Couldn’t-See TV

Two things got me to thinking about comics on TV when I was a kid, both of them involving the Super Friends.

One was picking up the DC’s Finest collection of Super Friends comics on Wednesday.

The other was a video from Casually Comics.

In my post about how and why I got into comics, one of the things I mentioned was my limited access to TV.

We relied on an antenna to receive our TV programming, and for many years the only stations we could pull in reliably were a CBS affiliate and the PBS station that broadcasted from the university that would eventually become my alma mater.

The era of the Super Friends discussed in the video is, thus, one that I didn’t see much of, as it was on ABC, and even when we managed to improve our reception with a better antenna and an antenna rotator, the nearest ABC affiliate remained a snowy mess on most Saturday mornings.

However, for a time, the CBS affiliate was a “secondary affiliate” of ABC, which mostly meant that in certain time slots in which they lacked any local programming or content from CBS they would air content from ABC. Mostly, it was content that had previously aired the week before – or the day before in the case of the daily broadcasts of All My Children – and was mostly sitcoms.

The two exceptions were the aforementioned soap opera and…Super Friends, which aired on Saturday mornings before the CBS block of Saturday Morning programming began.

Which is why young Jon was up at 6 AM every Saturday morning.

Many people were led to comics via the cartoon and live-action adaptations, but as noted, I was a comics-first kid, so it was comics that drew me to the adaptations.

And I was very drawn to the adaptations that I could watch, as is evidenced by my habit of rising early on Saturday mornings.

Even so, one thing was clear in my mind: the comics were better.

Eventually, my local station stopped re-broadcasting Super Friends, so all I had regular access to were what CBS had on offer. For a time – and there was some overlap with Super Friends – Saturday mornings offered me The New Adventures of Batman and Robin.

One thing I feel I should mention is that at the time I was watching the animated adventures of the Dynamic Duo, I had no idea that their voices were provided by actors who had portrayed them in live-action.

Reruns of the Adam West Batman series – I don’t know why, but I dislike referring to it as “Batman ’66” – did not air on my local station, nor did I encounter it on cable the many times I stayed at my grandmother’s house.

At least, not during the age in which I might have taken a liking to it. However, when I was older, and had several years of reading modern Batman comics under my belt, I happened to see the movie while at my grandmother’s house.

Now, this was a few years before Frank Miller came along, but well after Denny O’Neil had come along, so while he wasn’t as grim and gritty as he would become, the Batman I knew and loved was fairly grim and gritty.

What I saw was…not that.

I couldn’t even bring myself to watch the whole thing.

The Adventures of Superman with George Reeves, which I had gotten to see a few times, also wasn’t great as far as I was concerned, but at least it wasn’t so goofy, and young Jon could at least sit through an entire episode.

I understand that this sets me apart from most of my comic-loving peers – though it’s far from the only thing – but I have never, and likely will never, developed any affection for the campy take on Batman. It just caught me at the wrong time in the wrong state of mind.

That might have changed as I grew older, but that was stymied by the way in which the show cast a long shadow on any coverage of comics outside of the industry.

There were just too many “Holy Legitimate Art Form, Batman – Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore!” headlines for me to take, and if some variant on that headline wasn’t used, it at least seemed to be legally required to include a “BIFF!” a “BAM!” or a “POW!” somewhere in the article or TV piece.

That aside, CBS provided me with some live-action content, too, like Shazam! (and Isis, though I’d never read any comics with her in them) on Saturday Mornings.

And in the evenings, there was Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk, which, again, were appointment TV for me, but there was always the thought in my head that the comics were so much better, and the shows kept being wrong, dammit!

Why is she just twirling to change into her costume instead of using her lasso? Why isn’t Hulk talking about smashing? Why isn’t he bulletproof? Why isn’t his name Bruce???

Of course, a lot of those Hulk questions came later, as that was one instance in which the adaptation led me to the comics, but I very quickly grew to love the comics much more than I did the show. However, I did and do still retain some affection for it.

There were plenty of other comics-related cartoons when I was a kid, but most of them were on networks other than CBS.

I think I only ever got to see one episode of the Plastic Man cartoon. I never saw an episode of the Spider-Woman cartoon.

There were some that I “watched,” which is to say I changed the dial to the channel they were on and stared at a snowy image trying to puzzle out what was happening in much the same way that other kids watched scrambled porn.

Those included Spider-Man/Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, the much more comics-accurate The Incredible Hulk, both of which introduced me to the sound of Stan “The Man” Lee.

There was also The Kid Super Power Hour with Shazam!

And while I didn’t get to watch it regularly – and didn’t bother doing the mostly listening I did for some of the other shows with poor reception – I did at least catch a couple of those later Super Friends episodes.

Some adaptations that came along later in my life passed me by, such as the live-action Superboy.

By that time, we had a satellite dish, so in theory I could have managed to catch it either on some station that ran it in syndication or via the direct satellite feed, but in the former case that tended to happen when my mom was watching something else, and in the latter, it happened while I was in school, and the vagaries of having a satellite dish in the 1980s made timer-based recording using a VCR – especially the VCR I had – too much of a challenge to bother with.

I caught one episode while either home sick or on break, and then every other time I happened to be home during the feed it ended up being that same episode.

The 1988 Superman from Ruby-Spears was a better animated offering than most, but teen Jon was not the early riser that young Jon had been, so I usually missed it.

Beyond that, I did occasionally see some of the older cartoons, like the 1967 Spider-Man, which aired on PBS in the mid-80s, or the random Filmation DC cartoons from the ’60s that I saw on the Bozo the Clown Show when I was at my grandmother’s.

At some point around 1985 or so there was an open slot on Saturday mornings in which the local station started running the old Richie Rich show. I watched it, because of course I did, but I had long moved past reading any of the Harvey comics.

And of course, there were some cartoons I watched that had a history in comics even if that’s not where they began, such as Tarzan, the Lone Ranger, and Zorro.

I’m not really sure what the point of any of this was, other than that I just got to thinking about my experience with TV adaptations of the comics I loved – or in some cases, comics I’d read if not loved – and felt like I should put those thoughts down.

Throughout my childhood, plenty of those adaptations existed, but so many of them were out of reach, and while I did positively devour any of them that I could, I do wonder if the fact that I couldn’t fully join the fun kept me from actually enjoying them as much as I might have if I’d had a better menu to choose from.

Certainly, what I did see led me to be deeply distrustful and dismissive of any and all adaptations for many years.

I still am, to some extent, though it’s often a kind of dismissiveness that actually allows me to enjoy some of them in a way that I would not have been able when I was younger and got angrier about adaptations getting things “wrong.”

And there was another benefit to that distrust and dismissiveness: it left me completely unprepared for the jaw-dropping awesomeness of the greatest comic book adaptation of all time.

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