The Jackson 5ive premiered on ABC the morning of Saturday, Sept. 11, 1971. Michael Jackson was 13. His brother Jackie was 20.
The studio that made it was best known for Christmas. Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass were the men behind Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman. In 1971 they signed a deal with Motown.
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Jack Davis, a cartoonist for Mad magazine, built the model sheets and set the character designs. The brothers on screen are his.
That Is Not Them Talking
Rankin/Bass hired voice actors to speak the group’s lines. The Jacksons’ records are on the show. Their speaking voices are not.
Veteran voice actor Paul Frees handled the incidental characters, and one of them was Motown founder Berry Gordy. Animation historian Christopher P. Lehman calls that “a rare bit of 1970s vocal cultural appropriation.”
Two Songs an Episode
Every episode of the first season pulled two recordings from the group’s Motown albums: Diana Ross Presents the Jackson Five, ABC, Maybe Tomorrow and Third Album.
Robert Balser did the animation on those sequences. Lehman likens the psychedelic style to Balser’s own work on the Beatles feature Yellow Submarine.
What It Caught Without Meaning To
Lehman makes a bigger argument about the show. When the series premiered, Motown was still in Detroit, where Berry Gordy had founded it in 1959. In June 1972, the company announced it was leaving for Los Angeles.
The stars were invited west. The lesser-known acts and the house band stayed. That makes the 17 episodes of the first season, in Lehman’s reading, the last of Motown’s Detroit years caught on film.
How It Ended
The show came back for 1972-73 under a new name, The New Jackson 5ive Show, with six new episodes and reruns filling the rest. The animation got worse. Rankin/Bass was busy making Kid Power and The Osmonds at the same time.
It ended on Sept. 1, 1973. Michael Jackson was 15.
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