The Man Who Created the Black Window

This is another good issue of the Champions, writer Tony Isabella has really found his groove and things are going along pretty well. This is a classic set-up issue where stories are being laid out, so there’s not a ton of action. Well, meaningful action.

It opens with Hercules, Ice Man and Champions business manager Richard Fenster being attacked by some sort of remote control bomb. It takes them about three pages for the trio to capture it and then they give it to Natasha and her pal Ivan. The Russian ex-pats are going to look into this thing because something seems a bit too familiar about this rocket.

While this is going on, Ghost Rider and the Angel are visiting Stuart Clarke, aka Rampage, in the hospital. The Angel is trying to get Clarke to accept his gift of a lawyer, so that he can be defended in court. Clarke doesn’t want it (I don’t blame him) and he’s being a bit of a dick about it too. Oh yeah, he’s smoking. In a hospital. The 1970s were a weird time, man.

Angel wants to help Clarke because he feels bad for him. Johnny Blaze is like, “Dude, that’s dumb. I’m going to turn into Ghost Rider and scare him into taking your charity!”

As he bursts into the hotel room, he sees the villains Darkstar and the Griffin taking Clarke. Ghost Rider is so taken aback he yells, “Sweet jumping catfish!”

I didn’t read a ton of Ghost Rider books when I was a kid, but I don’t remember him talking like a stereotypical 1950’s TV cowboy. It’s really strange to see a guy with a flaming skull for a head, speak with these south western, homespun axioms. I’d think that you want a guy who looks like a demon, to talk like a demon. But that’s just me.

Otherwise he sounds like Jethro Bodine.

(I know this guy isn't a cowboy, but man alive Ghost Rider, any second now you're going to be prattling on and on about your ce-ment pond and Mrs. Drysdale. BTW, I really did not like "The Beverly Hillbillies". Even when I was a kid, I thought it was too low-brow and I genuinely like "Car 54, Where Are You?" and "Gilligan's Island")

Speaking of looks, the Griffin looks absolutely ridiculous. He’s got brown wings, a chalk white face that surrounded by shockingly yellow mane and he’s clad in a bright red onesie. Ghost Rider calls him “a homicidal maniac”, but he looks completely ridiculous.

(He even has a picture of a griffin on his belt! The fuck, dude?) 

While GR is fighting the bad guys, Angel rescues Clarke. How does Clarke repay WWIII? He punches him in the gut with one his exo-gloves that Darkstar smuggled in for him. Angel and Ghost Rider regroup and go back to the Champions headquarters, located in downtown LA.

Hercules, Ice Man and Fenster are walking around looking for the bomb perpetrator and the Champions business manager won’t shut up about tomorrow. Apparently, the Champions are going to announce to the world that they’re a new super team and looking for a bad guy in their headquarters could be bad publicity. Ice Man gets pissed and calls Fenster, “Dickey Boy” all while completely missing one of the bad guys hiding behind a file cabinet.

Apparently, Ice Man can either come up with a sick burn or be a detective. HE CAN’T DO BOTH!

The trio think that they stumble upon the bad guy, but it turns out to be a crybaby kid who wants the Champions to help him. We don’t know what, exactly, he wants them to do but he starts sobbing on Hercules and hugging him. Zounds indeed! The stealthily hidden villain, who I think is the Outcast (they never get around to mentioning his name), goes down the back staircase and out the door to freedom.

Which is fine because we move our attention to Ivan and Natasha. Ivan has taken apart the bomb and realizes that it wasn’t really a bomb at all, it was a remote-controlled device that was delivered a message. The message? One black pearl. That’s all Black Widow needs to hear and she jumps out a window. Was the pearl scary? No, she saw a guy on the rooftop, so she decided to track him down.

She meets up with him and realizes that it’s her old teacher – they guy from the title of this book! The man who created the Black Widow! He was about to tell her something, but he got shot by the Titanium Man. And that’s where this book ends.

When you think of classic Marvel teams like the Avengers or the X-Men or the Fantastic Four, they all came about in the early 1960s. The Champions debuted 15 years later, which isn’t really that much time, yet it feels like a completely different dynamic. Like I said, I think things are starting to go in the right direction for this book, but it still has a weird, ad-hoc sort of vibe to it.

When you go back and read those other team books, it seemed like there was more cohesion, it was more tightly knit. And I’m not sure whether that’s due to the writing of Stan Lee and art of Jack Kirby (two of the all-time titans of the industry). Or whether it’s because I didn’t read those first books until much later, after I already knew the stories and the background, so I was more familiar with the characters and willing to smooth over the rough, early patches.

But even though Isabella is doing a fine job and the books are entertaining, something seems to be off. Perhaps it’s because I know that I’m reading a finite book that most people have forgotten and that has colored my view – almost as if I’m looking for the one panel where the collective comic community threw up its hands and said, “We’re out!” but there’s no real sense of gravitas here.

It sounds as if it’s me, I’m the one who needs to change my perspective on this book and just read it for what it is: a fun, weird book centered around some C-list Marvel characters and not worry about any larger significance. One of the things that bugs me about modern comics is how super serious every character seems to be. I like books, like Kate Bishop: Hawkeye (I know that’s not the title), where there are some stakes, but the writing is bouncy and fun. The Champions are a lot like that, but in a more ironic way. It is intended to be serious and full of consequences (Ice Man has been having an existential crisis and bitching about quitting the super hero game to become an accountant – which sounds really funny after I reread it) but it’s not.

In a few issues, the Champions are going to fight a former Nazi scientist who’s made of bees. And that sounds pretty damn awesome.

BTW, despite the aesthetics of the Griffin, the cover is pretty damn dope. Six out of seven!

Anyway, I’d give this issue of Champions three out of five Angels wearing a vest.

 

39. Car 54, Where are You?

I'm not here to write an exquisite prose about the cultural merits of “Car 54, Where are You”. I'm not going to say that it was a wonderfully sublime show that worked on eight different philosophical levels. Nor am I going to say that the show reinvented the sitcom, and forced us to look at ourselves and our lives differently. I'm not going to say this because it's not true. I am going to paraphrase a certain NFL head coach and say, “Car 54 was what it was.” And what the show was was a screw-ball comedy about two oddly coupled Bronx cops and the people they helped and worked with every day.

Quick aside, everyone has met that guy; the one who always has to bring the must mundane, mindless pleasures up to a certain level so that he can explain why he enjoys them. Usually the medium involved is either music or books, especially comic books (“I read the Amazing Spider-man because of the subtle and sophisticated commentary on social mores that I can't find anywhere else.”). Every once in awhile he'll turn his attention to a television show that's “beneath him” and find some sort of crazy high-brow justification for why he watches it. I've never found anything wrong with this reason: I like it because I like it.

And that's the reason why I enjoy “Car 54”, the show does what it sets out to do: make me laugh. Each episode's plot was pretty much the same: something out of the ordinary happens to Gunther Toody (played by Joe E. Ross) or his partner Francis Muldoon (Fred Gwynne). And it's the typical sitcom faire: they have to take care of a baby or a dog, Gunther has problems with his wife, Muldoon can't find a date, etc. During the next 30 minutes, there's a few misunderstandings, some shenanigans ensue and the duo return to the status quo. To make things even better (Or worse depending on your point of view) neither of them ever bring up any of the previous episodes' “major” calamity.

If you've been reading some of my other entries, you'll notice that I harp on one thing: it's not the plot, it's the characters. And that runs true here: Muldoon is the typical straight man who is both sharp and level headed. Toody is the buffoon, whose responsible for most of the laughs. They bicker like a married couple, but they genuinely have a strong affection for each other, which is something that the audience can tell.

As actors, the two couldn't have been more different. Up until his role on the Phil Sivers' show “Sgt. Bilko”, Ross cut his teeth as a comedian who was the first act at a lot of strip clubs and bars. Gwynne was a Harvard-educated ad man who, like previous entry and Harvard alum Conan O'Brien, was the president of the Harvard Lampoon. He loved performing but found it tough getting a steady job (which is why he worked at an advertising agency) until “Car 54” came along. Of course, Gwynne was to become most famous for his turn as Herman Munster in “The Munsters” which aired a year after “Car 54” was cancelled. Joining him on “The Munsters” was Al Lewis who played his father-in-law Grandpa. In “Car 54” Lewis played fellow officer Leo Schnauser.

It is these differences that helped make the show shine. Officer Toody looked like a guy that would be a hacky comedian working at a strip club while Officer Muldoon looked like a guy that would've gone to Harvard. The writers were smart not to go against type and let these two guys play to their strengths. And like future sitcoms like “Seinfeld” there was never a “learning or hugging” moment in the program—though, I doubt that was an official edict as it was on the Seinfeld set. Gunther and Toody were two Bronx cops who happened to be involved in funny situations and for the most part, the producers left it like that.

When I started this entry, I promised that there wouldn't be any other reason for liking this program other than “because I like it”. However there was another interesting dynamic to the show that wasn't prevalent in the era: and that was the “dignified” appearance of black people on a TV show. I put dignified in quotes because of a few reasons, but the biggest one is that television in the 1950s and 1960s was typically a white world, when a black person was on TV usually he or she was in a role as servant or in some other menial job. On “Car 54” there were a few black cops, most notably Nipsey Russell who took on the role of Officer Anderson. They were treated the same as the white cops and as actors, Russell in particular, had some great lines.

Was “Car 54” the Rosa Parks of the sitcom world? No. But showing black people and white people equally working together was a step in the right direction.

Another reason why I liked this show was sort of the reason why I liked "The Andy Griffith Show" and that's there is no way that this program could ever be on TV now. America is too different of a place than it was in the early 1960s. Like Andy Griffith what made this show funny is that there was a certain respect that cops had that they don't have now. The neighborhood policeman was a pillar of the community and the jokes about them were seen as good natured fun. The modern day lampooning of police officers is a little more edgy, a little more mean and that's because of the way that cops are seen. Whether or not we're better off, I'm not sure, but while I can't see Jimmy McNulty and Bunk Moreland joining the 53rd Precinct, I couldn't see Toody and Muldoon signing up for a tour on "The Wire" either.

Perhaps the lasting memory of “Car 54, Where are You?” is the opening theme song:

“There's a holdup in the Bronx!
Brooklyn's broken out in fights!
There's a traffic jam in Harlem
That's backed up to Jackson Heights!
There's a scout troop short a child!
Khrushchev's due at Idlewild!
Car 54, where are you?!”

Of course, I know that Idlewild is the old name for the current John F. Kennedy International Airport, but when I was a kid I thought that the line was “Krushchev is doing Ida Wild”. It sounded dirty, which didn't make sense in the context of the show, but I had no idea who Ida Wild was. I think I may have even asked my parents, who also had no clue what the hell I was talking about.

“Car 54” ran for two seasons before it was cancelled. According to Fred Gwynne biography I watched over the weekend—yes, I am that much of a dork—the show was still popular when it ended, but the biography didn't give a reason why it was cancelled.* And after that it spent some time in syndication reruns before landing at Nick at Nite during the late 80s, which is where I found it.

* The same thing happened to “The Munsters” as it was a ratings bonanza when it debuted in 1964—which coincidentally was also the year that “The Addams Family” and “Bewitched” debuted, which says a lot about the copy-cat industry that is television even in those days. However, it fizzled once “Batman” came on the air the following year in the opposite time slot. Gwynne didn't care that his show was on the way out because by that time he was pretty sick of playing Herman Munster. From the hours it took to get him into makeup to the ridiculous Munster plots, Gwynne didn't go on a full-fledged Robert Reed rant, but he did make it known that he wasn't thrilled playing the role that would make him so famous.

In 1994, someone got the idea of revising the “Car 54, Where are You?” franchise for a full-length movie starring John C. McGinley as Muldoon (you may know him better as Dr. Cox on Scrubs) and David Johansen as Toody (you may know him as Buster Pointdexter who sang that insufferable “Hot, Hot, Hot” song that's played at every single wedding and the guy who lead the cross-dressing pre-punk New York Dolls). Adding to the cast were Fran Drescher, Rosie O'Donnell, Jeremy Pivin and Daniel Baldwin. There were also cameos by Russel and Lewis.

It was one of the biggest bombs of the year and given the cast, who could blame them from staying away from the theater. I have no idea why the producers used the “Car 54” name for the project as it really had nothing to do with the original show. McGinley and Johansen are just playing mismatched cops, like Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte did in “48 Hours”. Why go with the “Car 54” name? Call it something else, especially considering that this wasn't a time piece it was updated for the 1990s. I don't think that a name change could have saved the movie, but at least the show wouldn't have been connected to this stink bomb—which IMDB.com readers listed as the 28th worst movie of all time.

Watch the original TV show, but avoid this movie at all costs.