AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 3

 In Part 2 of this essay-series, I provided a broad sketch of how the specific genre of "the costumed superhero" had been treated in American movie serials, stand-alone films, and TV shows both live-action and animated for several decades. I purposely excluded narrative radio-shows, about which I have no expertise, as well as all of the "superhero-adjacent" genres, like jungle-hero tales, superspies and spacemen. In this essay, I want to include some "costumed crusaders" I omitted for the decades of the 1950s and 1960s (up until 1966 and the birth of Batmania). In addition, I'll mention some of the "adjacent" genres that arguably affected the superhero's development in movies and TV, though I'm going to set aside both space opera and all forms of archaic heroic fantasy as too complicated for this essay.

So I noted that the last serial of any kind appeared in 1956, and that American television in the 1950s did not show nearly as much enthusiasm for costumed heroes:

Though five space-opera teleserials showed up during the first decade of television's ascension, only three costumed crusader shows appeared-- THE LONE RANGER (1949-57), THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (1952-58) and ZORRO (1957-59)-- and the first two of those were indebted to earlier radio serials, even using some of the same scripts. 

 

As for "adjacent types," DICK TRACY got a live-action teleseries that lasted from 1950 to 1951, which did adapt some of Chester Gould's freaky fiends, like Flattop and the Mole. Later, around the time both Bomba and Jungle Jim stopped appearing in features, Jungle Jim and Sheena both got one-season TV shows in 1955. One year later, ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU presented the classic non-costumed super-villain with his own series. And all of the above did better than James Bond. One year after Ian Fleming published the first Bond tale, that novel was adapted into a single episode of the teleseries CLIMAX, which didn't exactly launch a new media franchise for the hero. During that decade Fleming would use more Gould-like villains in the novels, but in movies and TV the character would not catch the world on fire until nine years after the appearance of the book CASINO ROYALE. 

I also noted that though there had been a smattering of stand-alone films for live-action costumed heroes in the 1930 and 1940s, in the 1950s there was nothing but two LONE RANGER features, INVISIBLE AVENGER (a failed TV pilot issued as a feature), and a handful of "masked swashbuckler" movies. (I don't count SUPERMAN AND THE MOLE MEN, the pilot for the teleseries, even though it received theatrical release.) The only "superhero-adjacent" franchise that continued production of feature-films throughout the fifties and into the sixties was that of Tarzan. 

As for 1950s cartoons, I mentioned only the packaging of Mighty Mouse cartoons for THE MIGHTY MOUSE PLAYHOUSE, but there are others worth noting, and sometimes excluding.

The first made-for-TV cartoon was CRUSADER RABBIT, produced in 1950 by Jay Ward's animation studio. I've seen a few episodes of this cartoon-- which loosely borrowed the format of the live-action serial, albeit with episodes of five minutes at most. I don't think CRUSADER was relevant to the superhero idiom despite the fact that the opening shows the bunny dressed in a knight's armor. From what I've seen, Crusader and his buddy Rags Tiger just walked around sans costumes (or any attire but their fur). In fact, the opening cartoon emphasizes that even though Crusader wants to be heroic he doesn't have any powers, like flight or X-ray vision. As more than one person had asserted, Crusader and Rags, being an intense little guy and a big dumb guy, look like a template for Ward's later Rocky and Bullwinkle.

For comparable reasons I also dismiss 1957's TOM TERRIFIC from consideration. The titular character was a little boy with a magic hat, and he sometimes used his magic to thwart villains, but mostly in a comic manner, lacking the superhero's emphasis on action. But 1957 also introduced a spaceman/spy/superhero hybrid in COLONEL BLEEP. In this series-- some episodes of which may be missing from circulation-- Bleep, a super-powered alien with a gumdrop-shaped head, functioned as an "intelligence agent" hunting down criminals with names like Doctor Destructo and the Black Knight of Pluto, some of whom made multiple appearances. In fact, one surviving episode, "Knight of Death," may be the first time in which previously established villains teamed up on a TV cartoon, for in that episode Bleep is challenged not only by the aforementioned Black Knight, but also the Black Robot and a pirate named Black Patch. (I sense a recurring motif in there somewhere.) The same team returned in "The Hypnotic Helmets."

Even though I asserted that the TV studios seemed unwitting of the "birth of the Silver Age" in comic books, oddly 1960 opened with an animated parody of Batman and Robin. A studio known for very crude early TV toons-- one online article called the studio-head "the Ed Wood of TV cartoons"-- accepted a pitch for COURAGEOUS CAT AND MINUTE MOUSE. And as most fans know, the pitch came from the man who co-created Batman, Bob Kane. The show has its fans, but though I'm not one of them, there's no debating that CCAMM is a costumed-crusader show, in which cat and mouse used a variety of super-weapons to defeat villains. (I should also note that in 1960 Kane was still packaging BATMAN comics for DC, who would buy out Kane's contract in 1966.)

Like Mighty Mouse, Popeye's theatrical cartoons had been airing on TV for some time, and in 1960 King Features commissioned 220 new Popeye cartoons, at least some of which still showed the sailor-man using spinach-power to smite such nogoodniks as Brutus and the Sea Hag.

Briefly detouring into live-action, in 1961 one production company made the attempt to adapt another King Features property: the superhero/jungle adventurer The Phantom, but all that resulted was an unsold pilot. The same year saw the debut of a DICK TRACY cartoon show. However, though the slapstick scripts did utilize mild versions of classic Gould grotesques like Mumbles, Pruneface and The Brow, Tracy himself only appeared in the role of a supervisor, handing off the arrest-chores to four goofball detectives. Again, I disallow this one due to the downplaying of the combative mode.

Jumping back for one paragraph to the general category of live action, James Bond made his movie debut in 1962's DOCTOR NO, which arguably re-created the "superspy," realizing effects far beyond anything the genre had accomplished in serials like SECRET AGENT X-9. Though NO and later Bonds were British productions, the American company United Artists provided funding, thus tying the franchise into the American aegis. Surprisingly, it took about two years for either America or Europe to begin coming out with their own superspies. Then France initiated in 1964 a "re-imagining" of the FANTOMAS property, a three-film series that showed some Fleming-esque aspects. The U.S. launched THE MAN FROM UNCLE that same year, and WILD WILD WEST would follow in 1965 . After that, the floodgates were opened, though few imitators were as good as Fleming at creating vivid super-villains. Also, as mentioned in the previous essay, in 1963 Disney released its second costumed crusader TV-show, a three-episode adaptation of Russell Thorndyke's "Scarecrow of Romney Marsh."

Back to TV cartoons. THE MIGHTY HERCULES, debuting in 1963, deserves a quick mention, despite my disallowing archaic fantasy here, because the Greek strongman kept encountering a regular rogue's gallery, AND kept defeating them with the softness in his eyes and the iron in his thighs (if you believe the theme song). 

UNDERDOG showed up in 1964, and got right everything that COURAGEOUS CAT did wrong. The super-powered dog in the baggy long underwear had a decent rogue's gallery, though only two evildoers, Simon Bar Sinister and Riff Raff, made more than one appearance. JONNY QUEST debuted that year as a night-time animated show, and some Bond influence can be seen there as well, as in the debut episode "Mystery of the Lizard Men," with its very DOCTOR NO-like plot.

With 1965 we get into nebulous territory. The idea of adapting BATMAN as a live-action series began to get serious consideration in 1964, but it's hard to say if the earliest negotiations were known to the public. The actual show had to begin production at least by late 1965, but Hollywood would have been gossiping about the project long before the actual production. Did any cartoon shows about superheroes and their near-relations take influence from such gossip? Probably not 1965's SINBAD JR, about a heroic sailor who obtained super-strength from a magic belt (rather than a green vegetable). Nor ROGER RAMJET, with Jay Ward finally dipping his toes for real into the genre of the funny superhero. But in Fall 1965 Hanna-Barbera released its comical versions of both a superhero and a superspy-- i.e., ATOM ANT and SECRET SQUIRREL-- and the former might have been inspired in part by some notion that superheroes might start getting hot again.

And that's where I will leave things for now, because after BATMAN came the deluge.

THE READING RHEUM: FANTOMAS (1911)

I've heard for many years that the character of Fantomas, originating in a series of French novels (forty-three in all), has been pegged as one of the important "proto-superheroes," for all that he was an unregenerate villain, unlike "gentleman-thieves" along the lines of 1905's "Arsene Lupin" and 1914's "Gray Seal." I've now read only the first of the novels, and there's some evidence that Fantomas is an important transitional figure. However, one of the primary visual tropes to which superhero fans respond-- that of costume-- does not apply in the case of the initial prose version of Fantomas. The cover of the first book edition, showing the villain wearing evening dress and domino mask as he looms over a city, is not borne out in the prose, nor does he wear the hooded garments seen in some if not all of the Feulliade silent serials.

Instead, Fantomas's costume, if he has one in the first book, is that of being "a man of many faces." Now, being a simple "disguise expert" is not enough to mark a protagonist as belonging to what I've termed "the superhero idiom." In past essays I've noted the existence of various characters who went around in masks, some of whom belonged to the idiom, like the Durango Kid, and some who did not, like Oldring's Masked Rider. By the same token, there are various "men of many faces" who do make my cut for belonging to the idiom, like the 1934 pulp-hero Secret Agent X--

--while others do not, like "Paris" from MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE.

The original FANTOMAS novel does, I believe, create the sense of strangeness needed for any character relevant to the superhero idiom. Indeed, when the novel begins, various ordinary French citizens are discussing the rumors of Fantomas, and the first thing they mention is his penchant for disguise:

In these days we have been distressed by a steady increase in crime, and among the causes we shall henceforth have to count a mysterious and most dangerous creature, to whom the baffled authorities and general rumor have for some time now given the name of Fantomas. It is impossible to say exactly what or to know precisely who Fantomas is. He often assumes the form and personality of some particular and often well-known individual; sometimes he assumes the forms of two human beings  at the same time. Sometimes he works alone, sometimes with accomplices; sometimes he can be identified as such and such a person, but no one has ever gotten to know Fantomas himself.

Later novels do unveil aspects of the master villain's history, but as far as the first novel is concerned, Fantomas is a shadow that constantly looms over law-abiding civilization, committing crimes with impunity, despite being pursued by a resourceful detective, Juve, who also dabbles in disguises himself. Imposture seems like a disease spread by the evildoer. One of Fantomas's early victims, a young man named Charles, is framed for a murder probably committed by the master villain, and to escape prosecution the youth must, with Juve's help, take on a fictitious new identity, that of Jerome Fandor, who often joins Juve in future novels to pursue Fantomas. Indeed, for reasons that are never entirely clear, the fictitious cognomen "Fandor" is explicitly taken from that of the master criminal.

In this novel Fantomas is even less "on stage" than other famous villains, like Dracula in Stoker's novel or Fu Manchu in the Rohmer series. Usually the criminal's misdeeds are discovered long after he is gone. Only in one sequence does a victim confront for some time a disguised criminal who may or may not be Fantomas, but the only reason that the villain maintains the confrontation is to suss out where the victim's valuables can be found. During this encounter, the maybe-Fantomas speaks of himself in lofty terms; when the victim says that he "must" leave, he replies, "Must? That is a word that is not often said to me."

A preface to my edition of the novel mentions that in later works, the malcontent attacks victims with such devices of plague-rats and sulfuric acid stored in perfume-spritzers. There are no gimmicks in the first outing, though. Even more important, though, for the determination of a character's relevance to the superhero idiom is that there is also an absence of spectacular violence.

In contrast to the Fu Manchu novels that began the very next year, all of the villain's violent acts are committed off-stage. There are sporadic incidents of violence, but no combat in the sense of the combative mode. This isn't surprising, since the narrative seems more allied with that of the detective tale, so that it's quite as if the authors had sought to create a series in which the Great Detective's lauded foe Moriarty received his own universe in which to play games upon the righteous.

FANTOMAS by itself is a good if not exceptional proto-pulp story. Upon reading further novels, I may be able to determine whether the character deserves to be associated with the combative idiom of superheroes and their supervillain adversaries, or whether he belongs to a side-category of "subcombative supervillains."

MASKED MASTERMINDS AND SPECIOUS SPECTRES PT. 2

In Part 1, I said, "the common purpose of both the "masterminds" and the "spectres" is to create narrative tension, which is generally resolved at each story's climax when the villain/ghost is unmasked."

Despite that similarity, there's a pertinent disconnect between the two figures. Unmasking removes the mastermind's power, while it removes the spectre's appearance of power.

 

Most masked criminal masterminds don't share the agility of the villainous Bat (seen sans mask above), but they do have power, usually mainifested through the agency of gangs of henchmen or super-weapons. 

The character of Fantomas from 1911 was one of the first of this breed to circulate in early 20th-century pop culture, and the type, as noted in the previous essay, was particularly popular in serial films.  Most of the figures from silent serials are unknown save to buffs, though one, the Clutching Hand, was translated to a 1936 chapterplay. Many sound serials are replete with dozens of colorful masterminds-- the Crimson Ghost, Captain Mephisto, Doctor Satan, the Spider-- many of whom are more interesting than the films' nominal heroes.

In contrast, the spectre who pretends to be a ghost, a vampire, a mummy or whatever usually has no real power but that of illusion.  In Part 1 I also opined that "I tend to doubt that the specific trope of plotters pretending to be ghosts sustains much popularity in the prose or the cinema of these days, with the exception of SCOOBY DOO cartoons."  And whatever one thinks of said cartoons, the original 25 episodes of SCOOBY DOO WHERE ARE YOU-- unlike many later incarnations, that brought in real ghosts, zombies, et al-- always kept faith with the same basic idea.

The Mystery Inc. teens investigate rumors of a monster.

The monster appears, scares them with its ferocious looks and tries to chase them away, usually twice in each episode.

The teens set some trap for the monster, which succeeds in spite of much slapstick hilarity, and the monster generally turns out to be a man or woman in a monster-suit.

Rarely if ever do the crusading teens-- who are heroic in their intentions, if not their dynamicity-- turn and try to overpower the monster by force of numbers.  Often when the malefactors are revealed, they look about as powerful as Grandma Moses. But the cartoon's entire raison d'etre was to offer mild thrills seasoned with slapstick comedy, so the show emphasized not "the fight" but "the chase," "the trap," and "the crime-solving summation."

One may dismiss the "specious spectres" as a worn-out contrivance, but to judge from their popularity in bygone days, they served a psychological purpose that contrasts with the pleasures of the more overt horror films of the sound era. In these comedy-Gothics, monsters were all puffed-up illusions, and no doubt the mature audiences that watched THE CAT AND THE CANARY or THE SMILING GHOST enjoyed that comforting thought as much as did any and all kids who enjoyed Scooby Doo.
But as I noted in THE PHENOMENALITY OF PSYCHOS, even illusion does have a power of sorts, which I'll discuss in Part 3.