In 1966, Marvel Comics hired animation company Grantray-Laurence to create “The Marvel Superheroes”, a series of daily cartoons based on their titles Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Iron Man, and the Sub-Mariner. As it was Marvel’s first foray into television animation, the producers stretched out the budget by using existing stories and artwork. Original comic art pages were Xeroxed and used as key frames, with animators adding only mouth and limb animation. Body movement was often accomplished by animating still images across a background.
Fortunately for comic fans, this cost-cutting move preserved for all time the original artwork of Gene Colon, Don Heck, and Jack “King” Kirby, and the dialog of Stan Lee. It was exactly what readers have always asked TV and movie makers to do: just film the comics.
A year later they released the Spider-Man series, with one of the most iconic theme songs ever. While early episodes dealt with the web-slinger’s traditional rogue’s gallery, later episodes dealt with more generic villains. While Steve Ditko and John Romita Sr did character designs, they were not directly involved in the artwork, and Stan Lee had only a story consultant position, leading to some inconsistencies with the comics.
Also in 1967, Hanna-Barbera released their Saturday morning Fantastic Four series. While the veteran animators created their own animation, the character designs by Alex Toth were simple and elegant, and the storylines mirrored many of the early adventures of the team, though some modifications were needed as they could use none of the characters from the previous cartoons. This made adapting the two aquatic episodes particularly challenging, as they could not use the Sub-Mariner, a character that debuted in the modern era as a foil for the FF.
While Spider-Man saw home video release about 20 years ago, The Marvel Superheroes and Fantastic Four were never fully released in any form. The original opening and closing of The Marvel Superheroes was particularly hard to find, and is in the poorest shape. The episodes here are made up of the best copies I could find, often from other collectors. They were upscaled using Topaz Video Enhance AI and edited chronologically. Because Marvel used only certain storylines from across their first 5 years of publication, some chapters will have multiple episodes of one character, while others don’t appear at all. For example, one of the 5 original shows, The Sub-Mariner, doesn’t even appear chronologically until Chapter 8.
Many fans my age still remember these cartoons, but had given up ever watching them again assuming, as one person told me, they were “lost to time”. It is both a pleasure and a privilege to preserve and restore these tales of suspense and journeys into mystery, the first experience many of us had of the super heroes we love so much.