Steve Does Comics

Anyone who reads this blog with any regularity at all will have encountered my contention that, along with The Defenders, Tomb of Dracula was the best American comic of the 1970s. Therefore thanks to Pum Spak of the Unemployed Monsters blog who's drawn my attention to the Japanese Toei Studios' 1980 cartoon version of Marvel's Tomb of Dracula. It's an adaptation of the Domini/Janus storyline from the strip's later issues. Dark stuff indeed for a cartoon to be tackling.

It has to be said you'd struggle to call it lively and, for some reason, it changes the names of major characters, including bafflingly renaming Dracula's wife Domini as Dolores(!).

It also suffers from ropey voice-overs and, of course, lacks the moody artwork of Gene (the Dean) Colan but, on the other hand, unlike many comic book based cartoons, it's clearly not afraid to show death. It also takes its subject matter seriously and is therefore spiritually purer than the infantalized Conan cartoon I remember watching in the early 1990s. No comedy relief phoenixes for Dracula.


It may not go down as a classic but, for those of a curious bent, here it is:

"I don't care if you do do Saturday Night Fever impressions. You're still barred."

Look at that picture hard. In so many ways it sums up my childhood. I was Spider-Man, those bars were the Pennines, and Dr Octopus was the people of Lancashire.

Growing up in Yorkshire, I knew one thing - that we had the dullest TV station in history. A quick glance at the TV schedules told me that people in neighbouring Lancashire's Granada TV region seemed to be getting a virtually non-stop diet of Marvel super-hero cartoons and old Gerry Anderson shows. Well, when it came to Yorkshire, Gerry Anderson was often a rare treat to be slotted unannounced into the Sunday afternoon schedule when, for whatever reason, they had nothing else to show. And as for the Marvel cartoons? We didn't get them at all.

It rankled mightily that, probably no more than twenty miles away from my house, audiences were being treated to super-powered derring-do of a style guaranteed to blow the mightiest of minds, while we were watching Richard Whitely interviewing a ferret.

Of course, later, thanks the wonders of YouTube, I could at last see all those cartoons Yorkshire TV'd so cruelly denied us, and discovered I hadn't exactly missed the finest animation known to man.

But I'm sad.

No.

I'm very sad.

And so, despite their total uselessness, I get a strange pleasure from watching those cartoons. Their oddly inanimate animation and often hopeless miscasting of voice-artists holds a strange allure. Why, for instance, did Peter Parker have the voice of a middle-aged man in a hat?

But of course, the real gift those cartoons gave us had nothing to do with animation, writing or acting.

It was music.

When it comes to the matter of which is my favourite theme tune from those shows, it's a hard one to go for. There's always the inappropriate Americanness of the Thor theme, the weirdly 1940s Hollywood corniness of the Sub-Mariner song and the good old back-alley wildness of Spider-Man. Meanwhile, the admirable idiocy of the Hulk theme trying to rhyme "Gamma Rays" with "unglamorous" is a work of near genius. The worst was the Fantastic Four theme, an aimless piece of jazz that seemed to have been randomly acquired from some unmade Irwin Allen production.

But in the end I'd have to say my favourite's the Captain America theme, mostly because the air of gung ho,  Mom's Apple Pie squareness suits the cartoon's protagonist down to the ground.

For those who need reminding of the magic of the Captain America theme, here it is. Altogether now; "When Captain America throws his mighty shield..."