For National Superhero Day: A Job for “Underdog”

It’s National Superhero Day, an appropriate time seemingly for an overdue explication upon the worthwhile topic of the Saturday morning cartoon show Underdog (1964-67).

I watched the show in syndication, of course, for I was an infant during the original run, but it was one of my favorite cartoon shows. The concept was basically identical to that of Mighty Mouse, a parody of superhero franchises starring an anthropomorphic animal, in this case a pooch. The title is a clever flipping of Superman, basically the opposite idea, with the hero causing all sorts of klutzy havoc, not unlike The Mighty Heroes, another cartoon show that came out slightly later and seems to borrow from it. Underdog’s concept draws from Captain Marvel (Shazam version) in having the alter ego be a boy, in this case “Shoeshine Boy”, a kind of a Horatio Alger conceit. Like The Green Lantern his power comes from a ring, although in Underdog’s case, the ring contains a vitamin pill that gives him temporary strength and other abilities, as spinach does for Popeye. The city Underdog operates in resembles Superman’s Metropolis, and there is a ritualistic structure to the presentation that resemble Superman’s radio and television incarnations, including a reference to the old introduction (“A bird! A plane!”) Underdog himself spoke in rhyming couplets, which references stage and screen operettas, an even older tradition. His love interest Sweet Polly Purebred, evokes Mighty Mouse‘s Pearl Pureheart, herself an operetta parody, but she’s a gal reporter like Lois Lane (and the zillion Lois copycats). The mad scientist villain, Simon Bar Sinister has always reminded me of Felix the Cat’s antagonist “The Professor”, though he is voiced to sound like Lionel Barrymore (whose birthday, coincidentally, is also today). Another villain, Riff Raff, is a sleezy wolf hoodlum in the George Raft mold. And the episodes were structured in serial form, like in B movies of the the ’40s.

With all this appropriation there could be a temptation to dismiss the show as derivative, but it was far too clever and enjoyable for that. It was devised by a team headed by W. Watts Biggers of the advertising agency Dancer Fitzgerald Sample explicitly to sell General Mills breakfast cereals. Sorry if that’s a bring-down. We all know advertising drives American television; perhaps you didn’t know how much! This is definitely a prime example of the “tail wagging the dog”, haha! Anyway, perhaps you’ll recall that Superman originally soldKellogg’s Pep.

The show also had star power. Popular comedian Wally Cox, star of the sitcom Mister Peepers was the voice of Underdog. Norma MacMillan, who voiced Caspar the Friendly Ghost, was Polly. The Narrator was George S. Irving, whose other famous role “Heat Miser” came a decade later. The villains were played by AllenSwift. There were other celebrities on the show, Larry Storch of F Troop and Don Adams of Get Smart,although they were cast in the Underdog program’s supporting segments The World of Commander McBragg, and Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales.

In 2007 there was the inevitable wretched live action feature film reboot starring Jason Lee, Amy Adams, Brad Garrett, Jim Belushi, Peter Dinklage, John Slattery, Samantha Bee, et al. That’s a hell of a lot of big talent to waste in this fashion, but apparently it did make a profit and this was, after all, a property that was originally cooked up to sell breakfast cereal. Life is complicated. On the positive side, it was shot on my home turf of Providence, whose skyline is distinguished by a local landmark we’ve always called “the Superman building”.

Genuine comics fans will find the superhero section of Travalanche quaint at best. It’s devoted strictly to old stuff, from the late 1930s through the ’80s, with a relatively high proportion of kids’ stuff and parodies (such as this very post). But if you’re of a “vintage” turn of mind, I invite you to check it out!