The Adventures Of Superman!

Superman looks singularly heroic but still quite human in the drawing by Steve Ditko above. It was produced for an anniversary celebration of the Man of Steel. Though not technically an "atomic hero", I plan to revisit the most famous superhero, one powered by the radiation of our Sun itself. 

I want to look at the absolutely exquisite cartoons produced in the early 40's by the Fleischer and Famous Studios for Paramount. I'm always blown away by the craftsmanship in these earliest of adaptations of the hero to the big screen. 

Superman gets a bit more real when Kirk Alyn is tapped to portray the hero in two movie serials from Columbia. The animation is still important as it is used to showcase Superman in flight. The first introduces the hero and the second pits him against Lex Luthor, who also doubles as the "Atom Man" of the title. 

 

Most of my time though will be spent revisiting the classic Superman TV show starring George Reeves. These wonderful vintage shows are among the most pleasant and heartwarming adaptations of the great DC hero. I haven't watched these in nearly a decade or more and it will be great fun to dive into them again. 

And if time permits, I also want to take a look at those early 60's Superman cartoons created by Filmation. These were, along with a few well-handled comic books, my introduction to the character. 

I'll be using the 1976 tome Superman - Serial to Cereal to give me some background insights to these shows as the month rolls along. I'll not be reviewing them, so as to keep the focus on Captain Atom and Doctor Solar, but below is a review I did some time back of my favorite George Reeves outing as Superman. 

If you forced me to pick a single Superman feature as my all-time favorite, Superman and the Mole Men would get the nod. I love this delightful introduction to the George Reeves Superman which functions very effectively as a fable of mankind's fear of the unknown.

The Mole Men are small people who rise up out of a oil well hole which has sunk too far down. They emerge and are deemed hostile as humans get injured around them through a combination of fear and the innate radiation which emanates from the creatures themselves. They explore the small town in which they emerge and are met with fear by adults and ease with a small girl who warmly welcomes them into her bedroom.

This scene of the Mole Men lurking around the window scared the bejeezus out of me when I was a youngster. It seems a pretty naive scene today, but back then I was most affected by it. I love to revisit that tiny terror memory when I watch this one over and over. Phyllis Coates is effective as Lois Lane, though she is a particularly bitchy version of the character. No other regulars from the eventual Superman series appear.

This is a very good entertainment and gets my highest recommendation. So up, up and away amigos. 

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Star Trek - The Animated Series!

On Star Trek the Enterprise was famously on a five-year mission. But thanks to the hostility of NBC to Gene Roddenberry and his little TV show, only three years made air. But in 1973, four years after the cancellation of the show, the fourth year was finally broadcast. Now admittedly it was not live action, but animation, but that was actually a good thing. 

When the Roddenberry machine hooked up with the Filmation outfit, we got a Star Trek that was even more capable of going "where no man had gone before", because it's way cheaper to draw the unknown and impossible than to cast for it. Star Trek - The Animated Series kept the smart bits which made Trek special and added scope. 

The smartest thing was making sure that cast members like William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy along with most of the rest were available to voice their animated counterparts. This more than anything else gives the show its legitimacy. Save for Walter Koenig who was not cast for cost reasons, the whole gang is back. Nichelle Nichols and George Takei are on the bridge, though the latter was unavailable for a time because of TV fair time rules because Takei was running for public office in California. James Doohan proved to be perhaps the most important member of the animated cast as he provided a cavalcade of voices for the show. Many of the others did too, but nowhere near as many as Doohan. One source said he did nearly fifty different characters for the run of the show in its two season. 

I also think the Enterprise looked fabulous in its animated form. It was sleek and moved across the screen with a casual grace the live action had not been able to present. In the two seasons which added to a total of twenty-two episodes (sixteen in the first and another six in the second) Kirk and his crew found all sorts of new threats and all manner of different alien species. 

Two new aliens actually served on the ship, one a three-legged and three-armed navigator named Arex and the other a catlike communications officer named Mress. Many of the aliens the crew encoutnered were equally off the human model. In fact the designs often reminded me of the science fiction art of Jack Gaughan. And that added a whole layer of utter weirdness that the live-action shows of the time were just not able to match. 

I'm an enormous fan of the animated Star Trek. I think the shorter episodes of twenty-two minutes make for a more brisk storytelling and even at this size some of the stories seem to dawdle. Filmation uses limited animation by necessity and having so many different faces and form to switch back and forth between made Star Trek a visually more vibrant show than some of their efforts. The cartoon show kept the Star Trek boat afloat at a time when there was an enormous swell of interest in the show. Syndication had proved to be a surging and fabulous success. 

The comics from Gold Key were finding an eager audience. The "Trekkie" was a new creature lurking among us. There was interest in those wags who had killed it off to try to find a way to get a little of the golden goose they'd let slip between their fingers. They were anxious to get of the glamour and maybe that might be on the big screen. A few years later when a little thing called Star Wars taught Hollywood a thing or two, a Star Trek movie was a certainty. But more on that next month when the Dojo reviews the Star Trek movies starring this great first cast. 

Live long and prosper.  

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Jason Of Star Command - The Complete Series!

Jason of Star Command is the series I remember from all those Saturdays so very long ago. I'm older than Filmation's target audience, but as a sci-fi geek, I was interested in this old-fashioned adventure series still. It's a throwback to the old serials starring Buster Crabbe and Crash Corrigan. The series is set in the same Space Academy that had aired the previous season, but this time the action if focused not on the Academy and the young cadets, but on a more military section of the base full of adults who are actively engaging the threats that are in space, specifically a villain in the classic Ming style named Dragos.

Jason (Craig Littler) and his partners Professor Parsafoot (Charlie Dell) and a beautiful chick named Captain Nicole Davidoff (Susan O'Hanlon/Pratt) detect and fight episode after episode, each ending in something of a cliffhanger in the classic fashion. They are led by Commander Canarvin played by Star Trek vet Jimmy Doohan. Sid Haig plays Dragos to the hilt with his booming laugh becoming almost the signature for the show. The first season is a lot of fun and briskly paced as each episode is only ten or eleven minutes long. 

The second season offers up full half hour episodes and in place of Doohan gives us a blue-skinned alien named Commander Stone (John Russell). Davidoff is replaced by a statuesque black lady named Samantha (Tamara Dobson). Dragos and Jason and Parsafoot are still around and slugging out each week.

The has that Filmation look, being shot exclusively in a warehouse where Filmation had its sets and special effects sections. So, they were able to really crank out these things quite quickly. That's the thing about Filmation that has really impressed me as I've been watching these, is the way they were able to accomplish so much in really small timeframes with relatively small money. Looking at the some of the bloated movies of the last few years which have been dripping in costly special effects but bomb in the area of story and character, it's refreshing to get material that's rich on character and done for a relative song, but very effective. 

These aren't perfect by any means, but they are fun and offer up more than a smidge of mystery if not actual suspense. Although I will say that Jason does seem to rely on his pocket robot "W1K1" a bit too much from episode to episode to save his bacon. But that's a small cheat and still clearly within the traditions of the classic serials. If you can find them cheaply, I'd heartily recommend these. 

NOTE: This is a Dojo Revised Classic Post. 

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Space Academy - The Complete Series!

Space Academy is an old Filmation live-action TV show that I have some minor memory of. Jonathan Harris is the "star" of this one-season series, and he's surrounded by a bevy of young actors. The premise is pretty simple. Space Academy trains youngsters to work in space, and has organized them into teams, each with a color designation. 

The focus of the show is the "Blue Team" led by Chris Gentry and his sister Laura Gentry. This brother-sister act have various mental powers, mostly when they hold hands and work together. They can use telepathy, generate astral projections, and even use telekinesis before the show runs its course. Also on the team is Adrian Pryce-Jones who is mostly Chris's love interest though little comes of this side plot by season's end. She doesn't seem to have any special talents beyond adding a bit of sexy to the show, especially when they adopt a mini-skirt uniform mid-season. Tee Gar Soom is an Asian who is super-strong and a medical expert, and who from time to time seems to show some martial arts training. Paul Jerome is the tough black kid from the wrong side of the solar system, with giant smarts and chip on his shoulder, but this personality is too dropped by the middle of the season. 

Jonathan Harris plays "Isaac Gampu", the 300-year-old mentor for these kids and the one they go to for wisdom and guidance. He is especially close to Loki, an alien they discover in the first show, an orphan apparently who has blue hair and is played by a nine-year old kid. He can teleport and has various sorts of special eyesight powers. His best buddy is a half-pint robot named "Peepo", who is less annoying than most of these creations from this period. 

The show started out as somewhat of a harder edged science fiction tale, but as most of these things go unfortunately became more of a fantasy driven thing by season's end. It's all in the scripts and TV sci-fi shows seem always to end up with writers who talk down to their audience, and who seem not to have much real science knowledge. A story about these reasonably interesting kids facing real science-based threats would've been a neat show, and likely was the premise. But it fell into the Lost in Space-goofy mode or close to it, by the end of the run. That said, it's still a better show than I expected based on the glimmers of memory I had. 

The unfolding story of each Academy member is set up to offer real potential, but unfortunately that gets abandoned for a rotation of guest-stars, each increasingly offbeat. The special effects, done by the same guys who did Star Wars, are better than you'd expect and when adjusted for the time, are really great for kiddie television. Space Academy is a fun show, but just not one that lives up to some interesting potential. I got a mild Legion of Superheroes vibe off the very early episodes, with each youngster possessed of powers and skills, each unique. But sadly, little is made of this, and the kids all blend into an indistinct mob by the end. 

NOTE: This is a Dojo Revised Classic Post. 

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Ark II - The Complete Series!

Ark II is a 1976 series about a trio of young multi-ethnic scientists who along with their super-intelligent chimp joyride across the bleak landscape of 2500 A.D. helping humans who live in an arid world wrought by overpopulation and especially pollution. It's really pretty heady stuff for Saturday morning when you think about it. The world is demolished, and mankind is scraping a hunter-gatherer existence from the remains. If this were animation okay, but making it live action gives it a potency it might lack otherwise. I'm not objecting to it, but just noting that this is pretty serious stuff for a kid's entertainment. The Ark II is a giant truck really that looks like the space shuttle on wheels, and it is a rolling laboratory from which Jonah, Ruth, Samuel, and Adam (the talking chimp) perform experiments and missions to assist mankind on the brink. They are pretty sleek looking in their mostly red, white, and blue outfits, and contrast mightily with the rabble left on the Earth who wear mostly rags if not skins.

Filmmation prodded by the success of Captain Marvel wanted another live-action show and this was it. It's got some sound effects from Star Trek and Robby the Robot shows up in an episode. One character who shows up twice is a rascal named Fagan played by Jonathan Harris. There are some pretty interesting actors on this thing, attracted it's noted by the chance to play something their kids might actually see. 

The show was shot in one summer mostly in and around the Fox ranch which also saw production of The Planet of the Apes movies, and a few of those sets show up. There is a lot of outdoors material here, a really rugged look by and large. And most of the stories are actually pretty good, with sharp sci-fi twists, though alls well in the end and a moral ends each episode. That's okay, it feels like Star Trek lite in the beginning, but by the end with episodes that feature "Robin Hood" and "Don Quixote" the show has more of a Lost in Space quality, which isn't an improvement. I rather found I enjoyed this show, not remembering it at all from the 70's. I might've seen one, but it's certainly nothing I recollect. But I found them to be pretty entertaining, smart and creative with a tiny budget. The need to shoot exclusively in the daytime really gave the show a special tone, the actors looking rather beaten in the sun. 

Terry Lester who played the lead Jonah could be very odd looking in the sun with his unusually bright blond hair, almost giving him a bestial or alien effect. Contrasted with the gorgeous Jean Marie Hon who played Ruth, a much darker toned woman, really made for a compelling visual image when the two stood close together. One neat thing is the rocket pack, which is used pretty much every episode. It's real apparently as Filmation hired a real guy with a rocket pack to fly around in brief three-minute flights for one day, and shot him from dozens of angles. These shots are used throughout the series, and I have to confess don't really get all that static. It's a neat thing when you realize this is for real. The DVD comes with a few commentaries and an obligatory documentary, which are okay, but a bit too chatty and not really rich with information. The disk claims to have pdf versions of the scripts, but I haven't checked those out yet. Those could be good fun to read actually. I got mine for small money, so it's been large entertainment for a very nice price. I'd recommend regardless. 

NOTE: This is a Dojo Revised Classic Post. 

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Space Sentinels And The Freedom Force!

Filmation was an upstart animation house in the 60's which made its first mark on Saturday morning television with Superman cartoons. They went on to become somewhat specialized in "superheroes" so it came as little surprise when they dreamed up a team of their own named Space Sentinels. Originally the "Space Sentinels" were to be called the "Young Sentinels" but the network liked the idea of "Space" in the title as in the late 70's that made it connect to Star Wars in some vague way. 

There are three Space Sentinels, each of them a human being who was taken away from the Earth in an earlier time period. They were whisked to a distant planet where they were gifted with powers. Hercules was given great strength and Mercury was blessed with amazing speed. The field leader of the trio is Astrea who can transform into any animal. Another detail about the trio is their racial diversity. While Hercules is the typical default white male, Mercury is Asian and Astrea is Black. Such racial diversity was common on TV cartoons at the time but had yet to really make much headway in the comic books. 

Another detail is that each character was voiced by someone of the race they portrayed. Hercules was voiced by George DiCenzo who would achieve greater fame as the lawyer Vince Bugliosi in Helter Skelter. Evan Kim voiced Mercury and Dee Timberlake spoke for Astrea. The trio was led by a computer named Sentinel One and DiCenzo also did the voice for this disembodied projected head. The team is assisted by M.O. (Maintenance Operator) a robot meant to supply humor and another touchstone to the Star Wars fad. The whole operatior was in a spaceship tucked neatly into a volcano away from prying eyes. 

The team fought menaces on Earth, in space and even in other dimensions. Typically slow-paced for a Filmation show, the variety of the foes was really interesting and makes for a pleasurable viewing experience. The slender listing of thirteen episodes goes down quickly. 

Also on this DVD package was Freedom Force, a Filmation cartoon meant to be part of Tarzan and the Super Seven. These cartoons are a meager ten minutes and number only five. But they are interesting as far as they go. The Freedom Five are Isis, Merlin, Hercules, Sinbad the Sailor and Super Samurai. The latter was a young boy who transforms into a giant samurai warrior. Hercules looks identical to his Space Sentinels self, but is voiced by a different person and seems not to be a part of any outside outfit other than the magical which protects the valley they live in which is outside of time. Merlin casts some spells and Isis is the same character as appeared in the live action show but she is not voiced by Joanna Cameron. Sinbad barely makes two brief appearances in the five cartoons and does very little. 

All in all these are fun cartoons if you can find, certainly a marker of a different era. 

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Shazam! The TV Show!

I don't know why it took me so long to finally get around to ordering a copy of Shazam! from the Warner Archives. This delightful show was an absolute frolic when it hit television screens in 1974. Produced by Filmation, the story was full of charm and with its tiny budget produced a fairly entertaining superhero adventure geared for the youth of the day. Sadly, my copy doesn't feature the exquisite Jerry Ordway image above, but has the assembled actors seen below.

Regardless the shows inside are fast-paced and for the most-part light-hearted fables for the young-at-heart. A typical show begins with Billy Batson (Michael Grey) getting a message from "The Elders" (Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury) which then almost immediately leads him, and his older confidant actually named "Mentor" (Les Tremayne) to some danger. They roll up in their RV and before long Captain Marvel (played first by Jackson Bostwick and later by John Davey) is called upon with the classic magic word to save lives and the day in general. It's a solid premise which lasted two full seasons on Saturday mornings.

The show makes do with some vintage George Reeves Superman TV flying special effects and a memorable gimmick which puts the actor playing the Big Red Cheese out in the wind -- impressive. This will make a great addition to the shelves right next to the other Shazam live-action opus, the totally awesome 1941 Republic Pictures flick starring Tom Tyler and Frank Coghlan, The Adventures of Captain Marvel. A nifty bit of trivia is that Frank Coghlan actually makes an appearance in the 70's Shazam TV show. 

More on the movie serial later this week. 

NOTE: This is a Revised Dojo Classic Post. 

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Super Heroes - The Filmation Adventures 1967!

Among the real treats of the trail blazing Filmation Superman cartoon shows was the way in which the format allowed for other DC heroes to get the animated treatment, if for only a short time. Tucked into the show when it expanded to one hour were single cartoons for Green Lantern, Flash, Atom, and Hawkman as well as cartoons for the assembled Justice League of America as well as the Teen Titans.

Each of the heroes got three cartoons, which usually pitted them against alien invaders or insects or often a combination of the two. Monsters and villains were pretty ho-hum, but it was still a thrill to see the Atom shrink and fight against full-sized thugs, the Flash to race around fighting some monster from space, or Green Lantern battling some weird alien threat. Hawkman was a challenge and often used his spaceship to get things done. Green Lantern had a partner from Venus, a nifty way to avoid the racist character of "Pieface" from the comics. Kid Flash often helped the Flash. But both Atom and Hawkman (surprisingly) always operated solo.

The heroes bonded into the JLA to fight other threats and Superman shows up to lead the ranks. Superman was the obvious leader and inevitably gave the other heroes their marching orders. The Teen Titan cartoons were a lot of fun giving us the team of Speedy, Aqualad, Kid Flash and Wonder Girl. For whatever reason, Wonder Woman was never part of the Filmation animation world, but Wonder Girl does give us a glimpse of what it might have been like to include her.

There are all briskly paced delightful little adventures that do a surprisingly accurate job of translating the heroes to the small screen. Few liberties are taken with the core aspects of the heroes, though there is little time for supporting casts. Before the Super Friends, the friendly folks at Filmation gave us these. These are are highly recommended for fans of a certain age. 

NOTE: This is a Revised Dojo Classic Post. 

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Robert Of The Jungle!

The first season of Filmation's adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is among the smartest and most literate presentations of the Ape Man which either the small or large screen have ever seen. If anything, the Tarzan presented in these cartoons is a little bit too reserved and too cautious. He's certainly not the grunting, barely verbal creation of the popular Weissmuller movies. The voice for Tarzan in these excellent cartoons was Robert Ridgely, a veteran voice actor. The Tarzan here is the master of his domain who by his absolute willingness to help others weaker than himself finds himself cast into weird and time-lost domains all across the mythical geography of his Africa.

The folks at Filmation apparently had a deep understanding of the original Burroughs novels and sought to bring that literary version of the famous jungle hero to the small screen rather than the skewed rendition which still sadly dominates the popular imagination today. Tarzan here is not exactly the same character from the books (no Jane, no expansive estate either in England or Africa, no Waziri) but he is an intelligent and literate man who lives in the jungle and has a special affinity to the animals there by dint of his peculiar upbringing. And the use of the monkey N'Kima and not that tiresome Cheetah was most welcome as well as the inclusion of the remarkable Jad-bal-ja the Golden Lion.

He finds himself visiting versions of famed ERB locations such as Opar, the Golden City, the Forbidden City, and even a offbeat version of Pellucidar. But he also takes on robots and outer space aliens when those show up in his jungle too. Tarzan in these stories always seems to have someone to take care of, usually a denizen of the civilization he's visiting who has a reason to object to some aspect of that society. Usually the kingdom in question whether the Golden City of Zandor, the tree-top city of the Giants, or some other are despots who need to be defeated or deposed. Sometimes they are misguided and Tarzan's lesson is all they need to mend fences and make a better life for their subjects such as the land of the Vikings. As in most romantic fiction, the very notion of monarchy is rarely objected to, rather complaints are about personal failings in leaders and not in the very notion of class societies. But that's a bit much for Saturday morning to be fair.

This is Filmation at its finest and worst. The limited animation requires lots of repeated action, but generally that stuff is very well done to begin with and seeing it again and again is not really a problem. Though I confess the pace of the shows seems sluggish at times. The real weakness with Filmation is in the sound recording. Tarzan himself is excellent but often there seems to be an indifference to other voices in the show, with some meager acting filling in and hurting the proceedings. Having read about Filmation, I realize that Lou Schiemer was often part of these recordings as were his kids, but I don't really know the extent they are used here. It's a weakness for certain.

But that said, this is still a rousing version of Tarzan and I heartily recommend it to everyone with an interest in the Lord of the Jungle.

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The Saturday Serials - Filmation's Flash Gordon!

I wasn't smart enough to snatch up a copy of The New Adventures of Flash Gordon complete series when it was available for all too brief a time some years ago. The company which produced it dissolved and only an incomplete DVD package with most of the first season is currently available for a reasonable price. That said, it's an impressive achievement and one fondly remembered by cartoon fans from of the era.

This Filmation series was triggered by the interest which sparked the Dino DeLaurentis film, and has some details in common though I don't think there was any direct connection between the productions. Both were sparked by the sci-fi boom ignited by Star Wars and it's that  common new influence which takes the classic Alex Raymond material and gives it a somewhat new gloss, especially in terms of machinery.

This series, at the first season, is formatted as were the  vintage serials of decades gone by, with cliffhanger endings, or at least incomplete conclusions for most of the episodes in this run. The first five are actually derived from a feature-length version of the story which appeared on television in prime time and drew direct comparisons between the Nazis in WWII and Ming the Merciless and his cutthroat empire. Much of that is missing from the serialized version.

Given that this is a Filmation effort, it's marked by many of the gimmicks the company used to present animation for TV on a limited budget. There are lots of repeated shots, many used enough to be called stock and it's the clever reuse of these which tell the stories of our trio of heroes from Earth battling Ming on Mongo and surviving the effort. There are many callbacks to the classic original comic strip by Don Moore and Alex Raymond as well the structure itself being evocative of the vintage Buster Crabbe movies.

(Frank Cho Artwork)

There's a lot to love about these shows for Flash fans and I only wish the whole series were available again for a decent price. The series is available on Youtube though and it's there that I finished up the first season.

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