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.

NULL-MYTHS: KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE (2012)

Hmm, it's been almost a full year since I did a "null-myth" entry. I can't believe that I've been reading only good comics since then, so it must just be that I' haven't found any that were worth writing about.

I had to debate whether or not KINGSMAN (originally called just SECRET SERVICE) had enough mythic content to fall into the "near myth" group. It was an okay read, compared to earlier Mark Millar works like WANTED and OLD MAN LOGAN, two brain-dead exercises in superhero ultraviolence. Millar has written a lot of superhero works I have not read, so it's quite possible he's written something better than these two bore-fests. Yet I get the impression that, whereas many British writers sought to expand what superhero comics could do by bringing in aspects of the real world, Millar merely used realism as a method of degrading iconic characters, whether he used the actual characters (Wolverine in LOGAN) or approximations (various DC Comics villains in WANTED). KINGSMAN is no exception, since the project began as a pitch to Marvel Comics, in which eternal superspy Nick Fury took a young spy under his wing.

KINGSMAN is definitely improved by not taking place in the Marvel Universe, and by being centered in Millar's own country, which also happens to be the birthplace of Ian Flemijng's quintessential superspy. Millar, working alongside artist (and fellow Brit) Dave Gibbons, certainly brings a vraisemblance to this James Bond pastiche. The "older man" figure, Jack London, is a former working-class Brit who's been a covert superspy for decades. His sister still lives on welfare with her grown son and a succession of bad bed-mates, so one day London decides that he'll become a tutelary figure to young wastrel-in-training Gary "Eggsy" Unwin. The dramatic exchanges between the knowing elder and the impulsive youth are at least competent, and occasionally Millar and Gibbons touch on sociological themes about British society, though none of these get as much development as Fleming put into his least interesting Fleming novels.

To be sure, KINGSMAN isn't trying to emulate the Bond books, only the Bond movies. Fleming gave his villains assorted exotic gimmicks, but only in the films did Bond have access to similar doodads. In the TPB collection I read, an interview with Gibbons includes a passage wherein the artist scoffs at the "invisible car" seen in one of the Pierce Brosnan flicks. But KINGSMAN is lousy with crazy devices, such as the "laser penknife" with which Gary wins his climactic battle with a villain-henchman named Gazelle because-- well, he has two metal legs that look like those of a gazelle.

But if there's one thing that renders any potential meaning in KINGSMAN inert and inconsummate, it's Millar's handling of his villain. Even many of the Bond-villains invented for the movies prove fit to stand alongside the classic Fleming-fiends. But what does Millar come up with? Well, it's none other than-- James Arnold, Super-Fanboy. Arnold-- who's given one of the blandest villain-names of all time-- is a nerdy genius who decides to play God (or maybe Thanos) by eliminating most of the world's populace. However, because he's a nerd, he gives away his plans in part by trying to kidnap a lot of the celebrities from SF-films, such as Mark Hamill and Ridley Scott. Perhaps Millar and Gibbons thought they were putting across some devastating satire of fan-culture. Frankly, it seems more like a desperate attempt to keep away from the political content found in many of the Bond films, simplified though this content was in comparison to the Fleming books.

There are two sequels I've not read, but I'm not getting my hopes up, based on the mild pleasures of SECRET SERVICE.


ADDENDUM: I did read KINGSMAN THE RED DIAMOND and found it no better than the previous GN, though it's not written by creator Millar and so isn't nearly as bloodthirsty. This one's sole virtue is pitting Eggsy against Kwaito, a tough intelligence-agent from Africa, who is fairly charming despite the great improbability that any current country in Africa could come up with a world-class intelligence organization.