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.