In 1966, with super-heroes becoming big on TV thanks to the Batman show with Adam West, Marvel Comics managed to get a cartoon seres made and syndicated featuring five of their then-popular super-hero comic characters — Thor, Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America and Sub-Mariner. The show was originally sold to local stations with Spider-Man instead of Sub-Mariner but then its producer, Steve Krantz, discovered there was network interest in Spider-Man for a Saturday morning cartoon show. Spider-Man was quickly removed from this venture and packaged into his own presentation. The Sub-Mariner was then substituted in his place.
For the most part, the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon series used the actual stories and artwork that had been written and drawn for the pages of Marvel Comics. Never mind that the folks who'd drawn those comics hadn't designed their pages and panels for animation. What Grantray-Lawrence (the studio charged with "animating" the show) had in mind was some of the most limited limited-animation ever done for TV, producing the shows in record time and for a fraction of what was spent on other shows. Every possible corner was cut. While the show was produced mainly in Los Angeles, the Thor segments were farmed out to the then-almost-outta-business Paramount cartoon studio in New York and the music and voices were done for cut-rate prices in Canada. (One of the actors was John Vernon, who would soon gain fame as Dean Wormer in the movie, National Lampoon's Animal House.)
The artists who had drawn the Marvel Comics were not happy to see their work used on a TV show like that. Jack Kirby complained mightily. Steve Ditko appears to have decided to leave the company at about the time the material he'd drawn for Spider-Man was announced as part of the project. Marvel Comics owner Martin Goodman insisted to the artists via his intermediaries that he could not pay for the wider use of the art they'd done because he was receiving next-to-nothing for the rights to produce this series. This apparently was true. Goodman had let the license go for a small token payment because, he figured, the wider exposure of the characters would generate vast amounts of merchandising. At the time, Goodman was less interested in selling comic books than he was in selling his company and it seems to have worked out as he'd hoped. The show and a few others that were done around that time did indeed raise the licensing profile of those properties. That, plus an expanded publishing program raised the selling price of his firm when he sought and fielded offers the following year.
The last decade or so, the cartoons that made up the Marvel Super-Heroes show have been widely circulated on YouTube and bootleg CDs but no one seemed to have a decent copy of the opening or closing of the show. We have semi-decent copies for you today. Once you click, the opening will play in the player below and it will be followed by the closing, including the credits.
The credits are kinda interesting. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Don Heck and Gene Colan all get a mention. Ditko does not, though he drew around half of the Hulk stories that were adapted and a few of the Iron Mans. A few other artists (and all the inkers) who drew comics that were used are also unmentioned.
The Grantray-Lawrence crew included a lot of Hollywood-based artists (and a few New York guys at Paramount) who'd drawn or would draw comic books at one time or another, some of them for Marvel. In there, you'll see the names of, among others, Doug Wildey, Mike Arens, Mike Royer, Kay Wright, Otto Feuer, Reuben Timmons, Doug Crane, Sparky Moore, Herb Hazelton and Ken Landau, whose name was spelled wrong. Wildey, Royer, Hazelton, Moore and Arens did a lot of art for Sub-Mariner cartoons that had to be written and drawn from scratch. At the time, not enough Sub-Mariner stories had been published in the comics so they had to go that route. Some of those Sub-Mariner cartoons were storyboarded by Jerry Grandenetti, who at the time was the artist of the Sub-Mariner stories in Marvel's Tales to Astonish comic.
I thought it was an awful show and so did the fellow who hosted the cartoons when they were run on KHJ here in Los Angeles. He was Gene Moss on the legendary kids' show, Shrimpenstein, and he used to introduce them as "Another Marvel Mediocrity" or by saying, "Here's another one of those cartoons where nothing ever moves." But it helped Goodman get the price he wanted for his company — a sale he later regretted, I'm told. And it had a bouncy closing theme song. Here's that opening and closing with some Captain America scenes between…