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Dear Yahoo!:
Who was the first superhero?
Kevin
Indianapolis, Indiana
Dear Kevin:
Definitions of superheroes vary widely. One person's hero is another person's Hercules. For the sake of simplicity, we're going to define a superhero as someone who fights crime in disguise and is blessed with superior strength, powers, or (in the case of Batman) gadgets.
This excellent blog entry from kottke.org offers up plenty of theories about who the first superhero was. The author concludes that "Mandrake the Magician" may have been the first true superhero. Toonpedia agrees, calling Mandrake "the first super-powered, costumed crime fighter in comics." [Bob: Bolding is mine] Created by Lee Falk, Mandrake made his debut in 1934, approximately four years before Superman landed on Earth.
So what sort of powers did Mandrake have? King Features Syndicate explains he was a master of hypnotism and illusion. Like all the great superheroes who followed him, Mandrake used his powers to combat evil. But unlike other superheroes, Mandrake appears to have been based on a real person, a stage magician named Leon Mandrake.
Eat your heart out, Superman (and David Copperfield).
Mandrake the Magician is a U.S. comic strip created in 1934 by Lee Falk (also creator of The Phantom) and mainly appearing in syndication in newspapers. Falk soon gave the job of drawing the comic strip to artist Phil Davis, while continuing to write the storylines. Davis worked on the strip until his death in 1964 [Bob: see next posting for Falk & Davis]; Falk then recruited current artist Fred Fredericks. On Falk's death in 1999, Fredericks took over writing the strip as well. Mandrake is widely believed to have been the first bona fide superhero.
Mandrake was an illusionist whose work was based on an impossibly fast hypnotic technique. As the narrator informed us: "Mandrake gestured hypnotically" and the subject or subjects of this hypnosis would suddenly see the illusions he wanted. Mandrake fought criminals and other villains in his spare time. This would include common gangsters, mad scientists, and aliens from outer space or other dimensions.
After the series existing in cartoons, radio plays, and serials, a movie based on Mandrake with magician Criss Angel is set to start filming in 2008.
[CLICK TO ENLARGE]
----- DATABASE NOTES -----During the Second World War, much of Walt Disney's staff was drafted into the army, and those that remained were called upon by the U.S. government to make training and propaganda films. As a result, the studio was littered with unfinished story ideas. In order to keep the feature film division alive during this difficult time, the studio released four package films including this one, made up of various unrelated segments set to music.
Ten shorts are combined in a tuneful compilation. Disney's first postwar "package" picture, produced as shorts because financial problems prevented Walt from finding enough money to create a full animated feature. By tying a group of shorts together, he was able to get the production into theaters sooner.
It is a record of a studio struggling to come to terms with the post-war period, with the need to produce a feature in a hurry, using a mixture of style, design, animation and music, interpreted by an equally varied range of talents from Benny Goodman to Nelson Eddy via the Andrews Sisters and Dinah Shore. While the major Hollywood studios were flourishing, with output and attendance reaching all-time peaks, Disney was struggling, and Make Mine Music reflects that struggle. Make Mine Music was not particularly successful. It was too disjointed; audiences were already looking forward to more features with a single story line; and it was too witty. In an ARI survey conducted for Disney, 20% of those surveyed thought it "just average in enjoyment while 33% enjoyed it somewhat more than the average picture." It lacked "heart." Reviewers, like audiences, wanted their Disney traditional, and were not comfortable with the package format with its uneven sections of variable musical quality. The Los Angeles Times said, "The picture is not epochal, except in an incidental way, but at least it is a completely refreshing experience," while Time commented, "Even Walt Disney's best films -- barring his wonderful slapstick -- have suffered from sticky taste; in this effort to be just plain folksy, that stickiness pretty thoroughly gums up the works." Bosley Crowther in The New York Times said, "It is an unblushing patchwork assortment of ten different animated `shorts,' put together with no rhyme nor reason, but like the acts in a musical revue. Some are delightful Disney fancies and some are elaborate junk. Watching it is an experience in precipitate ups and downs." One of the more perceptive British critics, Alexander Shaw, writing in The Spectator, said, "I found the robust approach a great change. (Disney) shows in Make Mine Music that he is not afraid of being influenced by other people's work, and this may well give a new impetus to a talent that was becoming more notable for ingenuity than for anything else."
At the first ever Disney retrospective at The National Film Theatre, London, in 1970, the curator David Rider wrote, "This film has been, perhaps unfairly, described as `the poor man's Fantasia'...Of the ten sequences, seven are perfectly satisfactory...and in some cases they are quite excellent...Personally I think that Disney's would be well advised to consider re-issue of the entire feature." Disney was again honored in 1989 with a major retrospective at London's National Film Theatre. One of the curators Brian Sibley commented that "genuine and quite breathtaking beauty is achieved in 'Blue Bayou'...and for sheer inventiveness, the animation plaudits go to the two Goodman numbers...But perhaps the most memorable sequence is 'The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met.'"
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I bought this piece about the time the company I started was turning the corner from red to black. I brought the piece into my office and referred to it as "Us vs. the Competition." When potential clients would visit the office they would often comment about the piece and seemed to find some amusement when I shared with them my unofficial title.
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[To see the detail, CLICK TO ENLARGE]
----- DATABASE NOTES -----IMDB: "Blue Bayou"- a tone poem, reflecting the mystery and brilliance of a bayou scene, sung by the Ken Darby chorus.
Animation World Magazine, 4/1999: The second item, subtitled 'A Tone Poem,' is a popular ballad "Blue Bayou," but the animation had been completed for Debussy's Clair de Lune for the ongoing Fantasia, which Disney had seen as an extension to his concert feature, with new works added from time to time. This idea had been abandoned in 1941 at the time of the strike and during the increasingly fraught period when the war in Europe was closing down foreign markets for Disney films. The piece had been fully orchestrated and recorded by Stokowski, but this was 'the poor man's Fantasia' and so more popular music by Bobby Worth and Ray Gilbert, and sung by the Ken Darby chorus, was used. It must have been written at a late stage, because pre-release publicity for Make Mine Music still states "the classic Claire (sic) de Lune is heard in the 'Blue Bayou' sequence."
The item was directed by Sam Armstrong; and Josh Meador, who was one of Disney's most talented special effects artists, provided a number of inspirational sketches for the film. Another story artist for this section was the Englishwoman Sylvia Holland whose contribution to both Fantasia and Bambi I have documented elsewhere. The delicacy of Holland's chalk drawings are faithfully rendered in the completed animation, with herons in stillness and in flight. The colors are muted, with subtly blended contrasts in tone ranging from deep black to silver white, grey and dark blue. The water effects of the moon's reflection disturbed by the bird's movement are almost abstract, providing a delicacy of visual presentation to match the equally delicate music of Debussy. Holland, a highly trained musician herself as well as artist, was able to respond to the subtle grace of the music, but the popular ballad form debases the item. We must therefore applaud the Disney film archivist Scott MacQueen, who has faithfully and painstakingly restored the piece and shown it with the original music for which it was intended. When he presented it at the London Film Festival of 1998, it was seen as a revelation and greeted with astonished delight.
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Here's how the image is framed...
