The recent Justice League cartoon depicts superhero fights with wild abandon – punches are thrown, heroes and villains get blasted by energy beams, etc.
Recently I started thinking of cartoons from my youth, like Batman, Superman, the Herculoids, Space Ghost, Fantastic Four, etc. from the 1960s – They seemed to have a similar depiction of violence. Am I remembering this correctly? I also seem to recall that cartoons from the early and/or mid 1970s had really toned it down in terms of actual punches thrown, etc. I am really not sure if my memory is serving me well in this instance – does any one else remember superhero cartoons from the seventies being strangely devoid of good fight scenes?
It was a conscious decision by Hanna-Barbara in particular, to downplay fights and violence and try to end conflicts through nonviolent means. Of course, this led to many years of bland, boring, vapid, vanilla cartoons. One of the worst is the Super-Friends, which is absolutely horrible when watched by today’s standards.
I personally blame Hanna Barbera, whose approach to cartoons seemed to deliberately rebel against the mayhem established by Chuck Jones and Tex Avery and make cartoons designed While Warner toons up to ~1960 or so had been shown in theatres, and HB’s own The Flinstones was in prime time, the toons meant specifically for Saturday-morning viewing were exclusively for children, with no subtext to amuse adults in the audience. HB’s kinder gentler Superfriends cartoon of 1973 introduced teen sidekicks Wendy and Marvin (and Wonder Dog) and had virtually no violence. Rather, villains were misguided scientists or misguided aliens or misguided somebodies who could be set straight with a stern talking-to. The smashy-smashy picked up a little (but never any actual punches or other direct violence) with The Challenge of the Super Friends in 1978 when the sidekicks were replaced with Zan and Jayna (and Gleek) who at least had superpowers and could become involved in the conflicts. Periodically, the heroes would mix it up with the Legion of Doom supervillains, but never in knock-down brawls. Typically, one character would simply tangle another in a rope or golden lasso or bent girders or whatnot.
I don’t recall characters engaging in direct hand-to-hand (and even then, rarely) until SuperFriends: The Legendary Super Powers Show, when Zan and Jayna were dropped in favour of Firestorm and the recurring (in fact overused) villains became Darkseid et al. The quality of the show improved a little for the 1986 version, The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians (and addition of Teen Titan Cyborg), which included the first meta-reference: Adam West being cast as the voice of Batman. Some of the episodes were downright grim, including one about the death of Superman, years before the comic book would run a similar plotline.
After that, Hanna-Barbera stopped making DC superhero toons, allowing Warner to reclaim their characters (with the exception of HB-created characters like Zan, Jayna, Apache Chief, Black Vulcan, etc.) and start making more adult-oriented fare with their new, stylized and rather violent Batman, Superman and eventually Justice League shows.
Oopa, screwed up the editing. First paragraph should start:
I personally blame Hanna Barbera, whose approach to cartoons seemed to deliberately rebel against the mayhem established by Chuck Jones and Tex Avery. While toons up to ~1960 or so had been shown in theatres…
Oops, screwed up the editing. First paragraph should start:
I personally blame Hanna Barbera, whose approach to cartoons seemed to deliberately rebel against the mayhem established by Chuck Jones and Tex Avery. While toons up to ~1960 or so had been shown in theatres…
It was horrible then too. Even as kid, I found it embarrassingly bad.
Another horrible one was Thundarr the Barbarian. IIRC, his “Sunsword” was capable of cutting through rock or metal quite easily, but its effect on living organisms was apparently to make them assume a hunched-over position and turn upside down. I found it unwatchable.
But…but…Ookla the Mok!
A great band that specializes in nerdy and geeky lyrics and catchy pop melodies: otmfan.com .
I agree that the Super Friends cartoon sucked even back in the day, but when I was 5 and 6 years old in the early '80s, it was still a treat to see “second-tier” characters like Green Lantern, Flash, Hawkman, and Firestorm in a cartoon on TV. I was already discovering superhero comics at that age, and I knew it was better than nothing.
One thing I remember, at one point they cut out all the violent stuff from many Loony Tunes cartoons. For example, Wile E. Coyote would run off a cliff or step under a falling rock - and the cartoon would jarringly cut to the next scene. As a kid, I assumed that the films were old and falling apart; it never occured to me they would screw them up that bad on purpose. It was so jarring it largely drove me away from them.
Wikipedia makes references to a “watchgroup backlash” affecting the broadcast standards 70s cartoons. I wasn’t around at the time, myself, so I can’t tell you how accurate that claim is, though it seems plausible enough.
Kinda funny you mention this now—I’ve been catching a few reruns of Gigantor on Cartoon Network. A black & white, somewhat production-value-challanged little cartoon from the mid-sixties, that none the less happened to feature quite a bit o’ onscreen death. Quite a difference from all those years of having every hint of animated “death” painted over.
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I have a Gigantor T-shirt, which I have had for many years – it predates my marriage to Dangerosa. The image on it is not quite this one. but is similar. Note the two prominent fists. When worn by a woman with, um, notable assets, it’s 3D.
I will always have a special spot in my heart for Gigantor. 
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Didn’t DC later pick them up again? I could swear I saw them more recently in something.
The characters have appeared in the adult comedy toon Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, which specializes in using Hanna-Barbera characters.
Justice League Unlimited featured groups of Cadmus-created clones (called The Ultimen) which were slightly-altered versions of Zan, Jayna, Black Vulcan, Apache Chief and Samurai. In addition, the Ultimen’s headquarters was virtually identical to the Hall of Justice. It was a tribute to the HB characters without actually using them.
As for sanitized violence, there was a Conan cartoon in which his enemies were some kinda lizardmen. Every time he swung his sword at one of them, instead of treating us to a nice gooshy spray of blood and entrails, the blade would stop moments before impact and the lizardman would be magically banished to another dimension, or some such.
Will somebody point out the irony of Hanna and Barbara going from being known for their lushly animated, hyper-violent, silent Tom & Jerry cartoons to being synonymous with stiff, bland, diologue-heavy television animation?
Zan and Jayna were in Extreme Justice.
Mantou Raven, a native American mystic who was part of the JL for a time, had the ability to grow to enormous sizes by saying ‘Inukchuk’, just like Apache Chief - although I don’t know if he did it more than once.
Yeah, I remember as a very young child watching the episode where the moon apparantly was an egg, and hatched a big bird or something. Even as a kid I was like, “C’mon… That crappy writing, even for a Saturday morning cartoon…”
I haven’t watched many modern cartoons, but I was also chagrined by the lack of action/violence in cartoons in the 70s, when I was a kid. I much preferred Johnny Quest and earlier cartoons to the bland crap that was on TV in the mid to late 70s.
" just like Apache Chief", nothing, he was Apache Chief, albeit an updated version. At the end of the “Obsidian Age” Graphic Novel that introduced him, the writter said as much.
That’s it. I thought those guys looked familiar.