The Full Story of Inspector Gadget

The character was invented to sell a toy, and the toy flopped so badly it never got past a single plush doll. His face had to be redrawn roughly 350 times, and then his mustache had to be shaved off because a movie studio sent a letter. Two actors recorded the part before the right one was hired to do it all over again. The people who built him have been telling that story for a quarter century, and they still do not agree on the order it happened in.

Inspector Gadget was created by Andy Heyward, Jean Chalopin, and Bruno Bianchi at DIC, and began as a bid to land toy financing that never came. The pilot was released December 4, 1982, and the series went out in first-run syndication in fall 1983, with the earliest known station debut on September 5, 1983. Don Adams took the role after two other actors had recorded it. The show ran two seasons and 86 episodes, ending November 13, 1985.

The toy that nobody bought

Gadget did not begin as a cartoon idea. He began as a financing idea. Jean Chalopin, who founded DIC and is credited as a co-creator, laid out the sequence in a 2013 interview with The Globe and Mail, given while he was consulting on a revival.

"We started in Paris and ended up in Toronto. We started in Paris looking for a character to finance an animation series, we wanted it to be a toy so we could get a toy company to finance the show. But we never produced anything more than a plush toy with Gadget, it was never a success as a toy. But the idea we liked, so we took it to others. He became a mixture of other characters, the Six Million Dollar Man and Insp. Clouseau. We felt a toy was no longer essential and we found a way to finance with French television, Canadian television and some financing from the U.S. We produced 65 episodes up front, all in Canada."

That paragraph contains the whole business model of 1980s kids television turned inside out. The standard route was toy first, cartoon second, with the toy company paying. Gadget tried that route, failed at it, and got made anyway by stitching together French, Canadian, and American money. The result was a show with no toy line driving it, which is why Gadget was never redesigned every season to sell a new vehicle.

The money was thin and Chalopin has said so plainly. Describing why the revival needed a faster pace than the original, he pointed at the budget: "much more gags because the pace before was very slow and we didn’t have much money when we first produced the show."

Andy Heyward had come to Paris to make it. He left Hanna-Barbera in 1981 for DIC Audiovisuel, and the archival record credits him with the original story bible, the concept, and the pilot script. The influences were not hidden. Get Smart, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Hanna-Barbera's own Dynomutt all fed the character, and Penny was added because of concern the show would not appeal to girls.

The mustache that MGM killed

The design fought back. The first version of Gadget was drawn in Paris, included helicopter blades, and was modeled in part on Heyward himself and on one of the series directors. Writers found it confusing, so it was scrapped and simplified. By the time the design settled, Gadget had gone through roughly 350 sketches.

He also had a mustache. It is still visible in the pilot. It came off after DIC received a letter from MGM, which by then had acquired United Artists, warning that the character looked too much like Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther films. The fix was elegantly cheap: when the pilot was later folded into the series as a regular episode, one line from Gadget and one from Penny were redubbed so the mustache became a holiday disguise. The show explained away a legal problem with a single re-recorded gag.

Three voices before the right one

The most famous voice in the show was the third one hired.

Jesse White recorded Gadget for the pilot, and his voice characteristics did not test well. Gary Owens, who had starred in Dynomutt, auditioned with ad-libs, and one of them stuck permanently: "Wowsers!" is Owens' contribution to a character he did not end up playing. Producers then cast Don Adams and had him re-record all of Gadget's dialogue in the pilot. Adams had played Maxwell Smart, the character Gadget was built from, which made the casting look inevitable in hindsight. It was not. It was the third attempt.

Dr. Claw churned too. Frank Welker originated the role, along with Brain and M.A.D. Cat, then Don Francks took over Dr. Claw for 25 episodes before producers brought Welker back. Francks was the father of Cree Summer, who had auditioned for Penny and won it as her first major role.

Syndication was the loophole

Gadget did not run on a network Saturday morning. It ran in first-run syndication, station by station, and that choice shaped what the show was allowed to be.

American network animation in the era ran under tight broadcast standards, and slapstick of the kind Gadget lived on was close to forbidden. Syndicated series were held to a looser standard. The show's running joke, a policeman who blunders through physical catastrophe every episode while his niece solves the actual crime, existed in the gap between those two rulebooks.

The trade press tracked the rollout. On March 14, 1983, Television/Radio Age reported the series was coming in late 1983 with 65 episodes ordered. The earliest known station debut was September 5, 1983, on WFSL-TV in Lansing, Michigan, per the Lansing State Journal's listing of the station's new slate. Electronic Media's Syndication Leaders chart of March 1, 1984 recorded the renewal. Broadcasting Magazine announced on October 15, 1984 that a second season would arrive in September 1985, and it did: season two debuted September 30, 1985 and ended November 13, 1985, closing the series at 86 episodes.

Season one was written under Nelvana's Peter Sauder as head writer, and Inspector Gadget was Nelvana's first venture into animation outsourcing. By season two, Nelvana was out and DIC's own staff writers had the show.

What Chalopin says it was actually about

Asked in 2013 why a show that ran only two seasons stayed on the air around the world for decades, Chalopin did not credit the gadgets.

"It's very simple because you have a character who is completely predictable," he said. "He is always nice. He's completely idiotic, but he's a good human being and his niece loves him … the young girl is the real hero, and in every family kids feel they know many answers but they are not listened to very much."

He gave the fuller version in the interview transcript: "There’s a family relationship that works, he’s likeable character and behind him you have the real hero who is the young girl."

He was also unsentimental about the ratings. "We were getting very good ratings. But Gadget has been a very good No. 2, it was never No. 1. For eight years, it was on Nickelodeon every day." A show remembered as a monument was, in its own producer's accounting, permanently in second place.

And he described how the making of it changed: "Because we were having fun it became what it is, but little by little it became like a job."

How the telling has grown over the decades

• 2001, Animation Magazine. Heyward, newly independent after buying his studio back from Disney, describes reuniting with his co-creators for a spinoff. On Chalopin: "Jean [Chalopin] is an extremely creative individual. It was a pleasure and a thrill to work with him in every way. It always has been. Jean, as you know, actually began DIC [DIC Audiovisuel of Paris, a subsidiary of Radio Television Luxembourg] and really didn't want to be in the producing area; he wanted to stay in writing." He recounts the phone call: "I called Jean and asked, 'How would you like to be involved in a new version of Inspector Gadget?' He said, 'That's great. Can we get Bruno [Bianchi], who was the director?'"
• 2004, Ask Andy? (DVD, Sterling Entertainment). Heyward answers fan-voted questions on disc. This is the telling that puts Jesse White in the pilot first and Gary Owens auditioning after.
• 2006, Wowsers! A Retrospective Look At Inspector Gadget (DVD, Shout! Factory). Heyward and production assistant Mike Maliani give the fullest making-of account: the Paris origin, the scrapped first design, the roughly 350 sketches, the simplification Maliani and Heyward did together. In this telling, Heyward reverses the voice order, saying Gary Owens came first and Jesse White second. Both accounts are Heyward's own, two years apart, and the archival record flags the conflict without resolving it: it is unknown which is accurate.
• 2013, The Globe and Mail. Chalopin gives the only long-form origin telling on the record, and it reframes the show as a failed toy pitch rescued by three-country financing. Reporter Steve Ladurantaye published the full transcript separately. His site is now gone; the transcript survives in a fan archive.
• 2024, The Art Of Inspector Gadget (Cucúrucho ediciones). The first officially licensed art book, assembled by Daniel Gallego for the 40th anniversary, collects testimony from Chalopin, Bernard Deyriès, Heyward, Brian Lemay, Jean Barbaud, and other artists from the original crew.

The drift worth naming is not really about who created Gadget. Secondary retellings split on whether the idea was Heyward's or Chalopin's, but neither man has ever claimed sole authorship in his own words. Chalopin's 2013 telling says "we" in every sentence. Heyward's 2001 telling hands Chalopin and Bianchi their credit without being asked. The credits list all three, and the makers do not fight about it.

The contradiction that is real sits in a smaller place: which actor recorded Gadget first. Heyward told it one way in 2004 and the other way in 2006. That is a co-creator disagreeing with himself about his own show inside 24 months, which is exactly how well anyone remembers a casting session from 1982.

The honest bottom line

Inspector Gadget was a formula show, and the formula never varied: Quimby hands over a mission, the note blows up in his face, Gadget suspects his own dog, Penny and Brain solve it, Gadget takes the credit knowing nothing. The animation was inexpensive, the pace was slow enough that its own co-creator says it would not hold an audience today, and it was born from a toy deal that collapsed. It never hit number one. What it had instead was a joke that respected the kid watching it: the adult in charge is a well-meaning idiot, the child is the competent one, and the family stays fond of each other anyway. Forty years of reruns in nearly every country on earth suggests that trade was worth more than a toy line.

Sources

• The Globe and Mail, "Gadget grows up: Teletoon resurrecting cartoon series", Steve Ladurantaye, July 1, 2013 (published article).
• Steve Ladurantaye, full Jean Chalopin interview transcript, 2013. The reporter's own site no longer resolves; text accessed via the Next Time, Gadget! fan archive, which reproduced it in 2013.
• Animation Magazine, "Independently Speaking", interview with Andy Heyward, February 2001, reproduced with issue context by the Next Time, Gadget! archive.
• Wowsers! A Retrospective Look At Inspector Gadget, DVD featurette with Andy Heyward and Mike Maliani, Shout! Factory, 2006 (cited in the archival record; not quoted here).
• Ask Andy?, DVD interview with Andy Heyward, Sterling Entertainment, 2004 (cited in the archival record; not quoted here).
• Print trade press, named as the outlets of record and not read directly: Television/Radio Age, March 14, 1983; Lansing State Journal, September 3, 1983; Electronic Media, March 1, 1984; Broadcasting Magazine, October 15, 1984 (syndication rollout, order size, renewal, and season-two dates).
• Perlmutter (2014) and Stoffman (2002), the reference works cited in the archival record for the syndication standards point and for Nelvana's outsourcing history.
• Wikipedia, "Inspector Gadget (1983 TV series)" (air dates, episode counts, and production record, cross-checked against the trade-press citations above).

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the full story of He-Man and what the after school syndication block looked like in fall 1984.

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