Margaret Loesch still kicks herself over the loss of 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' when she was at New World Entertainment.
Loesch
In an entertainment field of dreams where batting .333 -- as in baseball -- will land you in the Hall of Fame, few people have been associated with more hits than Margaret Loesch. Recent headlines, though, offer an always-timely reminder about just how easily someone's near miss can become somebody else's gravy train -- and in Loesch's case, how a very big one got away.
Loesch -- who in July was named president of Discovery and toy titan Hasbro's joint-venture children's channel -- presided over the launch of the Fox Children's Network, where she put programmed such shows as "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers," which helped transform Haim Saban from a self-proclaimed "cartoon schlepper" into a billionaire mogul. The same channel cranked out the animated superhero hits "X-Men" and "Batman: The Animated Series" in the 1990s, which might explain why Loesch was an ideal choice to guide Hasbro in mining its properties for cable TV.
Still, there's another monster hit that isn't readily connected to Loesch: "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," which has also been in the news of late. Viacom is paying $60 million to acquire the property, with plans to launch a new Nickelodeon series as well as reboot the movie franchise.
Where does Loesch fit in? Back in the mid-1980s she was running Marvel Prods., another company that has been in the big-studio spotlight, and was eager to develop an animated series based on a comic book by a couple of young guys named Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird -- something with the cheekily absurd-sounding title "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."
Only Marvel was at that point owned by New World Entertainment, whose management --wrestling with financial troubles, which subsequently led to the company being sold -- wouldn't commit the $500,000 necessary to get the project rolling.
So a frustrated Loesch graciously steered the property to producer Fred Wolf, then of Murakami Wolf Swenson, which made "TMNT" for syndicator Group W Prods. The series went on to become an instant hit, setting a longevity record for cartoon franchises that was subsequently broken (OK, as it turns out, smashed) by "The Simpsons."
By the way, I only knew this "Turtles" tale because I happened to interview Loesch as a beardless young reporter in 1987 and asked what else Marvel might have in development. She told me -- then not for publication -- about her enthusiasm regarding "Ninja Turtles," so I noted with keen interest when the show surfaced elsewhere.
Here we are 20-some-odd years later, and Loesch is happily back in the business of mining such properties -- and has been reunited with Hasbro titles with which she once enjoyed considerable success, having overseen animated versions of "G.I. Joe" and "Transformers" while at Marvel, long before Michael Bay got his hands on the latter.
Yet even today, she refers to the inability to secure those slippery "heroes in a half-shell" as "one of those missed opportunities that I always beat myself up about" -- one that informed subsequent decisions, she said, including how hard she fought to convince Fox to do the live-action "Power Rangers."
"I was a good soldier -- I argued, but I didn't go to the mat," she told me in recalling the "Turtles" deal. "When it did become big, I was mad at myself for not going into royal battle mode with my management at New World. ... I view that as the biggest mistake of my career -- not fighting for something that I knew would be successful. It was a galvanizing moment for me."
According to Loesch, the experience influenced how she later handled the situation at Fox when higher-ups expressing misgivings about the animated "X-Men," which not only became a Saturday-morning children's hit but went on to become a profitable live-action theatrical commodity at the studio.
Every executive who lasts long enough, of course, comes away from the gig with similar war stories, but in Loesch's case, the durability of "Ninja Turtles" is one of those non-gifts that keeps not giving.
"Timing is everything, isn't it?" she said.
Indeed, and in Hollywood, the path to success can be far more complicated than just an ordinary shell game.
Contact Brian Lowry at
brian.lowry@variety.com