IMO, DC wins at cartoons, Marvel wins at movies. Batman Begins is the first decent DC movie in…a long while.
There was another Hulk cartoon in the early '80s, which ran concurrently to Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. It had a really awesome instrumental theme song that perfectly captured the power and rampaging of the Hulk.
The UPN cartoon had She-Hulk in it. And a rather foxy rendition, too.
The 60s one was part of the “Marvel Super Heroes” cartoon I mentioned in my OP. There were also Captain America and Avengers segments, and I want to say there were Thor segments too.
Captain America, Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, and Sub-Mariner.
Simple or not, Neil Hefti said it took him forever to write the Batman theme. Simple don’t mean simplistic.
Nonsuch. Agreed. I didn’t mean simplistic as a perjorative.
Is it just me? I seem to remember one or more live-action Spiderman films in the seventies …
Actually, I seem to recall them being pretty bad. But still.
McSpon. You’re doubtlessly thinking of the TV show.
Did you catch “X-Men: Evolution”? It might not have been full “Justice League” caliber, but it was pretty decent.
Hm. On research, I think you’re nearly right. It appears that there were two or more “movies” consisting of episodes from the TV series, edited together.
And to think I saw them at the theatre. Geez. Now I feel ripped off. :dubious:
I did, and unlike apparantly most x-men fans who are too much of an uberfanboy to accept a different telling of the story, I enjoyed it. Doesn’t mean I still don’t want something with the “regular” X-Men and their story. One based on the movies could be good, but I think even better might be a series of mini-series from the different alternate realities. Maybe one for Age of Apocolypse, one for Marvel 1602…umm…well, I don’t know how many more AU’s there are that are fleshed our enough for a mini-series, but the writers would, and they’d be the ones writing them!
Or instead of that, mini-series of the most popular X-Over series, like Days of Future Past, X-Tinction Adgenda, X-Cutioners Song, and others.
That’s how the urban legend tells the story, but that’s not what happened. DC did bring suit against Fawcett, but no court ruling was ever handed down. Fawcett settled and agreed to cease-and-desist publishing the Captain rather than continue a drawn-out legal battle. Fawcett, seeing the writing on the wall, (comic books sales have been on a declining spiral since the mid-50s) decided to get out of comic book publishing entirely.
And DC didn’t acquire the rights to Captain Marvel (and the other Fawcett characters) for quite some time. While the Captain was in limbo, Marvel came out with their own Captain Marvel and locked up rights to the name, which is why any comic (or TV show) featuring the Big Red Cheese always uses Shazam! in its title instead of Captain Marvel.
I have a family member who worked for Marvel in NY for a few years around 1990. He says Stan Lee is an egomanical lunatic. I feel that Marvel squandered a lot of time in the 80’s when the comic market was smoking hot by not exploiting it with a big movie or some other break out into other media.
Batman was huge when it came out, if you weren’t there at the time it’s hard to understand how big of an impact it had.
Marvel saw what was going on in the last few years and practically bet everything on the Spiderman movie. If it flopped I think Marvel would be bankrupt right now. So says my source still working in the field.
I’d say they bet it all on the X-Men movie, which came out one or two years before. It wasn’t as successful, but still makde a lot of money and is regarded by most as a good superhero movie.
I think back on all the years I’ve read Marvel comics and I recollect how Stan Lee was such a hugely agressive salesman for them.
He had the Marvel Bullpen columns, dropping tidbits about the artists and writers, and making them sound like rock superstars. The lettercolumns were full of gung-ho responses to readers, reminding them how lucky they were for reading the greatest comics in the world. He had the little editorial letterboxes refering the reader to another issue (do ya remember that happening in FF #32 Faithful Marvelites? Sure ya do!) After he stopped writing, he put his name first on all the marquees as EDITOR! Buy Marvel comics because the ultra-cool Smilin’ Stan Lee is in charge of 'em!
I remember one Marvel Bullpen blurb that was utter horseshit: Marvel had a couple of noncolor mags featurring Conan the Barbarian, et al. Stan plugged them, then said “We get so many questions from readers, Gee Mighty Marvel HQ, with all these blockbuster noncolor magazines coming out, does this mean Marvel’s gonna stop printing color comics? We will never discontinue our color comics faithful Marvelites, and that’s a promise from us!” He made an issue out of a nonissue to peddle his product.
Yeah, but there were no DC characters on The Electric Company!
Egomanical lunatic or not, I think he was right - when comic popularity was exploding (more in the early 90’s), both Marvel and DC dropped the ball in getting good movies to the big screen. In fact, when the comics were hottest, Marvel & DC performed at their worst artistically all the way around.
Well, as D_Odds notes, Stan and Marvel have settled. Anyway, they never really consulted him for any artistic contributions since the late '70’s, when he moved to Hollywood to be their pitchman. But even during the litigation, he still was doing the job – when Joe Quesada went on Larry King (?) to hype the gay Rawhide Kid miniseries, Stan went on the back him up.
A couple months after the suit was first filed, “Stan Lee presents” was dropped from the title pages of all the Marvel books (where it had sat comfortably for nigh on 25 years at that point). There was a huge fan uproar and Marvel restored it a couple months later and some CYA spin saying it was just an oversight.
–Cliffy
Stan Lee can be respectful and quiet and civil when he wants to. The whole “Stan the Man” thing is just an act he uses. I can’t imagine anyone believing for an astro-second that Stan truly felt his Fantastic Four] stories were better than anything Shakespeare eveer wrote, for instance.
And give Stan some credit, he’s never AFAIK bad-mouthed or demeaned anyone or anything, even when they were in direct opposition to him. He knows this is all just business, and doesn’t seem to take anything too personally.