Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Marvel Superheroes 1966

I'm back reading comics after a long hiatus where my reading was heavily fantasy oriented. Right now I'm reading some old Captain Marvel (or rather Mar-vell) comics and so I thought I'd post some video nostalgia.

I used to watch this show on Channel 44--a UHF channel broadcast out of Chicago in the late 1970s, and it was my introduction to many of these characters. Yes, the animation is practically non-existent, the dialog melodramatic and obvious, the voice acting over the top, but as far as I'm concerned this show is the closest anyone has ever come to distilling classic Marvel Comics onto the small screen. I can feel the crazy energy in these shoestring budget "animated" shorts far more than I can in whatever big budget productions come down the pike for the cineplex. These stories were directly adapted from the comics and the artwork was actually drawn from the comics as well. So here is the 1966 Gantry-Lawrence animation version of Lee and Kirby's Thor for your viewing pleasure:

Part 1 The Power of Pluto


Part 2 The Verdict of Zeus



Part 3 Thunder in the Netherworld

3 comments:

  1. I too watched these on ch.44 in Chicago back in the day. I still (and always will) love these as they're pretty much taken from the actual art and stories. The limited animation worked well because the artwork was awesome and the stories were classic. I even recorded the audio on a cassette player before we had VCRs!

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  2. When, oh when, will we see these on DVD (or whatever)? Oh, the humanity!

    The wonderful paradox of these things is because they are just cheap rip-offs of the comics, they are therefore the most comic booky cartoons ever. It's virtually as if someone were reading the comic aloud, holding up the pictures for you to see and maybe shaking them a little when a fight is on.

    As the super cartoons get more sophisticated, they resemble the source material less and less.

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  3. Hey, thanks for posting these, I enjoyed them a lot. Gotta say I really like the voice acting!

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