Iron Man’s Double Disaster
Hey kids (of all ages), it’s Saturday Morning Cartoon time again!
A couple weeks ago we covered THE MIGHTY THOR, and before him, THE INCREDIBLE HULK. But these two weren’t the only new Marvel characters making the jump to the company’s TV wheel show just a few years after their four-color print debuts…
Ol’ Greenskin was the most successful of Marvel’s attempts to put their characters into live-action, prime-time TV in the ’70s. They brought him back to try and launch others (including Thor) in the late ’80s, but none took root.
Iron Man didn’t even get a tryout in either era. (No. EXO-MAN doesn’t count!) But he was there at the start of Marvel animation. (If you can really call it that, with art lifted directly from comics and CLUTCH CARGO level motion added.) And he got various animated appearances in later decades… But it wasn’t until the 21st Century MCU that Tony Stark’s armor-plated techno-hero became a household name. (The Black Sabbath song had nothing to do with the comic book character.)
Kind of funny that, groundbreaking as Marvel’s 1960s superheroes were, they still felt obliged to stick to genre conventions… A doe-eyed Lois Lame knockoff. (You’ve come a long way, Pepper.) The whole well-guarded secret identity thing.
The episodes featured today include the introduction of Happy Hogan, sort of Iron Man’s less-lame answer to Jimmy Olsen. We also see the introduction of supervillain Jack Frost (who would later go by “Blizzard”). You might think he’s a poor man’s Mister Freeze… Well, maybe Mr. Zero, since BATMAN’s villain hadn’t really been developed beyond his ’59 introduction until well after this story was published in the comics. From 1966. More from the OldHorseman.
