Subscribe!The Telebugs (1986)
Originally posted on 31 January 2026First episode title: Angel Brain
How familiar with the show am I?: Not familiar at all.
The Telebugs are... well. This show stumps me a bit, to be honest. The Telebugs are three robot characters with television screens for faces, able to display their facial expressions and other things on them, who get around by being able to fly. What do they actually do in their adventures, though? Well, it's hard to know from just the first episode...
This is one of those cases like Tube Mice where the episode is only five minutes long and some decisions had to be made as to what needed to be included as a result, but whereas Tube Mice went the route of spending the whole running time introducing the characters and not yet reaching any plot, The Telebugs offers us the first five minutes of a longer plot without resolving anything that it introduces, once again making it hard to judge the episode on its own. It also takes until halfway through the episode to introduce the main, titular characters.
The opening sequence shows some circuit boards flying through the sky, which then turn into the three Telebugs, all to quite a nice computery synthesised theme tune!
The episode then begins with a shot of an amusement arcade on an ordinary street, except that, above the "Amusements" sign and the pleasant-looking brightly-coloured building, a featureless black slab towers up from its roof, many times taller than the building itself. If this place is trying to look like an inconspicuous, normal business, it is not succeeding!
We zoom inside the top of the tower. where a man with a German-ish accent and little bits of facial hair is yelling at a computer, telling it that he needs more power. The computer itself is a typical cartoon supercomputer at first, a bronze-coloured thing with lights and a monitor on it that's just a bit taller than the man himself. But, in response to his yelling, something emerges from the top of it - a black, pointy-headed thing with two red eyes peeking out through a visor, and black-and-red insect-like wings on its back, seemingly built into the computer or perhaps the true computer itself, the other part just being a kind of shell? The being's design is very unique and distinctive, and its emergence is surprisingly smoothly-animated in a show that is otherwise... not that. She has a female voice and responds "Negative" to all the man's demands for power.
An elderly woman comes to the man's side and remarks that Angel Brain, that computer being, must be getting bored. The man says that they capture children to play with her, as we're shown a room full of computers with children at them, hypnotised by the screens, but the old woman, referring to the man as Bullybyte, tells him that the children are getting too tired to play. Bullybyte orders her to go and find some more kids but tells her to watch out for the TV camera crew. Devoid of any context, this made me expect the Telebugs to already be in action here and perhaps be working for a TV station - but no, as we'll soon see, Bullybyte just doesn't want any media attention.
The old woman looks out of the arcade's doors and sees a boy and his mother walking by. She approaches them, telling them there is a place the boy can play for free, with Angel Brain. They look uncomfortable as you might expect, but then concentric circles appear in the old lady's eyes and the pair start to get hypnotised. The old lady's face turns into that of a young woman from their point of view - I'm not sure why that is part of the hypnosis - and she tells them the boy will be perfectly safe with "Sister Magna". So I guess she is a hypnotic old lady called Magna. How has she ended up working with this scientist guy anyway? Magna grabs the boy's hand and runs off back to the arcade.
Then, in an office with a balcony that has a view of the arcade, a redheaded man with shades and a huge bowtie comments in a Scottish accent about all the children going missing in the area around "Angel Palace". He must run the news program, because a woman with big earrings and an afro tells him that their cameras can't get in due to the place's "kids only" rule. Do I even need to comment on how ridiculous that is? She calls the man Mr McStarch, and he says that he needs that story for "my news program", which I guess doesn't actually have a name!
Back in Bullybyte's lair, Angel Brain warns him of an "intruder", and the computer screen displays a cameraman who's at a TV camera just labelled "TV". So the news program without a name seems to be made by a TV company called TV. He doesn't seem to literally be intruding, just pointing a camera towards the building. An enraged Bullybyte orders Angel Brain to "destroy", and a hole opens in the side of the building. A man takes the tape that the cameraman has filmed, telling someone to get it sent to "the news program", but Angel Brain shoots a laser out of her eyes, through the hole, and the laser makes the video tape vanish. Oh, so Bullybyte wasn't asking her to destroy the cameraman, then...
Bullybyte: Ha! Ha! I am Baron Bullybyte! Nobody can defeat me!
Well, I'm not going to forget his name, at least. However, in response to his proclamation, Angel Brain once again says "Negative", and explains that someone named Professor Brainstrain is more intelligent, showing a picture of a man with glasses and a lab coat, and an eccentric-looking house that's top heavy and has all sorts of little bits sticking off of it. She even shows a picture of him inside a room in his house, his silhouette behind a curtain where he's about to unveil something, almost looking as if she has cameras inside Brainstrain's house... but we get to follow the scene with Brainstrain without the bad guys getting to see the rest.
The only one present in front of the curtain is a ginger cat that Brainstrain calls Grumble. Brainstrain has rhotacism, the speech impediment that causes Rs to become Ws, so he actually says "Gwumble". And it seems to be only for Grumble's benefit that he pulls back the curtain and unveils... the Telebugs! As mentioned, they are three robots with television screens for faces, and no legs, just black bases that allow them to hover. There's a tall white one, a middle-sized yellow one, and a short red one - we'll soon learn that they're called Chip, Samantha, and Bug respectively. Yes, the one girl has the one human-sounding name. They're also accompanied by a little pink "dog" robot called Mic, who has a lens at the front rather than a screen, appearing to himself be a camera.
The trio of humanoid robots tell the Professor that they're ready - between speaking, they keep making random computery noises - so Brainstrain presses a button that makes a section of the roof of the house open up, and all four robots blast off, Mic unnecessarily positioning himself to blast Grumble with orange smoke that emerges from his rear as he leaves. The usual canine-feline rivalry?
So now they're in the sky. Ordinarily, Samantha's head decoration looks like two separate red pieces that stick out of the top like ears or horns. But as she flies up, the pieces are now connected by yellow sections and are rotating around inside her head like... well, just look at the gif! She says that her scanners detect a "human conflict situation", so I suppose this is just what it looks like when she's using her scanners for some reason.
Meanwhile, the screen that serves as Chip's face is displaying a bunch of numbers instead of his facial features, as he says that there is a 96.235 percent chance that it's the TV building where their help will be needed. For one thing, what is that number based on? For another, yes, it's just "the TV building", with the same vague "TV" logo outside.
Inside McStarch's office, the earringed reporter is telling him about the tape being disintegrated, and McStarch gets so angry that he starts hopping up and down, gradually moving backwards, until he reaches the balcony and falls off of it! The reporter's reaction is just to look slightly shocked, which is almost hilarious in how little of a reaction it is - I'd think if someone fell apparently to their death in front of me, my reaction would be much more of a panic!
Chip orders all the Telebugs to go sonic, and they speed ahead, with more orange blasting out behind them, towards the falling man. Chip calculates the time until impact with the same ridiculous precision as before, and Bug tells Mic to relay video, causing Bug's screen to start displaying the view ahead, i.e. the TV building. The Telebugs reach the shop at the bottom of McStarch's trajectory and pull out the awning to break his fall. As a nice little gag, it's a place that's selling skydiving gear, with a sign asking customers to "Drop in and browse"!
Now safely landed, McStarch asks the robots what they are. So they say that they're the Telebugs and explain that they're now filming him for his news program. He calls up to Frieda, the woman with the earrings, that they have a newsflash! This cuts to a quick view of Brainstrain and Grumble watching a TV showing Frieda presenting the news, explaining about the Telebugs' rescue of McStarch and using the Telebugs' recording to illustrate it. The "News" sign on the desk in front of Frieda is upside down, perhaps just as a random gag, perhaps to illustrate how quickly she had to rush to deliver this breaking news.
In McStarch's office, he asks the Telebugs if they could join his news reporting team, and they immediately accept. Brainstrain said earlier that the Telebugs are programmed to help people, but they clearly are going to follow in the path of Superman and Spider-Man before them in using their positions as news reporters to seek out emergencies. Then, finally, the Telebugs actually properly introduce themselves to McStarch! That is the wrong order to do those things in.
There's another quick newsflash where Frieda announces that the Telebugs have joined the news reporting team, which seems a weird thing to make into a breaking news story. And then Bullybyte and Magna are watching that broadcast on Angel Brain's screen, Bullybyte declaring that his Angel Brain will defeat those Telebugs.
Very weird show. Even with the context that future episodes will surely provide, I can't imagine it seeming any less weird. I do like weird! And maybe this would be a weird I'd come to appreciate more if I saw more of it. But with only this episode to go on, I'm just baffled.