Pop Culture Amnesia
The History of Superhero TV Justin Widerski Columbia College Chicago (2016)
The Walking Dead may be the most popular comic book show these days, but non-superhero comics only recently began getting the small screen treatment. With every advancement in technology or the comic book industry, creators have been trying and failing for decades to create successful television adaptations of our favorite characters. The Avengers and Marvel Studios changed all that. We now live in a world where superhero shows can actually get viewers and, by extension, ad revenue. Perusing the internet reveals that these shows get more attention from media and media fandom than the highest-rated comedies and dramas on primetime network television. But are things really that different? Budgets may be higher, but no comic book show gets a budget like Game of Thrones. The CW, a network known for its low-budget shows with passionate fanbases, has two of the biggest superhero series on right now: Arrow and The Flash. And a decade ago, they Watercooler Journal
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led the charge with Smallville and Birds of Prey. Is the writing better? Maybe. But 60 years after their creation, most of these characters remain, at their core, the same. Masks, secret identities, superpowered baddies, and melodramatic love lives are all fundamental parts of the superhero mythos, and they figure into every adaptation, no matter how old. Every time another Marvel movie comes out or another DC show gets greenlit, people ask, “When will the superhero craze end?” Nobody knows, but it certainly makes you wonder what, out of this glut of content, will be remembered two or three decades from now. Will people look back on this craze with fondness, or will only a handful of movies and shows retain the smallest of fanbases? On this note, I submit to you the history of superhero television for your consideration. Most TV enthusiasts will remember Batman, The Incredible Hulk, Wonder Woman, and even Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, but what about the forgotten ones? Can these shows give us some insight into whether or not we’ll be showing our kids Daredevil or Arrow? It is through the small selection of forgotten superhero shows included below that we’ll hopefully realize trends in how superhero shows are made, received, and remembered. Obviously I can’t include every single show, because some do deserve to be forgotten. That said, let’s start at the beginning.
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It’s somewhat astonishing how Superman tends to herald the coming of superheroes to whatever medium he’s translated to. He is considered the first in comics, the 1978 movie was the first big superhero film success, and his translation to television in 1954 proved the genre could even be successful on TV at all. Superman had already been on the radio for over a decade by the time 26 episodes of the Adventures of Superman TV series were commissioned. Since most of the radio stars were too old for their respective roles, a new cast was hired. B-movie actor George Reeves was brought on as Superman/Clark Kent and with him came a sense of groundedness to the role that really helped sell the show as something other than campy comic book nonsense. Within the first two seasons the show’s popularity skyrocketed, hitting baby boomers at just the right age. The Adventures of Superman lasted for six seasons, even making the transition into color. The first season is hardly what you’d expect from a Superman TV show these days, as it’s far more of a crime series then a sci-fi one. However, this is actually quite faithful to the way the radio series was formatted. Most of the time, Clark Kent would investigate through most of the episode and Superman would step in at the very end when he and/or Lois got in danger. Over the years, the series took on a lighter tone and leaned more on sci-fi stories. The series was syndicated and even aired into the ‘70s. While simple, The Adventures of Superman is charming, and its legacy continues to influence creators to this day. The 1966 Batman TV show is by far the most influential superhero show in history. It created the public image of Batman for almost 25 years, only to be replaced by Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989. It holds up better than many older comic book shows because it embraces its campiness to the point of self-parody. This may put some people off to the show, but so would a ‘60s Batman that took itself seriously. Since it is still well remembered and even still airs on TV, we’ll brush past it, but its importance (or its entertainment value) shouldn’t be ignored. The ‘70s saw the popularity of superhero-esque shows like The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. Desperate networks capitalized on this by greenlighting actual superhero adaptations Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk, as well as a short-lived The Amazing Spider-Man series. Spider-Man, like a lot of genre shows from this time, suffered from a small budget and lackluster writing. It was a very loose adaptation, with none of the beloved supervillains from the comics and only bland crime organizations for Spidey to fight. And by fight, I mean jump from wall to wall while bad guys fumble and fall around him. Its cheesy funk soundtrack and lackluster special effects lost their novelty quickly, and the show was cancelled after 11 episodes. The Amazing Spider-Man is an interesting watch if only because the time when it was made makes it so radically different from every other interpretation of the character. Several other characters were set to get TV adaptations when CBS purged itself of superhero shows, Watercooler Journal
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concerned about their reputation. This left only The Incredible Hulk, a far more adult and dramatic series, on the air. Perhaps the strangest superhero TV show was the result of a licensing agreement between Marvel and Toei. While Marvel used a couple Japanese super robots in their comics, Toei set about creating their own Spider-Man TV series. The result is unlike anything you’ve seen before. Keeping only the name, costume, and powers, Spider-Man’s titular character is a motocross racer who fights the evil alien Iron Cross Army in order to avenge his father. He gets his spider powers from the Spider Bracelet given to him by the dying Garia, an alien from the planet Spider, who also fought for revenge against the Iron Cross Army. The Bracelet gives him access to the Spider Protector, his costume, and The Marveller, a spaceship that transforms into a giant robot. After Garia dies he is reincarnated into a spider and often gives Spider-Man telepathic advice… as a spider. So while you may be confused, remember that this is somewhat typical stuff for a Japanese Tokusatsu (Special FX) show. In fact, it’s these differences that make watching Spider-Man so amusing. Japan has almost always lagged behind the US in terms of filmmaking and it shows in Spider-Man, which is so filled with zooms and quick takes that it’s sometimes hard to watch. It jumps from scene to scene erratically, but in its chaos we see where the money went: the special effects. The fight scenes are well-choreographed, the giant robot fights are exciting, and some of Spider-Man’s powers are pulled off with such ease that it’s hard to imagine how they did it. With 41 episodes and a movie, Spider-Man was a big hit in Japan and there’s a very simple reason why: it’s a whole lot of fun. The ‘80s were rather light on superhero content, and what was on the air wasn’t very good. The producers of the Superman film franchise, Ilya and Alexander Salkind, shot 13 low-budget episodes of a Superboy series, unsure if it would get picked up. It did and lasted for a total of four seasons, drastically changing each season due to production changes and behind-the-scenes issues. The basic concept is Clark Kent, Jimmy Olsen, Lana Lang, and Lex Luthor all attending college together, regularly getting into messes that require Superboy to save them. While the first season was light, melodramatic, and cheesy, the second season raised the stakes, opting for more serious, but weirder stories and villains. The third season dropped the original college setting for a paranormal investigation bureau, and the show adapted a modest film noir look. The episodes reflected this darker tone and would only become more mature in the fourth season. Despite still being popular, the show was cancelled due to legal conflicts with Warner Bros. These legal issues also prevented it from being released on home video until 2006, which killed any chance of Superboy retaining a fanbase. While there are certainly many, many awful episodes, the show ventures into such unusual territory in the later seasons that it practically begs watching. Smallville Watercooler Journal
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certainly wouldn’t have had an episode where Clark befriends a vampire that takes a serum to appear more human. While The Flash may be a popular hit in 2015, back in 1990 The Flash didn’t make it past its first season. The 22-episode show was the direct result of the 1989 Batman film, capitalizing on the art deco/gothic style and even going so far as to get Danny Elfman to score the series’ theme. With its constant references to the original, it’s clear that the creators of The Flash (2014) certainly have a reverence for its predecesor. This has thrust the show back into public consciousness, with even the CW acknowledging its existence by putting episodes up on their site.
While the original Flash may be getting more attention as of late, that doesn’t mean it’s getting more fans. This is somewhat of a shame, because while its effects and Batman-esque tone are dated there is a certain novelty to The Flash. The silliness is at least consistent and, despite this, the actors take their roles seriously. Sure, Flash’s costume doesn’t look great and his one-liners could use work, but watching him fight bikers with mullets is just as fun as watching today’s Flash fight scenery-chewing metahumans. There’s a unique form of entertainment to be gotten from seeing such a ridiculously Watercooler Journal
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costumed hero partake in some occasionally dark and mature stories. Entering the late 90s/early ‘00s, genre TV exploded thanks to the popularity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files. Networks, especially cable networks desperate for programming, began to pump out numerous sci-fi/fantasy shows in the specific hopes that they’d amass fans who’d tune in every week and potentially buy as much merchandise as, say, the X-philes did. While this did lead to the greenlighting of classics like Stargate SG-1, Smallville, and Charmed, it also resulted in the existence of Mutant X, Birds of Prey, Blade: The Series, and even Flash Gordon. Mutant X barely qualifies as a comic book series, despite sharing its title with an X-Men spin-off book. This is because when Mutant X was being made, so were the X-Men movies, and Fox sued Marvel for infringing on their contract that gave Fox all rights to develop an X-Men TV series. They settled and Mutant X was allowed to continue production, under the stipulation that it used nothing from X-Men in the show and especially the advertising. The production companies involved sued Marvel for pressuring them into including comic book material and because of this, Mutant X was cancelled after three seasons. Even though it ended on a cliffhanger, nobody is particularly clamoring for it to come back. Out of all the shows mentioned here, only Mutant X suffers from being painfully generic. Its inability to use any of the interesting X-Men lore forced its writers to create the world and backstory from scratch. Instead of human evolution, mutants are the results of an evil corporation’s experiments. Instead of Charles Xavier, a man trying to create equality between humans and mutants, we have Adam Kane, who’s simply trying to atone for creating these mutants in the first place. The characters aren’t what make the show interesting though, but rather how it is made. The shots and editing look like something out of an MTV music video or a Michael Bay movie, with the camera constantly spinning, quickly cutting, and frantically shaking. It’s hard to watch, but it does make the rather cheesy overdramatic actions of the characters (like spinning in circles pointing guns at hostages) even more exaggerated and occasionally amusing. Coming in close second to Toei’s Spider-Man, Birds of Prey is one of the strangest shows in our retrospective. The premise is that Batman (Bruce Wayne) and Catwoman (Selena Kyle) had a daughter, Helena Kyle, who was forced to watch her mother die when the Joker declared war on Batman. After killing her, he also crippled Batgirl, Barbara Gordon, by shooting her in the spine. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, the young Dinah Lance dreams of these events and is convinced they are real. Years later she travels to New Gotham, only to discover that Batman has disappeared, Joker is dead, and Helena Kyle is in Barbara Gordon’s care. Helena has become an angsty 20-something who patrols the streets as The Huntress. Barbara (now Oracle) monitors her from their
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base in a massive clock tower. After convincing Oracle and Huntress of her psychic powers, they take Dinah in and the three become the crime-fighting Birds of Prey. It should be noted that in the flashbacks revealing this backstory, the Catwoman costume is the suit from Batman Returns, the Batman costume is a combination of the mask from Batman Forever and the suit from Batman & Robin, and the Joker is voiced, not played, by Mark Hamill of Batman: The Animated Series fame. The show opened strongly, getting 7.6 million viewers, but ratings dropped sharply in the following weeks and Birds of Prey was cancelled after 13 episodes. The show has a hypnotic nature to it, managing to be so angsty, stupid, and weird that it surpasses being just plain terrible into a surreal form of entertainment. This is an important era to pay attention to in the context of modern television. Our current style of television writing is only a small evolution of this period. The technology used to make these shows has advanced, but the way that the effects are used – whether for powers or fight scenes – hasn’t. These are shows that many of the people working on the current crop of comic book shows used to work on. More popular, and frankly better-written, shows like Smallville are far more influential, but watching Smallville or Angel in concurrence with Mutant X or Birds of Prey reveals similarities in how these shows fail. Melodrama, poor music choices, awkward cinematography and editing, cheesy special effects, and clunky dialogue proliferate all these shows, even the “good” ones. Mutant X or Birds of Prey merely exaggerate the problems. These are the same factors that have held back superhero shows since the beginning, and we can no longer apply “Well, they’re a product of their time” to shows that were on the air a decade ago. In a post-The Avengers world, do these factors still apply? I think they do. It may be hard to recognize now, but even in five years series like Arrow or Daredevil will quickly lose their shine. It is entirely possible that these internet phenomena will, in coming years, reveal themselves to be, like their predecessors, cheesy and dated, but still entertaining.
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