A couple weeks ago in this space I mentioned that the animated Superman cartoons produced by Filmation Studios for Saturday morning TV in the late ’60s were my gateway drug to comic books a couple years later when I started reading. But there was another animated series produced by another studio for another network that also helped open the floodgates for all the misspent dimes and quarters of my misspent youth.
In 1967, Hanna-Barbera Studios – which pretty much dominated Saturday morning TV at the time – cut a deal with Marvel Comics to produce twenty episodes of The Fantastic Four. Six years earlier, Marvel had introduced its Fantastic Four comic book series about a dysfunctional family of superheroes – each one genetically altered and enhanced during a trip into outer space. Created by artist Jack Kirby and writer Stan Lee, the comic book had resonated spectacularly with readers, not only resuscitating the struggling publishing company but also revitalizing the entire industry.
The animated Fantastic Four made its (their?) initial run on the ABC network every Saturday morning from September 1967 to September 1968. ABC continued to air the same episodes for three subsequent seasons before pulling them out of the rotation to make room for new programming in the early ‘70s.
Bits and pieces of the 1967 series stick in my memory more than five decades later. It was my first exposure to Marvel’s first family: Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben. They struck me as edgy and cool in a cosmic, sci-fi kind of way – much like the original source material was edgy and cool in a cosmic, sci-fi kind of way, which I later learned when I started reading Fantastic Four comics a few years later.
Over at the CBS network, Superman was reassuring in his consistency. He was the elder statesman of superheroes, and the standard bearer for all things related to DC Comics. And he had a reputation for being indestructible, so he was a safe bet.
But the Fantastic Four? They were a different story. They each brought a certain skill set to the game – and the whole, as the saying goes, was indeed greater than the sum of its parts. But every episode pitted them against some formidable foes, so for all of their weird but fascinating powers and abilities, victory was never certain – which just made the experience a little more exciting.
Fast forward more than a half-century. The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Marvel Studios’ big-screen, live-action adaptation of the FF franchise, opens in theaters everywhere this weekend. For as much as I’m looking forward to it, I’m struck by a sense of poignancy at the same time. If Hanna-Barbera’s iteration of The Fantastic Four in the late ‘60s was my first wide-eyed encounter with the team – or any other Marvel Comics property, for that matter – this movie will likely be my last.
Hollywood has tried three times in recent decades to put the franchise on the big screen. Actually four times, if you count the 1994 low-budget oddity that never saw the light of day outside of pirated copies and YouTube. Two subsequent attempts by 20th Century Fox in 2005 and 2007 were lukewarm performers at the box office and with the critics. The third and most recent in 2015 was godawful.
While all that was happening, Marvel Studios spent more than a decade building its Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) by unleashing a steady stream of big-screen, big-budget adaptations of Marvel Comics’ most popular and recognizable properties: Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Black Panther and others. These legacy characters dating all the way back to the 1960s (or earlier, in the case of Captain America) were the ones that I had wanted to see on the big screen since I was ten or twelve. The films were consistently well-crafted and well-received, and some were great.
But the legacy characters have all finished their respective cinematic arcs. They’ve all been done. By the end of Avengers: Endgame (2019), Iron Man died and Captain America aged out and retired. Various screenwriters and directors re-engineered Thor and the Hulk into comedic versions of their former selves that I have no further interest in. And the Black Panther’s saga came to an abrupt and tragic end when actor Chadwick Boseman, who portrayed him brilliantly, died in 2020.
Marvel’s first family are the only ones still awaiting the proper treatment, and they may finally get it in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The trailers suggest that director Matt Shakman has conjured a retro-future, Cold War sensibility that’s consistent with the franchise’s origins in 1961. My gut says it will be the big-screen adaptation that finally closes the loop that started with the cartoons I watched in the late ‘60s and the comics I read in the ‘70s.
Thus my sense of poignancy. Endgame was the culmination of eleven years of interconnected storytelling across more than twenty movies. As such, it was a tough act to follow. In the six years since, few if any MCU offerings have lit a fire under me. So even if First Steps is as good as I think it might be, it will likely be my last burst of childlike joy in what has been a golden age of superhero films.
In the end, the market will decide how much longer it all lasts. The Marvel/Disney machine – and their DC counterparts – will keep making superhero movies as long as people keep buying tickets to see them. But I know I’m not the only one who thinks that golden age might be entering its twilight.
If it is, I plan to savor the glow while it lasts, even if it’s just for a couple hours. When the lights go down in the theater this weekend, it’ll be Saturday morning in my living room in Euclid, Ohio, circa 1969. The cereal bowl will be full, the 19-inch black-and-white Zenith will be on, and the five-year-old boy (now past sixty) will listen one last time for the rousing battle cries:
Flame on! It’s clobberin’ time!