The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show
animated television series
The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show is an American animated television series produced by Ruby-Spears Productions from 1979 to 1981; it aired right after Super Friends on ABC.
The show featured various adventures of the DC Comics superhero Plastic Man. The anthology show included several components, including Plastic Man, Baby Plas, Plastic Family, Mighty Man and Yukk, Fangface and Fangpuss, and Rickety Rocket.
By January 1980, it was reduced to 90 minutes, dropping Rickety Rocket, amidst low ratings. By the 1980–81 season, the format was reduced to a half-hour and retooled as The Plasticman/Baby Plas Super Comedy Show alongside two other Ruby-Spears productions Thundarr the Barbarian and Heathcliff and Dingbat. The show was repackaged by Arlington Television into 130 half-hour episodes, and released into national, first-run-off-network daily syndication in 1984. The Plastic Man Comedy Show was produced and directed by Steve Whiting and featured a live-action "Plastic Man", played by Mark Taylor.
Premise
The origin of Plastic Man is never expressly stated on this series, but it is implied he was originally the small-time crook Patrick "Eel" O'Brian who reformed after he was left for dead by the mob and gained plastic stretch powers. Plastic Man, his girlfriend Penny, and his Polynesian sidekick Hula-Hula travel the world and are given their assignments from the Chief to stop any threat to the world. Plastic Man often retains his sense of humor even in dangerous situations, such as a giant octopus capturing Penny and Hula-Hula causing him to ask "What scout troop did he belong to?"
Only Plastic Man villains Doctor Dome, his henchman Lynx, Doctor Honctoff, Carrot-Man, and Spider came from the comics while every other villain was created for the series. The series has a regular consumer affairs public service announcement that presents simple consumer advice for viewers, such as shopping around various retailers for the best price, or going to the public library to see if a desired book is available to borrow instead of buying it.
“The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show” enters the record as animated television series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Plastic, Comedy and Adventure can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Plastic, Comedy and Adventure provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7757402. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1981, 1980 and 1984.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.