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Date and Issue: Volume 2, Number 3 / July 1979.
In the final analysis, television's recent super-hero craze—largely an invention of CBS—has been a failure. The electronic medium has not succeeded in capturing any of the style, magio and enthusiasm of the four-color artform.
Not that the comics are doing all that well. Any business analyst will tell you comics (with average sales of around one-third of their print run) is, at best, a marginal operation, victim of antiquated distribution and marketing systems.
Yet the fact remains the average script of a television adaptation of a comics character has been too boring and too childish to make it as the plot of the average super-hero comic book.
Television has had limited success when it created its own properties fea-turing characters that did not stretch the imagination or fill the viewer with a sense of wonder. Kung Fu, a programrun on ABC between 1972 and 1975, featured a Kung Fu superstar wandering around the old west.
The Six Million Dollar Man and its spin-off The Bionic Woman enjoyed considerable success between 1973 and 1978. These shows featured half-human androids (or half-android humans) performing slightly fantastic feats in behalf of the United States government.
Yet the plots of these shows were hardly unique; most could have been used on shows like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. or Bonanza with only minimal rewriting.
What Kung Fu and the Bionic Duo refrained from dealing with was the aspect of, in the words of the only long-range television super-hero success, "powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men."
Super-heroes have been a staple of mass media since the days of Homer's The Iliad. In recent years, they have been successful on radio and in motion pictures, pulp and comics magazines, novels and, most recently, records. They should be successful on television as well; they could have been successful.
Perhaps the most disappointing recent failure has been the televization of The Amazing Spider-Man. This character has enjoyed legendary success in the comics: the character has a total monthly sale second only to Superman and The Amazing Spider-Man comic book has often outsold the Superman title during the past three years.
Yet the television show abandoned most of the aspects of the Spider-Man myth that made the character unique. Obviously there were reasons why Spider-Man was such a publishing success; evidently, those reasons completely escaped the show's producers.
The central theme of a teen-ager (or young adult; it really does not matter) having human reactions to fantastic situations was generally overlooked in the television incarnation. Gone was Spidey's obsessive speculations into the morality of his endeavors, gone was his frequent confrontations with life's irritations, gone was Spider-Man's sacrifice of his scholastic career and his personal goals for the questionable life of a crimefighter.
Gone too, were most members of his comic book cast, as important to Spider-Man as Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Perry White are to The Man of Steel.
In the comics, Spidey has had a variety of interesting girl friends—all are absent from the series. His one-timeroommate turned out to be one of his greatest villains; he too is gone.
The two most crucial supporting characters have. been greatly mishandled. Spider-Man's Aunt May, who is always on the verge of a heart attack and is often to be found in the hospital would certainly die if she knew her nephew's alter-ego. One of the reasons Spider-Man takes to the streets in the comics is to earn a living as a free-lance photographer in order to earn the money to pay Aunt May's hospital bills. Not only are these interesting conflicts missing from the video version, but when the producers bother to write Aunt May into the script, she strictly plays out a maternal function.
J. Jonah Jameson, the other truly innovative character from the Spider-Man comics, is a man consumed by two great passions: greed and a deep sense of hatred for the crimefighter he sees as agreater evil. On television, Jameson is little more than a fop, a petty version of Perry White who at best complicates the life of Spider-Man's alter-ego.
Gone too, are the super-villains. The reasons behind this are obvious: the producers are paranoid. If they use super-villains their show might be confused with the camp version of Batman from the mid-sixties; therefore, Spider-Man is doomed to challenge video menaces which are hardly worthy of his abilities.
And the costume! One of the great strengths of the comic book is the amazing appear of Spider-Man's costume. Yet the show's producers have never correctly duplicated the costume. In the pilot, Spider-Man's awesome white eyes were re-placed by metallic screens—they could have been easily faked by using white nylon patches in the mask. After the pilot, the eyes were improved but little metallic utility belts were added to the waist and wrists, interrupting the flow of what may be the most visually appealing super-hero costume ever created.
Outside of a total lack of understanding of the character and an obvious lack of care in the show itself, the Spider-Man television programs had faults which were suffered by all other super-hero television shows: a lack of time and money. Spider-Man's wall-crawling generally looked cheap; the better shots often were repeated. The webbing effects, when used, also looked cheap. They looked like somebody strung up a fish net.
Spider-Man started off quite strong in the ratings; it got worse with each successive broadcast. The regular readers of the comic books did not recognize the video imitation; people who did not read the comics were offered little reason to watch what was ultimately a boring and foolish show. Spider-Man wound up as programming fodder to be thrown up against such sure-fire ratings winners as Roots ll.
The powers that be over at Marvel Comics were just as disappointed as were their readers: hopefully in a few years somebody with the time, money and vision will be able to seize the opportunity to do it right.
The New Adventures of Wonder Woman had less of a background from which to capitalize. The comics had little direction over the past decade. going through over a dozen writers and editors. Nobody knew how to handle the character; her life suffered from so many twists and changes it was impossible for a regular reader to keep on top of all the changes.
Nonetheless the name Wonder Woman was one known by three generations of Americans; with the success of The Bionic Woman. Wonder Woman was a natural for television adaptation. After one false start set in the 1970s with a different costume, ABC and Warner Brothers developed a World War II version of the character using the appropriate costume and an actress who, even if she was incapable of acting, certainly was able to fill out the costume. The first season offered a regular series of 90-minute and one hour specials that did well enough in the ratings, but at the end of the season, then-ABC programming chief Fred Silverman believed the days of The Bionic Woman and Wonder Woman were numbered and both shows went to other networks. CBS pulled Wonder Woman back into the 1970s and, after trying out a couple different approaches, more-or-less settled on a Man From U.N.C.L.E. type of orientation.
Wonder Woman's physical stunts were easier to pull off than Spider-Man's. The bullets-and-bracelets bit involved a touch of posing and a dab of post-production effects. Feats of physical strength have always been easy to affect. Since Wonder Woman rarely had - noteworthy super-villains, the Batman trap did not effect the show. The one spectacular stunt from the comics, the invisible plane, was virtually abandoned after the pilot.
What The New Adventures of Wonder Woman suffered from was scripts that could be best defined as uninspired. They were not fantastic and they did not require the super-hero to perform super-heroic deeds. They did not in-spire a sense of wonder upon the viewer.
After three seasons, the program was put on indefinite hold last February. No doubt the unaired episodes will fill in the summer schedule; Warner Brothers insists the program still has a chance at being renewed for next fall. The DC Comics editorial staff always disliked the show and, after the initial season of specials, refused to let the television show interfere with their development of the character. most members of DC's editorial staff were relieved when the show was postponed.
Perhaps the best of the super-hero adaptations to make it on the home screen in the past several years was the two-hour Doctor Strange pilot. Where-as the program was not faithful to the origins and the roots of the character in the comics, it did manage to capture the important atmosphere of the source.
Interestingly enough, Doctor Strange was never much of a success in the comics. One of Marvel's oldest characters, he had appeared regularly in at least five different titles; his own comic book was cancelled after about fifteen issues in the late 1960s: it was brought back in 1974 and today remains one of the few magazines Marvel publishes on a bi-monthly basis. One suspects the book was saved from cancellation be-cause it was more prestigious than it was profitable.
One of the artistic wizards from the comics. Frank Brunner. served as a consultant to the telefilm. It is clear the producer knew his material and man-aged to translate the more fantastic elements from print to screen; it is also apparent Brunner served well as keeper of the flame.
What made Doctor Strange work was its special effects and approach to the subject matter. The plot, essentially a conflict between the mystical forces of good and evil, was handled in a perfectly straight manner—no tongue-in-cheek satire, no embarrassing self-indulgent feats of power, just a straight-forward battle of the cosmos. Whereas the show was a bit padded to fit its two-hour time slot, it used the time it had and the money it needed to produce an often stunning program. If Doctor Strange were to "go to series" though, it would not have the time needed to pull off the effects. It is unlikely it would get the money, either, since each mystical gimmick would be used in a one-time only situation. There are problems that are unlikely to affect the producers, as Doctor Strange did very poorly in the ratings and will probably never see the light of regular airplay. Mandrake the Magician, the oldest American comics super-hero (being from the newspaper strips and not the comic books) was television's second recent attempt at doing a mystical crime-fighter. The plot here was less supernatural and more padded; in fact, it reminded one of Bill Bixby's short-lived series The Magician. It was more interesting than your average episode of Wonder Woman or Spider-Man, even though it could have been cut down to one hour. It faired slightly better than Doctor Strange and might go to series if NBC perceives it as the harbinger of a fad or (more likely) if NBC' gets desperate. Having been burned and embarrassed by television's treatment of its star character, Marvel Comics took some courageous steps in the broadcast of the Captain America two-hour pilot. They insisted the costume resemble that worn by the comic book character, and they saw to it the character in the movie was not in conflict with the one in the comics. Captain America is little more than a costumed athletic crime-fighter; the television origin capitalized on that point and even suggested the Captain America active today was the son of a costumed Captain America who operated during World War II—a clever point, as Marvel Comics' Captain America operated throughout the 1940s and again for a time in the early 1950s before resurrection in the Marvel wave of the 1960s. Unfortunately, Marvel's Captain America suffered from some of the same problems that plagued DC's Wonder Woman. Throughout the late 1970s the character wandered about without much of a direction or purpose, and even some of the best writers in the business failed to give Captain America an interesting and unique foothold. It was felt the readers were beginning to lose interest; since Captain America is one of Marvel's most recognizable and most merchandisable names, the television program could actually help give the character some stability and some badly needed promotion. As it turned out, the folks at Universal Studios were as unable to handle a potentially hot property as were their counterparts over on the Spider-Man set at Columbia. When the Marvel editorial staff noticed—in TV Guide, of all places—the television Captain America was in a costume different to that of their character, they took Universal to court. Without going to trial, Universal, afraid Marvel might get an injunction prohibiting broadcast, allowed the publisher to produce a placard employing the famous Captain America logo and a drawing of the comics super-hero; this placard was shows at each cutaway to commercials. A short one minute clip will be added to the pilot when it is re-broadcast this summer showing the crime-fighter adapting the costume of his father—the original and famous costume from the comics.
Since Marvel Comics gets a substantial portion of its income from the television adaptations generally produced by Universal Studios and broadcast on CBS, their actions concerning Captain America were quite courageous. They recognized the fact that after the television show is gone they will still be in the business of producing Captain America comic books, and they must be allowed.
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