Trivia / The Great Space Coaster

• Dueling Works: With Sesame Street obviously, but it also had the syndicated Kroft series and other shows such as Pinwheel and Today's Special to compete with.
• Genius Bonus: Roy had a Gadget Watch that played cartoons when he plugged in a cartridge. The surprising part is that the cartoons were often independent animation like Oscar-nominated shorts ("Munro", "What on Earth!"), National Film Board of Canada shorts ("Hot Stuff", "Getting Started"), John Canemaker's "The Wizard's Son", or the "La Linea" series from Italy.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Because this series is rather obscure, it's almost difficult to come by for people today to view it, even Jim Martin is amazed at the number of postings on YouTube. Unfortunately, because the series included a number of copyrighted songs, legal issues with music clearance and license is preventing the series from officially released on DVD. The only official home entertainment release of this show was a "Supershow" compilation VHS that was released in 1981 (which is presently posted on YouTube, in five installments).
  • Additionally, in 2012, Jim Martin announced that many of the master tapes are starting to deteriorate, and launched an Indiegogo campaign to make digital copies of as many episodes as possible (with the goal to save at least one show). The campaign raised enough money to make digital copies of 20 episodes, with the currently ongoing eBay fundraiser having raised enough so far to preserve seven more.
• What Could Have Been: Big Jock Ox and Rory were added to the cast of puppet characters, after a separate pilot featuring them (also produced by Sunbow Entertainment) failed. Likewise, another veteran Muppeteer, Richard Hunt, was originally going to perform Big Jock Ox, but instead, the character was handed to Kevin Clash (who also performed Rory).
  • An early conceptual artwork shows Roy, Danny, and Francine riding in the Great Space Coaster with a bear-like creature; Jim Martin believes that the character of Baxter may originally have been conceived as a bear, which he says would have made sense, because of the already-existing alliterative naming with Gary Gnu and Goriddle Gorilla (to wit, Baxter Bear). You can still see it in the shape of his nose.

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