The Gary Coleman Show

The Gary Coleman Show is an American animated comedy TV series produced Hanna-Barbera for NBC's Saturday morning children's programming. It ran in 1982, airing 13 episodes. The TV series is a spin-off, although only loosely inspired, by the NBC movie, The Kid with the Broken Halo, which starred Gary Coleman as the lead.

The series is essentially the same with Coleman reprising his role as Andy LeBeau, who is training to become a full-fledged guardian angel by doing good deeds, but this time for a group of kids in the town of Oakville. To communicate with the kids and other humans of Earth, he must remove his halo, which allows him to become visible. In his angel form, he has all kinds of magical powers. He also serves under a supervisor called Angelica (opposed to Blake, played by Robert Guillaume in the film). While he slips up on his own mistakes, he is also tormented by the challenges presented to him by an opposing demon called Hornswoggle, who is always determined to make sure Andy fails. Hornswoggle only makes himself visible to Andy, so he can never get help from Angelica to permanently rid himself of Hornswoggle.

Casey Kasem went uncredited for narrating the premise of the show in the opening theme song, as well as continuity for commercial breaks for the original NBC run. In reruns on Cartoon Network, the narration was removed.

Despite Coleman not playing himself as the name of the series suggests, he did eventually play himself in animated form as an adult in 2001 for the Night of the Living Doo TV special.

Development
Coleman was signed onto NBC to star in a cartoon series for them, which Hanna-Barbera took the job of producing, but not before Joseph Barbera had to pitch and receive ideas from a 14-year-old Coleman himself, which Barbera found extremely unpleasant, as the first hour of the meeting involved Coleman telling Barbera how Space Ghost should be rerun more, and being critical of how he didn't like Godzilla and that Scooby-Doo had gotten stale.

Music
The music was composed by Hoyt Curtin, credited as musical director, with supervision from Paul DeKorte.

Cast

 * Gary Coleman as Andy LaBeau
 * Jennifer Darling as Angelica
 * Sidney Miller as Hornswoggle
 * Calvin Mason as Spence
 * LaShana Dendy as Tina
 * Jerry Houser as Bartholomew
 * Julie McWhirter Dees as Lydia
 * Lauren Anders as Chris
 * Geoffrey Gordon as Haggle
 * Steve Schatzberg as Mack

In popular culture

 * In the Comic Book Men episode "Holy Zap Copter", Walt thought The Gary Coleman Show was the most outlandish cartoon.