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Sep10

The TOP 13 FILMATION SUPERMAN Cartoons — RANKED

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Sep 10, 2021

The TOP 13 FILMATION SUPERMAN Cartoons — RANKED

THE FILMATION FILES: An anniversary tribute to a charming series… — UPDATED 9/10/21: Filmation’s The New Adventures of Superman premiered 55 years ago! Perfect time to re-present this piece from 2020. Dig it. — Dan — Welcome to THE FILMATION FILES, a recurring series that takes a deep dive into some of the most entertaining cartoons ever – the DC Comics segments first broadcast in the ’60s but which were also a staple of ’70s syndication. Click here for the complete index of features, as well as links to our podcast with John S. Drew. — If you love Superman and cartoons, you’re pretty lucky. The Man of Steel has been animated since his earliest days and can still be found in DC’s direct-to-video films. The quality has always varied, but for sheer goofy charm, you can’t do any better than The New Adventures of Superman, Filmation’s 1960s take on the Man of Tomorrow. The show ran Saturdays on CBS for three seasons in various permutations, starting Sept. 10, 1966 — 55 years ago. I first encountered the cartoons in syndication in the ’70s and have long had a soft spot for them, even though I prefer Filmation’s 1968 Batman series. (Because of course.) But in anticipation of the program’s anniversary, my son Sam and I spent a good part of the summer binging the whole run and we came up with THE TOP 13 FILMATION SUPERMAN CARTOONS — RANKED. Two things to be aware of: The first two seasons featured shorts while the third season contained two-parters, but we felt it was fair to judge them all equally. On the other hand, we left out the Superboy shorts because that felt like comparing red apples to green apples. So let’s go… up, up and away! — 13. The Men from A.P.E. (Season 1). Who doesn’t love a good villain team-up? Lex Luthor, the Toyman, the Prankster and the Warlock – who would have made a great villain in the comics – combine forces to create Allied Perpetrators of Evil. Naturally, it doesn’t work out. — 12. Luthor’s Lethal Laser (Season 3). Moon madness reaches Filmation Superman as Luthor builds a gigantic laser cannon to attack Earth from the lunar surface. And Brainiac shows up! — 11. Luthor’s Loco Looking Glass (Season 2). Helpful hint for urban planners: If...

Aug28

JACK KIRBY AT DC: The TOP 13 Post-Fourth World Stories – RANKED

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Aug 28, 2021

JACK KIRBY AT DC: The TOP 13 Post-Fourth World Stories – RANKED

A BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE: Kirby maven FRED VAN LENTE gives just due to The Demon, Kamandi and MORE… By FRED VAN LENTE Happy birthday to my favorite comics creator, and, statistically speaking, yours, Jack “King” Kirby, born 104 years ago on August 28, 1917. He’s been pretty important to my life and career, and was the subject of a play my wife Crystal Skillman and I wrote called King Kirby that recently got turned into a dramatic podcast you can listen to for free, in its entirety, without commercial interruption, as of today, wherever you get your podcasts! In what has become a tradition here at 13th Dimension (in that I’ve done it twice) I’m doing a TOP 13 of different aspects of Kirby’s career on his birthday. Last year I looked at Kirby’s final go-round in mainstream comics with Marvel. This year, I’m leaping back to the period before that. Frustrated that his accomplishments had been subsumed by the celebrity of Marvel editor/writer Stan Lee, Kirby jumped ship to DC at the end of the 1960s to launch a series of so-called “Fourth World” titles created by him: New Gods, Mister Miracle and Forever People (and absorbing Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen as well). It was apparently Kirby’s intention all along to launch the series himself, then hand them off to other creative teams, as he had at Marvel with strips like The Incredible Hulk, The Avengers, Iron Man, Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD, The X-Men, et al. Except at DC he’d be in the editorial chair. Unfortunately, the Fourth World books, while hardly bombs, were not the sales juggernauts DC was hoping for when they poached their biggest rival’s biggest star. And to Kirby’s supreme irritation, DC got way more excited about two titles they asked him to create outside his cosmic purview, Kamandi and The Demon. It turns out his publisher was not in fact interested in Kirby books not written or drawn by Jack Kirby, so he had to set aside New Gods and Forever People to work on those two instead. Soon, Mister Miracle bit the dust too, and Kirby ran out the rest of his DC contract doing books other than his beloved Fourth World. It’s a bummer for Kirby, but his output in this period was characteristically spectacular, so we comics fans win either...

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