The “Weirdo Superhero”
was the topic of an article from TV
Guide in 1968. It pits, so to speak, the
Bugs Bunny cartoons against the super-hero ones, in a competition to get on the
air. There is a great picture of the
Marvel Super-Heroes, led by the Thing, approaching, combating, Mickey
Mouse. Who knew that in 40 years they would
be related.
This was also a time
that the FCC was cracking down on TV violence and the cartoons had to
adapt. Fredrick Wertham had changed his
target to TV, but here is able to get in a double header, going after both TV
and comics.
This was also a time
that the FCC was cracking down on TV violence and the cartoons had to
adapt. Fredrick Wertham had changed his
target to TV, but here is able to get in a double header, going after both TV
and comics.
A special thanks to M.M.M.S. member Jack Martin for pointing out who the cover artist was.
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| Cover by Bernie Fuchs |
Bugs Bunny has been
relegated to another day. You’ll find neither hide nor hare of him around TV’s
Saturday morning cartoon ghetto. And the old carrot-cruncher—a Saturday
superstar since TV’s salad days—was shifted with nary an answer from the
networks to his final pleading, “What’s up, Doc?” The networks could have told
Bugs what was up, though. And in two words: Weirdo Superhero.
The Weirdo Superhero
is the new look in cartoon characters. Super-king-size in brawn and just about
as freakish as anything you’ll find on a sci-fi dust jacket, the weirdies have
virtually taken over Saturday morning network television. And Saturday’s
cartoon-loving child seems to be gobbling up the ghoulies like M & M’s.
In case you haven’t
toured the weekend-morning dial lately, here are portraits of a few of the new
breed of Weirdo Superheroes.
The Fantastic Four
are led by scientist Reed Richards, who stretches like taffy. The queer quartet
includes Reed’s wife, Sue, who keeps vanishing into thin air; teen-ager Johnny,
who flames up like a can of Sterno; and The Thing. The Thing’s thing is to be
ugly, which, since he resembles a demolished Edsel, isn’t hard.
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| Illustration by Wally Wood |
Spider-Man is a born
loser named Peter Parker. Beset with job worries and usually bedded down with a
cold, Peter nevertheless is compelled to slip into a grotesque spider suit to
polish off villains.
Birdman resembles a
tarred and feathered Charles Atlas with wings. Saved from a fiery death by a
sun god, Birdman flies around, pulverizing the baddies with solar power.
Space Ghost, the only bona-fide
spook in the crowd, is a space-cruising crime fighter. But thanks to a magic
belt which renders him invisible, this animated apparition is out of sight a
lot of the time.
Super President is a
gas—that is, when he’s not transforming himself into solid rock or something.
But whatever shape the chief executive is in, he has a dandy way of dealing
with villains. He just zooms off and beats the tar out of them.
Those are just a few
of the weirdies. There are plenty more. Practically three-quarters of the
cartoons being aired on all three networks fall into the Weirdo Superhero
category.
And co-starring with
the Weirdo Superheroes, you’ll find an equally spooky bunch of Supervillains.
There’s Professor Stacordo, for instance, who looks like Fu Manchu and careens
around on a flying monster, yelling “Kill! Kill!” Later on you’re apt to run
into a demented midget and his army of menacing Lilliputians or a platoon of
crazed, hyperthyroid beasts of every species. Then there’s always Spider Woman
(no relation to Spider-Man). She gets her jollies slicing up people, aided by
an army of garden-shear mechanical spiders.
The
Weirdos—Superheroes and Supervillains alike—have catapulted TV cartoons into a
multimillion-dollar business. The top-rated shows can pull in as many as
14,000,000 kids, making it very attractive to sponsors, who happily pay up to
$9750 a minute to sell their wares. The networks expect to take in over
$50,000,000 this year, while the cartoon factories haven’t had so much work on
their hands since the heyday of the movie-house cartoon. For instance,
Hanna-Barbera, the cartoonery which grinds out more than half of these shows,
keeps 300 employees working year-round. Saturday morning has become a Grand
Guignol gold mine.
To understand how the
networks got on this weird kick, you must realize that Saturday morning TV
wasn’t always the bonanza it is today. Two years ago, in fact, the networks
were filling the morning with reruns of shows like Lassie and Dennis the Menace
in addition to cartoons such as Mighty Mouse and Alvin. The cartoons were
grabbing most of the kids, so the networks decided to capitalize on them. The
cartoons in stock—most of them made for movie theaters—were getting low. They
needed something new. Only what?
The “what” emerged
soon enough. The networks and the cartoon makers had for some time been aware
of the popularity of comic books in genes al and superheroes in particular. Sa
is Allen Ducovny, who produces the Superman-Aquaman show: “Kids have always
read comic books and played war games. It seemed natural to put superheroes
into an action-adventure format.” Ed Vane, ABC’s daytime chief, conceived of a
cartoon which would be “full of action and far-out,” to accommodate today’s
space -conscious children. Says Vane: “Children today are highly sophisticated.
They don’t suspend that sophistication on Saturday morning.”
It’s here that the
influence of Marvel Comics came into play. Marvel has become champ of the
comic-book game (50,000,000 books a year, with a high number of them selling to
college kids) by introducing the Weirdo Superhero. “Superheroes had been around
for a million years,” says Stan Lee, Marvel’s editor and art director. “We
revitalized them.” For starters, they gave the heroes hang-ups. “So what if a
hero is the strongest being on earth?” Lee explains. “Doesn’t he also have
acne, sinus trouble and problems dating girls?” Marvel also introduced another
innovation in superheroes: the ugly hero, a la “The Thing.” “People can identify
with someone who’s not beautiful,” Lee thinks. “You say, ‘That guy could be
me.’ But you still feel superior to him.”
The first Weirdo
Superhero to make a substantial splash in the Saturday A.M. lineup was Space
Ghost. That was two years ago, on CBS. According to Allen Ducovny, “It set the
industry on its ear.” Predictably, NBC and ABC jumped on the Weirdo Superhero
bandwagon—and the era of the weirdies began. Says Marvel Comics’ managing
director, Chip Goodman: “The networks know they’re on to something big.”
The networks have
also inherited 3 few unexpected headaches. There are many—parents, teachers and
psychologists—who vigorously condemn the Weirdo Superhero cartoons. TV GUIDE
has received a flood of protests and the networks likewise admit to receiving
complaints (although they claim not many). NBC’s daytime boss, Larry White,
minimizes the tempest thusly: “When we were kids, our parents had no idea what
we were seeing in the movies on Saturdays. But because we go into the living
room, parents are suddenly critical.”
The criticisms have
been noticed by at least one sponsor—Kellogg’s, which next season will break up
the networks’ Saturday morning procession of Weirdo Superheroes by sponsoring a
“wholesome” weekly variety hour for children.
One of the major
complaints is about the violence in the current shows. White, however,
maintains, `The shows are not violent. Violence always implied. It occurs
off-camera. There are no dead bodies around.” Which, to a degree, is true. The
actual physical contact — i.e., a sock in the jaw, a hit on the head—is never
seen. What is seen is the action immediately preceding and following the
violent action. But whether omitting a few frames of film dispels any notion of
violence is doubtful at best. Says Chip Goodman: “The violence is still there.
It’s just tempered a bit.”
Granting, then, that
the violence exists, a larger question looms. And it’s one which concerns many
parents. Does a repetitious display of fictional violence have a psychological
effect on children?
There are two
prominent schools of thought on this issue. One is represented by Dr. Wilbur L.
Schramm. Fri his study “Television in the Lives !sf Our Children,” Dr. Schramm
con-eludes that “the kind of child we send to television, rather than
television itself, is the chief element in delinquency.” Dr. Schramm’s study
further sites: “The roots of delinquency are
much lower and broader than television. They grow from the home life,
the neighborhood, and the disturbed personality. The most that television can
do is to feed the malignant impulses that already exist.”
Opposing Dr.
Schramm’s findings is Dr. Fredric Wertham, who for years has been warring
against violence in comic books and on TV. He maintains that when an
environment tolerates violence, violent behavior is apt to happen. Dr. Wertham
told TV Guide: “Children want to reason. However, they need raw
materials—models—on which to build their acts. Television—and its display of
violence—comes to the child with adult approval. In cartoons, a child believes
the matter-of-fact hitting going on is a proper course in settling differences.
It’s important to realize that cartoons are not fantasies to children.”
Dr. Wertham adds:
“One cannot, of course, single out TV as the sole contributor to violent
behavior. Nor can one single out cartoons. Both are part of a broad spectrum
which has made a fetish of violence.”
Each of the two
schools of thought has its supporters. Proponents of Dr. Schramm’s theory would
doubtless argue that countless generations have been nurtured on fictional
violence without an appreciable number committing overt acts of violence. As
for Dr. Wertham’s position, it is significant to note that at a recent meeting
of the American Psychiatric Association, 401 members answered a questionnaire
entitled “What Do You Think About Violence?” Eighty-one percent of the
psychiatrists and 74 percent of the non-psychiatrists agreed with Dr. Wertham’s
opinion that violence cannot be explained entirely by the psychology of the
individual and “when the environment tolerates violence, violent behavior is
apt to happen.”
Understandably, it is Dr. Wertham’s
side of the argument which troubles the networks and cartoon makers.
But many maintain
that, as Allen Ducovny puts it, “Wertham has never told us how to construct a
cartoon any other way.” Most cartoons have always, of course, been built around
a chase or fight situation.
Ducovny points out:
“Most of those old cartoons, which people thought were so cutsie-wootsie, were
far more violent than anything that’s on today.” The height of brainless
clobbering was probably reached in the postwar “Tom & Jerry” cartoons, the
battling cat-and-mouse sagas.
Still, there are
those who maintain that a return to TV of the earlier cartoons would be
preferable to the Weirdo Superhero school of violence. Yet they may not really
be asking for Bugs, Mickey, et al. What the animal cartoons had—and what the
majority of the Weirdo Superheroes series conspicuously lack—is comedy. As one
cartoonist explains: “When people yell, ‘Bring back Mickey Mouse,’ they’re
really asking us to put comedy back into the cartoons.”
Some cartoonists are
trying to do just that. But at present, they aren’t making much headway. One such
cartoonmaker, Jay Ward (Bullwinkle), bemoans the onslaught of Weirdo
Superheroes but shrugs: “They’re getting the ratings and that’s all the
networks care about.” And although all three networks keep a slim stable of
comical cartoons (Ward’s George of the Jungle is one), Ward doesn’t think the
number is apt to increase.
At any rate, the Weirdo
Superhero—born of the desire to fill the fantasy needs of today’s
“sophisticated” child —lives on amid controversy. And the networks and cartoon
makers, while staunchly supporting their moneymaking animated monster,
nonetheless admit to sometimes wishing he weren’t around. Says ABC’s Ed Vane:
“We’d love to give the kids Reading Room or A Day at the Planetarium. We’d be
applauded by many—and watched by absolutely no one.”
