“It’s funny: Someone could do a True Hollywood Story of Small Wonder.” — cast member Emily Schulman Webster (Harriet)

Looking back, a lot of the TV shows we watched as kids in the 1980s don’t hold up all that well. Live-action shows like The Facts of Life and Punky Brewster were corny and preachy, and cartoons like G.I. Joe and Transformers were marred by crude, lazy animation. But one show from that era consistently gets singled out as maybe the worst TV show of all time: Small Wonder.

Debuting in first-run syndication on September 7, 1985, Wonder starred 10-year-old Tiffany Brissette as Vicki, a robot made to look like a girl who lives with her inventor Ted Lawson (Dick Christie), Ted’s wife Joan (Marla Pennington), and his son Jamie (Jerry Supiran). Vicki was supposed to blend in with the rest of the family as Ted’s adopted daughter, but she also possessed special powers like superhuman strength and Mr. Fantastic-like stretching ability.

So yes, the show’s off-the-wall premise (and diabolically catchy theme song: “She’s fantastic/Made of plastic!”) make it a ripe target for mockery. But the real story behind the making of Small Wonder might be even stranger than the show itself. With Wonder turning 30 years old next week, Yahoo TV spoke with cast members Marla Pennington Rowan (who played mom Joan) and Emily Schulman Webster (who played nosy neighbor girl Harriet) about their memories filming the show, and how they respond to it being labeled one of TV’s all-time biggest disasters.

“Oh, I thought it was strange, yeah,” Rowan says of her initial reaction to the Small Wonder script. “It was a kids’ comedy, and kind of science fiction. I was just happy I didn’t have to say all those long words that Dick had to say.” But Webster’s father was a “huge tech guy,” she says, and he saw Small Wonder as a glimpse at our inevitable future: “My dad was reading this script and saying, ‘This is going to happen! We’re gonna have robots.’” (We’re still waiting for our Vicki, by the way.)

The role of Vicki would be a large undertaking for any child actor: Not only did she have to carry the whole show, always in her trademark red-and-white pinafore dress, but she had to remain robotic at all times, speaking in a monotone and betraying no emotion whatsoever. Rowan and Webster both say that was tough on young Tiffany Brissette. “I know she got frustrated that she couldn’t wear different clothes, and she had to talk in the monotone,” Rowan says. “That was a big frustration for her. But she was a pro.”

A veteran of child pageants, the multi-talented Brissette could sing, dance, ride horses, do gymnastics, play the piano — but she wasn’t able to display any of those skills as Vicki. “I really respected her… she was brilliantly talented,” Webster remembers. “She could do everything. She was like a little machine. But it was very challenging for her. The better she did at portraying a robot, the harder it was for her… I do remember that she had to bite the inside of her cheeks to keep from smiling. That was tough. My heart sort of broke for her.”

View photos

Another difficult aspect of shooting for Brissette: the show’s numerous (and onerous) special effects shots, which saw Vicki’s head spinning around or her effortlessly lifting Jamie off the couch with one arm to vacuum underneath him. Every Thursday morning on the Small Wonder set was devoted to these shots, using a primitive version of green-screen technology. “Again, that was something Tiffany had to endure,” Webster says. “It would take a lot of trial and error.”