The Phantom - First Super Hero & Mandrake the Magician - The Lee Falk Comic Strips and Walt Disney + World of Cartoons
The Phantom - First Super Hero &
Mandrake the Magician – The Lee Falk Comic Strips and Walt Disney + World of Cartoons
Since
the debut of the prototypal superhero Lee Falk's The Phantom in 1936
followed by Superman in 1938, stories of superheroes — ranging from
brief episodic adventures to continuing years –long sagas — have dominated
American comic books and crossed over into other media.
In modern popular
fiction, a superhero (sometimes rendered super-hero
or super hero) is a type of heroic character
possessing extraordinary talents, supernatural phenomena, or superhuman powers
and is dedicated to a moral goal or protecting the public.
As a kid I used to wait for the morning daily news paper. As soon as the newspaper boy riding the bicycle drops the morning daily, I used to run to my residence compound gate to get it first before anyone else. My bungalow had a compound wall and gate two hundred meters away from my ancestral chair in the portico next to the car porch and garden.
My curiosity was to see the cartoons and first thing I used to look for
was the Phantom page and then the Mandrake the Magician the popular comic
strips everyday the daily newspaper carried.
As I can recollect the Phantom was my first super hero before the
arrival of Superman, Flash Gordon, Batman, Birdman and Spiderman - the modern
day super heroes.
Lee Falk, born Leon
Harrison Gross, was an American writer, theater director and producer, best known
as the creator of the popular comic strips The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician.
The Phantom the King of
Jungle was the nemesis of evildoers everywhere.
Phantom the ghost who walks with his heyna was the fear factor and
destroyer of evildoers. Phantom used to roam around the jungle on horseback in
search of his victims or villains.
The Phantom had a lady love called Diana. She is an adventurous woman from a wealthy family.
You could be a child or a man who likes the comic strips and cartoons
depicting adventurous heroes flashing the guns or magic wanton.
Mandrake the Magician is a syndicated newspaper comic strip, created by Lee Falk. Its publication began June 11, 1934. Phil Davis soon took over as the strip's illustrator, while Falk continued to script.
Mandrake the Magician is a syndicated newspaper comic strip, created by Lee Falk. Its publication began June 11, 1934. Phil Davis soon took over as the strip's illustrator, while Falk continued to script.
Mandrake’s Assistant Lothar and sweetheart Betty were the other
protagonists of Mandrake the Magician comic strips.
.
Lee
Falk – Biography
·
Movies
and TV shows: The
Phantom, Defenders
of the Earth, Phantom
2040, Phantom
2040: The Ghost Who Walks
Lee Falk, born Leon Harrison Gross
(April 28, 1911 - March 13, 1999), was an American writer, theater director and
producer, best known as the creator of the popular comic
strips The Phantom (1936–present) and Mandrake the Magician (1934-2013). At
the height of their popularity, these strips attracted over 100 million readers
every day. Falk also wrote short stories, and he contributed to a series of
pulp novels about The Phantom.
A playwright
and theatrical director/producer, Falk directed actors
such as Marlon Brando, Charlton
Heston, Paul Newman, Chico Marx
and Ethel
Waters.
Falk was born in St. Louis, Missouri, where he spent his boyhood
and his youth. His mother was Eleanor Alina (a name he later, in some form,
used in both his Mandrake the Magician and The Phantom story
lines), and his father was Benjamin Gross. Both of his parents were Jewish. Lee was
born and raised Jewish. Benjamin Gross died when Falk was just a boy, and after
a time, his mother Eleanor married Albert Falk Epstein, who became the father
figure for Lee Falk and his brother, Leslie. Falk changed his surname after
leaving college. He took the middle name of his stepfather, but "Lee"
had been his nickname since childhood, so he took that name also. His brother,
Leslie, also took the name "Falk".
When Falk began his comic strip and comic book
writing and drawing career, his official biography claimed that he was an
experienced world traveler who had studied with Eastern mystics. In fact, Falk
had simply made it up in order to seem more like the right kind of person to be
writing about globe-trotting heroes like Mandrake the Magician and The
Phantom. His trip to New
York City to pitch Mandrake the Magician for publication by the King Features Syndicate was at that time
the farthest that he had traveled from home in St. Louis. In later life,
however, he became an experienced world traveler for real - at least partly, he
said, to avoid the embarrassment of having his bluff inadvertently called by
genuine travelers wanting to swap anecdotes.
Lee Falk married three times, to Louise
Kanaseriff, Constance Moorehead Lilienthal, and Elizabeth Moxley
(interestingly, he married Elizabeth, a respected stage-director, not long
before he decided to depict the marriage of The Phantom to the
character's longtime girlfriend Diana Palmer in Falk's The Phantom comic
strip). Elizabeth also sometimes helped him with the scripts in his later
years. She even finished his last The Phantom stories after he died.
Falk became the father of three children, Valerie (his daughter with Louise
Kanaseriff), and Diane and Conley (his daughter and son with Constance
Moorehead Lilienthal).
Falk died of heart failure in 1999. He lived the
last years of his life in New York, in an apartment with a panoramic view of
the New York skyline and Central Park; he spent his summers in a house on Cape
Cod. He literally wrote his comic strips from 1934 to the last days of his
life, when in hospital he whipped off his oxygen mask to dictate his stories.
However, new episodes of The Phantom, and also Mandrake the Magician,
are still being drawn by others, both as comic strips and in comic books (with
the newest addition to The Phantom coming from Moonstone
Books). New movie and TV versions of his comic strip characters are also
reported to be forthcoming.
His interment was in Brooklyn's Cypress Hills Cemetery.
Creation of Mandrake the Magician and The Phantom
Cover of Falk's novel The Story of the Phantom: The Ghost Who Walks. Drawn by George Wilson.
Falk had had a fascination for stage magicians
ever since he was a boy. Falk, according to his own recollections, sketched the
first few Mandrake the Magician comic strips himself. When asked why the
magician looked so much like himself, he replied, "Well, of course he did.
I was alone in a room with a mirror when I drew him!".
The Phantom was inspired by Falk’s
fascination for myths and legends, such as the ones about El Cid, King
Arthur, Nordic and Greek folklore heroes and popular fictional characters like "Tarzan" and
"Mowgli"
from Rudyard Kipling's The
Jungle Book. He was fascinated by thugs of India and hence based his
first comic on phantom as "Singh Brotherhood". Falk originally
considered the idea of calling his character "The Gray Ghost", but
finally decided that he preferred "The Phantom". Falk revealed in an
interview that Robin Hood, who was often depicted as wearing tights,
inspired the skin-tight costume of "The Phantom", which is known to
have influenced the entire superhero-industry. In the A&E
Network's Phantom biography program, Falk explained that Ancient
Greek stone busts inspired the notion of pupils of the eyes of "The
Phantom" not showing whenever he wore his mask. The old Greek busts had no
eye pupils, which Falk felt gave them an inhuman, interesting look. It is also
probable that the look of "The Phantom" inspired the look of what has
today become known as the "superhero".
Falk originally thought that his comic strips
would last a few weeks at best. However, he wrote them for more than six
decades, until the last days of his life.
Theater
Falk's next large passion after cartooning was
the theater and stage plays. During his lifetime, Falk ran five theaters,
at one time or another, and he produced about 300 plays, and also directed
about 100 of them. Falk wrote 12 plays, including two musicals: Happy Dollar
and Mandrake the Magician, which were both based on his comic strip
character. After Falk's death, his widow Elizabeth directed a musical called Mandrake
the Magician and the Enchantress, which was written by Falk, and which was
practically the same as his previous Mandrake the Magician musical. Some
of his plays drew well-known actors and actresses such as Marlon
Brando, Charlton Heston, Celeste
Holm, Constance Moore, Basil
Rathbone, Chico Marx, Ethel
Waters, Paul Newman, Ezio Pinza,
James
Mason, Jack Warner, Shelley
Winters, Farley Granger, Eve Arden,
Alexis
Smith, Victor Jory, Cedric
Hardwicke, Eva Marie Saint, Eva Gabor,
Sarah Churchill, James Donn,
Eddie
Bracken, Ann
Corio, Robert Wilcox and Paul
Robeson to perform in them.
The actors and actresses were all paid for their
work, but many of them worked on small fractions of what they would normally
earn with their movie work. Falk was proud to state that Marlon Brando had
turned down an offer of $10,000 a week to act in Broadway
plays, in favor of working for Falk in Boston in the
play, Arms and the Man. In 1953, Brando's contract for Falk's play paid
less than $500 a week.
Awards and recognition
Falk won many awards for his dedication to the field of writing for comics and theatre. Here are a selected few of them:
- Yellow Kid Awardde (1971)
- Roman Lifetime Achievement Award
- Adamson Award for best foreign comics creator (Sweden, 1977)
- Golden Adamson (Sweden, 1986)
- National Cartoonists Society's Silver T-Square Award (1986)
- In May 1994, his birthplace St. Louis honored him with Lee Falk Day.
- In 2013, he was entered into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame.
On the occasion of the premiere of the movie, The Phantom, which starred Billy Zane,
Falk was congratulated by letter from President Bill
Clinton with his best wishes.
Lee Falk has also been a candidate for a star on
the St. Louis Walk of Fame many times, and was so honored in a ceremony on what
would have been his 104th birthday, April 28, 2015.
Lee Falk, like the characters he
created, has been a world traveller, who has visited Europe, China, Japan,
India, and South America. He has used all these journeys to generate ideas for
stories. Somehow he managed to keep up with writing his scripts for Mandrake
and The Phantom -- even if it meant taking his work with him.
Lee
told a funny story about the subject of his travelling: "As soon as I
began writing Mandrake for King, their publicity department requested a
biography from me. Up until that point, I hadn't done much of anything except
grow up, so I manufactured a great tale to satisfy them. I wrote that I was a
world traveller, that I had met with the magicians of the east and had been
initiated into all their mysteries, etc.
"In
reality, I'd just been in Missouri and Illinois - and that's about it. But when
I came to New York, most of my friends turned out to be in the newspaper
business, so I began to know foreign correspondents. They were a very glamorous
bunch, the stars of the newspaper world. In those days, people didn't travel
very much, so the foreign correspondents were like movie stars. Naturally,
these men had travelled a great deal, and they soon read about Lee Falk, world
traveller, in King's publicity releases.
"They
began to tell me about that little restaurant in Venice, or that great bistro
in Paris, expecting me, of course, to regale them with stories of some of my
own favourite hangouts abroad. Naturally, I had to bluff my way through these
sessions, so I began to travel in order to catch up with my own autobiography!
I travelled and travelled and finally caught up with my bio, and even went
ahead of it. Believe me, this is a true story! Finally, the King publicity
department sent out releases telling the truth about my original bluff and how
I resolved it."
The Avon Novels
In the early 1970's,
Lee Falk was approached by Avon Publications with an interest in producing a
series f Phantom novels. "They wanted me to write a novelization of the
strip every two months! At that time, I was not only doing both strips, but I
was very active in the theatre. I had five of my own theatres, some of them
with stock companies, and I was writing and directing plays. I told them I
could do the first one. I took one of my stories and wrote about The Phantom's
trip to Missouri as a boy to become educated, and how he had to return to the
jungle to take over as The Phantom. Then they got some other writers, and I
gave them proofs of my original stories, and they wrote some of them up. Every
six months I would do one myself, so in the course of a few years, I did five.
I'm rather proud of them, worked hard on them and I think they're rather good.
I was very disappointed in the others. I gave them the stories, but they did a
hack job. I told them to take my name off them. If it's good, I want credit -
but if it's lousy and I didn't write it, I don't want it."
This requirement to provide author credit
eventually caused the demise of the Avon novel series. The book which was to
become the last in the series, The Curse of the Two-Headed Bull
(#15), was written by Lee Falk. However, in early printings, the author credit
was given to Carson Bingham. This incensed Falk and he instigated legal action
against Avon. A second edition of the book was produced in which Falk was given
appropriate credit as the author, but no more books were subsequently written
for the series.
Public Recognition
Lee Falk received a special "Yellow Kid" award (shown above) at the 1971 Comics Conference in Lucca, Italy, and has received many other tributes during his long career. "I was in Rome three years ago and was presented with their Lifetime Achievement Award by their Minister of Culture. They held a big press conference because the award had never been given to a cartoonist or anybody in the cartoon world. It had previously been given to people like Federico Fellini and the mayor of Paris. From there I went on to the big comics festival in Lucca where they made a very big deal out of the award because they felt it elevated the whole field of cartooning."
In May 1994, he was honored by his hometown St.
Louis, with his very own Lee Falk Day. "I was in town for a comics
conference," he explains. "I have a slide show called The Golden Age
of Comics, which includes pictures and the history of comics from the Yellow
Kid in 1895 up to the strips of the 1950s such as Peanuts. At that slide show,
they announced that I was being honored and presented me with a beautiful
certificate, which I have in my home."
Writing for Comic Strips
"Writing plays is a very
definite craft - it's like building a cabinet - you just don't write it, you've
got to know how to build it. You have to know about entrances and exits, how a
scene works, how lines sound, etc. And I think the art of writing a comic strip
is closer to the theatre and to film technique than any other kind of writing I
know. When I do my stories for Mandrake and Phantom, I write a complete
scenario for the artist, in which I detail the description of the scene, the
action and the costumes. If new characters are being introduced, I write their
descriptions and the dialogue for each panel. With such a scenario in front of him,
a cameraman could take this and shoot it or an artist can take it and draw it.
"The first thing you have to do is to get a
good story and the only way you know whether you have a good story is if you
like it yourself. Strips like these are read by all kinds of people all over
the world and you couldn't possible know what would please or displease all of
them. I have to follow my own taste because there's nobody else around, and I
don't go to a lot of people for opinions because I'd get too confused. I've
found that if I'm getting bored with a story, it's time to cut it off pretty
fast. Of course that's not always true - sometimes the stories I like the best
are not favorites with readers - but generally I try to please myself. I've
raised three children and I used to try out stories on them - I could tell when
their interest was flagging that the story was getting boring.
"Each artist, out of his own interests and
imagination, creates his own world in his strip - this is true of Peanuts,
Beetle Bailey, Popeye, all good strips. And you accomplish this not by
imitating others - you come up with your own idea. To me, The Phantom and
Mandrake are very real - much more than the people walking around whom I don't
see very much. You have to believe in your own characters.
"We don't discuss sex -- religion and
politics is very minimal. My only politics is up with democracy and down with
dictatorships. Down with human rights violations. Down with torture. This kind
of thing which I do in both strips. So there's no complaint about it. I don't
go into anything like Doonesbury, although I think he's very clever, but that's
not my stuff at all. My feeling is that they belong on the editorial page and a
comic strip to me is pure entertainment.
"I can't write a story for Mandrake that The
Phantom could do. Mandrake is stiffer, elegant. The Phantom is a very easy,
laid back guy. He may look like an unusual person with the Skull Cave and the
mask, but he's a very normal man who happens to be a super-athlete. When you
shoot him he hurts and when you hit him he falls down, and so forth. He has a
good sense of humor and Mandrake has sort of a sense of humor but he's a little
more formal. These are very strong men and I feel that I'm the chronicler who's
writing down their adventures and they go ahead and do what they have to do,
which is kind of an odd idea, but I sometimes feel that they're going their own
way and I'm just writing it down. Just as the Phantom keeps his own chronicles
in the Skull Cave, I keep the chronicles of both of them."
Saif Ali Khan and Katrina Kaif starrer Phantom
The Phantom title of a forthcoming bollywood movie is interesting. The movie stars bollywood super stars Saif Ali Khan and Katrina Kaif in the lead roles. The movie is directed by hit maker film director Kabir Khan and is slated to release on August 28, 2015 (USA). The producer of the film is Sajid Nadiadwala.
The Phantom title of a forthcoming bollywood movie is interesting. The movie stars bollywood super stars Saif Ali Khan and Katrina Kaif in the lead roles. The movie is directed by hit maker film director Kabir Khan and is slated to release on August 28, 2015 (USA). The producer of the film is Sajid Nadiadwala.
The plot of the movie is an Indian
counter-terrorism drama film about post-26/11 attacks in Mumbai, and global
terrorism.
When you discuss comic strips heroes and animation series movies it is essential and unavoidable to mention Walt Disney cartoon series and most popular animation series from Walt Disney Co. The contribution of Walt Disney to cartoons and animated movies are exemplary.
Walt Disney World
Theme park
in Bay Lake, Florida
· · The Walt Disney World Resort, informally known
as Walt Disney World or simply Disney World or shortly WDW, is an entertainment
complex in Bay Lake, Florida, near Kissimmee, Florida and is the flagship of
Disney's worldwide theme park empire.
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was an American entrepreneur, cartoonist, animator, voice actor, and film producer.
The famous Disney cartoons are -
·
Pop Eye The Sailor
·
Ice Age
·
Tom & Jerry
·
Shrek
·
Snow white and 7 dwarfs
·
Madagascar
·
Lion King
·
Avenger series
·
Hercules and Xena
·
Allice in Wonderland
·
Hotel Translyvania
·
Peter Pan
·
The Little Mermaid
·
Robots
·
The Magic Riddle
·
Swan Princess
·
Hulk
·
Jungle Book
·
Cindrella
·
Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles
·
Happy Feet
·
Tappy Toes
·
Planet of the Apes
·
Alladin
·
Toy Story
·
Fantasia
·
Pinocchio
·
Aristocats
·
Pogo
The Walt Disney empire
started it all with famous cartoon character Mickey Mouse.
Archies Comics are also famous.
Archies Comics are also famous.
“Bobanum Moliyum” an
animation series created by Toms
published in Malayalam Manorma Weekly was very popular amongst mallus.
Abu Abraham, Ajit
Ninan, Yesudasan, O.V.Vijayan and G. Aravindan were other popular mallu
cartoonists.
Weekly, Fortnightly, Monthly magazines and
tabloids used to publish cartoons or animation series. Some of the popular cartoons were made as
successful motion pictures.
Mumbai or Bombay, India
produced notable cartoonists like R.K.
Laxman (Times of India), Ajit Ninan (TOI), Bal Thackeray (The Free Press Journal & Saamna) and
Mario de Miranda (The Illustrated Weekly of India & TOI). These cartoonists were the most popular Indian cartoonists.
R. K. Laxman
Mr. R.K. Laxman’s cartoon character ‘the common man’ was very popular and TOI front page cartoon ‘You Said It’ was a contemporary political satire which was very meaningful and delighted the TOI readers. Everyday beginning 1951 this cartoon was a regular in TOI. R.K. Laxman worked only half an hour in his TOI office cabin and was paid handsomely for that. Laxman’s were genius strokes with his pencil. Laxman (October 24, 1921-January 21,2015) was a great Indian cartoonist.
Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Laxman was an
Indian cartoonist, illustrator, and humorist.
The world of cartoon
characters are a childhood well spent.
Some of the model cartoon characters always remain in a person’s memory
until his tryst with destiny of death.
Humor is the spice of life including the abstract one and it compelled
me to write this Blog.
posted by Unknown @ 06:52
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