Don't Give Him The Bird.
Or, why Moltar shouldn' t make fun of Birdman.
What started it for me was the string of insults used on Cartoon Network about one of its Toonami elements, the old Hanna-Barbara show Birdman. The insults all come from Moltar, the former Space Ghost villain and current "director" of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. "What a wimp!" he says, as the screen shows the continual scenes of Birdman being beaten, zapped, knocked out and captured by his villains. "He's got two sidekicks, a kid and an eagle. They're always bailing him out."
All right. I concede that Birdman was one of the lesser efforts of Hanna-Barbara. I didn't even know the character had an official origin until it was printed in TOON Magazine. I always thought the character was a simple ripoff of Hawkman, the DC Comics character. The show's backup feature, The Galaxy Three, was also a swipe (although not as obvious) of Star Trek, which was still in its original network run.
Still, Birdman was pretty good compared to its contemporaries. Do you remember the cute-cartoon series The Impossibles and Frankenstein Junior? How about Super President? You could even compare present-day series like Ultraforce and Sky Surfers and the winged guy still looks good. Why is CN making fun of it, besides the fact that it's an easy joke to make?
It's traditional for younger generations to make fun of their elders' entertainments. Sometimes it may be justified. However, the very essence of Cartoon Network is the history of animation, even if they don't like to admit it. Television has always been the history museum of movies, and with the coming of cable channels the museum has added many new wings. Exploring this museum, scholars and fans have found new virtues in old material. Before the TV generation discovered them and saw them in multiple reruns, live-action films like It's a Wonderful Life and Duck Soup were considered failures. Now they're prized parts of American culture.
Well, I can make a case for Birdman as a prized classic of animation. It has depths of meaning that CN seems not to notice. Look at Birdman himself. The character is grim, determined, morally rigid, technologically bound. But he is tied to nature through his feathered wings, his eagle Avenger, and his need for sunlight. That's a divided persona. He doesn't fit in, in either the worlds of technology or nature.
Birdman is usually alone. He doesn't socialize. He doesn't go on patrol, rescue cats from trees, enter charity exhibitions or take part in any "civilian superhero" activities. He works on government contract. He talks to his boss Falcon-Seven on a TV screen, almost never in person. He only spends time with people trying to kill him. Wouldn't you guess it's his own personality conflict appearing as a desire for lonliness?
As Moltar observed, Birdman seems always to get in "over his head." No reasonable hero drives himself to destruction. Maybe Birdman just doesn't understand the limits of his abilities. But I suspect he has a subconscious drive for self-destruction. This may be funny to Moltar. I see it as an emotional problem more severe than Batman's guilt over the death of his parents.
Does this sound like heavy rationalization on my part? Or what comic fans call "retroactive continuity?" If so, consider that Batman used to be considered a "silly" hero, especially after Adam West played him like a wooden, campy idiot on TV. Next time you go to the video store, find West's Batman movie and Tim Burton's first Batman movie. Play them back to back. Same character, different depths. What was silly in the 60's was emotionally touching in the 80's.
I am certain that Birdman could experience the same revival as Batman. His internal conflicts could be brought into the forefront, making him interesting to kids and young adult fantasy fans. I know for a fact that Time Warner doesn't care; in a recent issue of DC's Cartoon Network comic, a six-page Birdman story copied the show's cliches, down to the capture of Birdman and the rescue by Avenger. (By a non-super-powered woman who just had a fetish for birds. Who will they pit Birdman against next? Two Stupid Dogs?) But even if DC, Time Warner and Hanna-Barbara don't care...even if Birdman never sees the stroke of an animator's pen again...that's no cause to make a cheap joke out of him.
My late father loved an old line when my older brother got uppity; "My old man started out stupid, but as I grew older, I was surprised at how much he'd learned." The same could be said of our fantasy figures: Batman, the fairy tale characters of Stephen Sondheim's musical Into the Woods, Schwartzenegger's action heroes who gained humor and sympathy with each succeeding film. The smug wiseguys at Cartoon Network think Birdman is dumb. Maybe when they grow older, they'll be impressed enough with his intelligence to give him a new show and some real work.
Still More Kirby: Rob Tomshany (mtomshany@worldnet.att.net) informed me of another interesting tidbit concerning Jack Kirby's history in animation. I quote his entire E-mail message:
Not only did Jack Kirby work in animation late in life, but as a young man in the mid-1930's he worked for the Fleischer studios doing in-betweens on Popeye shorts, and might well have stayed with animation if the Fleischers hadn't moved to Florida and Jack's parents didn't want him to leave. Too bad--the mind boggles at what Kirby might have done on the Fleischer Superman shorts (which are still pretty magnificent anyway).
Who knows? The Kirby we admire today went through a lot of formative experiences that shaped his art. To take one example, the grind work of producing comic books makes animation in-between work look like a vacation by comparison. But it's always fun to consider a "what-if" scenario. Maybe Kirby might have risen to the rank of animator, and created a dramatic animated film that would have affected the history of the art. We may know more if animation and comics writer Mark Evanier ever finishes his definitive Kirby biography.
Thomas E. Reed is a television engineer in Orlando, Florida. He wonders how Moltar would feel if he really worked in a broadcast station, with Space Ghost showing up on camera uprepared and seconds before air time, stumbling over words that a high-schooler could pronounce perfectly, and threatening to fire Moltar if he focuses the camera sharply enough to show his ample wrinkles. Sympathize with TV people, Moltar. Sympathize with us all. Sympathize with Tom at tomreed@sundial.net.
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