The Mighty Hercules

 

For January's Cover Cavalcade, I had declared that month to be HERCULES MONTH and featured comic book covers showing versions of the demi-god as imagined by various comic book companies.

One of those covers was one of two Gold Key comics featuring stories based on the Saturday morning cartoon The Mighty Hercules, which ran in syndication from 1963 to 1966. Jimmy Tapp, a Canadian broadcaster, was the voice of Hercules through most of its run. The cartoon consisted of concise 5-minute adventures, running in 30 minute blocks.

I remembered at least occasionally watching it when I was a little one, though my only strong memory is of Newton, Hercules' centaur sidekick with an annoyingly high-pitched voice. But I didn't remember enjoying it and, when that comic book cover reminded me of the cartoon, I watched a few on YouTube. They really are fun.

With just five minutes to tell a story, the cartoon wastes no time. For instance, "Wings of Mercury" starts with Newton and the Greek Hero Theseus sitting together in a field. A giant bird (one of the Stymphalian birds) swoops down and snatches the Wings of Mercury that Theseus was carrying.

Hercules arrives and says glad to get the wings back for a hero like Theseus. Newton asks about Theseus' heroism, so Hercules explains. This sends the cartoon into a flashback, in which Zeus gives Theseus the wings so that he can quickly reach Cyprus and defeat an evil statue that is essentially firing a barrage of laser beams at everything.

Theseus defeats the statue, but now he's lost the wings. Hercules uses his ring to activate his super-strength (a feature of this version of the demi-god) and gives the bird what-for. The Wings of Mercury are recovered and everyone (well, except the evil statue and the bird) is happy.

It is indeed fun. The animation is limited but imaginative and and stories gallop through their five minutes with unironic charm and fun. I am, of course, a little annoyed at the mixing of Greek and Latin names. I get that Hercules (the Latin version of the name) is too ingrained in our culture to ever allow Heracles, but if its ZEUS on the throne of Olympus, then the wings should have been the Wings of Hermes. Oh, well. The cartoon does deserve credit for using a "Stymphalian Bird" rather than a generic monster to snatch the Wings. 

In a few weeks, we'll begin a look at the Gold Key comic book version of the Mighty Hercules.

Here's the episode. Enjoy.

Steampunk Lone Ranger

 

In a 1943 story arc, the Lone Ranger radio show did dip into vaguely steampunkish territory when the Ranger and Tonto battled a mad scientist who used electricity-based death traps and a drug to turn hostages into zombie-like minions. But, overall, the Ranger's universe did not allow much in the way of Steampunk or science fiction into its stories. This was also true of the TV show and the long-running Dell/Gold Key comic book series.

That changed, though, in 1966, when a production company called Format Films turned out 26 episodes of a Lone Ranger cartoon for CBS' Saturday morning line-up.

I like to think that someone at Format Films fondly remembered that radio story arc, but it was actually the success of Secret Service agents James West and Artemus Gordon on The Wild, Wild West that dictated the premise for this particular version of the Lone Ranger. The Ranger and Tonto are tossed into a Steampunk universe that includes robot dragons, bad guys using scuba gear, a lost valley populated by neanderthals and dinosaurs, and giant wind-up toys. A reoccuring villain, Tiny Tom, was obviously based on West's arch-enemy Dr. Loveless.

Each half-hour had three stories, each running about 6 1/2 minutes, so each story moved at a furious pace. diving right into the action as yet another supervillain or mad scientist spreads chaos across the Old West. One story each episode was often devoted to a Tonto solo adventure, allowing him to have his own Crowning Moments of Awesome. In fact, this cartoon might have been the strongest example of any Lone Ranger venue in showing that the two heroes had an equal partnership. Tonto out-thought a villain and saved the Ranger as often as the Ranger did the same for Tonto.

The animation was obviously low-budget, but was done with imagination and style. To quote the Wikipedia article about the show: The drawings were produced by chinagraph pencil on cell. Colored papers were cut or torn under or against the lines of the background, producing a dramatic and rich textural effect. 

I loved this show as a kid. Though I watched re-runs of the live-action TV series growing up as well, this version of the Lone Ranger may very well have been my introduction to the character.

Fortunately, many of the episodes are showing up on YouTube. Here's one of them:

And, if you have another 7 minutes to spare, here's a Tonto episode in which I like to think he visits the same Lost Valley that was the setting of the comic book Turok, Son of Stone.

I bought a new microphone and now you all have to SUFFER!

My YouTube channel has largely become a repository for movie clips to be embedded here when I talk about a particular film. But I've also done a half-dozen videos in a series called "Pulp Era Video Reviews"--I'll never win a prize for my narration skills, but I have fun doing them.

Well, I just bought an external microphone for my laptop, relieving me of the necessity of recording the videos during my lunch time at work. To test the mike out, I recorded some commentary for a scene from 1950's Tarzan and the Slave Girl, then recorded some comments about various adventure cartoons made during the 1960s & 1970s. 

Usually, I write out my comments before I record narration.This time around, I didn't bother. I just did the narration stream-of-consciousness, so I tended to ramble on a bit and I'm not sure I'm always making a particular point as clearly as I should.  But these videos were made simply to test the new microphone, which turns out to works just fine.

But that leaves me with two videos that I did, after all, go to the trouble of making. So what do I do with them? I really don't want to just delete them--I had too much fun simply geeking out when I made them. Obviously, then, I must force the loyal readers of my blog to endure them. It's the only solution:

Happy Birthday, Bud Collyer

Yesterday would have been Clayton "Bud" Collyer's 100th birthday.

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Collyer was the first actor to give voice to Superman. He played the Man of Steel on radio through most of the 1940s, using a pleasant tenor voice for Clark Kent, then shifting to a base for Superman. His spot-on characterization was one of the strengths of a classic old-time radio show.

He also gave voice to Superman in the classic Fleischer studio cartoon made in the 1940s. (He returned in the 1960s to play Superman in the not-so-classic Filmation cartoons.)

For your viewing pleasure, here's one of the best of the Fleischer cartoons:

The Mechanical Monsters

The Fleischer Studio Popeyes

Last year, Warner Brothers put out a wonderful DVD set featuring 60 of the original, mostly black-and-white Popeye cartoons.

One of the many really neat qualities of the Popeye cartoons (and the Fleischer cartoons in general) is the seamless mesh of animation with music. These cartoons are timed to perfection--body language, movement and action all exquisitely match the accompanying music, which makes watching them an addictive experience.

One of the cartoons--The Man on the Flying Trapeze--is one of the few I had never seen before. It's so much fun to watch, I replayed it three times before finally moving on to the next cartoon on the disc.

Of course, now I have the song stuck in my head, but I've learned to live with that.

The DVD set is worth getting, both for the cartoons and the nifty little documentaries. But you can also see many of these cartoons on-line (most, if not all of them, have fallen into the public domain).

So if you want to risk being glued to your computer screen all day, unable to do anything productive, take a look at this link:

The Man on the Flying Trapeze