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Post by tonebone on Sept 14, 2021 16:59:31 GMT -5
OOH! Forgot about the Legion of Super-Heroes cartoon from the early 2000's.. I loved that and would watch it with my kids.
The first season featured Superboy, right about the time of the big lawsuit where they found the Seigel family did indeed own at least part of Superboy. So the second season changed him to some sort of clone-Superman. It only lasted the two seasons. But the Legion characters were great.
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Post by tonebone on Sept 14, 2021 17:07:42 GMT -5
Also just remembered the Ralph Bakshi directed Mighty Mouse the New Adventures. It was pretty frenetic, with some Tick-like superhero satire, and featured a notorious young animator, John Krikfalusi, who would later create Ren and Stimpy. However, the show is MOST famous for being taken off the air by CBS when Mighty Mouse sniffed a flower, and parental watchdog groups said it looked like he was snorting cocaine. Believe it or not.
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Post by profh0011 on Sept 14, 2021 17:34:26 GMT -5
You used to be able to see the complete Flash Gordon: the Greatest Adventure of All, on Youtube, but it appears to have been taken down. from Archive.org... in ENGLISH with Japanese subtitles (heh). Arguably the best damn thing Filmation EVER did. "FLASH GORDON: THE GREATEST ADVENTURE OF ALL" (1979)
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Post by codystarbuck on Sept 14, 2021 21:50:13 GMT -5
Sadly out of print, and goes for top money, in the complete set. Mill Creek put out a budget set, but it is missing the final two episodes, as the original set had them on another disc, then season 2 and the extras. However, it is up on Youtube, at least for now.... You used to be able to see the complete Flash Gordon: the Greatest Adventure of All, on Youtube, but it appears to have been taken down. The first 10 minutes is here, starting in Warsaw and then arriving on Mongo.... The same poster included another part, which has scenes only in the movie version, about the Nazi subplot... The rest of the film was used for footage in the first 4 episodes of the tv series, as well as the final episode (in part, as the movies finale is split between Chapter 4 and chapter 16, with new footage in chapter 16, to lead into the reused footage). Filmation wanted to do a live action film, but the cost would be too high, but sold an animated feature to NBC and created the whole thing, using rotoscoping (animating over live action footage) to give it more motion. The plot and characterization was a little more mature than the average Saturday morning fare, too. NBC loved the footage and asked for a series and the movie was broken into segments, making up the first 4 episodes, more or less. Then, they animated new episodes, to continue the story, withholding the climax until chapter 16. They reused scenes in multiple episodes, to save time and money. They also revoiced some of the parts. For instance, Vic Perrin, the voice of Dr Zin, in Jonny Quest (and the Control voice, on The Outer Limits) voiced Ming, while Alan Oppenheimer voiced him in the tv series (and later did Skeletor, on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe). When you watch the series version, Episode 1 opens with Flash, Dale and Zarkov already orbiting Mongo, when they are attacked. They are also wearing their Mongo clothing, rather than their Earth clothing, as in the film. A rifle also gets redrawn as a raygun. You also see the same sequences, as Ming's ships come in for a landing, the same aerial battles, and the same movement of Ming's robot soldiers. Ming's ships are said to be robot-controlled, though you do see some of Barin's fighters disappear and those are definitely piloted by humans, and Hawkmen disappear, when hit by rays, and they are also living. My set is from "Ink +Paint" Hearst Productions and contains everything, minus the Greatest Adventure movie. Yeah, I bought that set, when it was released (as well as the Space Sentinels/Freedom Force set). Loved it and some nice extras. Darrel McNeil, a longtime Filmation guy, was featured and he wrote a book about Filmation's output, back in the early 90s, which I used to own. It's a 4-disc set. When Mill Creek picked up the rights for a budget set, someone didn't check the previous sets closely. Their's was only a 2-disc set, and they only duplicated the first two discs of the Ink & Paint set; but, Episodes 14 and 16 were on Disc 3 of the Ink & Paint set, along with the second season. I bought the few episodes that came out on VHS, when those were released. They had some 2-episode tapes and some 3 episode. I had the tapes that took you through about episodes 1-6 (as I recall, that was where it stopped). Similarly, I had the Space Sentinel ones and what I could find of Shazam. Again, they never released the complete series, on VHS. I also own both Filmation Batman series (Adv of, from the 60s, and New Adv, from the 70s, with West & Ward), the DC Heroes ones, Shazam! (bootleg, I must admit, since they haven't done a dvd release), the first Superman one, Flash Gordon, Space Sentinels/Freedom Force, Zorro, Lone Ranger & Tonto, and the one set Warner put out of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. I'm 50(mumble.....mumble....) and have no kids, and watch cartoons for my own love. Granted, some of my childhood favorites haven't aged well (Space Sentinels seemed so much cooler when I was younger); some were still awesome, like Rocky & Bullwinkle, Underdog and Tennessee Tuxedo.
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Post by tonebone on Sept 16, 2021 8:45:00 GMT -5
from Archive.org... in ENGLISH with Japanese subtitles (heh). Arguably the best damn thing Filmation EVER did. "FLASH GORDON: THE GREATEST ADVENTURE OF ALL" (1979) You're the real MVP.
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Post by profh0011 on Sept 16, 2021 11:54:22 GMT -5
It's really crazy. I read this story all the way back in the early 80s, and it impressed me then. But in the decades since-- apparently, as an outgrrowth of some deliberately-misleading product description, and later, some deliberately-misleading stories spread by people with their own agendas-- the story has gotten buried, or totally distorted. I've seen a lot of people say George Lucas "couldn't" do Flash Gordon because Dino already had the license. NONSENSE. And this story has apparently been promoted by someone in Lucas' organization. Lucas COULD NOT AFFORD the license, and decided to do something "original" instead. Which, to me, is a more creative way to go anyway. (Even if you are ripping off countless things at once... that's how actual creativity works.) As it happens, from what I've read, Lucas wanted to do FLASH GORDON after he did THX-1138, but wound up doing AMERICAN GRAFFITTI instead to raise his visibility in Hollywood. Ironically, some now feel it's his best film.
The story I read in the early 80s was... Filmation wanted to get out of the "Saturday morning ghetto" they'd been trapped in for more than a decade, where they were not only engaged in a race to the bottom with Hanna-Barbera, quality-wise, but also since 1979 a victim of network censorship, which made it very difficult to do ANYTHING exciting, interesting, etc. FILMATION licensed the film rights to FLASH GORDON with the intent of doing a feature film to showcase what they could really do. They got about a third of the film done before they ran out of money, then showed around what they'd done to distributors, hoping to find someone who would put up the rest of the money needed to finish the film. In England, Hammer Films spent most of their existence coming up with a concept and a poster, and raising 100% of the film costs from distributors, before they even started shooting their films. (The unfortunate side-result of this was, the distributors owned the films, not Hammer, which has caused a lot of chaos in the home-video market when it comes to "series" like DRACULA, etc.) NOBODY in America wanted to touch what Filmation did, due to the narrow-minded attitude that " cartoons are for kids and ONLY for kids". They could have been screwed... when an unexpected person came to their rescue... Raffaella DeLaurentis. She ran her father's European distribution company, and liked what she saw. She put up the money to finish the film, IN EXCHANGE for the FILM RIGHTS. That's how Dino got his hands on the rights to FLASH GORDON. He'd never even heard of the character until that moment. The film was distributed in Europe, and reportedly did quite well in theatres. But Dino liked what HE saw... and decided to MAKE HIS OWN live-action film. Which, astoundingly, opened in theatres less than a year later. At that point, WHO in Hollywood could have accomplished such a thing in that time frame? Of course, the relative "rush job" no doubt explains the schizophrenic nature of Dino's film. The Italian film crew wanted the film to be a lot more SEXY AND VIOLENT. The American film crew wanted something more like the Adam West BATMAN. (And note who wrote the screenplay: Lorenzo Semple Jr. Heh.) Somehow, against all odds of sense, Dino's 1980 FLASH GORDON "worked", in a way pretty much no other such film reviving classic old characters at that time did. (Remember how many really AWFUL such films came out around that time, all terrible INSULTS to the characters and the source materials.) To me, his one BIG mistake was hiring Sam Jones, the guy with arguably the LEAST amount of talent in the entire film. On top of anything else, Jones had a falling-out with DeLaurentis and WALKED off the film near the end, preventing the 2 sequels Dino had in mind from ever happening. None of the networks wanted to touch Filmation's feature, but someone did like the idea of re-doing it as a serial (in the tradition of the 1936 film), and cutting out anything from the feature they deemed "offensive" to the little kiddies. A 2nd season, however, was "kiddie-fied" beyond all reason. The 1979 feature was finally run on NBC in 1982, in PRIME TIME on a Friday night. By then, the anti-violence censorship thing had started to die out. I've always put it down to Ronald Reagan getting in office somehow making "violence on TV" acceptable again. In 1981, crime shows were back, with HILL STREET BLUES, THE GANGSTER CHRONICLES and STRIKE FORCE, and in 1983, MIKE HAMMER was being run Saturday nights at 8 PM. When I saw that on that early in the evening, I knew "family viewing hour" was finally GONE.
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Post by tonebone on Sept 16, 2021 15:49:41 GMT -5
It's really crazy. I read this story all the way back in the early 80s, and it impressed me then. But in the decades since-- apparently, as an outgrrowth of some deliberately-misleading product description, and later, some deliberately-misleading stories spread by people with their own agendas-- the story has gotten buried, or totally distorted. I've seen a lot of people say George Lucas "couldn't" do Flash Gordon because Dino already had the license. NONSENSE. And this story has apparently been promoted by someone in Lucas' organization. Lucas COULD NOT AFFORD the license, and decided to do something "original" instead. Which, to me, is a more creative way to go anyway. (Even if you are ripping off countless things at once... that's how actual creativity works.) As it happens, from what I've read, Lucas wanted to do FLASH GORDON after he did THX-1138, but wound up doing AMERICAN GRAFFITTI instead to raise his visibility in Hollywood. Ironically, some now feel it's his best film.
The story I read in the early 80s was... Filmation wanted to get out of the "Saturday morning ghetto" they'd been trapped in for more than a decade, where they were not only engaged in a race to the bottom with Hanna-Barbera, quality-wise, but also since 1979 a victim of network censorship, which made it very difficult to do ANYTHING exciting, interesting, etc. FILMATION licensed the film rights to FLASH GORDON with the intent of doing a feature film to showcase what they could really do. They got about a third of the film done before they ran out of money, then showed around what they'd done to distributors, hoping to find someone who would put up the rest of the money needed to finish the film. In England, Hammer Films spent most of their existence coming up with a concept and a poster, and raising 100% of the film costs from distributors, before they even started shooting their films. (The unfortunate side-result of this was, the distributors owned the films, not Hammer, which has caused a lot of chaos in the home-video market when it comes to "series" like DRACULA, etc.) NOBODY in America wanted to touch what Filmation did, due to the narrow-minded attitude that " cartoons are for kids and ONLY for kids". They could have been screwed... when an unexpected person came to their rescue... Raffaella DeLaurentis. She ran her father's European distribution company, and liked what she saw. She put up the money to finish the film, IN EXCHANGE for the FILM RIGHTS. That's how Dino got his hands on the rights to FLASH GORDON. He'd never even heard of the character until that moment. The film was distributed in Europe, and reportedly did quite well in theatres. But Dino liked what HE saw... and decided to MAKE HIS OWN live-action film. Which, astoundingly, opened in theatres less than a year later. At that point, WHO in Hollywood could have accomplished such a thing in that time frame? Of course, the relative "rush job" no doubt explains the schizophrenic nature of Dino's film. The Italian film crew wanted the film to be a lot more SEXY AND VIOLENT. The American film crew wanted something more like the Adam West BATMAN. (And note who wrote the screenplay: Lorenzo Semple Jr. Heh.) Somehow, against all odds of sense, Dino's 1980 FLASH GORDON "worked", in a way pretty much no other such film reviving classic old characters at that time did. (Remember how many really AWFUL such films came out around that time, all terrible INSULTS to the characters and the source materials.) To me, his one BIG mistake was hiring Sam Jones, the guy with arguably the LEAST amount of talent in the entire film. On top of anything else, Jones had a falling-out with DeLaurentis and WALKED off the film near the end, preventing the 2 sequels Dino had in mind from ever happening. None of the networks wanted to touch Filmation's feature, but someone did like the idea of re-doing it as a serial (in the tradition of the 1936 film), and cutting out anything from the feature they deemed "offensive" to the little kiddies. A 2nd season, however, was "kiddie-fied" beyond all reason. The 1979 feature was finally run on NBC in 1982, in PRIME TIME on a Friday night. By then, the anti-violence censorship thing had started to die out. I've always put it down to Ronald Reagan getting in office somehow making "violence on TV" acceptable again. In 1981, crime shows were back, with HILL STREET BLUES, THE GANGSTER CHRONICLES and STRIKE FORCE, and in 1983, MIKE HAMMER was being run Saturday nights at 8 PM. When I saw that on that early in the evening, I knew "family viewing hour" was finally GONE. The story I've read from the start was that King wanted too much money for the rights. Never heard that Dino already had the rights. As a matter of fact, I'm sure that part of Dino's desire to get the rights was at least in part due to the success of Star Wars. I always saw Flash Gordon as a classier version of Star Crash, Battle Beyond the Stars, etc. that tried to cash in on the success. It's interesting, also, that after Lucas balked at the high price of the rights to Flash Gordon, and walked away and did something bigger, that it seems King must have slashed the price somewhat for Filmation to afford them. I have always loved the movie. How can you not? It's just such a perfect combination of such different styles and sensibilities. Part of me would love to see a serious, competent attempt at Flash Gordon, but part of me knows it will be too serious, too violent, and too polished. What's the fun in that?
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Post by Calidore on Sept 16, 2021 19:28:40 GMT -5
Part of me would love to see a serious, competent attempt at Flash Gordon, but part of me knows it will be too serious, too violent, and too polished. What's the fun in that? Really, the 1936 serial was both serious and competent, and the sequels weren't bad either. If you haven't seen them yet, check them out.
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Post by profh0011 on Sept 16, 2021 21:12:33 GMT -5
A couple years ago, I re-read the 9 years of Alex Raymond's Sunday strips detailing Flash, Dale & Zarkov's adventure on Mongo. (9 YEARS!) I also re-watched the 3 Universal serials (1936, 1938, 1940) as part of a year-long sci-fi marathon.
I'd once read that FLASH GORDON in the papers had the BEST art of any adventure strip... but, the WORST writing. I can CONFIRM that. I wasn't sure when I was a teenager in the 70s, but I am now. Geez, I couldn't wait for that thing to end.
By comparison, the Universal serials were a MASSIVE improvement over the source material. The 1st 8 or so episodes of the 1936 serial were actually adapted from the papers, but streamlined, and with several of the main characters drastically improved in the film version. After that, they picked and chose details from later stories here and there, but I would now say, the writing in the serials were way better than that in the papers. EVEN "TRIP TO MARS", which is by a wide margin my least-favorite of the 3.
"FLASH GORDON CONQUERS THE UNIVERSE" (1940) is actually my favorite. It's only 12 chapters, the story structure is much tighter and more concise, the costumes are really cool and the ACTING is the best. The only thing I miss in the 3rd one is having Barin and Aura both recast. Dale I didn't mind, I actually prefer Carol Hughes over Jean Rogers.
As for "serious and competent", the 1979 Filmation feature film fits that description as well. It's not as much fun as the Buster Crabbe serials, but when I consider WHEN it was made, it's ASTONISHING how good it was, compared to the overwhelming majority of "kiddie-fied" TV cartoons in the 70s.
I never thought of this before, but I wonder if 1981's "HEAVY METAL" would have even happened without the 1979 "FLASH GORDON" feature happening first?
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