Also, he guest-hosted on Leno for a week

During his year away from Gotham City, Batman found some time to pursue a few of his side projects:



(See if you can spot him!)

I Want My M(arvel)TV

I see, you see, we all see, for TV! Yes, that's right, everybody loves television! Never trust anybody who says "Oh, we got rid of our television and we spend our evenings having family discussions, reading classic books and playing board games." They're communists! After all, if TV wasn't good for you, why would they be piping it completely free of charge into your home 24 hours a day, eight days a week? Well, except for cable. And Hulu. And video cassettes...look, you get the idea. To paraphrase Randy Newman: I love TV! And so, apparently, do superheroes! It's true. In their busy and hectic comic-book lives, you may not see them sitting around for twenty-two pages watching Lost (unless you're reading a comic by Brian Michael Bendis), but trust me, from their wisecracks, commentary, and up-to-the-minute pop culture references, we definitely know that superheroes love television. How do we know that TV is a hero's best entertainment value? Well, they're certainly not reading comic books! BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA! But my point, and I do have one, is this: which shows do you think the Marvel Superheroes and their supporting cast members love to watch best? Is Captain America a fan of Love, American Style? Does Johnny Storm enjoy Gordon Ramsey's Hell's Kitchen? How about Doctor Doom? Do you think he tapes every episode of Phineas and Ferb? (Yes.) Anyway, let's out out, shall we? Yes, let's shall!



U.S. Agent is no out-of-time, never-watches-NASCAR Captain America type, oh no no no. But what the Agent loves best are the great shows of the sixties and seventies: Hawaii Five-O and Gilligan's Island! Guess he loves shows set on land masses smaller than a continent that are entirely surrounded by water. And he likes the remake of Twilight Zone. Let's hope he means the late-eighties TV version and not the Vic Morrow-killin' movie version.




Oh course Edwin Jarvis, the Avengers' butler, enjoys watching not one but several news programs. He better not lose track of time watching CNN, though, because if Thor steps through the door and his dinner isn't on the table, there's gonna be Hel to pay!




Also enjoying newscasts: Dr. Anthony "Don't Call Me Droom" Druid. But what he really loves is appearing on local cult talk shows alongside faded Broadway stars. No Tonight Show or Letterman for Druid, nuh uh!




Of course an old-time newshound like J. Jonah Jameson is also a fan of TV news, altho' he prefers his retro-style without all those confusing modern computer graphics. In fact, if he had it his way, Edward R. Murrow would smoke his way through every newscast, and they'd all be about how Spider-Man was really a communist.




Guess who else likes watching the news! (Betcha can't!) That's right, everybody's favorite party girl and non-existent bride-to-be, Mary Jane Watson-Parker! She especially loves the news footage of supervillains tossing her female competition off New York City's bridges.




But don't kid yourself: boy-crazy MJ is really all about the hottest hunks out there in TV-land. That means Scott Baio, Donny Osmond, Shaun Cassidy, and an actor by the name of John Travolta who nobody would ever hear of ever again.




Not every hero watches episodic television, though. Scot Lang (Ant-Man II) prefers the movie classics that run on Sunday afternoons during baseball rain delays, or overnight on the Superstation. I'm not certain he's got the finest taste in cinema, however. Or maybe he just likes hairy, hairy men of the 1970s. Don't we all?




Just don't ask Scott to be on your team when playing Trivial Pursuit: Hollywood Edition.




Daredevil never watches TV, but he's a big radio fan. Gal pal Elektra, on the other hand, is a big fan of movies like The Princess Bride. Now do Andre the Giant, Elektra!




On the other hand, judging from her expression, it's pretty sure that Elektra has never seen the movie Se7en. And also, that she would kill anyone who actually pronounced it like that.




Now, Colleen Wing of the Daughters of the Dragon...you'd think she would be watching chop-socky Hong Kong action flix all the time on TV. But actually, she reads a lot. Huh. Maybe Misty Knight is watching Cleopatra Jones all the time.




Not so literary: Tigra. She's a fan of The Wheel. And we're not talkin' about the one that's on fire.




Oh, now, it's not like Tigra doesn't or can't read. It's just that her preferred reading ain't exactly fine literature. Then again, who does like Mondays and who doesn't like lasagna?




But by far the TV-watching champ of the Marvel U is our old pal, everybody's ever-lovin' blue-eyed friendly neighborhood Ben Grimm. He enjoys watching morning nautical shows:




..and true-to-life historical reconstruction documentaries about life in the prehistoric stone age:




For Ben Grimm, there's only one true late night talk show host, and it ain't Joan Rivers:




And he's not only a fan of two single girls in the big city (maybe because they work in a brewery), but he knows all about that show with those Muppet things:




Why, he even watches—altho' he's green with jealousy—shows about his fellow Marvel Superheroes!




Then again, even The Hulk watches his own show. Bixby was raking it in on those shows! Maybe that means he could finally give Mrs. Livingston a raise and put Eddie through college.




Hulk's such a TV fanatic, he even makes a regular pilgrimage to drop in on the filming of his favorite Monday night comedy-drama S*H*O*W:




And, as we begin to wrap up, what kind of TV show do you think a goth teen who secretly thinks her parents are evil enjoys watching? Seein' as Nico Minoru enjoys dystopian fiction, I'm betting it's not Saved By the Bell!




And, yes. The Punisher is one of those fanboys.


(Context:)

Saturday Morning Cartoon: Wonder Woman and other TV series with animated openings

Play this just once and I dare you not to have this theme stuck in your head for the rest of the weekend.


Animated first season titles of Wonder Woman (1976)


And, while we're at it:

Huh.

So apparently, they all died from cholesterol.

Saturday Morning's All Right for Watching

Courtesy of a two-page center spread in Top Comics: Uncle Scrooge #2, let's set the Time Bubble for September 1967! South Vietnam holds its first elections! NASA space probe Surveyor V lands on the moon! Jim Morrison sings about getting higher on The Ed Sullivan Show! Harry Connick, Jr. is born! BBC Radio 1 is launched! But to heck with all of those things...The CBS Saturday Morning Cartoon Lineup trumps them all!:


(Click image to embiggen)

You young whippersnappers today with your Nickeledeon and your Cartoon Network and your Kids WB and your BBC America may find this hard to believe, but at one time American kids, hopped up on pure cane sugar and unfiltered cigarettes, had exactly three networks of Saturday morning TV viewing to choose from (except for the weird kids watchin' PBS). You had your choice of NBC, CBS, and ABC, and CBS surely was targeting the growing fans of comic books with these series, weren't they? According to this excellent survey page of 1967's Saturday mornings, ABC had CBS well-beat from 9:30 to 10:30 with the double-punch of the original Fantastic Four and Spider-Man cartoons, but I'd sure as heck be hanging onto CBS for the rest of the morning.

The banner on the ad reads "Saturday's Super Heroes," and hoo boy, they weren't kiddin': except for the day opening with (unshown in this ad) Captain Kangaroo and ending with The Road Runner, every single show on CBS's '67 lineup is science-fantasy heroic adventure. What's interesting is that of all the shows in the '67 CBS Saturday morning lineup, only two can probably be considered true "classics" (minus the word "camp" in front of that): Jonny Quest and Space Ghost. Jonny was in its third year, but no original episodes were being broadcast since the show's first season, perhaps contributing to its placement in the tail-end "graveyard" of the lineup at 12:30 PM. (But the cartoon lineup ran until 2 PM with The Road Runner!) Poor Space Ghost doesn't even get a picture in this cartoon ad; the man known south of the border as El Fantasma del Espacio was only in his second season, yet like Jonny, new episodes were produced only in season one and the rest of his run was re-runs. You can catch most of the other shows shown here on Boomerang and they haven't aged well, but those two seem to have stood the test of time. I'm fairly partial to the updated Space Ghost Coast to Coast and the Quest parody The Venture Brothers, and it's out of love for the original concepts that I came to enjoy the new ones.

By the early '80s the great art of action-adventure cartoons seemed to be at a nadir, replaced by gag cartoons like Heathcliff, The Smurfs, The Littles, Laverne and Shirley in the Army (their sargeant was a pig! Really!) and Fonz and the Happy Days Gang (they travelled in a time machine with a dog named Mister Cool!) Slowly the field began to build up again (Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends was an early sign of the swing back) and by the mid to late 1980s we had turtles, transforming robots, real American heroes, and, by the early nineties, the height of the TV animation medium, Batman: The Animated Series. Which all goes to show: if you don't like what's on TV now, wait a while. Surely something you like will come along soon. Me? I'm waiting for the Gilmore Girls 2099 cartoon.

Purely to win brownie points with Tegan, here's a closeup of panel for The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure:



Secret messages? Way cool! I hope they spelled out ZJFZNZM RH XLLO ZMW MLG ZG ZOO OZNV.

Parents of today may think twenty-first century kids have a lot to keep track of—schoolwork, friends, instant messaging, Tivo, MySpace, MP3s, Gogurt, and a million other outside demands for time, which can dog-pile on the young 'uns of today and sadly lead to child stress and meltdown. Well, I'm telling you, those kids have nothing against the children of '67, who had to keep track of dozens of amazing Saturday cartoon shows in their pre-cell-phone limited memories! No wonder kids in the late 60s were snapping left and right! But Bully! (I hear you asking.) How the heck could we even keep track of such a wonderful line-up of senses-shattering action, adventure, magic and heroism back in the Summer of Love? Why, that's simple, true believers, because with the same thoughtfulness and generosity they will later show in allowing Julie Chen to report on both news and reality TV, CBS has provided a handy pocket chart:



Don't even bother asking Mom and Dad for permission to use the scissors, kids: just tear it out of your hard-earned comic! Who cares if you're ripping out a panel of Carl Barks's sublime work on the other side? No matter if you've just destroyed the future resale and collectible value of your weird-ass bumpkin Top Comic! Paste it in your scrapbook alongside all your Marvel Value Stamps! Just don't come crying to me when Mike Sterling tells you that Top Comic you want to sell to him is worth pennies instead of thousands because you tore out the freakin' chart!

So. Saturday cartoons. I miss 'em. And so do you.