As I learned from Mark McCray’s book The Best Saturdays of Our Lives, 1966-1968 was the short-lived reign of superhero action cartoons on Saturday morning TV, building off the success of Filmation’s The New Adventures of Superman—over a dozen series in this genre from all the major cartoon producers premiered in the fall of 1967. This trend was short-lived because those shows became the target of parental groups and publications that criticized the violence (McCray contextualizes this by noting the atmosphere of the US in the midst of the Vietnam War, making some people much more sensitive to what their kids were being exposed to), and by the end of the decade they were replaced by musical comedies, while the “action” shows that came down the pike in the seventies were severely defanged. Anyone born in the last few decades would probably watch any of those sixties action shows and be flabbergasted that anyone would consider them too much of anything—that’s just a sign of how things change.
During that brief two-year superhero cartoon buzz, one of the big pushers of the genre was Hanna-Barbera, who seemingly had a hit with their series Space Ghost & Dino Boy in 1966, and so in 1967 managed to produce a half-dozen new shows in a similar vein (it makes more sense when you consider that they were making cartoons for all three of the big networks at the time, but it’s still a lot.) Almost none of them lasted for more than twenty episodes, although it’s hard to tell if it was because of that anti-violence backlash or just Hanna-Barbera’s typical cut-and-run style of production. As surprising as it may sound for a company not known for originality, H-B did try to find ways to differentiate all these shows from each other, leading to a decent variety of settings and concepts— from that we got our present subject, The Herculoids, whose distinguishing element was that the titular heroes were a team of monsters (with a human family guiding them) protecting their extraterrestrial home from various generic sci-fi threats. This series aired eighteen episodes (thirty-six ten-minute segments) and then halted, but it had enough of an impact that it was briefly revived in the early eighties, alongside Space Ghost, as part of the package series Space Stars. The characters of Herculoids have made cameos or been referenced in later Hanna-Barbera-related series, especially Adult Swim stuff like Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law (coincidentally, the original Birdman series premiered at the same time as Herculoids), so I had some knowledge of the series through cultural osmosis, and its concept would obviously intrigue me—its combination of a “primitive” setting with science fiction, and its clear appeal to kids who were in the midst of a kaiju renaissance in the mid-sixties, is both completely of its time and also still fairly unique.
The series takes place on the mostly undisturbed natural beauty of the planet Amzot (renamed Quasar in the eighties episodes, probably because they forgot the name), where the pseudo-barbarian nuclear family of Zandor, Tara, and their son Dorno hang out with their cool monster buddies: the “rock ape” Igoo, the many-legged triceratops-like Tundro, the “laser ray dragon” Zok (whose other defining trait is SCREAMING, CONSTANT SCREAMING), and the morphing blobs Gloop, the larger one, and Gleep, the smaller one. They would all be content to chill in their giant, retro-sixties alien treehouse if not for the near-endless supply of technology-wielding alien intruders who invade their space and harsh their buzz, which in turns leads to action, adventure, and a tremendous number of explosions. There’s an interesting, unspoken nature vs. technology angle to this set-up: Zandor (whose name was originally Zartan, an anagram that tells you exactly what his inspiration was) and his human family don’t necessarily abhor the future tech they see, and apparently are knowledgeable of it (they can pilot spaceships and identify a time machine on sight somehow), they just choose to live a back-to-the-land kind of life, and they oppose those who try to exploit their environment or their monster friends, whether those are Space Romans who force the Herculoids to take part in their gladiatorial games, or militaristic aliens who want to use their planet as a missile launching base. If you really want to project some retroactive historical meaning onto it, you could see it as a group of Sci-Fi Flower Children taking it to the plundering forces of modern civilization, a reading that almost certainly was not intended by its creators.
Ultimately, the kind of adventure you get with this series is not going to be terribly different from Hanna-Barbera’s other superhero cartoons of the time—you could probably put most of the plots and villains here into Space Ghost or one of the dozen other H-B action series and they wouldn’t feel out of place—but it’s a wonder what a strong central concept can do for something like this. You might not be particularly interested in the idea of a masked guy in a cape flying around space zapping aliens, but having a group of creatures pulled from all your dinosaur fantasies do the same thing? Now we’re talking! It’s two very different subgenres colliding together to produce something ludicrous.
This series had contributions from many of the big names at Hanna-Barbera in the sixties—it was made at a time when William Hanna and Joe Barbera were producing AND directing their own cartoons, and also features the late Ken Spears and Joe Ruby (co-creators of Scooby-Doo) crafting the stories, regular composer Ted Nichols creating the jazzy score, voices provided by mainstays like Don Messick, and the classic Hanna-Barbera sound effect library in full force. Most essential of all, though, is series creator/character designer Alex Toth, a celebrated comics artist and the creator of Space Ghost—I doubt the series would be half as interesting without his inventive, streamlined designs. As with the iconic design of Space Ghost, Toth does a lot with straightforward use of shapes and colours, a pop art style that is decidedly sixties but also manages to be appealing even fifty-odd years later. In the book Alex Toth By Design, Toth writes that “Because of the far-out, comic bookish characters, sets, costumes, hardware, otherworldly Sci-Fi/spacey content of our shows, I approached the designs as abstracts…Many stories were derivative—so the memory banks were tapped to draw new variations of the old.” This philosophy is readily apparent in The Herculoids, and is likely why I found it was still entirely watchable.
The Herculoids themselves cover most of the essential monster idea bases, each one highly distinct visually within the group, and equal parts fearsome and friendly in appearance. A design like Igoo, whose features look like they’re constructed from shadows, is immediately recognizable, so the animation’s inability to stay on-model for more than a minute doesn’t affect it much (Gloop and Gleep sidestep that issue by being formless blobs who don’t have much of standard model to stay on—I’m sure the animators appreciated that, and so almost all the best pieces of animation are given to those two.) Even the villains and monsters of the week have slick, appealing designs—in one episode, the Herculoids fight evil robotic duplicates of themselves that look absolutely adorable—so while none of them will likely stick with you for more than a episode, you enjoy watching them for that episode, at least. Combining those designs with the colourful background art creating the archetypal alien planet, this has an aesthetic you can appreciate even if the animation itself isn’t particularly impressive.
Now, as someone who has a side-hobby as a scholar of low-quality cartoons, I have had many encounters with Hanna-Barbera, and I both concur and argue with their reputation as a chintzy house of cheap garbage, with Herculoids being a good example why. I would never argue that this show is “good”, per se—the writing is entirely quotidian (I love how terse and not-clever Zandor’s closing remarks in each episode usually are), and the animation itself is obviously limited, as was standard for H-B—but there’s an artistry there, especially the design work by artists like Toth, that’s hard to deny, and the bluntness of the storytelling can oftentimes be an asset. The pacing helps: once the action in Herculoids starts rolling, it rarely relents, and it doesn’t feel the need to waste our time, especially with things like logic—in the episode “The Time Creatures”, we’re barely a minute in before our villains declare “We are from the future! All of you from the past must be eliminated!”, a statement that raises more questions than it answers, and then we’re off. In every ten minute short, every one of the Herculoids gets something interesting to do (although as mentioned, Gloop and Gleep often steal the show with the imaginative uses of their shape-shifting), and even Dorno, the usually-dreaded child character, is not an irritating presence because he contributes meaningfully to the action rather than distract from it (of course, this being an old adventure cartoon, Tara is the one who sits things out most of the time.) Every once in a while, it’s refreshing to watch something that’s just there to give us some wild imagery and then end, without any pretensions whatsoever.
Notably, there’s a vigour and momentum to these cartoons that is entirely missing from later Hanna-Barbera productions I’ve seen—to compare it to a similarly monster-themed series, H-B’s Godzilla was filled with useless characters and sidelines the monster star for large sections of an episode, as Godzilla would invariably pull something in his back and have to go lay down for ten minutes. Godzilla was a full half-hour show rather than multiple shorts, so was it simply a case where needing to fill its running time encouraged H-B to engage in many of their worst impulses? I don’t think it’s that simple—I also see a lot more effort in the direction of Herculoids, and even with the limited animation budget there’s a clear attempt to stage more inventive and entertaining moments in the action. So, then, was it just a general deterioration of their standards, or possibly a result of the increasing content regulations they faced in the seventies and beyond?
I guess the real test of that is in the eighties version of Herculoids, which on the surface looks much the same as the original—to the point where you might wonder how a cartoon in the early eighties doesn’t look noticeably better than one from the late sixties—and even features most of the same voice actors (except for Dorno, of course, and Zok, whose screaming is slightly less forceful while still ceaseless.) The biggest change you might notice at first is the addition of a mostly unnecessary narrator, but that’s far from a deal breaker. However, the more I watched it, the more it became apparent the old energy just wasn’t what it used to be, and it was clear that as much as they tried to maintain the tone of the original run, the malaise of Hanna-Barbera’s previous decade still crept in and made for a slightly less exciting program (they do have more scenes of the Herculoids just hanging out and having fun, though, which I can appreciate.) One unique element of Space Stars was that the segments would frequently do crossover episodes—reminiscent of how the final episodes of the original Space Ghost had its hero meet the Herculoids and other H-B superhero characters as a sneaky form of promotion—and in one episode where Space Ghost made a cameo, the great Gary Owens was saddled with the hilarious line “[You] will return to normal when we return the [made up Sci-Fi macguffin] to outer space, which is right now.”
“It was a job demanding constant gearshifting from sublime to ridiculous” Toth explains in the book, “this charged my batteries—it prohibited any chance of ever being bored doing the same old thing!” When you have a series about monsters fighting alien villains, that sublime/ridiculous dichotomy is crucial—everything is so simple, so purposefully without depth, you need to tap into the absurdity inherent in the concept to create something entertaining. A kid who loves monsters simply wants to see them do cool things, and despite the limitations of TV animation, The Herculoids made an honest attempt to deliver that. It’s all the more interesting because it existed in the brief window in its era where something like this was possible, an ephemeral world as strange and intriguing as Amzot itself.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 