Wiki Worries

mightor01

In 1967, Hanna-Barbera produced for CBS a Saturday morning series called Moby Dick and Mighty Mightor. Someone just called my attention to the Wikipedia page on this series and this paragraph…

Tor is voiced by Paul Stewart, while Mightor is voiced by Robert Duvall. Pondo, Tog, Ork and Bollo are voiced by John Stephenson. Sheera is voiced by Patsy Garrett. Little Rok is voiced by Norma MacMillan.

The reference to Robert Duvall links to the Wikipedia page for the actor who appeared in Tender Mercies, M*A*S*H, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Godfather, Lonesome Dove and many other films. I don't know of him ever doing voices for any animation but he was certainly not the voice of Mightor. Paul Stewart was the voice of Mightor and Bobby Diamond was the voice of Tor. Then we come to this paragraph which is even screwier…

When Hanna Barbera was producing an animated series based on the Marvel Comics super-group the Fantastic Four they were also slated to produce a series based on the Marvel superhero the Mighty Thor (Marvel Comics) as well. However, Marvel had recently made a deal with Grantray-Lawrence Animation to produce several animated series based on some of their other characters called The Marvel Super Heroes. And at the last minute Marvel pulled Thor from Hanna-Barbera slate as part of this new deal. Not wanting to abandon the Thor concept entirely, Hanna-Barbera retooled the designs made for Thor and come up with a show which became "The Mighty Mightor". There are noticeable similarities between the characters: First, their names, "The Mighty Thor" and "Mighty Mightor". Thor carries a hammer-weapon that fires blasts and enables him to fly. Mightor carries a club-weapon that fires blasts and enables him to fly as well. Thor wears a cape and a winged helmet. Mightor wears a cape and a horned helmet. And lastly, both can transform into secret mortal identities initiated by the power of their mighty weapons. In addition, there are similarities between some of the supporting characters as well. Most notably Thor's father Odin and Chief Pondo of Mightor's village.

There aren't many similarities between the two features and the timeline is wrong. The Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon show — which included animated adventures of Thor — was produced for the 1966 season. Then the company that had acquired the animation rights to the Marvel properties made a deal with ABC to do shows of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four for the 1967 season — the same season when Moby Dick and Mightor debuted on CBS.

So Thor couldn't have been pulled "at the last minute" from H-B to put into the Marvel Super-Heroes series since that show was already on the air, and since Thor had been a part of it from its earliest sales presentations.

It also would have been dumb to kill a network sale of a Thor TV series to make the property a part of a low-budget syndicated series. In fact, the opposite happened with Spider-Man. Spider-Man was part of the original sales presentation for the Marvel Super-Heroes series and when Steve Krantz's company (which had acquired all those rights, not Grantray-Lawrence) realized they could sell Spider-Man to ABC, they pulled the character out of that show.

So this "history" doesn't make any sense…and like I said, the characters were quite different. I can't see how anything developed for a Thor cartoon show could have been of any use for the Mightor series.

mightor02

Lastly, the Wikipedia page says "Moby Dick and Mighty Mightor is a science fiction animated series created by Alex Toth." My late friend Alex routinely gets credit for creating most — sometimes all of the Hanna-Barbera adventure shows from that period. And while it's true he did most of the design work on them and had a lot to do with their successes, there were also producers, writers and even other artists involved. Some of them claimed they created Mightor or Space Ghost or The Herculoids or any of them.

Alex sometimes claimed he'd created some of those…though I'm pretty sure he never claimed Moby Dick. I'm not in a position to judge who should be considered the creator of these shows but it seems to me that those who just reflexively credit Alex are in even less of a position to make that determination. I suspect they're just giving Alex the credit because they don't know the names of the other folks.