Fantastic Four In Animation - A Retrospective
The comic was a major success, rejuvenating the medium and began what a golden streak of new comics from
Lee/Kirby including The Incredible Hulk, The X-Men and The Silver Surfer and Lee would go on to create characters
such as Spider-Man, Daredevil and Dr Strange in a boom period of the next five or so years. The Fantastic Four
would be one of the shining stars on the comic rack, and the book is widely regarded as the finest work either
of both The Man and The King in their 100 issues plus run, which is yet to be beaten by any two creative teams
over at the House Of Ideas. The comic was successful to be one of two Marvel Comics to be given it’s own show in the 1967 fall schedule on ABC on Saturday mornings and on September 9th, both The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man premiered. The episodes themselves were based upon the Lee/Kirby comics and managed to do a fairly good job capturing the unique tone of the old comics, with Ben’s feelings towards his looks and Johnny’s rebellious nature. Obviously, watching them in this day and age would probably even be difficult for the thick skinned which is more than understandable – the cartoon celebrates it’s 40th anniversary next year and in those days, cartoons were just dumb fluff aimed at a very young audience. Also, as this was a Hanna-Barbera production, it was cheap looking, just like the aforementioned Spider-Man series. Unfortunately, it didn’t have a catchy theme song to make it so memorable. 
The series lasted 19 episodes and featured a hell of a lot of villains, as again, these were pretty straight up
adaptations of the Lee/Kirby comics, with the odd original story thrown in. The likes of Dr. Doom, Blastarr and
The Mole Man all appeared here, even if they weren’t all that 3-dimensional. Since I’ve yet to actually see this
show, I’ll simply have to inform you that our own Jon T rates Galactus as the show’s finest episode, the story of
course being based upon the legendary Galactus trilogy (the original one, of course – not the piss poor Ultimate
Galactus Trilogy).It would over a decade later before The Fantastic Four made it back to the small screen, in the late 70’s as DePatie-Freleng Enterprises brought The Fantastic Four back to animation. Both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby actually worked on the show, with Lee scripting several episodes and Kirby providing the storyboards. Boyd Kirkland, who drew layouts for the show told Marvel Animation Age of his experience of working with the legendary King of comics; “The biggest kick was drawing layouts on the Depatie-Freleng FF show because Jack Kirby was drawing the storyboards. He didn’t quite have a handle on scene cutting or continuity, etc., so we had to fix those things, but his drawings were just so powerful and great to look at, like his comics, they were a great inspiration. The best use of his talents in animation was as a designer for the Thundarr series, which I also drew layouts for on the first season.” Oddly enough, despite the presence of Lee, Kirby and Roy Thomas on the show, it’s regarded to be inferior to the 1967 show. The show is also universally mocked because The Human Torch doesn’t appear in the show. He was replaced by HERBIE, a robot created by Reed Richards. HERBIE has become the butt of millions of jokes over the years, but in all fairness, he was a Lee/Kirby creation. Despite popular belief that Johnny Storm wasn’t featured in the show because the network thought kids would set themselves on fire, The Torch didn’t appear because his rights were bought by someone hoping to do a live action version of the character, in a similar vein to The Incredible Hulk and the terrible The Amazing Spider-Man shows of the same decade. 
The show isn’t as faithful to the comics as the previous show and features some of the most primitive
animation one can recall and is clearly aimed at an even younger audience than the previous FF show. Despite
some stellar casting, there’s really not too much to write home about here. The lack of Johnny Storm doesn’t
seem to be that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, but the fact that the characters aren’t really all
that well defined really hurts the show. For example – Ben doesn’t seem to care that he’s now made of rock.
Given how important this has always been to his characterisation, it really does make him come across as flat
and uninteresting. The show remains moderately enjoyable in Jon T’s opinion, but it’s not something I’d personally
hunt down to see, even though I’m a fan of The Fantastic Four. The series later had a random spin off with a Thing solo show, barely related to the character. In it, a teenage Ben Grimm would transform into The Thing with the help of a magic ring whenever he shouted “Thing ring do your thing!”. I’ve never seen the show and I never, ever want to. And believe it or not, as far as the Fantastic Four in animation goes, it was about to get much worse…
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