1966 Marvel Super-heroes cartoons

Staying with the year 1966 we get the first of animated Marvel characters. The cartoons were produced by Gantray-Lawrence; a Canadian animation company, which featured Iron Man; Captain America; Sub-Mariner; Thor; and Hulk. The syndicated color series had extremely limited animation and were actually only photo static copies of the characters' comic book panels. The animation primarily was from moving lips, and some minimal arm and leg movement. Stories were lifted directly from the mags in their entirety and were shown in seven minute segments. Each character had it's own cheesy theme song with the best being the Hulk's: "Dr Banner belted by gamma rays...turns into the Hulk...ain't he unglamorays". What a hoot!

Check out the intro from the Hulk.


Here's the opening of every Marvel cartoon in 1966-67 including the Saturday nationally televised bigger budgeted Fantastic Four and Spider-Man with it's classic jazzy "Spider-Man...Spider-Man...does whatever a spider can...

LOST and Comics

If you are fan of LOST you will remember the season 4 episode "Cabin Fever". In this episode Richard Alpert shows up at the child John Locke's foster home to present him with several items to choose from that are "his already". One of the items is the March 1956 Atlas(Marvel)comic Mystery Tales 40. The "Hidden Land" is a four page story with the most obvious similarity to LOST being that Fred Phipps, the story's protagonist, works as a bookkeeper as did Locke.

Comics are one of the major influences on the LOST producers particularly Damon Lindelof who called Watchmen "the greatest piece of popular fiction ever produced". Producer/writer Brian K. Vaughan, who is best known for his works in the field of comics (writing the excellent "Runaways"), cited Watchmen as "definitely" the inspiration for his start as a writer. Javier Grillo-Marxuach, writer/producer in Seasons 1 and 2, has stated that Watchmen "was a topic of much discussion among those of us in the writers’ room who were comics-minded." Quoting Damon: “The Watchman” influenced me by telling a story out of order with flashbacks to explore the universe. And how — to know these four characters — you need to know about these six as well, and how they seem to not come together, but they do. We kept that in mind when creating the “Lost” universe. We learned that people will swallow a tremendous amount of story if it’s fed to them the right way."