Fleischer to TAS: The Superhero Cartoon

The superhero cartoon began rapidly on the heels of the invention of the form, with Superman appearing in Fleischer cartoons in 1940. After this much-admired series of stylish films, however, superhero cartoons would languish for decades, then reappear as dreadful made-for-television cartoons devoid of production values in the Bad Years of animation: the 1960s. Yet, after decades of trying, thanks to the efforts of Marvel Entertainment and especially the innovations of Warner Brothers' stylish Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series, the form may have found what went missing all those years ago.

Fleischer's Example

Fleischer's studio had a feel for the material when they broke new ground with their Superman cartoon. These cartoons treated the material with some respect, avoiding the tendencies of other media to reinvent the concept and plaster over the familiar costumes. The early Superman cartoons got the characters and cast right; they got the setting right; and they pitted Superman against menaces including mad scientists, attack robots, mummies, and volcanos.

By any animation standard, they employed excellent, elegant, fluid motion. Characteristically Fleischeresque movement would infuse these works with a subtle surreality typical of his best work.

He couldn't have known, in those days, that superhero cartoons would someday represent the very worst examples of American animation in an age when it had sunk to absurd depths.

American Cartooning Goes to Hell

After the forties, with exceptions bankrolled by the big, big movie studios American animation went into a decline. One by one, the elements that defined quality fell to accountants' axes, including cel material (which began as glass [!] and ended as celluloid; the art itself; the coloring applied to the art cels; the quality of background paints; the design of motion in the animation; and the content.

By the early seventies, cartoons had become a Saturday morning children's ghetto, devoid of quality, insultingly stupid, tawdry, and trite. Disney and Warner Brothers and Fleischer had little to fear from the likes of The Grape Ape Hour or similar exemplars of the indifferent state of American animation.

However, although seventies children's cartoons do represent a long-enduring trench in an art form stripped of its pride and will to quality, one batch of cartoons from the 1960s must bear the claim to having dragged animation to the very rock bottom, unsurpassable in their complete absence of quality.

Marvel's Marvel Action Heroes cartoons managed to degrade a medium seemingly already sunk to unfathomable depths.

Marvel Action Heroes

Somewhere, perhaps, a stone marker comemorates the death and damnation of American cartoons. Such a marker could bear on its face nothing besides one of the panels from Marvel's first, and truly awful, venture into creating superhero cartoons.

Granted, Marvel did not erupt, fully-formed, drenched in venture capital, into the comics market, ready to spend sums that would bankrupt governments on experimental projects like animation. Yet where, I have to wonder, did they get the idea that they could produce cartoons that did not contain animation?

Marvel's first cartoons did not move. If you suspect that the last sentence contained a typographical error, allow me to repeat: Marvel's first cartoons did not move. Budget constraints, evidently, did not allow them to create an actual animated feature in those first days, so they simply photographed panels from their comics, removed the word balloons, dubbed voices over this mess, made the mouths move by filming a moving mouth and doing blue-screen tricks, and added theme music. Occasionally the camera might pan across or towards a panel to simulate motion.

Such cynical lack of concern for quality somehow escaped the punishment it deserved, however, for some people actually still enjoy these works, which sell on home video. Fortunately, however, this new approach to cartoons did not take the industry by storm; and later Marvel cartoons would, like the competition's product, move on screen.

Spider-Man and Fantastic Four

The next round of Marvel cartoons did somewhat better, owing perhaps to innovative changes like the use of animators and scripters. A Fantastic Four cartoon by Hanna-Barbera would appear as one of a series of rotating titles in the Hanna Barbera Super Adventure Hour. This cartoon would represent a generation of contemporaneous work such as Space Ghost, the Herculoids, Birdman, and other, more obscure superheroic creations original to Saturday morning cartoons. Nonetheless, the Fantastic Four cartoons of this era would demonstrate little to immortalize them. Their main appeal lay, perhaps, in that they treated Marvel Comics characters; very young readers might view them with fascination, noting the new dimension motion provided to the familiar topic.

The Spider-Man cartoon did little better, although it dealt in sometimes interesting stories that could disturb with their tone. This cartoon, though, if demonstrating better scripting, did nothing to move the superhero cartoon forward from the lukewarm animation of the Fantastic Four cartoon.

DC's Superman, Batman, Aquaman

DC presented cartoons comparable to the Spider-Man and Fantastic Four cartoons on a show that may have rotated Superman, Batman, and Aquaman segments, though later syndication tended to break up these programs and use the commercially viable Superman and Batman portions only in reruns.

These works, however, clearly represented the doldrums of the art. Motion did not flow; backgrounds lacked detail; stories represented the extremely simple and unfrightening model once viewed as appropriate for children back before dumbing down had become a cultural concern.

The Seventies

For animation in general, and superhero cartoons specifically, the seventies would represent a tapering off of the slow decline that had afflicted cartoons since the forties.

Through this period the Saturday morning cartoons would occasionally dabble in truly strange applications of superhero comics. From the guest appearance of Batman, Robin, and the Joker in "Scooby Doo Mysteries" to the peculiar guest appearance of Superman and Lois Lane in the "Brady Kids" cartoon to the likes of an odd teenaged superhero with a magic ring that turned him into the Thing from the Fantastic Four (only to be replaced by one of Al Capp's Schmoos in a later stage of production), the superhero cartoon of this era sometimes took great liberties that, in the absence of a sound editorial reason (like quality) seldom made much sense to comics readers.

Super Friends

DC characters appeared again on the television screen in the various seasons of the Super Friends cartoon, which utilized character designs provided by comics veteran and savant (and perhaps, even, Doctor of Comics) Alex Toth. This show would enjoy incarnations across thirteen years and range from preachy pablum to pointless weakly contests of hero versus villains to actual attempts to tell stories using characters from the Justice League, Teen Titans, and Kirby's Fourth World books.

The Super Friends cartoon provided the first animated versions of a number of DC's stalwarts, including the Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Plastic Man (who had never been a member of the Justice League). It also occasionally introduced new characters, such as Black Vulcan, the Wonder Twins, and annoying sidekicks like Wendy and Marvin. Initially, the stories followed a formula where the superheroes tracked down the menace, which proved to involve some human doing bad things. This human, once apprehended, would regret his actions, but evoke some good intention his crimes had meant to serve, such as environmental concerns. The whole good intended villain notion, in fact, recurred in every episode of the first seasons, becoming no small nuisance.

A later version of this program would bear the name Challenge of the Super Friends and would involve a weekly conflict between the Justice League and their villanous counterparts, including the prominent villains particular to specific heroes, such as Superman's enemy Lex Luthor (in his disco collar costume) and Flash's enemy Captain Cold.

These cartoons offered slightly higher production values than had their sixties counterparts, but provided no great moments of animation or storytelling. Their main service to the comics medium may involve the wider exposure they provided for superheroes who could now enter homes where television penetrated, but comics had not.

Batman

The mid-seventies had, in a few examples, come to a point where Saturday morning cartoons began to improve noticeably. The Tarzan cartoon, for example, included animated sequences based on real motion pictures of the human body in motion. If the same series of actions based on a single film clip appeared again and again and again in these cartoons, at least they represented some attempt to bring quality to animated motion.

In this period, Shirmer and Associates, who had a number of cartoons in the seventies that demonstrated a commitment to better animated work than the dreadful and apathetic detritus of of ten years previously, released a Batman cartoon. This cartoon included fair stories, though sometimes inclined to take liberties with minor characters. The studio produced a number of science fiction and adventure cartoons that would, in the long run, do better than its Batman cartoon; but the symptom of improvement seemed to begin gaining momentum with this offering.

Plastic Man

Plastic Man appeared in a short-term cartoon property. Properly handled, the Plastic Man concept could fuse the best elements of the high days of Warner Brothers cartoons with the conventions of superhero comics. Not surprisingly, given the era it appeared, however, no one handled the Plastic Man cartoon properly. It evokes adjectives like "vapid," "awful," and "insulting."

This cartoon represented one last voice of the truly awful indolence of properties geared to keep children busy Saturday mornings while parents slept late. It contained awful animation and dreadful characters ("Baby Plas"; "Hula Hula", the insulting caricature of a Hawaiian native that replaced Plastic Man sidekick Woozy Winks). Yet it managed to maintain enough of a following that someone released this matter to the home video market. However, by the time this cartoon appeared on television screens, the medium had already begun to improve; Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and the seventies Batman cartoon already demonstrated production values that showed up the lameness of this kind of uninspired dreck.

Fantastic Four, Mark II

The people that licensed the Fantastic Four for the second cartoon by that name found some kind of legal obstacle in their way. Marvel, it seemed, wanted a separate licensing fee for the character Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, since Marvel held a trademark inherited from the Golden Age character that predated this version of the Torch by over two decades. Unfortunately, rather than abandon the project or pay the ripoff double-entry licensing fee, the producers of the seventies Fantastic Four cartoon replaced the Human Torch with another character.

They chose a pear-shaped, annoying, helpless character entitled "Herbie the Robot" to fill the fourth seat in the Fantastic Four. One must wonder if Herbie resulted from a last-minute brainstorming session that had given way to sarcasm and cynicism, since the average twelve year old could come up with a more engaging character. The writers of the cartoon could have created almost any kind of superhero, one would think, unless something in the contracts specifically stated they must either license the Human Torch (C)(R)(TM) OR create the most inane, worthless, uninteresting, inconsistent, and unsatisfying fourth member the human imagination could conceive. One can justify it somewhat if one takes Marvel's word that the change had come from a desire to protect impressionable children who might set themselves on fire in imitation of the Human Torch; but many more children put towels on their backs and jumped from high places, hoping to fly like Superman but injuring themselves instead, and this never resulted in attempts to make Superman walk everywhere. The licensing explanation seems far more likely.

In spite of this considerable handicap, the second Fantastic Four cartoon attempted to tell interesting stories well. Its animation compared well to the earlier Hanna-Barbera production that had contained the entire team, but this cartoon did not noticeably advance the development of the super-hero cartoon standard. Viewers who read the comic book resented the intrusion of the pear-shaped mechanical nebbish "Herbie," although later Fantastic Four scribe John Byrne would work a mechanical babysitter robot named H.E.R.B.I.E. into a story in the comic book.

Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends

Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends represented a lighthearted version of the familiar character and also an interesting take on the concept. Rather than presenting the canonical loner who worked alone and fought alone in a dark and friendless world, this cartoon teamed him up with a version of Iceman, from the X-Men, and a female version of the Human Torch called Firestar (who would eventually enter Marvel Comics canon in the pages of the defunct New Warriors title, which dealt with young adult heroes).

Purists might argue forever about Spider-Man belonging to a team, but the chemistry of the team really did not seem off the mark; and it might provide a model for using Spider-Man as part of a team, particularly since both of his partners from the cartoon now exist as characters in other teams (Iceman appears in one of Marvel's infinite number of X-titles; Firestar appears in The Avengers).

Like the unfortunate second Fantastic Four cartoon, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends did not break new ground, but it did represent a noticeable improvement over what had gone before, and this improvement would continue through the next round of Marvel cartoons. While remaining fairly true to the Spider-Man concept, this cartoon did not fear to ignore continuity in a way that superhero cartoons sometimes can't.

Cartoons as Merchandising

The eighties would host a generation of children's cartoon shows that essentially advertised lines of accompanying toys; such cartoons fairly earned the name of "Saturday Morning Commercial." From Care Bears, Smurfs, Strawberry Shortcake, He-Man, and the Transformers, to the more familiar territory of established superhero concepts, these shows would demonstrate characters available as dolls, backpacks, spiral notebooks, or bath towels; every show would, in those days, accompany a product to hype to hapless children who, suitably indoctrinated to want these products, might pester parents until they bought.

Marvel did not resist the temptation in those ambitious days, and it tied in cartoon production with an explosion of toy products that made the limited lines released by Mego toys in the 1970s look spare and bleak.

In the early nineties, before its unfortunate collapse under plummetting stock prices and astronomical debt, Marvel would embark upon an incredibly ambitious program to become an entertainment magnate. Marvel attempted to expand into television, movies, toys, and even planned to build a never-realized theme park. Having overborrowed and overreached, Marvel subsequently entered bankruptcy and Toy Biz, a producer of a number of lines of Marvel superhero dolls, purchased the increasingly unviable company.

During this ambitious heyday, however, Marvel optimistically dived into the waters of animation, moving Stan Lee to its animation division, where he would (and does) serve in both editorial and promotional capacities. This new wave of Marvel Cartoons would do much to erase the very sour taste left behind by its first awful experiments in cartooning without animators.

Even with more going for them than in the previous two periods of attempted expansion into the cartoon market, Marvel failed to reproduce anything that hinted of the magic of Fleischer's day. However, the cartoons continued to improve. Marvel would not allow, this time around, an indifferent treatment of its properties; when the company killed a live-action Fantastic Four movie on aesthetic grounds, this represented a typical example of the new hardline policy about its creations.

The Marvel Cartoons

The late eighties (and later) Marvel cartoons represented an improvement, definitely, over the abysmal nonanimated Marvel cartoons, the later sixties Marvel cartoons, and even the Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends cartoon that marked a noticeable tightening of standards.

Marvel introduced an X-Men cartoon; an Iron Man cartoon; a Fantastic Four cartoon; and an Incredible Hulk cartoon. This proliferation continues in 1999, with Marvel having abandoned a planned Captain America cartoon (censors feared the effect of having Nazis appear, even as villains, in cartoons) but currently planning an Avengers cartoon. The very existence of so many comics titles translated into cartoons suggests something right in Marvel's approach.

These cartoons would have, on their side, benefit of the Asian animation industry (who do it better and cheaper, evidently) and improvements in technology that would employ computers as animation tools and greatly aid in the difficult process of drawn cartoons.

Such kudos out of the way, however, one may note the general blandness of these cartoons. Visually pleasant, they nonetheless lack style and energy to the extent that an average-to-good comics story will demonstrate more vigor and motion than the Marvel cartoon productions that have come from Marvel's animation division. Stan Lee, one of the architects of the Silver Age, may remain blameless in this, however; he trained in comics and drama, and, prior to his high period in the sixties, had not worked in animation, unlike his onetime partner Kirby, who began and finished his career in cartoons.

These Marvel cartoons tell their stories with occasional admirable flourishes, but fail to engross. Nonetheless, until Warner Brothers reinvented the superhero cartoon in the mid-1990s, these Marvel cartoons represented the pinnacle of the superhero cartoon. At this point, Marvel had both plumbed the depths and defined the peaks of the form.

Warner Brothers to the Rescue

Within recent memory, something new happened to superhero cartoons: they became good again in a way that owed to the Fleischer legacy, which they shamelessly imitated (for one need not show shame for doing good).

Batman:TAS

Bruce Timm, whose name sounds much like what one would expect of some alter ego of a villain or of a dark-toned superhero, had much to do with the design of the Batman cartoon that Warner Brothers pioneered in the 1990s. The flow of animation strongly suggested the Fleischer Superman cartoons that came and went over fifty years earlier; and Timm's elegant simplified depiction of the characters remained true to the visual aspect of his subjects even while it eliminated the kind of superfluous detail that might render animation difficult.

Batman: The Animated Series managed, somehow, to blend elements of Fleischer's superman, the better Batman movies, the current Batman magazines, and the Adams/O'Neil era Batman before later scribes would make him too dark a hero (indeed, Timm's Batman accomplishes the moody darkness of the Batman of about 1969 without getting into the lame one-upmanship of today's dark-as-machismo portrayals).

The success of this show, premiered during late afternoons not far from prime time, would spawn derivative shows, including Batman and Robin: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series, and Batman Beyond. One may take this ability to inspire spin-off programs in similar style as a sign of both artistic and commercial success.

Superman:TAS

In a strange turnaround sometimes foreign to producers of television properties, the creative team on Batman: The Animated Series had demonstrated a postulate of obvious import: Quality succeeds. Not only had Batman: TAS produced, without question, the best animated presentation of the Batman concept; not only had it made a compromise between accessibility and the caricaturishly obsessive Batman of post-Miller comics; but it had, in the process, managed to attract viewers.

With Superman: The Animated Series, Warner Brothers had demonstrated that its superhero properties do have an appeal that cuts across age groups; and that the proper presentation helps reach audiences that the continuity-heavy and gimmicky comic books the Silver Age consistently failed to do. Furthermore, the Superman cartoon would provide a springboard from which other DC-related cartoons might pilot. Experiments such as the TAS Green Lantern, a fusion of Hal Jordan (face and origin), Kyle Raynor (name and profession) and John Stewart (costume), impressed many fans of the sort who enjoy good stories well told rather than canonical purity in continuity.

Inasmuch as Superman ushered in the superhero cartoon, Superman: TAS serves some level of justice in providing a springboard for the DC superhero cartoons of the future.

Future Developments

As of February 1999, newsgroup gossip and industry press releases indicate that the Timm-inspired superhero cartoon renaissance still grows. DC may be discussing cartoon treatments of other properties, possibly the Justice League; and Fox, carrier of the X-Men cartoon, plans an Avengers animated series sometime soon. The Fox people would have brought a Captain America cartoon to the screen had not preemptive self-censorship and warnings from analysts suggested that having Captain America flash back to the forties and beat up Nazis would invite moronic public censorship groups to accuse the cartoon of spreading Naziism (this presumes a natural, irresistable tendency to Naziism in small children that only awaits seeing a single swastika to instantly and permanently convert them to genocidal sociopaths). Such setbacks aside, however, the present seems like possibly the best time for superhero cartoons in the entire history of the medium; and I make that claim without hyperbole.