Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio. This week, Bennett talks about the animated King Kong show and the Hanna-Barbera universe.
The CGI-animated
King Kong series premiered on Netflix last Friday. I’ve seen the first ninety minutes installment calling itself
Kong of the Apes: The Movie, and while I was fully aware this version was going to be kid-friendly, I didn’t know it would be skewed to the littlest of kids. This is made obvious from the onset because, like Bugs Bunny before him, Kong has gone from being a naturalistic slate gray to a bright blue, all the better to move merchandise to this younger demo.
As well as now being eminently huggable, part of what makes this Kong so appealing to kids is he has the intellect of a three-year-old. He’s a big, innocent kid whose principal opponent Richard Remy is more like a stuck-up bully rather than an actual supervillain. Oh, eventually he gets up a good head of steam about conquering the world via his groundbreaking bionics, but for most of this episode's running time, he relentlessly torments Kong because he hates him and he hates Kong because he does. Richard is motivated solely by a sibling rivalry so petty and senselessly spiteful it makes Dr. Who, the cliched mad scientist from the 60s
King Kong Show, seem positively sophisticated in comparison. That being said, the animation is fine, the pace brisk and the battles with bionic dinosaurs frequent enough that kids will sit still for the ecological messages. Kids should like this just fine.
One point of interest, for me anyway, was the calculated use of the word "bionic," especially in places where the words "robotics" and "cybernetics" would have been more accurate and appropriate. Since Universal Studios is already busily building a "cohesive cinematic universe" for their Universal Monsters, and King Kong is owned by Universal, who also owns the Bionic Man/Bionic Woman franchises, I have to wonder which will come first--a
Bionic Kong spinoff or a
King Kong Vs. The Bionic Six* movie?
You’ve all no doubt heard about Hanna-Barbera’s plans for building a universe of their own (see "
Warner Bros. Plans Hanna-Barbera Cinematic Universe"), starting with what I’m going to go ahead and assume is a Scooby Doo update/revamp called
S.C.O.O.B. After hearing this it’s hard to see DC’s plans for a series of revamped Hanna-Barbera comics other than an effective example of corporate synergy at work. Of course, the number of copies of
Scooby Apocalypse sell will have a negligible effect on DC’s, let alone Time-Warner’s, bottom-line. But what it has done already is give one of the company’s somnambulant franchises an enormous amount of free publicity, and to do it all they had to was send out a press release with an image of Shaggy with tatts and a handle-bar mustache.
Of course, I remain all-in regarding
Future Quest, the crossover comic featuring all of H-B’s heroic characters. And while wandering around online totally random I came across something I never even dreamed existed, a
Jonny Quest manga. I still don’t know very much about it, other than this image is apparently the cover to a 48-page, black-and-white comic published in July 1965. Some of the pages have also been posted and the art is an intriguing amalgam of Western and Eastern comics styles, giving us scenes where the Quest team, looking more or less like their normal selves, interact with an army guy who’s a dead ringer for Inspector Blooper from the
Gigantor cartoon.
I was a huge fan of
Batman: The Jiro Kuwata Batmanga (see "
Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--A Nuclear Powered Car! A Ray Gun! He's Awesome!"), which I believe did very nicely for DC. So I hope that someone will point this manga out to Dan Didio and Jim Lee, because what I really, really want is to read a translated version of this; right away, please.
* For those who weren’t there for it,
Bionic Six was a late 80s syndicated cartoon series with a distinctive anime look featuring the Bennetts, an ahead-of-its-time extended multi-racial family whose members all had various bionic powers as well as a robot gorilla housekeeper named F.L.U.F.F.I. As F.L.U.F.F.I. would suggest the show could be fairly silly even by the standards of syndicated action/adventure cartoons of the time (on the tolerable scale I’ve always ranked it somewhere between
Defenders of the Earth and
Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors). But given the large amount of
Bionic Six fan art I was able to find on Deviantart, clearly it’s fondly remembered by some.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
