The Moonbeams

The Moonbeams was an early episode of The Rainbow Adventures, a fantasy animated series created by the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids' Department of Entertainment for internal broadcast in the Cupid Homeworld.

It and the previous episode, The Death? Planned It!, were actually parallel developments of the same original story outline from Sketchbook-430, featured versions of the fearsome robots known as the SavageMen as third-act monsters within the dream-worlds. In the former story, developed by a team led by Paintbrush-122, they were depicted as a hypothetical degenerated offshoot of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids after a group of Cupids became trapped in a pocket dimension and dared to meddle with their own programming. In the latter, developed by Sketchbook himself, they were stated to have been created by a “ranting mad scientist” of a Creator, and the Kids referenced having met them before “in the 14th Cosmos”, a faux-continuity-reference which didn't actually do anything to resolve the contradictions between the two episodes.

The Moonbeams had a post-credits stinger providing a cliffhanger into the next episode, The Walkies; it involved Mr Raymond, the Kids' schoolteacher, discovering that he had a fever using Little Billy's thermometer, promising an adventure which “would see the Kids face enemies far more dangerous than even the SavageMen inside [his] fever-dreams”.

When the two episodes premiered back-to-back at the Cupid Theatre, however, Sketchbook and Paintbrush were considerably more startled and dismayed to realise that their respective designs for the SavageMen were almost identical despite their lack of communication, above and beyond what the script specified. After breaking out into a fistfight, they were brought before Judicator-337, but no real clarity ensued as to who if anyone had ripped of whom; instead, a Rift opened in Judicator's office and allowed a group of visiting real-world SavageMen through. The SavageMen asserted that they were the only rightful owners of their own copyright, and insisted on being credited as such in all subsequent episodes of The Rainbow Adventures featuring their fictionalised counterparts. (PROSE: Plagiarism of the SavageMen)

Behind the scenes

Plagiarism of the SavageMen was created as a topical satire of a then-ongoing controversy in the Doctor Who surrounding the perceived resemblance between a piece of 2016 armchair concept art by artist Matthew Savage for a new design of Cybermen, and the design used for the helmet of Ashad as seen in the 2019 trailer for Series 12 of the TV series, which did not credit Savage. The dispute would eventually be settled amicably between the artist and the BBC along terms not disclosed to the public.

As such, despite obviously having a very different storyline and main characters, The Rainbow Adventures is presented as a sort of spoof of Doctor Who. Not only do the conspicuously-named SavageMen correspond to the Cybermen, with the pivotal cranial light-bulb matching the head-lamp which was one of the main smoking guns between the Savage and Series 12 Cybermen designs, but The Death? Planned It! references the title of The Tenth Planet, the first TV Cyberman story, while The Moonbeams references The Moonbase, the second such story. In The Moonbase, the Cybermen confusingly claimed to have previously met the Doctor on "Planet 14" rather than the previous "Tenth Planet" in an apparent retcon of the Cybermen's origin which caused considerable tangles in later continuity; this is referenced in Plagiarism of the SavageMen with the SavageMen being retconned in The Moonbeams to have originated in the 14th Cosmos.