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  [–] splatterpuss 15 points 8 days ago

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  [–] SweetWeaselJackson 41 points 8 days ago

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  [–] RudysMisplacedMicrophone 26 points 8 days ago

  So, no take-up on the Stephen Beacher lawsuit, then?

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  [–] RudysMisplacedMicrophone 24 points 8 days ago

  hello?

  12. (September 2018)

  ‘IS IT A CLOUD? IS IT A METEOR?’ – Finefinger’s Brief History of Thunderman On-Screen (Published in Collectors’ Fugue #330)

  I: The Essler Studios’ Animated Thunderman Shorts (1941–1943) *****

  Let me say right from the get-go that this list is chronological rather than in order of merit, although, as it turns out, the first listing is the best, the last is the worst, and the ones in the middle are kind of middling. Thunderman’s screen exploits, a little like the progress of the Egyptian dynasties or the career of Orson Wells, start out wonderful, end up in advertisements for cheap sherry, and may well perfectly demonstrate the concept of entropy.

  Although there could be cine-antiquarians out there who will disagree, while Thunderman is arguably the first superhero in print, he is certainly the first to make it to the screen. So, a study of Thunderman’s screen history is as good a way as any of understanding superhero movies as a whole, before they either wink suddenly from existence, or else continue to submerge the medium of cinema in bilge until the end of time, the way they’ve done for comics. That’s what I’m telling myself is the reason I’m wading through this junk, anyway: that there may yet be some glimmer of social significance amongst the spandex, after all. Let’s see, shall we?

  It should first be pointed out that in 1941, both cartoon animation and Thunderman were relatively new ideas. Having unburdened David Kessler and Si Schuman of their most important intellectual property in 1942, the people at my former employers American Comics must have been delighted by Thunderman’s perfect suitability for a comic book business that was then in its birth throes: a strikingly colourful figure in that grey Depression landscape, that could go anywhere, do anything, and, in a visual medium, could generate unprecedented visual spectacle of a kind that the despairing and marvel-starved audience clearly couldn’t get enough of. It would hardly take a genius to realise that an endlessly kinetic character who could fly, bench-press the moon and outrun lightning might be even more successful if presented as stop-motion animation.

  And so it proved to be. When American approached the Essler brothers, already making a mark with their Belinda Beep and Out of the Pencil-Sharpener animated shorts, and suggested that they make an animated Thunderman, the business-minded Bernard Essler was reluctant to take on the project. In what may have been an effort to discourage his prospective clients, Essler told them that for Thunderman to be done properly, each short would cost them $90,000, to which they immediately agreed. And so, perhaps with mixed feelings, Bernard and his brother Abe embarked upon what were to be some of the most beautiful and sumptuous works that Essler Studios ever had a hand in.

  The cost and care lavished on the project is visible in almost every frame of the fifteen theatrical shorts completed between 1941 and 1943. Much of the main action is rotoscoped, and the figures have been carefully shaded to provide modelling and a near-3D sense of solidity. This illusion of mass and weight is particularly impressive when combined with the Essler brothers’ impeccable feel for visual dramatics: the scenes with a tiny Thunderman pitted against something of much greater size – like the comet he catches and then throws into the sun in Peril of the Planetary Pool-Shark, or the amok giant construction-robot in War of the World’s Fair – are perhaps the best realisations of the character’s appeal, in any medium, ever.

  If you’re interested in my bullshit theory as to why this should be, then for my money it probably has something to do with the character’s ontology, ontology being the study of what can be said to exist, as opposed to epistemology, which is the study of what we can know. The only Thunderman that can be said to exist is the perfect and ideal one, who is made of nothing more than lines on paper or acetate, and the Essler shorts are the purest and most glorious expressions of this: the true imaginal essence of this fictional character in a moving, speaking, unbounded form. It’s when you materialise Thunderman as a flesh-and-blood human being with pubic hair and a rental agreement that you start to run into trouble. Maybe it’s like how ancient cultures may have told stories about superbeings like Zeus or Jehovah, or depicted them in statues or paintings, but anybody dressing up and pretending to actually be them would have probably been in for all kinds of divine retribution.

  So, yeah, the Essler animated shorts are all well worth looking at, and some of them are little masterpieces. Empire of Worms is especially rewarding for its climactic battle between Thunderman and the colossal Worm-Emperor that has kidnapped Peggy Parks, when the hero cuts the writhing monster in half with his Thundervision, only to find himself battling two thrashing, segmented horrors. If the saga of Thunderman on-screen could have been left to rest there, then I feel we would all be in a much happier world, if only because I wouldn’t be writing this. But it was not to be …

  2: Pacific movie serials, Thunderman (1948) and Thunderman vs. the Riot Ray (1950) ****

  When Pacific Pictures released these fifteen-part serials, it was hardly as if they were entering uncharted territory or making any kind of risky moves. Since the success of newspaper-strip science fiction hero Zoom Wilson as a motion-picture serial only ten years before, it had been evident that modern special effects were capable of sustaining a moderately fantastic narrative for the required number of episodes. Meanwhile, the popularity of Essler Studios’ animated shorts made Thunderman an ideal candidate for the same treatment. There were even plans to cast Zoom Wilson’s bleached-blond leading actor Flip Fraser as Thunderman, but happily the part went to experienced serial-hero Donald Adams, whose dark, steely gaze was perfect for the role.

  Although by any reasonable cinematic standard they are no doubt terrible, I found both of these serials hard to dislike. The performers are all doing their absolute best with the material, and both Donald Adams as Thunderman and Josephine Derwent as Peggy Parks are particularly winning. The wrinkly costume, creaking special effects and ludicrous cliff-hanger cheats (Peggy had bailed out of the plane we saw her crash and die in last episode; the high window she fell from was on the second floor above a shop awning; the coroner who pronounced her dead was just joking to lighten the mood) somehow serve to cocoon the enterprise in a fuzzy grey blanket of affection, which the grainy black and white action only enforces. Concurrently, there is something haunting about these exact same qualities. In 1943, we had been given the Esslers’ full-colour, unrestrained vision of the real Thunderman. Now, five years and one Hiroshima later, it was as if this comparatively prosaic, dishwater Thunderman was the only version that we could allow ourselves. The comet-tossing champion of the animated shorts was now more relatable, more drab, more vulnerable-looking – a more managed expectation of American godhood. The earnestness of Adams’s performance and the whole venture’s utter lack of cynicism may also, to modern eyes, add a rather melancholy aspect to this generally haunted atmosphere.

  Both serials are adequately plotted, with the first featuring heavily accented foreign spies who seem themselves unclear whether they’re resurgent Nazis or infiltrating Reds, while the second features an entertaining turn from veteran screen heavy Laurence Bays as Felix Firestone. The effects of Firestone’s ‘Riot Ray’ in the 1950 serial are ingeniously (and cheaply) augmented with real footage of riots or public unrest, and both productions have an air of being reasonably innovative for their times. That said, I still find their most interesting aspect to be in the unlikely area of the credits. This feeds into what I was saying above about the character’s ontology: in the first of the two serials, a decision was taken, probably by Julius Metzenberger at American Comics, that Donald Adams should not be given a screen credit for his portrayal of the cumulonimbus crusader. Instead, the initial publicity and the movie posters claimed that since no human being could ever play Thunderman – an unusually frank admission of the point I was making earlier – the superhero had kindly stepped in and offered to portray himself.

  We need to take a closer look at what is happening here. A comic company, that knows a significant number of its readers are technically adults, is attempting to convince this audience that Thunderman is actually a living, breathing entity who exists in the same reality as it does. While some have maintained that this was American’s attempt at a cute publicity stunt, I’d have to say that doing anything cute has always been completely out of character for this famously rapacious outfit. Furthermore, trying to persuade the public that an omnipotent being from another world is watching over it seems less like establishing a publicity campaign than it does an attempt at some kind of commercial religion.

  Perhaps this echoes an American desire or need to feel that even the most exceptional individuals are no different to ordinary citizens, and that the altitudes they inhabit are somehow still within the reach of the average working stiff. Whether it’s a pro-fascist president and quintuple bankrupt who was born a billionaire, or an extraterrestrial who can see through walls and withstand a direct hit from an atomic bomb, it’s apparently necessary to our self-esteem to insist that this is a regular Joe who we could see ourselves having a couple of beers with, or maybe organising a panty raid. We are, it seems, more comfortable with our American gods if they are tawdry ones whose costumes tend to bag at the knees.

  With all of the above taken into account, we are left with two movie serials that are like silvery postcards from a lost or abandoned American dreamtime, a place where nobody swore and our deities wore crumpled clothing just like we did. Whatever their merits, these generally well-done and well-acted pieces would arouse public interest in Thunderman to the point where an orchestrated campaign to embed the character in the national group-mind could begin in earnest.

  3: Bugle Pictures, Thunderman in the Underworld (1951) ***

  Piggybacking on the moderate success of the previous year’s Thunderman vs. the Riot Ray serial, Bugle Pictures’ Thunderman in the Underworld had a slightly plumper Thunderman and a markedly more slender budget. Yet, despite its sometimes comical special effects, this is still an interesting movie for a number of reasons.

  For a start, this is the first Thunderman feature film and also the first superhero movie, and here we can see the establishment of a template for much of what would follow. Secondly, this is the movie that provided a foundation for the subsequent TV series, situating the character in a medium that was even more culturally permeative and, in the 1950s, was dealing massive blows to what had once been Hollywood’s entertainment monopoly. And thirdly, there is the strange aura of the film itself – in the peculiar impact of the role upon the movie’s leading man, we start to see the impersonation of superhumans looking less like a career choice and more like a syndrome.

  Victor Richards, star of Thunderman in the Underworld, had experienced a difficult upbringing, and it would clearly be unfair to claim that playing Thunderman was the beginning of his many problems. All the same, it doesn’t look as if it helped. Reportedly, right from the outset, Richards hated the idea of playing Thunderman and only took the role because his agent had assured him that the movie would only be seen by little kids, that no one in the grown-up film field would remember it, and that it would consequently have no impact on Richards’ serious acting career. Which, as far as prophecies go, could have been easily outperformed by Richards’ daily horoscope. Or a stale fortune cookie.

  The gathering miasma of depression that Richards seemed to bring to the character is perhaps best exemplified by Richards’ greeting on first meeting co-star Vera Marshall: ‘Welcome to the toilet, sweetheart.’ Marshall’s presence as Peggy Parks does much to lift the film’s spirits, but cannot dispel the sense that Thunderman isn’t really enjoying being Thunderman.

  The fact that much of the movie’s action takes place in a sewer may have inspired Richard’s initial greeting to Vera Marshall, and certainly doesn’t seem inappropriate. That said, the underground setting jibes nicely with our developing idea of Thunderman as an attempted American god, in that a trip to the underworld seems prerequisite for many gods, heroes and mythical figures such as Orpheus, Persephone, Gilgamesh or Jesus. This, however, does nothing to raise the movie or Thunderman into the realm of the mythical, when Victor Richards’ aggrieved presence is doing so much to pull the film in the opposite direction.

  Richards was roughly the same age as his predecessor, Donald Adams, and in his early thirties when he took the role. He was a different physical type to Adams, however, lacking the latter’s lithe physique and dark-eyed good looks. If Adams brought the character a touch of silver, Richards brought a touch of lead. Somehow, Victor Richards realised Thunderman as a bulkier, older-looking man, with the forced bonhomie that comes with a drink problem and a generally depressed, defeated manner. In short, Thunderman had become a perfect American dad, like mine and everybody’s that I knew, who didn’t look like he was even getting any from Peggy Parks.

  Ironically, this metamorphosis into Thunderdad seems to have completed the character’s descent into the sorry material world, and to have ensured his acceptance at the heart of the national psyche. This, at the time, seemed to be the rumpled, careworn and increasingly tipsy Thunderman that America felt comfortable with, that America wanted.

  4: WBC television series, The Adventures of Thunderman (1952–1959) ***

  The budget for Thunderman in the Underworld had been, appropriately, somewhere below floor level, and this may have contributed to the film being enough of a financial success to make an ongoing TV series based around the same formula seem economically viable. The movie was re-edited into two halves, with these becoming the opening pilot episodes of the new series. It became clear early on that not only would the show retain many of the same cast as its big-screen forebear, it would also inherit its predecessor’s frugal production values: a recreation of the famous origin scene, with the elders of Thunderland debating their artificial world’s imminent destruction at the hands of interdimensional super-pirates, will reward sharp-eyed viewers when they notice that the elders’ costumes are the repurposed outfits of numerous 1940s movie-serial heroes. I personally spotted elders in hand-me-downs donated by Zoom Wilson, Devil of Dawn Island and the National Guard, but you younger people with better memories and better eyesight may well detect more.

  The series, for the most part, progresses competently enough, and there are likeable performances from Vera Marshall and new addition Jeff Trench, as rookie photographer Teddy Baxter. Acromegaly-afflicted actor Rondo Hatton, on the other hand, is wildly miscast as Felix Firestone, an avoidable error when the second movie serial’s perfectly adequate Firestone, Laurence Bays, must surely have been available. Predictably, though, the show’s biggest casting problem resides in Victor Richards himself.

  The show’s success must have seemed like a two-edged sword to the increasingly troubled actor. On the one hand, Richards was more wealthy and more famous than he’d ever been or could ever have expected to be. On the other, he was becoming permanently cemented into the identity of Thunderman in the nation’s eyes, and, under the strain of this, his alcoholism and his chaotic personal circumstances were beginning to spiral out of control. And just as the burdens of the Thunderman persona would become Richards’ own, so too did the melancholy actor’s flattened spirit come to be inextricably entangled with the perceived nature of Thunderman.

  For one thing, as with the omission of Donald Adams’s name from the early movie-serial publicity, there was a similar case of ontological creep going on with Victor Richards. With his increasingly sozzled avuncular appearance and manner boosting his appeal as an average American who could exhale hurricanes and travel in time, and with televised appeals such as ‘Thunderman endorses National Flashlight Battery Inspection Day’ becoming more frequent, it was clear that to a large section of the public, ‘Victor Richards’ was just an alter ego like Ambrose Bell – an irrelevance, when they knew they were looking at the one and only real-life Thunderman.

  This slippage of identification was starkly underlined by an incident in 1956 when Thunderman – not Victor Richards – was advertised as presiding over the opening of a department store. Amongst the attendees was an eight-year-old boy who turned out to be carrying a loaded gun. Levelling the weapon at the costumed Richards, he announced his intention to possess a bullet that had been flattened against Thunderman’s invulnerable chest home as a souvenir. I find it telling that Richards’ enviably calm response was not to explain that he was just a human actor who was playing Thunderman, but, astonishingly, to remain in character and point out to the child that a bullet bouncing off his steely hide might well kill an innocent bystander. Admittedly, this was just one little kid, but when we recall all the letters sent to soap opera characters by their adult fans, informing them that their on-screen spouse is having an affair, we start to realise how blurred the line separating fact from fiction is for many people, even without deliberate attempts to persuade them, for commercial purposes, that an impossible superbeing is as real as they are. Victor Richards, in the minds of a few million people, was inescapably America’s own endearingly paunchy Thunderman.

  The profound national shock when his suicide – or very possibly murder – was announced in 1959, then, cannot be overestimated. I was around eight years old myself at the time, and I can recall a stunned and appalled disbelief that in some ways was a precursor to what the country would experience four years later with John Kennedy’s assassination: in both cases, a human being was made an embodiment of America’s imagined spirit, essence and soul. And in both cases, when America’s soul was in such a position that it perished of a gunshot wound in wretched and suspicious circumstances, the emotional impact on America’s still living heart and body was devastating.