PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological*
Without Filmation's early success at producing Superman's first animated teleseries, we might never have had all those later great Filmation shows, like-- uh-- don't help me--
I joke, for even though the first season of SUPERMAN is largely pedestrian, it did give rise to better shows like AQUAMAN and THE ADVENTURES OF BATMAN, as well as some later above-average efforts like TARZAN and BRAVESTARR. The DVD I'm reviewing includes all 36 episodes of the first season, all of which are about seven minutes long. The DVD does not include the SUPERBOY episodes, each of which was originally sandwiched between two SUPERMAN stories.
The absence of the SUPERBOY tales is no great loss, for they lack the principal asset of the SUPERMANs-- that of adapting a handful of familiar figures from the DC Super-mythos. The radio show had utilized kryptonite and had guest-starred Batman and Robin, and the second Super-serial included Luthor as its main villain. But ADVENTURES was the first non-comics appearance for such four color creations as Mxyzptlk, Brainiac, Titano, Toyman, Prankster, and the Parasite-- though many of these, particularly Brainiac, were retooled for the simplistic cartoon format. Unfortunately a lot of the Filmation tales feature aliens and/or rampaging monsters, and as in the later AQUAMAN, Filmation coudn't design a good E.T. to save its corporate life.
Indeed, both the scripts and the animation are extremely rocky, though all the episodes feature good voice-work, particularly by Bud Collyer, reprising his Superman/Clark Kent vocals from the radio program. Though the scripts are kept simple, they at least have the same feel as many comic-book scripts, not least because some contributors, such as Arnold Drake and editor Mort Weisinger, came from the comics.
The comics of the time had given the Man of Steel a few other vulnerabilities other than the default of kryptonite, but things like red-sun radiation and magical spells are never invoked in the cartoon. Indeed, the scripts featuring an original super-villain, the mystic Warlock, claim that the evildoer's magic CAN'T harm the hero. But he can at least be rocked about a bit for a few super-powered monsters, like "The Force Phantom." Only one episode really overcomes its limitations: "The Pernicious Parasite," which adapts the first Parasite story from the comics. Writer Oscar Bensol put a new spin on the comics-original by renaming the villain "Icy Harris," which as I've argued elsewhere, is a pun on the Greek myth-name Icarus. I particularly like this one because Superman, who usually spares his enemies, practices good self-defense by letting Harris steal so much strength that the villain blows himself up.
Other tidbits: Bensol also penned "The Malevolent Mummy," in which an Egyptian sorcerer rises from the dead and creates havoc by inverting the Pyramid of Khufu and making it spin around like a top. This mummy, BTW, travels from place to place in a sandstorm, over thirty years before the 1999 MUMMY associated its mummy-magus with such elemental powers. Lastly, the story "The Men from APE"-- clearly a joke at 1964's THE MAN FROM UNCLE-- teams up Luthor, Toyman, Prankster and Warlock. This comes close to being the first super-villain teamup in American animated cartoons. However, SUPERMAN gets beaten out in that category by another famed strongman, given that ACP's 1963 MIGHTY HERCULES program sometimes had its small coterie of villains gang up to defeat their Olympian foeman.
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