Hope of Good Capes

I saw the latest Marvel flick this weekend and got into a new version of an old
debate: Thor vs. Superman.

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Superhero films during the first three decades of my life were essentially limited
to Superman and then to Batman. A Thor movie, let alone more than one, was all but unthinkable. In my 30s it was pretty much just the Marvel stable and Batman’s resurgence, as Fox launched its X-Men dynasty, Columbia teed up a Spider-Man franchise, and even lesser Marvel-inspired films put DC, sister company to and/or division of Warner years before Marvel was purchased by Disney, in quite the awkward position regarding the dichotomy between its library of legendary characters and lack of live-action achievement.

It’s not simply that adaptations of the Big Two superhero canons back then rarely duked it out in the same place at the same time for a cinematic showdown, however.
It’s that not since I was in grade school has there been such a full slate, perhaps a glut, of real men and women dressed up as costumed crimefighters (or alien-invasion opposition forces) to entertain the masses on TV and movie screens — with the scale almost inconceivably bigger now.

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I’ve loved superheroes for literally as long as I can remember.

As I wrote here back in 2009, I got introduced to comics and cartoons early. Superheroes were the most exciting common denominator. The various incarnations
of Super Friends produced by Hanna-Barbera for ABC, translating DC’s Justice League into animated form, sat at the nexus.

I’ll always be grateful for having parents who were teachers and encouraged my flights of fancy. Maybe when your son is reading and doing puzzles and writing and drawing at a young age, well, you’re not so worried about letting the television babysit your children on a Saturday morning, or maybe that was just life in the 1970s. But I have vivid memories of all of that good stuff dating back to nursery school.

Even though a larger percentage of kids read comics back then and there were a fair number of superheroes on TV, cartoons and merchandising understandably focused on the big names — Batman, Hulk, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, a certain guy from Krypton — and, being an omnivore as well as a connoisseur, I could easily stump my friends on the playground at recess playing Justice League. One would pick Superman, then another would choose Red Tornado after I’d explained who he was the day before, so I’d be the Phantom Stranger.

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In 1989, I began writing a series of articles for the trade newspaper Comics Buyer’s Guide titled Superheroes on the Small Screen. It documented the history of, well, exactly what you’d think. Fascinated by the subject, I kept the research going for several years.

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I was delighted when cartoons would put esoteric characters in motion or when superheroes were invented, some decidedly more original than others, for a new animated or live-action show — Hanna-Barbera’s Space Ghost and Mightor, Filmation’s Isis, Sid & Marty Kroffts’ Electra-Woman and Dyna-Girl. The Filmation versions of classic DC characters and the charmingly basic limited-animation Grantray-Lawrence Marvel Super-Heroes that ran as weekday repeats enraptured me too. As I mentioned in a 2011 post, however, there was a special thrill to seeing established four-color favorites played by real, honest-to-gosh people.

While the late-’60s Batman series and the 1950s’ Adventures of Superman were in reruns during my childhood, the boom in live-action superheroes during the latter half of the ’70s was impressive to behold: The Incredible Hulk and Wonder Woman, very different series, were both hits in prime-time, with Captain Marvel appearing on Saturday mornings in Shazam! And then of course there was a little movie starring Christopher Reeve as DC’s Man of Steel that premiered in late 1978.

Owing as much to the hybrid superhero/secret-agent series The Six Million Dollar
Man and its spinoff The Bionic Woman as their comics origins in certain regards, Marvel’s line was also mined for less-successful interpretations of Spider-Man, Captain America, and even Doctor Strange. Various DC characters — Adam West and Burt Ward reprising their roles as Batman and Robin, plus the first-ever live-action incarnations of Flash, Green Lantern, Black Canary, and The Huntress, among others
— were assembled in a couple of terribly low-budget specials trading on the Super Friends motif called Legends of the Superheroes.

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I’m barely scratching the surface in terms of the breadth of the phenomenon. What I mean to do is set the scene and contrast it, objectively and subjectively, to our current explosion of live-action superhero efforts and my reaction to that explosion — so I hope you’ll bear with me for a bit longer as I sketch in the last 20-30 years.

Super Friends continued in several forms well into the 1980s and the Superman
movie series offered diminishing returns over a decade, ending on 1987’s The Quest for Peace before a quartet of Batman flicks kicked off in 1989. Perhaps the best thing about the latter was the 1992 debut of a new animated series from Warner Bros. featuring the Dark Knight, on the heels of Batman Returns, which led to a companion series for Superman and then in 2001 to Justice League. Although I’d watched Marvel’s Spider-Man shows in the ’80s, I found myself far more discriminating by the time the new Batman cartoons launched. Fresh out of college and freelancing in comics journalism, I was captivated by the quality of what became known as the DC Animated Universe yet didn’t care a whit for the decidedly subpar 1990s takes on Marvel’s X-Men, Spider-Man, Iron Man, et al.

Now there are so many superheroes on screes of all sizes that quality matters to a greater extent than ever. It would be nice if a certain amount of fidelity to a character’s roots went hand-in-hand with big budgets and capable craftsmanship, but that’s clearly still asking too much of even the most recognizable properties.

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I seldom enjoyed Thor in his solo title because its space-faring, science-fiction version of Norse mythology was often ponderous and less squarely in the superhero genre than his exploits as part of the Avengers. For a mixed-bag cinematic sequel of his to be more fun than a new Superman movie boggles the mind. I’ll pick it up there next time.


Related: M*S*H • Number Ones • The ’Vison Thing • When Barry
Met Ollie • Stars and Gripes • Lightning Round • Group Dynamic