One of the things we consciously try to do with (or for) our children is to not dump our nostalgia or fandoms onto them so they can develop their own affinities. Most of the time, it turns out they end up liking what we like. Other times it goes off in a different direction than you experienced and can open up a whole new world, or worlds.
This is one of those times.
Full disclosure: I am coming at this completely cold on this property save a few episodes of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon which wasn’t my favorite thing (I preferred the funnier cartoons) and the cultural consciousness that is “It’s clobbering time.”
We didn’t even get into this because the newest movie coming out this year (Fantastic Four: First Steps) but because Marvel published a “What If…?” Comic starring Mickey Mouse and his Friends. They already What If-ed into the Avengers but he blipped over that one. This one, though, for reasons not entirely clear, landed.
Instantly I was annoyed that Donald wasn’t on fire and that, as goofy as he is, Goofy wasn’t Mr. Fantastic. Visually you can’t argue that he’s already on the bendy/stretchy arc. Then I thought about what little I remembered about the animated version of first family of comics and how Ben was cranky and complaining and that Reed was insufferable in that Scott Summers type of way. But they didn’t ask me.
Also something to note here if you go looking for this at some later date, this was a comic with a storyline showing Mickey and Friends as the Fantastic Four. There were, however, numerous other regular Teen+ rated Fantastic Four titles that had this What If..? team as a variant cover and we were all confused, not just those of us new to the title.
The comics proper started back in 1961 with probably the second most homaged cover in all of comicdom and likely the first place holder in the Marvel imprint. You have to place yourself back into that summer. The Space Race was just out of the starting blocks. Sputnik had only been in space for just under four years. And Project Mercury had began in 1958. The Apollo Program conception was contemporaneous with the first comics and there was still a lot of unknowns about space.
This is a heaping helping of why I never really got into them. I was never one for the space side of science fiction. My preference lies in the other direction inside the hollow earth or time-travel, and I have some idiosyncratic parameters about the latter as well. Maybe the MoleMan stories will grow on me.
The Fantastic Four was on television before mankind was on the moon. Their first cartoon debuted in 1967. Produced by Hanna-Barbera. Huckleberry Hound was 8 and Magilla Gorilla was only 3.
Thanks to the internet archive you can give this first run of Fantastic Four a watch:
The second generation of animation for Reed, et al. came in 1978. This time the Depatie-Freleng (Pink Panther) house took up the mantle with some caveats. The rights to the Human Torch™ were apparently sold for a tv movie that was never made and so The New Fantastic Four replaced the Torch with a robot named H.E.R.B.I.E. That is “Humanoid Experimental Robot B0Type Integrated Electronics.
The interesting thing here is that the Robot was pitched to replace the Torch and Jack Kirby who was storyboarding for Depatie-Freleng designed him. According to Marvel Comics the Untold Story, H.E.R.B.I.E’s design and the storyboards were his last work(s) for Marvel.
Thanks to the internet archive you can give The New Fantastic Four series a watch
I am not sure what was happening in the 80s, but the next iteration of the foursome hit the painted celluloid in 1994. Imaginatively entitled: Fantastic Four: The Animated Series. The two seasons have markedly different animation and storytelling styles from just the small sampling I’ve done so far. All the characters in the first season seem to have some varying degree of Mr. Fantastic’s rubberyness.
The second intro has much less exposition and disco. It also carries more of the “mid 90s animated series” aesthetic.
Another Internet Archive save is this 1994 gem.
The fourth time (you know they had to) MoonScoop’s Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Heroes aired sporadically on Cartoon Network’s Toonami in 2006. Looking very anime-influenced especially Johnny’s hair.
The animation style is very consistent with its contemporaries which were all evolved or r e-evolved versions of 90s animates series.
According to the current editing on Wikipedia it only originally aired eight of the 26 episodes on cartoon network and wasn’t broadcast in its entirety until Nicktoons got the show to air alongside Iron Man: Armored Adventures and Wolverine and the X-Men.
Version 2 with end credits. This one has spoken backstory voice-over exposition. Not the YMCA-ed explanation of its 1994 predecessor.
If you can find the DVD extras for this show they are pretty interesting. At one point they are talking about character design and they wanted to give Sue pink hair and “Marvel said no, Sue is American, she needs to be blonde.”
Internet Archive has the French dubbed version, but a quick web search shows DVDs available. Volume 1 and 2 are currently about $10 each on Amazon.
Taking a step back to 2005, after the missed Human Torch film and some weird unreleased 1994 film and the success of 20th Century Fox’s tow X-men movies, the Fantastic Four hit the skies, er stars, er gamma rays on the big screen. Starring Jessica Alba a couple years off her Dark Angel series, a young Captain America, and the guy from The Shield, The Commish and the decidedly not cop TV biopic The Three Stooges.
Mid-trailer there is The Thing saving a civilian from an onrushing 18-wheeler which is a good scene markup with the 2004 Hellboy’s “red mean’s stop” clip. Though The Thing just stops the truck, Hellboy flips it over. These are excellent examples to use in physics of superheros courses by the way.
Incidentally, why is there no fan art of Hellboy and The Thing smoking cigars together?
Fox’s X-men trilogy ended with The Last Stand in 2006 and The Fantastic Four sequel hit theatres in 2007. I still haven’t seen these, but I probably should give them a go. One thing I do remember is having a literal fever dream in a hotel on an out of town job about the silver surfer all based from this movie as I had literally no other ideas about the character.
Fox played in the X-men sandbox for the rest of that decade with varying degrees of success. But with enough of a universe to balance out in the black. For some reason (I don’t know and it isn’t really worth the time to look up), they decided to put some of that good ole Fox finesse onto rebooting Fantastic Four. It’s only a matter of time before the take a property and Fox it up.
Enter 2015’s Fantastic Four or “Fast4stic“. Look you know it’s cold out of the box when they use words using numbers. They aren’t Prince. (Thank’s Al.) I will say that updating the accident to a more modern inter-dimensional transporter problem than the boring old space race seemed an inspired choice. Even in this time before “space tourism” the “unknowns” of local space were lessened inversely to the amount of space junk we sent orbiting the planet.
It’s 2015 normal space exploration is mundane, let’s get inter-dimensional. The reviews were less than fantastic. I think my favorite is Todd McCarthy’s from The Hollywood Reporter: “like a 100-minute trailer for a movie that never happens.”
You also have to wonder about the early run of Fox’s superhero films. Was the restricted color palette of blue, black, and gray an inspired choice or a limiting factor?
But hey, that was ten years ago! Just before the Marvel Cinematic Universe expanded to just be one long movie that runs from January through December of every year and you just meander in and out of the theatre when the people you know are fighting or having an existential crisis (or to see the after credits scene(s)).
That brings us to this year, 2025, sixty four years after that first comic strip and we have a new (old) Fantastic Four. First Steps is due in theatres late summer. It’s a period piece, which already makes it better than the others in my book, but it also assuages a lot of the problematic things with a “modern” or “contemporary” (I guess this is like art now) Fantastic Four Family. Period piece probably isn’t even the correct descriptor as it is probably another universe Earth-µ or something, but it is directed by the same guy who oversaw WandaVision (Matt Shakman) and that was, too.
Either way from the trailers we get the feeling that there in the middle of a space race, the family (and Ben) are celebrity scientists and explorers maybe before they become heroes, but definitely after. And aside from the team uniforms the costumes are all very period, look, well, fantastic, and give off more than a bit of the Oppenheimer vibe.
My biggest complaint about the whole Marvelverse is the aversion to using comic accurate, or at least comic influenced (adjacent, even) costume and effects. I don’t mean the POW! type Batman ’66 stuff, but color, wildness, suspend disbelief stuff. You know, the thing that made Deadpool and Wolverine so loved. So having Mr. Fantastic’s insane stretchability “look real” is the wrong way to go into this. You have to make it look unreal on purpose because it IS unreal. Trying to make it look real is a surefire way to make it look fake, make it look wild and you have much more leeway and less “that’s bad cgi” from those people who can’t animate a flip-book.
It’s interesting to see how the animation of the Silver Surfer has changed in almost twenty years. And the amount of hate it’s getting because it’s a woman. Again with the “I thought Gozer was a man” vibes.
Back to the page, though. There is a prequel comic coming out this summer too that is supposed to set up this universe and reveal all about the first going public with their powers bits. This is one thing they are getting right about this as it gives people unfamiliar with the whole thing a way to get in without having the movie rehash the origin story that everyone wanting to see it already knows. It also gives a way to explain what differences are coming in to those people too. And it’s a nice homage to the 001 cover, again.
What dropped me on this path was my son wanting to read more Fantastic Four after enjoying the Mickey Mouse What If…? Which means backtracking and seeing what is even out there for kids. The sad state of affairs in comics in general is this whole move to dark and gritty and serious. It’s grown as a medium if not a genre, yes, many serious issues can be addressed in comic form but something’s been lost in the way of execution and most of it is just disaster or violence fetishizing. So, you can’t just grab an old title that you used to read and send your kid off with it.
If you are like me and your child has gotten you into a world you know less about than they do, or you are at least on equal footing with them, and they want to read more after seeing the movie there are two post-2000 runs of all ages Fantastic Four that we’ve found bits and pieces of that seem to be alright. He likes them so far.
From 2004 there is the 12 issue Marvel Age Fantastic Four. It was collected in three trade paperbacks. I’d say these are for the youngest of readers (Kindergarten through 3rd maybe), but the art is great and the stories are fun.
For the older block, maybe third grade through, there is the Marvel Adventures Series that ran 48 issues from 2005 to 2009. This imprint seems to have had other titles running as well including Spiderman, The Avengers, and Iron Man. They have also been digest-ed. There also seems to be a LOT of crossover characters showing up in this run as well.
A few years ago Penguin publishing house released a few collections in their Penguin Classics Marvel Collection titles, including Fantastic Four. roughly 8×10 $30 Hardbound ($18 paper) collections. Their Fantastic Four collects Fantastic Four #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 48, 49, 50, 51, and Fantastic Four Annual #6. The reviews all say that the binding quality of the hardcover is great but eventually the gold starts pealing, even if not handled much.
While digging I also came across some of the newest runs written by Ryan North. Again, complete unfamiliarity with this iteration or where it is going or where it has been but dinosaurs show up, and there was one brining Sue in as an archaeologist and as that is part of my background of course I am going to check that out. As soon as I get my unread series in check.
This is all entirely ridiculous but its fun, and it deals with larger more abstract issues between the systems (as far as I can tell). And you know what, I like my escapism on the light side and would much rather read this that modern paranoid paramilitary batman.
Adding to the infiltrations of my world by the Fantastic Four, while I have been compiling content and making notes for this post Free Comic Book Day came and of all titles the Gargoyles Demona #0 ended with the Fantastic Four showing up. I also read that during one of the post credits scenes for whatever 8 Marvel movies are out now had a wing with a 4 on it, and it’s doubtful that’s the Beatles or the Ninja Turtles.
And I am going to bookend this with the exact opposite of that I just shared: something dark and gritty. Funnily enough, my first comic book interaction with the Fantastic Four was very similar to my son’s: it was a What If…? title. Though on the opposite end of the spectrum than his, what I read made me rethink superheroes in general. It’s a bit of a conundrum for me given that picking it up as an early teen it revealed a version of the squeaky clean heroes on the Hanna-Barbera cartoons that was dark and gritty.
It wasn’t just white hats grey temples, black hats, and metal faces; it was real life. On second thought, it’s not a conundrum, It’s aging and having children. The profusion, or protrusion really, of antiheroes in popular culture may have introduced more than a little (more than a lot, actually) of moral ambiguity into people’s lives. There is that whole thing about reading fairy tales not to know and fear that dragons exist but to know they can be defeated. Good needs to win, it just doesn’t have to be as saccharine as it was on the Filmation shows. Sometimes the right thing is difficult.
Still this one stands up as one of my favorite comics even if it wasn’t a team I read about frequently (or at all). There is another one I read later starring the Fantastic Four as cosmonauts (remember the space race again) and one of the handful I didn’t get rid of when my father said the boxes I had were a “fire hazard.”
Before I go, one last thing that you’ve might been wondering this whole time: Where does The Incredibles figure in all of this. It’s obviously a nod to the Fantastic Four, not just for the (slightly rearranged) powers on display, but for the more grounded family aspect of the team. I liked it as a pastiche of all the other super things before it. When Edna mentioned Dollar Bill in her “no capes” speech and the hunting the heroes thing I saw it more as Watchmen for kids.
There are some who agree:
And there are some who disagree (or they did 10 years ago):
Just don’t get them confused with The Impossibles which Hanna-Barbera produced in 1966, the year before their Fantastic Four.
The Impossibles surfaced again in 2016 and picked up a fourth member named Esme Santos who controlled magnetic fields. Her inclusion made this band a fabulous, if not fantastic, four. Their story ran in two issues of FutureQuest, but that was DC so it shhhhh, it probably should be mentioned here.
I’ll end with this, just about every time I hear, say, or read the word “fantastic” all I can see is Christopher Eccleston 9th Doctor. Which, coincidentally ushered in the reboot of Doctor Who the same year as the first Fantastic Four Film.
I can’t believe I wrote a post on the Fantastic Four before I wrote something about X-Men.
Thank you for this delightful read. I could make, I think, a thousand tiny irrelevant side comments, but here are only a few:
1) I do really agree with that allow-the-unreal-to-be-unreal element you mention. It reminds me of how I think the very first X-men movie sort of successfully “dodged” the issue of not giving Wolverine a glaring-yellow jumpsuit costume, and then made a kind of snarky comment about it in the film just to make sure we knew there was a kind of deliberate choice being made there.
2) I’ve always liked the Fantastic Four, and yet it occurs to me that none of the movies have worked all that well, which is probably because, for some probably obvious reasons, it’s very easy to do the FF very poorly. You’ve got a mish-mash of characters, every one of them with a rather complex personality, and everyone one of them with a superpower that is rather layered and multifaceted, once you poke into it. What can actually work very well, and has in the past, is when a particular character is singled out and given lengthy exposition, such as “The Thing” where Ben stays behind on the planet after the “Secret Wars” and is given his own run for many issues. Or some of the “Marvel Team-Ups” where Spider-Man and Johnny Storm pair up a couple of times and he seems a character in his own right.
3) Though you don’t go into it here, the “Doctor Doom” character has always fascinated me, but I mean precisely that he has never fascinated me. I always felt that Marvel has almost deliberately left him really quite ambiguous, so he can become whatever-the-hell kind of foil they need him to be for fighting the FF. Is he smarter than Reed? (no? but he is smart?) Is his power in his charisma and authoritarianism alone? (no? — but in some versions he’s clearly got an undefined level of power/strength due to the same forces that give the FF their powers, and so forth). Often Marvel tries to turn him into some kind of absurdly powerful Lex-Luthor equivalent, or even Thanos-level combatant, but for me it’s always seemed some kind of deus-ex-machina gesture of “oh what the hell, we’ll just turn him into this thing that can do this stuff, for the purposes of the narrative.”
They “yellow spandex” quote from X-men is the perfect example. It seems in the first animated iteration (which I haven’t yet seen all of) they fell into this trap, too with Sue being more of the patented damsel in distress, albeit with some modifications. I have no idea of any of Doom’s iterations, except that his “von” ness means he’s probably descended from some of the earliest European inhabitants of New Amsterdam. I gather from what I have read that he and Reed were students together and two paths diverged in a hood, or something. It sounds like what’s coming this summer is setting up the next cinematic eon for MCU which is great, but it’s also getting to the point where I checked out of comics because every third panel said “*see issue something of another title” and you have to be keeping up with on average between 9 and 23 different runs to stay in the loop. Though I see now they are releasing omnibi collecting the 7 titles in reading order (lookat at you mid 90s Uncanny X-men, et al). And I might actually get to finish a story arc.
Ok, first, I will shove my nostalgia down my kids throats at every chance. The youngest’s first stuffy was Stripe. Second, Watchmen for kids, now that’s a thought…. I’m not in here with you, you’re in here with ME!
To be fair, being in a room with children is very much like that. Our nostalgia is out and available, we just try not to influence which way things will go, or at least the particulars of it at any rate. It’s been broadening for me, too.
Full disclosure: I know next to nothing about Marvel anything, other than passive ingestion of what’s been in the air for the last 15 years or however long, but I’ll slide in here like a Seventh Day Adventist who assumes he can blend in at a Mormon convention because, Seventh “Day,” Latter “Day” …eh, eh? The insight that for some reason film makers are crippled by the technology that allows them to make things look “real” is right on. The live action Jungle Book that Disney made suffered greatly from all the animals looking like real animals. The wizardry involved in translating Louis Prima’s personality into a reasonable facsimile of a chimp with humanly expressive face is more difficult and less sexy, but more entertaining; if I wanted to see a real chimp, I would turn on Nat Geo. I’m reminded of one of my favorite slights of all time, by my favorite slightest. G.K. Chesterton, complaining about George Bernard Shaw’s education philosophy (of all things) in some context that I’ve lost the fullness of, says something like, “He’s the type of man who walks out into a rain storm with an umbrella, to stand over his plants and water them.”