Unsung Superheroes: Mister Terrrific.

Unsung Superheroes title card

Here we are, folks! The start of a third series on this blog. Is this too much? I hope not. Anyway, I'm not prepared to do a cartoon or failed pilot post right now. So, this is all I've really got to work with.

This series I'm calling Unsung Superheroes. Spurred on by my disappointment at how minutiae-filled my post about the Justice League was, I came up with this. The idea is to pick a C-list superhero from DC Comics, particularly one I like or who I think will appeal to others, and give an explanation of them while focusing on their core traits and central appeal without getting bogged down in minutiae and convoluted details. It's an exercise in accessibility, really. Though, not always an easy one. DC Comics can be complicated. Mantles get passed between generations. There are frequently multiple versions of characters on multiple different earths. And DC has been known to tinker with its own fictional history. As for why I specifically chose DC and not Marvel. Well, if we're at the point where people are willing to watch movies about Ant-Man or Rocket Raccoon, then there's not much I really have to do. People are already hooked in.

So, I thought I'd start with the hero who stole the show in the 2025 Superman movie: Mister Terrific. But before we get to that specific version, we're going to have to take a little trip back to the 1940s.

Terry Sloane, the original Mister Terrific.

January 1942. In the midst of what many now refer to as the Golden Age of superhero comics. The smash hit debut of Superman in 1938 has caused a race to create more big characters in the same mold. This is when the original Mister Terrific debuts in Sensation Comics #1. This Mister Terrific is Terry Sloane, also known as “The Man With a Thousand Talents”. Sloane was a successful businessman, Olympic-level athlete, master martial artist, and a genius who graduated college at the age of thirteen. Having accomplished all his goals by age 20, Sloane saw nowhere else to go in his life and started pondering suicide. It's at that point that he sees a young woman jump off a bridge and, acting fast, saves her. He then found out that the woman's brother had gotten mixed up in a gang. This is when Terry Sloane devised the costumed identity of Mister Terrific to save him. His costume consisted of red tights, a red cowl, and a green tunic with a yellow emblem emblazoned with his motto “Fair Play”. Mister Terrific was basically the superhero-ification of the concept of the “Renaissance Man”. That sort of multi-field scholar, athlete and often artist whose goal is to become well-rounded rather than to specialize in one field. There are actually a lot of superheroes that have this trait (Batman comes to mind). However, Mister Terrific is probably the only one where it's actually the point. Sloane as Mister Terrific would continue on to create the Fair Play Club, a group meant to keep kids from turning to juvenile delinquency. He would also continue on to become a member of the Justice Society of America. And it's during a team-up between the Justice Society of America and the Justice League of America that Terry Sloane dies at the hands of a villain known as the Spirit King.

However, his legacy would not be forgotten.

Michael Holt as the second Mister Terrific, as he appeared in Spectre #54

We now fast forward to 1997. Businessman, athlete, inventor and martial artist Michael Holt is at the end of his rope. Holt had lost his wife Paula and unborn child in a car crash. Not seeing any other path forward, Holt prepares to take his own life. This is when he meets with an extremely powerful supernatural hero called the Spectre (I'm not explaining the Spectre now. It'll have to wait until another post). The Spectre then proceeds to try to talk Holt down by telling him the story of Terry Sloane. Inspired by Sloane's story, Michael Holt takes on the mantle of Mister Terrific and proceeds to try and turn things around within his community.

A more defined Mister Terrific.

Michael Holt then disappears for a while within the comics, resurfacing in the 1999 JSA series. This version of Michael Holt is closer to his more fully-formed version. He now has his signature T-mask (which blocks him from all technological detection) and multipurpose T-Spheres and greater emphasis is placed on his capabilities as an inventor. He's even acknowledged to be the third smartest man in the world (some say this is just him trying to be humble. It's been heavily suggested that he's the one who made the list in the first place). Mister Terrific then became a member of the JSA in good standing, even becoming the group's chairman. It was from this point that Mister Terrific started to develop into one of DC's top utility players.

Mister Terrific played by Edi Gathegi in Superman (2025)

In both cases, Mister Terrific is a Renaissance Man. A man with a thousand talents. Or as Michael Holt has said about himself, a man with a natural aptitude for having natural aptitudes. But there are things that make the Michael Holt version stand out. His inventiveness for one. For another, he's probably one of the most popular African-American characters in DC Comics. The other is the way that his past and his loss still influence him. His attitude can be cynical or overly clinical. He's also one who's not given to faith, becoming an atheist after the loss of his wife. However, he continues on. While a number of superheroes are motivated by loss, most of them are seeking some form of justice or revenge. For Mister Terrific, it's much more a case of finding some degree of purpose after a major part of his life was taken away from him. But he takes that pain and his innumerable talents and uses them to make the world better.

Despite being a well-regarded character, Mister Terrific just never seems to reach the level of popularity where he can headline. He was given his own title in 2011, which ended up being cancelled in short order. He was also made the lead of a team book titled The Terrifics in 2018 along with Plastic Man, Metamorpho and Phantom Girl, which lasted about two years (fun fact: The Terrifics ws something of an homage to Marvel's Fantastic Four). And right now, Mister Terrific has a big role in the comic book series Justice League Unlimited. He's really succeeds most as a utility player in an ensemble cast.

Mister Terrific's solo series and the team he headlined.

And that's Mister Terrific. I've got a list of other characters I'm going to cover, but if anyone else has a DC hero they'd like me to cover, let me know in the comments.

Until next time.

Cartoon Stars Re-Animated: Mighty Mouse

 

Oh, Mighty Mouse. What is there to say about Mighty Mouse?

There are a couple of problems with talking about Mighty Mouse. One is that in some ways it's more interesting to talk about the unusual reality of Paul Terry and his Terrytoons Studio where Mighty Mouse was born than it is to talk about the actual character.

Paul Terry was a cartoonist and animator. Terry's animation career started with a film he created while working for the New York Press newspaper, titled Little Herman. After that, he started working at the pioneering Bray Studios. After that, he formed his own company, Terry Productions. Terry then closed that studio to go fight in World War I. After returning, he made a deal with screenwriter Howard Estabrook to make a series of animated films based on Aesop's Fables (these cartoons ended up straying from the fables quite a bit. However, they did provide inspiration for a certain fellow by the name of Walt Disney). After that he formed a partnership with Amedee J. Van Beuren to form Fables Studios. That lasted until 1929 when a disagreement about whether they should make cartoons with sound caused Terry to leave and form Terrytoons Studio. Fables Studio would then change to the lesser-known Van Beuren Studio. For the record, Terry was anti-sound.

None of this was unusual for those chaotic early days of animation. What was unusual was Paul Terry's personality among all this.

Paul Terry didn't value taking risks. He didn't value artistic ambition and pushing the artform forward like Walt Disney. He didn't value being good to his talent like Walter Lantz. He didn't value technical innovation like Max Fleischer or Ub Iwerks. What he did value was pure nose-to-the-grindstone production. Pumping out cartoons faster and cheaper than anyone else. Terry's studio was among the last to add sound to their cartoons and one of the last to produce cartoons in color. He routinely took other people's ideas and claimed them as his own. You'd think he was just in animation for the money, but if you asked him he'd claim there was no money to be made in cartoons. He pushed his animators to make cartoons so quickly that he was pretty much immune to labor organizers, having created enough of a backlog of unreleased cartoons that his studio could coast for months through any work stoppage. In his autobiography My Life in 'Toons, Joseph Barbera talks about working at Terrytoons Studio for a short time. He describes Paul Terry as reminding him of Sydney Greenstreet, an actor best known for playing unsavory characters. He even says that Terry once described animation as being no different than being a milkman with their job being to have their product sitting on their customers' doorstep every morning. There are a couple other things he says, even stuff involving veiled threats. When Barbera was considering leaving, Terry told him that he was “Taking care of him”.

It's safe to say that Paul Terry didn't create Mighty Mouse.

Mighty Mouse as he orignally appeared.

The root of the idea came from animator Isadore Klein in 1942 who suggested creating a parody of Superman. The original idea was to be a superhero fly. Terry nixed the idea then told his animators he had a brilliant idea: a parody of Superman that was a mouse (Terrytoons used a lot of mouse characters).

The character originally started as Super Mouse and he debuted in a cartoon titled The Mouse of Tomorrow. He was an ordinary mouse who, in order to fight off a group of cats plaguing the mouse population, goes into a supermarket and transforms by eating Super Soup, Super Celery and Super Cheese and bathing with Super Soap.

Mighty Mouse in his classic form

At least, that's the first origin story.

Super Mouse's name would be changed to Mighty Mouse in 1944 when Paul Terry learned that another character named Super Mouse would be published in an issue of Coo-Coo Comics from publisher Standard Comics. His costume would start to change that same year too. The final design for Mighty Mouse's costume would debut in the cartoon The Sultan's Birthday on October 13, 1944. Here he'd sport his yellow suit, red cape and red trunks as designed by animator Connie Rasinski.

The thing about Mighty Mouse is that there really isn't a lot to him.

A great number of his early cartoons spend the first two thirds setting up some kind of threat to put normal mice in peril (disasters, monsters, cats. Usually cats). Then in the last third, someone would call for help and Mighty Mouse would zoom down from his home up in the stars to fight the foes and reverse the disaster.

It's like a superhero parody in its simplest form. It doesn't even bother with tropes like secret identities and the like.

In a 1969 interview, Paul Terry attributed the popularity of Mighty Mouse to certain religious qualities:

"When a man is sick, or down, or hurt, you say, 'There's nothing more we can do. It's in God's hand.' And he either survives or he doesn't according to God's plan. Right? So, 'Man's extremity is God's opportunity.' So, taking that as a basis, I'd only have to get the mice in a tough spot and then say, 'Isn't there someone who can help?' 'Yes, there is someone; it's Mighty Mouse!' So, down from the heavens he'd come sailing down and lick the evil spirit, or whatever it was. And everything would be serene again."

After years in both cartoon and comic book fan circles, I'm hesitant to attribute Messiahnic qualities to Superman-like figures. But maybe Terry is right.

Though, it's not to say that there wasn't anything interesting in any of Mighty Mouse's cartoons. The melodrama parodies are notable. Starting in 1945, with Mighty Mouse and the Pirates, Mighty Mouse started starring in a series of cartoons with dialogue sung throughout in the style of an operetta. In these cartoons, there was an element of romantic melodrama because Mighty Mouse would have to rescue a dark-haired beauty of a mouse. By 1947's A Fight to the Finish, they had refined the melodrama spoofs further, replacing the dark-haired mouse girl with a fair-haired one named Pearl Pureheart and giving Mighty Mouse a recurring foe in the form of a villainous cat named Oil Can Harry. None of this was particularly new, though. The format and even the villain were lifted from an old Terrytoons series starring a character named Fanny Zilch. In those, a human version of Oil Can Harry always tries to do nefarious things to the aforementioned Fanny. They're fun, if not entirely original.

Now, the thing about Mighty Mouse is that he may have been the most popular of the Terrytoons characters, but the Terrytoons were not all that popular to begin with. So, why didn't Mighty Mouse fade into obscurity a whole lot faster than he did?

Well, it so happened that at one point in the 1950s, when much of the movie and animation induustries were pondering what effect television was going to have on their livelihoods, Paul Terry just up and sold his entire studio to CBS. It happened seemingly without much warning at all. The great irony is that Terry could have made a lot more for his studio. Terry's business manager who became the Terrytoons excutive producer at CBS said that they recouped the investment the network made in only two years.

Anyway, the rest is television history. The show Mighty Mouse Playhouse hit CBS airwaves in 1955 and became one of the very first Saturday morning hits. Even the famous Mighty Mouse theme song that so many people know came from this show.

There were some interesting twists and turns for the Terrytoons studio as time went on. At one point, Gene Dietch from UPA became the director of Terrytoons. Which meant that someone from one of the most experimental studios of the era was running what was once one of the most risk-averse studios of the era. It didn't really work out though, largely because Dietch's cartoons at Terrytoons really just . . . well . . . weren't funny. There were bright spots, though. Under Gene Dietch, Terrytoons created the character of Tom Terrific for The Captain Kangaroo Show. Then Bill Weiss took over. Under him, characters like Hector Heathcote, Hashimoto and Deputy Dawg were created. But Weiss's tenure was marked by significant cost-cutting. Famed animation maverick Ralph Bakshi also started his career at Terrytoons during this time before moving on to other things. Eventually, the studio closed in 1973.

But Terrytoons' legacy seems to be Mighty Mouse.

In 1979, a new show The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle premiered. It was made by Filmation. In addition to the two previously mentioned cartoons, it also included a segment featuring a vampire duck named Quacula. The show ended in 1980.

The 1979 version of Mighty Mouse

In 1988, the aforementioned Ralph Bakshi returned to the Terrytoons stable of characters with Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures. Bakshi's take was much more satirical with more risque humor. It also is a much more effective supehero parody, giving Mighty Mouse a secret identity in the form of Mike Mouse and a sidekick by the name of Scrappy Mouse. It lasted two seasons.

Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures.

Mighty Mouse and the other Terrytoons characters still belong to CBS, which makes it part of the greater Nickelodeon/Paramount/Viacom family. Right now, Mighty Mouse cartoons are airing on the channel MeTV Toons. There was some talk about a Mighty Mouse movie a while back, but nothing materialized. It's still possible. If nothing else, there's still room to take risks with the Mighty Mouse character. So, maybe don't count the Mouse of Tomorrow out just yet.

The Justice League Paradox.

 Okay . . . so this might be a bad idea. Seeing as what few readers I have probably don't care much about comic book superheroes. At least not to the degree that I have since the age of 11 (Oh, my misspent youth). But I started writing all this for my post on the 1997 Justice League of America pilot, then cut it out and told myself that I'd turn it into a separate post somewhere down the line.

So, what is it?

Well, it's a post about how the Justice League as a concept has been sold to most people both comic readers and folks outside the hobby as a certain platonic ideal that is often fairly distant from what it actually is in the comic books themselves. The Justice League is typically sold as a serious all-star team composed of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman and Martian Manhunter, with maybe the occasional substitutions made for the sake of diversity, and only engaging in the most epic of adventures. The truth is not exactly that.

Ahem . . .

Okay, so the first Justice League wasn't actually a Justice League. The concept first appeared in All-Star Comics #3 in 1940 as the Justice Society of America. A group of costumed mystery men banding together into one group. It was the first superhero team ever. It was also a promotional scheme. You see, National Comics and All-American Comics (soon to merge into DC) decided to put all the heroes who couldn't quite get popular enough to have their own monthly feature in one book to give them more exposure. This includes early versions of Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman and Atom, among others. They would meet at the beginning of the issue, discuss some problem, and then generally go off and have some solo adventure connected to that problem. There was very little actual teamwork for at least the first year. And then when one of the members became popular enough to anchor a monthly magazine, they were moved off the team as an “honorary member” and then a new member came in to replace them.

The original Justice Society of America

Then, after superheroes started making a comeback (their popularity had been surpassed in the '50s by crime, romance and horror comics), DC tried to revive the Justice Society concept in 1960. This time it was renamed the Justice League of America and featured all the superheroes who were already popular enough to carry a title. The roster was: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman and the J'onn J'onnz-The Manhunter from Mars! Epic, right?! Well . . . Superman and Batman didn't show up much during the first year. DC editorial didn't think they needed to. It was only later they realized that Superman and Batman's popularity could be used to promote the JLA rather than the other way around. And even before that, the “Big 7” didn't last long as Green Arrow joined in the team's fourth issue. They did have some big science fiction stories, but they felt more like something out of Star Trek or Doctor Who than big blocksbusters. They also very rarely acted together, usually splitting into small groups to handle different parts of an adventure in different locations. And also . . . they were just kind of a club for superheroes. When they weren't out adventuring they just hung out in their Secret Sanctuary (it was a cave. Lots of superheroes hung out in caves) and told adventure yarns to their sidekick/mascot, a hipster teen named Snapper Carr.

The early Justice League of America, including team mascot Snapper Carr.

Moving into the late '60s, the League phased out Snapper Carr and moved their headquarters to an orbiting satellite. Now, this is where the Justice League starts to seem like what was advertised. Mind youy, the HQ wasn't called “The Watchtower” yet. That would come later. But if the “Big 7” is what you think of when you think of the Justice League, then they're going way beyond that. The League at this point consists of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Atom, Hawkman and Black Canary. The Martian Manhunter had already started to be phased out as well, because his popularity had declined. And to this group of nine, they added such luminaries as Hawkgirl, Zatanna, Red Tornado, PhantomStranger, the Elongated Man and Firestorm. It's not quite the most exclusive team anymore, now was it?

Most of the cast of the Satellite era Justice League of America

And here's where things really go off base.

You see, at this point there was a big shift in how superhero teams were written. Over the years, they had already been leaning more and more into character drama, which was popular with older readers. However, there was also an increase in the popularity of teams of younger heroes with more youthful energy. This was exemplified by the popualrity of DC's own Legion of Super-Heroes and New Teen Titans, as well as Marvel's X-Men.

So, with that in mind and decreasing sales for Justice League of America, writer Gerry Conway had Aquaman disband the League. He then reformed it with fellow remaining members Martian Manhunter (who came back), Zatanna and Elongated Man. To this, they added new, young, fresh members Vixen, Steel, Vibe and Gypsy. The team was at the time without an HQ (the JLA Satellite had been blown out of the sky as part of the previous story) so they relocated to an underground bunker in Detroit, Michigan provided by their new member Steel. This version of the League didn't do particularly well. It lasted for only two years, from 1984 to 1986. It ended with two members, Steel and Vibe, being killed off.

The Justice League during the Detroit period (plus Cosmic Boy and Firestorm)

After this, in 1985, there was a huge time-bending story across all of the DC line called Crisis on Infinite Earths. The Crisis is hard to explain, but its intention was to rewrite DC's in-universe history, streamline some things, revitalize some other stuff and just try to spruce up pretty much everything.

So, this would be a good time to relaunch the classic Justice League of America, right? Get all the big guns back in one place. Back to an all-star lineup of characters, right? Well, DC editorial thought so at first. There was a problem, though. It turns out that when you rewrite the history of everything, you end up rewriting the history of all the major characters too. Every major superhero DC had was in the process of being revamped and rebooted. And in order to keep their work from becoming more complicated, the editors of all their solo books told the editor of Justice League “hands off”.

So, other than Batman and Martian Manhunter, all the other big name Justice League characters were unavailable. They also got a Green Lantern, but not the classic one Hal Jordan. Instead, they got the ornery and egotistical Guy Gardner (you may remember him from the recent Superman movie). Beyond that, the new writers pick from what they could among the lesser lights, choosing some characters who were brand new, some who were facing a revival and some that were pretty obscure. The roster was flexible, but a basic line-up would be something like Martian Manhunter, Guy Gardner, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Fire, Ice, Captain Atom and Rocket Red. Batman, despite involvement, remained a bit aloof. The new creative team had a few tricks up their sleeve. First was the addition of a mysterious new suppoprting character named Maxwell Lord to head up the team's development. Next, they managed to set the stakes pretty high by giving the League a new political status as a team backed by the United Nations. And the last thing they did was maybe the biggest risk of all: They made it funny. The Justice League International as it was now called was basically a workplace comedy that found humor in how a group of very different people bounced off each other.

And it was wildly popular. Much to the consternation of higher-ups at DC.

There were spin-off titles. Justice League International split into Justice League America and Justice League Europe. Later on, there would be comics with titles like Justice League Task Force and Extreme Justice. The comical tone didn't stay and neither did the original writers and artists, but this version of the Justice League lasted for ten years. I should also note that this is the version of the Justice League that I grew up reading about.

The Justice League International

Despite a respectable run, sales would eventually decline significantly. In 1996, that version of the Justice League ended too. A new title JLA was launched by superstar writer Grant Morrison (note: I will be referring to Morrison as “they” and “them” pronoun-wise because that's what they prefer to be called). They once again brought back the “Big 7” roster, stationed them in the new JLA Watchtower on the moon and used their knack for big concept science fiction to create one of the most lauded runs of the Justice League there is. And even Morrison didn't stick with the “Big 7”. Morrison added characters like Green Arrow, Plastic Man, Oracle, Huntress, Zauriel, Steel (a different Steel than the one in Detroit), Aztek, Tomorrow Woman, Orion and Big Barda. Some of them were just temporary members. Others were part of Morrison's greater theme of the Justice League as a pantheon of modern gods. You see, the new members along with the “Big 7” were supposed to correlate with certain figures from the Greek pantheon (Oracle=Athena, Steel=Hephaestus, Plastic Man=Dionysus, etc).

Anyway, that version was also wildly popular. And it basically became the basis for most Justice League-related media outside of comics going forward. Notably the Justice League cartoon series.

JLA by Grant Morrison and Bryan Hitch

After that, I stopped paying quite such close attention. But it was mostly the same stuff. New writers and artists constructing their own Leagues of both major and minor players. The main difference now seemed to be that they were very hesitant to not have Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman in their lineups. Also, the Justice Society had a revival, though they've evolved from a promotional title posing as a team to a multi-generational extended family of superheroes where the descendants and proteges of heroes from the '40s go to train with what remains of the old guard.

The new generation Justice Society of America

So, why does it keep happening? Well, beyond the obvious cases of editors saying “no”, there's also the fact that a comic book series can be really boring if all you can do with your characters is have them punch things. Most modern comic writers don't have the knack for just big science fiction like Morrison and are more attuned to character drama. So, it helps a lot to have characters they themselves can have full control of. Characters they can change and put through their paces. Characters who can be coupled up in romantic pairings. Characters they can kill off if it serves the story. And it didn't just happen for the League. Over at Marvel, the Avengers stopped being a collection of big stars in 1965.

So, what's the takeaway? Why did I write all this? Well, part of me hopes some Hollywood big shot at Warner Brothers sees it and realizes that Justice League media can be more flexible. I hope for that, but know it's a long shot. At best, maybe I can convince some comic book fans out there that this stuff doesn't need to be taken quite so seriously.

[SIGH]

Anyway, next time will be a subject that's more approachable. Though, I am thinking about taking another shot at writing about superhero comics now. Because I think I can do better than this giant wall of minutiae I just produced. Maybe. It's an interesting challenge at least.

Television Oddities: Justice League of America (1997)

 

Television Oddities title card

Today, dear readers, I want to take you back. Back to a time when superhero media was no where as prevalent as it is today. Back to the ramshackle days of the mid-to-late 1990s, when superheroes weren't blowing up international box offices and were still largely the denizens of comic book shops, toy boxes, video game consoles and Saturday morning TV. With maybe the occasional evening drama or big budget movie to serve as an exception to the rule.

It was into this environment that this pilot was made. After the ambitious but ultimately doomed 1990 series The Flash, and 1993's rousing success of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, DC Comics was still interested in continuing to showcase their characters on TV. That's when a pilot for CBS was greenlit for one of DC Comics' premiere teams, The Justice League of America.

Group shot of the cast of Justice League of America.

Now, this is kind of an infamous pilot in some circles. And it's been talked about a lot. But many of the videos and blog posts I've encountered about it seem to mostly be the same thing. They all just kind of seem like comic book fanboys kvetching about how the pilot, and particularly the cast, don't match perfectly with their platonic ideal of what a Justice League of America television show should be. I'm hoping to take a different tack and cover both why it didn't work from a comics fan perspective and why it just doesn't pass muster as a pilot.

Part of me wants to give you a “quick-and-dirty” run down of the history of the Justice League, but that would be a bit much. So, I've decided to save all that for a different post and focus on the one version of the Justice League that this pilot is ostensibly based on.

In 1987, DC Comics wanted to relaunch the Justice League of America. This came right after a big event story titled Crisis on Infinite Earths, which changed the DC Universe to a large degree. And which they were now using as an excuse to try to clean up and revamp their big name characters. Origin stories were retold in different ways. Wonder Woman was relaunched completely. The Flash was a different person. A lot going on. Now, DC wanted to relaunch the JLA with all the big name characters. The last version didn't have any of them (I'll explain that some other time) and it didn't work out well. There was just one problem and it was that all the big name characters were being relaunched too. The editors of those comic books told the editor of Justice League to kindly keep their hands off. So, writers Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and artist Kevin Maguire reaching for whoever was available. They ended up with a cast of lesser lights, newbies and characters who were being tried for a revival. The cast changed but a general line-up would be something like Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern (the Guy Gardner one), Captain Atom, Rocket Red, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Fire and Ice. They had a couple of tricks up there sleeves, though. One is that they maintained the sense of scope for their team even without Superman in their ranks by making the team official. The Justice League was rechristened the Justice League International and was now officially sanctioned by the United Nations. So, now they had to deal with global politics too. The other was the philosophy for the JLI. The idea was that the League would be a place where superheroes could act like people complete with flaws, foibles and rough edges. Some became fast friends, others grated on each others' nerves. And a lot of these interactions would be leveraged towards humor. Giffen, DeMatteis and Maguire essentially created possibly the first superhero workplace comedy.

The comic that introduced the Justice League International.

It was wildly popular. Popular enough for Justice League International to be spun into two series Justice League America and Justice League Europe. Plus a quarterly book they would share.

This was the Justice League I largely grew up with. It's also the Justice League that this pilot is supposedly based on.

Supposedly . . .

We start out with Tori Olafsdotter aka Ice giving a documentary-style confessional to a camera about her lack of confidence and how she never expected to end up a superhero.

In comics, Ice is Tora Olafsdotter and she hails from a race of Nordic “Ice Gods”. Here, she's a meteorologist with self-esteem issues who works for Dr. Eno at the Eno Institute. They are tracking a shurricane headed to New Metro City. A storm that has been predicted by a cryptic individual known as The Weatherman.

Ah, New Metro City. Of all the fake cities associated with DC superheroes, this one seems the fakest. Somehow the city is near a desert and a waterfront and has some sort of film/TV industry going on and yet has no truly noteworthy character. It's not gloomy like Gotham, awe-inspiring like Metropolis or bustling like Central City. It just kind of is.

Then we get another confessional featuring Barry Allen aka The Flash. The Barry Allen we know from the comics and recent TV shows is a forensic scientist. This one is unemployed. And he's seemingly going out of his way to communicate that he is basically “Joe Shmoe”. He talks about how he likes to go bowling and watch football on the tube and all that. And then we're treated to a scene of Barry's landlord evicting him from his apartment, including throwing his stuff out of a second-story window. Right before Barry has to race off and deal with the rogue hurricane.

Next the camera trains itself on Guy Gardner, aka Green Lantern. There have been a number of different Green Lanterns in the comics. This version seems to be three different ones squished together into one character. For a more accurate take on the Guy Gardner version, watch 2025's Superman movie. Anyway, he laments that Barry gets to have such an uncomplicated life while his is so complex. We then see him on a date trying to make up with his girlfriend Cheryl, who apparently is angry because he keeps disappearing to save the city. And then he disappears to save the city.

I feel like this will go a long time if I keep doing this as a blow-by-blow.

To keep things short, we are introduced to two more heroes via on-camera confessional. One is B.B. DaCosta aka Fire. In comics, Beatriz DaCosta, a Brazilian supermodel and secret agent with fire powers. Here, she's a struggling actress. The other is Ray Palmer aka The Atom. Here he's a science teacher who can shrink down in size. In the comics . . . actually, Ray's pretty much spot on. Except he's a college professor instead of a science teacher.

The Justice League right before they run off to the final battle. 

The confessionals continue throughout the pilot. The plot becomes about finding and stopping the Weatherman, who is manipulating the weather while dealing with their own personal struggles. Barry keeps looking for a job. Guy keeps trying to get back together with Cheryl. B.B. Doesn't struggle so much with pursuing acting as being pursued by a guy she meets at an audition who's way too young for her. Ray deals with his growing attraction to Tori while Tori deals with her confidence issues. This is also an origin story for Tori as she gains ice powers from being zapped by the Weatherman's machine.

To aid Tori in her quest to control her powers, she's brought to the Justice League's mysterious, shadowy leader/mentor, The Martian Manhunter. He's played by David Ogden Stiers, of M*A*S*H fame. He's got an amazing voice for the role, but he's more than a little, shall we say, paunchy. The pilot uses Martian Manhunter very sparingly anyway. The two times he leaves the League's secret underwater headquarters, it's shape-shifted into someone else.

David Ogden Stiers as The Martian Manhunter

As for the Weatherman . . . I'm just going to spoil it up front. The Weatherman is Tori's boss Dr. Eno, played by Miguel Ferrer. They tried to do a fake-out thing where one of Tori's co-workers is hinted to be the Weatherman. But anyone watching should have figured it out. Because there are only two actors in the whole cast that seem capable of projecting enough gravitas to be a supervillain. One is David Ogden Stiers, who is already playing Martian Manhunter. The other is Miguel Ferrer.

So, I'm going to say something that would be considered blasphemy in some comic book circles: the problem with this pilot was not the lack of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Adding them to this specific pilot would not have improved anything (imagine Barry complaining about not having a job while billionaire Bruce Wayne is right there). And under normal circumstances and with proper characterization, the characters they did have are good characters. After all, Justice League International was able to succeed using a group of characters who are even lower tier than this (Note for the uninitiated: The Flash and the Atom are generally considered to be bigger characters than, say, Blue Beetle or Booster Gold). And most regular people and network executives would not be comparing it to a comic book.

The problem is that it's just a bad pilot.

I mean, the costumes are a problem and the special effects are a problem. But a further problem is that it's just so generic. The city they're in is generic. The villain is generic.  The characters feel like the generic character types you'd pick if you were doing “Five young people getting by in the big city”. There's the guy with relationship problems, the guy who has trouble holding down a job, the struggling actress and two varaiations of the nerd with self-confidence issues. They're clearly trying to run with the same “What if superheroes were human beings with feelings” approach as the comic book and seem to have circled around again to “What if superheroes' personal lives were kind of boring and mundane”. The scope has gone downright local and domestic. And they're relying on trends of 1990s television to make it work. Instead of a workplace comedy like the original JLI, they went with a friend group dynamic like the NBC show Friends. And while the confessional bits may remind modern people of The Office, back then it would have been considered evocative of the MTV reality show The Real World.

The final line-up sans Martian Manhunter and including Ice.

But for some reason I still find it kind of charming. Because it reminds me of a time earlier in my life when depicting the Justice League didn't have quite so many rules attached to it.

Anyway, this pilot never aired in the United States. But I believe it did air in some places overseas. And bootlegs of it did start popping up on the comic con circuit shortly thereafter. If you're morbidly curious, I found it online at Dailymotion.

Cartoon Stars Re-Animated: Felix the Cat.

 

Cartoon Stars Re-Animated title card

There's a famous quote by Walt Disney that goes “I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing-that it was all started by a mouse”.

And that may be true of Disney's huge business empire. However, in cartoons before there was a mouse there was a cat.

The artform of the animated cartoon started before Disney and a lot of others came on the scene. The concept first arose in the teens (uh, the decade runnng from 1910 to 1919. There really isn't a non-awkward term for this decade). Much of it grew out of the world of newspaper cartooning and comic strips. One of the earliest movers and shakers in the animated cartoon world was Winsor McKay, cartoonist of the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, and creator of the animated Gertie the Dinosaur. William Randolph Hearst, newspaper magnate and owner of the King Features comic strip syndicate, even started his own animation studio. But as the teens moved into the '20s, we saw some of the old studios go under and new ones arise. It was at this time that we saw the rise of Pat Sullivan Studios.

Pat Sullivan was Australian and had lived a rather checkered past before coming to the U.S. and becoming a newspaper cartoonist. Sullivan was working to turn some of the comic strips he worked on into animated cartoons when he met a young cartoonist named Otto Messmer. Messmer was only learning the basics of cartoon animation when Sullivan met Messmer but as Messmer got better and better, Sullivan gave him more and more responsibility for the cartoons until he stopped drawing them altogether. Though, he continued taking credit for all of Messmer's work.

It was under Messmer's pen that gold was struck in 1919. With the studio being particularly busy, Sullivan prompted Messmer to create a cartoon at home on his free time (Sullivan really isn't beating any “bad boss” allegations, is he?). What Messmer created was a cartoon titled Feline Follies, which starred a black cat that at the time was called Master Tom. Paramount loved it, which netted Pat Sullivan Studios a contract to be part of their Paramount Screen Magazine that aired before Paramount feature films. Moreover, the public seemed to love the little black cat as well. And over subsequent cartoons, the character would be developed further in design and would get a new name.

An early Felix the Cat

He became Felix the Cat. And Felix would go on to be one of the biggest cartoon stars of the 1920s. He also went on to be one of the first highly merchandised cartoon stars in history. Sullivan would license out the character to numerous different parties. Felix toys would be manufactured. A Felix comic strip would be developed (back then, it usually went the other way. A comic strip first and then an animated cartoon) which Messmer worked on for years. Musical acts would write and record songs that mentioned Felix.

Why was Felix so successful. Well, one of the big things was that he had “personality”. A lot of animated cartoons back then were mostly just strings of visual gags and lots of motion for about six minutes. The characters weren't characters yet even in the strictest sense. But “personality animation”, something Walt Disney specialized in and propelled his cartoon empire, wasn't really a thing yet. But people saw the beginnings of it with Felix. One of the big things that hit with people was “the walk”. When Felix met with an obstacle, he would do this specific walk. Head down, hands clasped behind his back, hunched forward and eyes narrowed. It was a thinking walk. Felix had hit a roadblock, was disappointed, but was thinking of a way around it. This was one of the first suggestions that an animated cartoon character had some kind of internal life. (Here's a fan recreation of the Felix walk done by FTF the Toonist).

The surreal gags and animation probably helped too. The cartoons of the 1920s were big on surreal gags. One thing Felix frequently did was detach his tail and transform it into other things like a telescope or a walking stick. He would also sometimes interact with things in the cartoon that weren't supposed to be physical parts of the environment. Like, he'd get surprised and a bunch of question marks would appear above his head, and then he'd climb up onto the question marks. One of my favorite early Felix cartoons is probably Comicalamities, in which Felix interacts with his own animator (which was much more common in 1920s cartoons than you may think).

Before we move on from Felix's original run, I think maybe we should stop and acknowledge that I may have been making all this sound a lot better than it was. Largely, because I've been leaving out elements that were just there as part of a less enlightened era.

Yes, the cartoons were successful. We already acknowledged that Sullivan, though a shrewd businessman, probably wasn't a very good boss. The other thing we need to acknowledge is that Felix and a lot of other 1920s and early 1930s cartoon characters drew elements and mannerisms from a type of show that is very fairly maligned now. That is, minstrel shows and the “pickaninny” blackface stereotypes therein. It's not just Felix, either. There's a lot of it in Mickey Mouse too. Heck, Harman and Ising's character Bosko pretty much took the subtext and made it text. Even the white gloves many cartoon characters wear have roots in costuming used in minstrel shows, despite them having an actual purpose in setting their hands apart from bodies that were often rendered in all black (note: Felix somehow side-stepped the white gloves). The thing is that, back then, it was an easy way of communicating that a character was happy and cheerful and mischevious to an audience largely made up of white people who didn't know how awful they were being.

So now, with that out of the way . . .

Felix the Cat did not survive the transition to sound cartoons. A number of studios hesitated on transitioning to sound and it really hurt them. It hurt Pat Sullivan Studios a fair bit. Mind you, the failure of Pat Sullivan Studios was exacerbated by Sullivan's alcoholism and his failing health after the death of his wife.

Revivals were attempted. The first was by Van Beuren Studio, another studio that definitely existed but would not last a long time. They licensed Felix for three cartoons in their Rainbow Parade series. Those cartoons were Felix the Cat and the Goose that Laidthe Golden Egg, Neptune's Nonsense, and Bold King Cole. The first of these cartoons came about in 1936. To a large extent, these cartoons traded the more surreal elements of 1920s cartoon with fantasticism. Felix found himself fighting pirates to save a magical goose, walking around underwater and meeting King Neptune, and helping a braggart nursery rhyme king from being bedeviled by the ghosts of his ancestors. These cartoons didn't really create a long term revival for Felix. Maybe a better takeaway for them is that cartoon revivals have been attempted for a lot longer than a lot of people think.

In 1953, Official Films purchased the Sullivan-Messmer shorts and gave them new soundtracks, distributing them to home movie and television networks.

In 1958, a new Felix the Cat television series premiered. This one was headed up by Joe Oriolo, who had been Messmer's assistant and taken over the Felix comic strip (he was also one of the creators of Casper the Friendly Ghost). This cartoon, made by Paramount Cartoon Studios and distributed by Trans-Lux Entertainment, saw a much less mischevious Felix get into numerous adventures as a number of villains like the Professor, Rock Bottom and the robotic Master Cylinder try to steal Felix's magic bag of tricks, a carpetbag that can transform and hold anything inside it (the bag of tricks is probably one of Oriolo's most lasting additions to the character). The cartoons were not of the best quality, with severely limited animation and a main character whose personality kind of felt like it was cribbed from Mickey Mouse. Critics and people who remember the earlier Felix the Cat were quick to criticize them as such. None of which mattered, because the cartoons were actually very popular with children at the time.

Title image for 1958 Felix the Cat.

In 1970, Joe Oriolo gained full control of the character. Ownership would later pass to his son Don Oriolo.

In the late 1980s, Don Oriolo teamed with various European animators to create Felix the Cat: The Movie. This movie actually took Felix, his friend Pointdexter, his enemy the Professor and Felix's magic bag to a distant science fantasy world called Oriana to save a princess and stop a dastardly plot by her evil uncle the Duke of Zil. Judging from the trailer, the movie was a big, crazy swing visually. But I can't say more about it because I haven't been able to find a copy to watch. Trust me, I've looked! Anyway, the movie went straight to video and was not a financial success.

Felix the Cat: The Movie poster

In 1994, Felix was brought back to TV again for The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat. This series tried to combine all the elements from different versions of Felix while doubling down on the surreal imagery from the 1920s cartoons. This was probably seen as a viable option because there were more and more cartoons at the time using more outlandish imagery (think Ren & Stimpy). But this production was troubled and only lasted two seasons. Among other things, word is Don Oriolo kept trying to push the show to be more like the version his father created in the '50s.

A host of characters from The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat.

Personal note: Of all the different versions of Felix, Twisted Tales is probably my favorite version. With the 1920s cartoons coming in second and the Van Beuren ones third. I just prefer a more mischevious Felix.

Anyway, Baby Felix followed in 2000 for the Japanese market (did I mention that Felix is big in Japan.  You haven't experienced Japanese commercials until Felix the Cat tries to sell you a car). This was a preschool show starring the characters from 1958 show. Then in 2004, there was the direct-to-video Felix the Cat Saves Christmas, again drawing inspiration from the 1958 show.

Baby Felix

And that's basically been it for a while. The earliest Felix cartoons have since moved into the public domain. In a move that's sounding very familiar, the later stuff was bought up by Dreamworks Classic (formerly Classic Media), putting him under the auspices of Universal. Though he is no longer owner, Don Oriolo is still very involved in promoting the character.

I know others may not see it this way because the character is just so old now, but it is a shame that one of the first big cartoon stars never really seemed to find a concrete way forward. A character once seen as having so much personality within his medium is now seen as having almost none (like a certain Mouse we alluded to earlier). On top of that, there's the push and pull between creators who want to have more surreal hijinks and those pushing for simple adventures for kids. It wasn't even the problematic origins of the character mentioned previously (after all, it never hurt Mickey). It was just not deciding on who Felix is in the modern day. At this point, it's easier to find him as a pop culture icon on a t-shirt than as an actual character.

So, what might they be able to do with Felix now?

I don't know. Maybe . . . video games?

There's been an uptick in video games that use very retro cartoon art styles in the last couple of decades. One of the big ones is Cuphead from 2017. There was also a horror game titled Bendy and the Ink Machine from the same year (though I'm not sure I'd like to see a horror version of Felix). And I still see trailers for retro cartoon style video games pop up in my YouTube feed today. There's one specific one with airplanes that keeps popping up as an ad, though I forgot the name of it (probably a sign that the advertising is only half working). On top of that, a rerelease of the Felix the Cat NES and Game Boy games from 1992 and 1993 respectively came out in 2024 from Limited Run. It feels like it's only a matter of time before someone does it with an actual classic cartoon character. And if they can run with the surreal visuals like Cuphead did and not turn it into a riff on the 1958 cartoon, maybe it would have a chance.

Beyond that, I don't think we'll see any big revival of Felix coming soon. He's probably a lot easier to make money on as an image for t-shirts and the like. And I don't see a lot of showrunners lining up to take on a 100+ year old cartoon character.

But still, it's a shame.

Television Oddities: Inner Tube (1987)

 

Television Oddities title card

Okay! So, my series Cartoon Stars Re-Animated continues apace. But it seems that there's a real lack of variety on this blog. So, I have an idea. Why don't we have a series about TV shows that never happened?! Thanks to the wonders of the internet, we now have access to many things that either were shown only once or weren't meant to be seen at all. By that, I mean failed pilots and pitch reels. Here I will draw attention to the existence of such things, talk about them and give my two cents on why they might have failed to become a series. And I call this series (for lack of a better name): Television Oddities.

I thought I'd start with something fairly safe and familiar . . .

Actually, no, I'm starting off with something that may be one of the strangest things you've seen on YouTube in a good, long while.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jim Henson's Inner Tube.

Inner Tube started as an idea titled In-TV. The basic idea was meant to be an update of the Muppet variety show concept, but with some parody and satire of the then-current state of cable television (it was 1987). The idea is that instead of being on a vaudeville-esque show with a bunch of oddballs, the guest star would get sucked into the TV and would then have to traverse from channel to channel in order to eventually get out. And it would be as they jumped from channel to channel that they would find themselves in the various sketches and musical acts. At the center of the show would be two characters, mechanics Henry and Jake who run their own fly-by-night cable channel out of the back of an electronics shop.

Jake and Henry from "Inner Tube"

A script for a pilot was written by David Misch with John Candy written in as a possible first guest star (no guest star actually appeared, though). Jim Henson had issues with the original script, though. And creative consultant Larry Mirkin called the original pilot “consistently dark, victimized and pessimisstic” and emphasized that it also seemed unfunny. But Jim Henson thought it still had potential and cut down the script to a ten minute pitch reel which was filmed to be shopped around to different networks.

The pitch reel itself establishes the satirical tone right off with an introduction of the “Inner Tube System” by Kermit the Frog (who assumedly would not be in the regular show), selling us the idea that Inner Tube would have “1500 channels so you can find the right channel to match your mood, your IQ, your income bracket and your clothes”. We're also introduced to the mechanics Henry and Jake. The former a younger, thinner, less savvy fellow and the latter older, fatter, mustachioed and with more of a grasp of the situation they're in. There's also a band of characters playing a wonderfully late-80s song which I'd assume is the theme song. And there are three antagonistic characters introduced. One is Crasher, a violent, punked-out fellow who channels his frustration at not being able to star in every show by jumping from channel to channel and literally crashing their shows. Another is Glitch, a msichevious animated glob-like thing that runs from channel to channel and which Henry and Jake seem very concerned with catching (I'm not sure why). And last was Zaloom, a “channel pirate” played by a human actor (or at least his head and hands), who takes over channels to spread his message about the dangers of technology through unusual means (fun fact: Zaloom is actually played by Paul Zaloom, who went on to play Beakman in the kids' science show Beakman's World).

Glitch

One thing I can't help noticing is that with Kermit's whole spiel and Henry and Jake's whole channel-hopping escapade to catch Glitch, the premise of the pitch reel seems to vary from the confirmed premise that's been chronicled online. Instead of two mechanics running a public access channel out of the back of their shop, Henry and Jake seem more like two technicians for the whole Inner Tube System. Perhaps the change came with Jim Henson's tweaking of the pilot into a pitch reel.

The show itself never came to pass. It was pitched to networks like NBC and nobody bit. Henson gave it one last go, pitching it as part of The Jim Henson Hour, now with the name changed from Inner Tube to Lead Free TV. Still didn't happen. The blue screen graphic of the main setting with all the TV screens would be reused for the MuppeTelevision portions of TheJim Henson Hour, and the band's keyboardist Digit would also appear on the show as a supporting player. But that's it.

Digit.  Originally created for Inner Tube, but officially from The Jim Henson Hour

Why did networks pass on it? I don't know for sure, but I can take a coupld of guesses.  For one, a television series that actively makes fun of your product was going to be a hard sell. Even if he only shopped it around to networks like ABC, CBS and NBC, most people were now accessing those channels through cable packages and the networks were benefitting from it. There have been episodes of TV shows that have poked fun at cable, certainly. But an entire series playing off the notion of “cable TV is weird and kind of excessive” probably wasn't going to fly.

Also, well, you've seen what the puppets on this show looked like. One of the unfortunate things about puppets is that they generally seem to fall into the categories of either “cute” or “creepy” with little space in between. And the more human you try to make the puppets, the creepier they seem. These are definitely falling more into the creepy category.

Still, if you can get past that, the pitch reel is an interesting snapshot of a specific time in media technology. The days when cable was king. Nowadays, the common criticism is now that “everyone has a streaming service”. But even before streaming, many of the jokes presented in the pitch reel became outmoded. For example, one of the main jokes seems to be how amazingly specific each channel has to be to justify its existence. But I remember a time in the late '90s or early 2000s when that hyper-specificity was starting to be done away with as cable channels started focusing more on demographic rather than genre. I remember when Cartoon Network started playing live action shows. I remember when the Sci-Fi Channel (later SyFy) started playing non-science fiction programs like the WWE. I remember when American Movie Classics (AMC) stopped focusing on airing classic movies. The days of a channel being focused on something like science fiction are now long gone in favor of being a channel focused on adult males aged 18-35.

Anyway, that's it for the first episode of Television Oddities. I have some idea of what I'd like to do for the next installment. But if anyone knows of a failed pilot or pitch for me to check out, please let me know in the comments.

Next time: more cartoons.