How about a '70's-era Charlton Heston as Nick Fury?
Retro-casting superhero films and shows
- Thread starter JRoss
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Never bought white as JJJ.
Yeah, he was way too avuncular. As was Robert F. Simon, who replaced him on the regular series, though that was more a function of how he was written (closer to Perry White than JJJ).
For some reason or another I'm picturing a young Burt Lancaster in my head as Aquaman. He was in a late '60's movie called 'The Swimmer' which I recently watched on television. Maybe that's where the idea comes from.
I always assumed that his character in True Lies was inspired by Fury.
If I have to choose between David White or Robert F. Simon, I choose White. Far from avuncular, he always seemed to have steam coming from his collar in frustration, either from Darren Stevens, or Peter Parker. The best, of course, is J. K. Simmons, but he's not from the era in question.
Hey, a twenty something J K Simmons would rock as JJJ.
Yeah, but I think he just lacked the edge a good JJJ would have.
Ed Asner is, and he was fantastic as JJJ in the '90s animated show, though he doesn't look the part at all.
Oh, yeah, that could work. That could really work.
More recently, when Gerald McRaney played a rather Jameson-like authority figure on J.J. Abrams's short-lived spy series Undercovers, I realized he could make a fantastic Jameson.
Until he spoke, it was easy to mistake Robert F. Simon for Keenan Wynn. While their voices are completely different, their looks were similar.
I hadn't thought about Gerald McRaney, but I could see it working.
The guy who voices him in the PS4 game, Darin de Paul does an amazing job, and I think if you stuck a wig and mustache on him, he could proabably pull it off in live action too.
The era-typical casual racism of the Fleischer cartoons has never bothered me. I accept that they reflect the era they were produced, and understand why some of them were included in storylines that were commentary on the then-current war effort.
Is such racism ever good? Clearly not. But there's no reason to pretend it didn't exist. In fact, its inclusion is an increasingly necessary part of educating future generations on why racism is bad.
Is such racism ever good? Clearly not. But there's no reason to pretend it didn't exist. In fact, its inclusion is an increasingly necessary part of educating future generations on why racism is bad.
I gotta tell ya, the first time I saw Jungle Drums was on one of those two dollar VHS tapes that they used to sell pretty much everywhere. It was fuzzy, it was dark, but when I popped it in at night it was the scariest cartoon I’ve ever seen. It’s racist as hell but really chilling.
The problem with the "reflect the era" argument, though, is that even then, there were people who recognized racism as wrong and refused to perpetuate racist stereotypes and tropes in their fiction -- e.g. Jack Benny, who cast Eddie Anderson as Rochester rather than having a white actor do a "black" voice, and who forbade his radio and TV writers from resorting to stereotype humor when writing Rochester. Or director Jacques Tourneur, one of the only filmmakers of his era to portray black characters in non-stereotyped ways. Even then, there were people who knew better. So the people who uncritically embraced the tropes weren't entirely innocent.
To give the Fleischer’s credit, the propaganda episodes were under Paramount’s Famous Studios banner, after they left. Prior to that, the Superman shorts by Fleischer Studios were primarily slanted toward sci-fi and fantasy. The first Famous Studios story was “Japoteurs.” Yikes…
Yeah. Credit to Fleischers. for what they did. Yes, the animation in Jungle Drums is very good and the music is incredible. But their portray of black people just isn't acceptable. I was five when I watched all those cartoons. Imagine showing Jungle Drums to a five-year-old black kid? History or not, it's not an okay way to portray people.
Famous did some good stuff. I loved The Underground World and The Mummy Strikes.
But just imagine a Batman animated shorts series with the same production values. Around the time that the Superman cartoons came out the comics had Clayface, Hugo Strange, Joker, Scarecrow and Two-Face. Plus they could have come up with their own villains.
Famous did some good stuff. I loved The Underground World and The Mummy Strikes.
But just imagine a Batman animated shorts series with the same production values. Around the time that the Superman cartoons came out the comics had Clayface, Hugo Strange, Joker, Scarecrow and Two-Face. Plus they could have come up with their own villains.
At the time, though, it was unprecedented for superhero adaptations to use villains from the comics, or from each other. They cross-pollinated with heroic characters -- like the comics and cartoons adopting Perry and Jimmy from radio -- but no comic book villain ever showed up in an adaptation until Luthor in 1950's Atom Man vs. Superman, and he was the only one until Batman '66. Even in that show, only about a third of the villains were adapted from the comics. And after that, aside from a pair of obscure '40s Wonder Woman foes showing up in the first couple of episodes of her TV series, we didn't see any more comics villains adapted for live action until the first two Superman movies. It wasn't until the '80s that adapting comics villains to the screen started to happen more often (e.g. in the Swamp Thing movie, the Superboy TV series, and Batman '89), and it wasn't really until the '90s that it became the rule rather than the exception.
Before 1950, the closest thing we got to a villain being adapted from one medium to another was when the Superman radio show did a storyline called "The Mechanical Man" a month after the Fleischer short The Mechanical Monsters came out. It featured a robot roughly similar to the ones from the short and clearly inspired by them, but its origin and abilities were very different.
(Also, the Clayface of that era, Basil Karlo, was just a master of disguise, not the modern shapeshifter, so he wouldn't have been as cinematic.)