“Ain’t no monster clown…” Huh?

A couple of years ago I was rummaging around in the magic box known as Youtube when I stumbled across the old 1960’s Marvel cartoons.  And no, not the “does whatever a spider can” Spider-Man series, but the first foray into Marvel on the small screen, The Marvel Super Heroes.  These cartoons are the goofiest, most wonderful things ever created.  I may have been born long after these things disappeared from syndication, but I can always rely on them to make me smile when I need a boost.

The “animation” is simply copied artwork from the books of the time that’s manipulated to make it move around.  It’s crude but charming in its way, and its the closest we’ll ever get to seeing the work of the likes of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko come alive.  And not only that, they also have the niftiest opening theme songs you could ever come up with.  Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Namor, and the Hulk all get the royal treatment in these shorts.

Since Iron Man is currently the talk of the town, we’ll start with him.  Here’s an episode where he battles Titanium Man:

I didn’t realize until I was getting ready to do this post that the late great John Vernon was the voice of Tony Stark/Iron Man.  Now that I know, I keep expecting Stark to say “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”   Or, at the very least, “Every Halloween, the trees are filled with underwear…every spring, the toilets explode.”

Here’s the intro to the Captain America episodes:

My favorite character of that era, Thor, has perhaps the most stirring intro and the best episode, an adaptation of his classic duel with Hercules.  Here’s part 1:

And part 2:

I generally couldn’t care less about Namor, but in his opening there’s a rare bit of fluid motion (pardon the pun) as he flies out of the water and dives back in.  Here it is:

And finally, there’s the Hulk:

Now, forgetting for a moment that this song commits the nigh-unpardonable sin of trying to rhyme “gamma rays” with “unglamorous” – can anyone tell me what a “monster clown” is?  Because, according to this little ditty, the Hulk ain’t one.

Good golly, how I love these things.