The Rainbow Adventures

The Rainbow Adventures was an animated TV show created by the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids' Department of Entertainment for its own entertainment.

Contents

The Rainbow Adventures was an animated series starring a group of human children called the Rainbow Kids who used a magic rainbow to travel into the dreams of various character, leading to whimsical adventures where — this being the work of the Cupids — saving the day often involved “helping the supporting cast of each episode sort out their endearingly dysfunctional romantic entanglements”. At the Supreme Quaestor's insistence, there was a Clockwork Cherub supporting character.

Two early episodes, The Death? Planned It! and The Moonbeams, which were actually parallel developments of the same original story outline, featured versions of the fearsome robots known as the SavageMen as third-act monsters within the dream-worlds. In the former story, 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, 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”. (PROSE: Plagiarism of the SavageMen)

History

The show was in development around the time of Mandragora's Great Experiment, with the Supreme Quaestor having only allowed it to go forward once the creators agreed to include one tokens recurring Copper-Colored Cupid character instead of the all-human cast they'd initially envisioned. After returning from Morningstar 1, Paintbrush-122 was drafted into the Department of Entertainment to design monsters for the show, soon being assigned to lead a team which worked to turn a story outline by Sketchbook-430 into a full episode as The Death? Planned It!. Due to a miscommunication, however, a team led by Sketchbook himself also went forward with production of its own version of the storyline under the name of The Moonbeams.

The mistake was noticed before release, and a line was hastily dubbed into The Moonbeams about the Rainbow Kids having encountered the antagonists, the SavageMen, before. 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)

In later years, Cupids sometimes enjoyed the show through the only television set in the Cupid Homeworld, a “rather dodgy” one owned by Pessimist-242. (PROSE: Rifts Crisis Officially Over!)

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.

The references extend beyond Cyberman-related elements: the retconned invention of “a ranting mad scientist who was eventually destroyed by his own creations” as the SavageMen's inventor recalls Davros, the retconned creator of the Daleks, and The Walkies appears to be a counterpart to the original 1963 The Daleks serial, with “Little Billy” being named in reference to William Hartnell who portraied the Doctor; the cliffhanger throwing a rising thermometre evoking the Who cliffhanger of a rising radiation counter at the end of the previous serial; and “Mr Raymond” being named in reference to Dalek designer Raymond Cusick.