tino is given little in regard to character, but performs a killer medley of Michael Jackson hits, including “Beat It,” “Shake Your Body,” “Off the Wall” and “Rock With You.” Then there are Micky’s bandmates, Chris and TJ, who fill in on most of the musical vignettes. All of these kids would be cut from the eventual show, but their performances would ultimately be preserved as part of the first “KIDS Incorporated” album!
And that’s the interesting thing about that first album. Obviously produced in tandem with the pilot, the album uses every single musical performance within it. In all, 36 songs are presented in what was a 45-minute pilot, including a medley of both Elvis and Beatles songs, and featuring other artists of the era including The Police, Kim Wilde, Toni Basil, Men at Work and The Stray Cats. However, the standout performance on the album goes to eight-year-old Stacey Feruson, who does an incredible cover of Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” showing some powerful performance chops, and a hint of things to come.
“KIDS Incorporated” made its debut on syndicated television on September 1, 1984, over a year after the production of the pilot. Beyond the streamlining of the cast, the look and the feel of the final product was much more polished, and the kids, now all a year older, had greatly matured in both their appearance and performance ability. Now here is the strange thing. In doing research for this Vinyl Story, multiple sources says that the pilot was never aired on television, and wasn’t made available to the public until 1985 when it was released on home video as “KIDS Incorporated: The Beginning” with new wrap around footage and narration (this is the version of the pilot seen on YouTube). But here’s the thing. Although it was over forty years ago, I clearly remember watching the pilot on syndicated television. I clearly can remember both Stacey Ferguson singing “Gloria” and Renee Sands doing “Micky” in my minds eye. My family didn’t own a VCR in 1984, and I never saw a home video tape of “KIDS Incorporated.” Furthermore, I clearly remember an added scene tacked on to the pilot episode where the show’s featured characters – Mickey, Gloria, Renee and Stacey, invited you to come back every week to hang out with them and watch the show, and introduced the audience to the newest member of KIDS Incorporated who wasn’t seen in the pilot, The Kid, played by Rahsaan Patterson. It may have been decades ago, and I’ll admit that time and age has affected my memory at times, but I know I am right that I saw the pilot on broadcast television. If anybody out there can collaborate my memory of this, especially in regard to that added scene, please drop me a note.
Although “KIDS Incorporated” would get very little in the ways of mechanising, releasing soundtrack albums for the series was a no brainer, and the distribution of the album appropriately went to K-Tel Records. This seemed to be a good fit as K-Tel had cornered the kiddie rock n’ roll market with the international distribution of The Mini-Pops, which despite being cancelled in the UK was experiencing its biggest success in Canada. However, the finished product design for the first KIDS Incorporated album seemed to be rushed. It seems that “KIDS Incorporated” was an afterthought for K-Tel who were far more focused on continuing the Mini-Pops franchise.
Possibly the most glaring problem with the first KIDS Incorporated album is the cover art and overall design, which not only looks cheap, but was created by someone who either didn’t care, or wasn’t paying attention to the basic highlights of the show. As a result. the cover features more pictures of the kids who were eliminated from the series than the stars that would remain on the show. The front cover featured four performance photos, with only Jerry “Micky” Sherrel making the front cover in the top left photo. Meanwhile, a photo of Renee Sands did get printed on the back cover, but it mistakenly labeled the photo “Gloria” – which not only wasn’t her character, but not the song that she sang! The likeliest explanation of K-Tel’s art department featuring the wrong kids is that they didn’t know which kids would eventually be featured on the album, but mislabeling the photo of Rene and denying Stacey her credit for “Gloria” is just sloppy and lazy. Meanwhile, if anybody in the art department had bothered to pay attention to the actual narrative of the show, they would have realized that Marta Marero would eventually be the show’s central character no matter how the series played out, but she is absent from the cover completely.
What is really confounding is that the two break out stars of “KIDS Incorporated’s” first season aren’t pictured or identified on the front cover at all. What the folks at K-Tel couldn’t have known is that they had just produced the first recordings of two of two future stars but passed them over on the album cover for kids who’d fall into obscurity.
In the role of Gloria, Marta Marrero immediately established herself as the primary performer in the early episodes of “KIDS Incorporated,” not only because, at age 13, she was the oldest of the kids, but she had some serious diva energy which she brought to every performance. In 1985, as the second season of “KIDS Incorporated” went to air, Marreno changed her first name from Marta to Martika, and eventually dropped her last name completely. After playing Gloria for the show’s first three seasons, Martika “aged out” of the series when she turned 17 and launched herself into solo success as the show’s first breakout star.
Releasing her first single, “We Are Music” for the Japanese market, Martika successfully eclipsed her tween-com fame when she released her first self titled album in 1989 and had a monster hit with the album’s moving ballad “Toy Soldiers.” An original song Martika wrote about a friend battling a heroine addiction, the song went to #1 on the Billboard charts, while the album landed at #15 on the Billboard Sales Charts. What might not be commonly known is that for the recording of “Toy Soldiers,” Martika had former castmates Stacey Ferguson, Renee Sands and Rahsaan Patterson on the track singing amongst the children’s choir.
Although Marika is often thought of as being a “one hit wonder” from the end of the 1980’s. “Martika” had two other singles enter the Billboard charts following “Toy Soldiers” – “I Feel the Earth Move” which landed at #7, and “More Than You Know” which went to #17, In 1991 Martika put out a second album, “Martika’s Kitchen,” with music produced and co-written by Prince, which spawned another Billboard hit, “Love….Thy Will Be Done,: which landed at #10, while the title track entered the top 40 in pretty much every country except the US. However, soon after the release of “Martika’s Kitchen,” citing burnout and feeling overwhelmed by fame, Martika backed away from the entertainment industry while still on top. Although she’s kept a lower profile since her early 90’s success, Martika currently continues to release music as part of the pop combo Oppera with her husband Michael Motzart.
But, of course, it’s Stacey Ferguson, better known these days as Fergie, who would go on to be one of the biggest pop icons of the 21st Century! I mean, anyone who listens to her performance of “Gloria” knew she was something special. Fergie would have the longest run on “KIDS Incorporated,” going from being the youngest to the oldest member of the show through the first six seasons, ending her run in 1989. After leaving “KIDS Incorporated,” Ferguson and KIDS alumnus Renee Sands and vocalist Stefani Ridell formed the r&b influenced pop group Wild Orchard who released a debut album in 1997, scoring a minor hit with “Talk to Me,” which went to #48 on Billboard (just a quick note – as a kid, I was always a Renee Sands fan. Closest to my own age, I had a childhood crush on her when I was ten years old,).
But, the trajectory of Fergie’s career would be forever changed when she joined forces with hip-hop trio The Black Eyed Peas in 2003, who amassed multiple Grammy Awards, Billboard hits and musical accolades with tracks like “My Humps,” Don’t Phunk My Heart” and “I’ve Got a Feeling.” Her success with The Black Eyed Peas would help springboard her into her own solo career in 2005 with her album “The Duchess,” which put her on the top of the charts with “Fergislicous,” “Clumsy” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” But Fergie’s first pressing on vinyl is her version of “Gloria” on the KIDS Incorporated LP, making it a true pop music collectable.
And these KIDS Incorporated albums do seem to be fetching fairly high prices on the vinyl market. Although four KIDS Incorporated albums were produced, the albums went underproduced and distributed, making them rare albums to find today. I’ve never seen any at record stores or shows, and on Discogs some copies of KIDS Incorporated albums are fetching more than $100US, which is relatively high for a kid’s album.
Now my time watching “KIDS Incorporated” during my childhood proved to be brief. It only lasted on syndicated television for two years before it was taken over by the newly established Disney Channel where it aired from 1986 until 1994. Upon moving over to Disney, I lost sight of it because at that time Disney was another premium channel, much like MTV was, and my parents were not paying for it. So as “KIDS Incorporated” continued to evolve, I never saw it. More notable stars made their start on the show, including Jennifer Love Hewitt and Eric Balfour, but any nostalgia I have for “KIDS Incorporated” lies in that original syndicated run, and especially with the first cast.
But while the show has seemed to have dipped under the radar in regard to remaining part of our cultural history, “KIDS Incorporated” was in many ways a revolutionary children’s program that greatly changed the way that children’s television was made. Although live action Saturday morning programs continued being popular in the 1970’s, by the 1980’s Saturday morning television was almost all cartoons. When “KIDS Incorporated” made its debut in 1984, the only other live action Saturday morning show airing that year was Richard Pryor’s short-lived kids show “Pryor’s Place,” which lasted 13 episodes before getting replaced by reruns of “Land of the Lost.” It wouldn’t be until 1987 that the Disney network released their short-lived series “Good Morning, Miss Bliss,” which, more famously, would morph into the ultra influential “Saved by the Bell” on NBC starting in 1989. Although “Saved By the Bell” would go on to become the standard blueprint of all tween sitcoms for the next thirty five years, it isn’t too much of a stretch to see that “KIDS Incorporated” was an early predecessor to that series, and that Disney was looking to create a similar success in it’s format. Of course, by the mid-1990’s, cartoons had been primarily replaced by “Saved By the Bell” clones on the networks, while cartons continued to flourish on premium and syndicated television. In 1984 the idea that a live action tween com in the mold of “KIDS Incorporated” would eventually replace animated programming would have been difficult to imagine, but by 2000 Saturday morning cartons were no more than a sweet, sugar-coated memory from the past.
Once it moved from syndicated television to Disney, “KIDS Incorporated” continued to be a successful series in the early days of the network that was still trying to forge its identity. Thus it’s not impossible to believe that the successful musical element of “KIDS Incorporated” wouldn’t have somewhat inspired the now legendary “All New Mickey Mouse Club” which made its debut in 1989 and became training ground for future pop superstars such as Britney Spears, Christina Agulera and Justin Timberlake. Although “MMC” was more of a variety/sketch/music series, having showbusiness kids performing hits from the current charts was the element that made both series’ successful, Although “MMC” would go on to become a far more culturally significant series, again it’s easy to see the influence “KIDS Incorporated” had on it’s development.
Within time, many popular tween series added musical elements to the series, with shows/films like “Hannah Montanna,” “High School Musical” and “Glee” becoming major hits in the current century, completely eclipsing the memory of “KIDS Incorporated” altogether. One of the main reasons that “KIDS Incorporated” has possibly fallen out of public memory is that the modern licensing of all the hit songs that were used on the series makes it too expensive to release “KIDS Incorporated” on modern home media, streaming services or even as basic reruns. Yet while it remains to be one of the lesser appreciated programs, the series still has a devoted fan base which is keeping the series alive on social media. These fans have also managed to keep the series available via YouTube where full episodes of “KIDS Incorporated” from all its various incarnations can be found and enjoyed today.
It’s fair to say when looking at the first “KIDS Incorporated” album that nobody involved could have ever known the impact that the series would eventually have on the development of tween entertainment, and they obviously didn’t know the talents that were making their debut on the album. The cheap presentation and under distribution of the album proved that. However, for those lucky enough to find one, it remains to be an easy to overlook cultural oddity.
