So while Margie was sleeping off her all-nighter, I gave Kitten an early Christmas gift — the Bird Man and the Galaxy Trio DVD collection. Woot! Yes, the classic 1967 Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, collected on two DVDs.
Yes, it’s inutterably goofy, but in a charming, retro, nostalgic way. And Katherine just ate it up like candy. My plans to raise a little geek proceed apace …
The two different serials (which ran on a single show, with a Birdman ep, a GT ep, then a Birdman ep) were part of the Alex Toth-designed era at HB, when (goofiness aside), the adventures were taken fairly seriously. Birdman is a solar-powered flying hero (duh), vaguely associated with the sun god Ra, but now working for an international police organization against various other super-powered threats. The plots were simplistically formulaic — villain threatens, Birdman is called to the rescue, they fight, Birdman runs short of solar energy, Birdman regains solar energy to escape near death, Birdman defeats the villain — but still fine, and the art design, and classic HB music / sound fx / voice artists all make it a quality production for the period.
The Egyptian connection shows in the show’s visual design, mostly. There’s one very brief allusion to it in the show, and in some promotional materials, but it was seriously downplayed in production, for whatever reason. On the other hand, the show did a nice job of establishing that there was a back story to all this — villains were often someone Birdman had faced in the past, etc.
The Galaxy Trio are a bit more interesting — a trio of super-powered future space cops, sort of a mini-Legion of Super-Heroes crossed with Space Ghost, and with a lot of visual influence from Star Trek (which was on its third season when this premiered). The plots and their resolution are a bit more varied than Birdman, since the mix of powers and personalities were more varied, too — but there’s nothing here that’s particularly ground-breaking. Just good fun.
More on info on both sets of heroes here and here.
And, yes, I choose to consider the later incarnation as Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, however amusing, to be non-canonical. 🙂
Actually, Birdman wasn’t my favorite HB super-hero from that era — but that’s another gift for Kitten this Christmas …
Good Gwad, you must be the “funnest” dad in the whole world!
I’m ashamed to admit it, but I had no idea that Keith Andes voiced Birdman!
Yes, that was pretty cool to discover.
And thank you, Mrs SEB — I try.