... the beasts call him brother, the Ghost Who Walks!
Defenders of the Earth was a Marvel Productions cartoon of the '80s that brought together characters from three King Features Syndicate comic strips - Lee Falk's The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician, plus Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon - to create a "brand new" group of world-saving, alien-beating adventurers. A friend once described it as a show that teamed "your grandpa's favorite superheroes" together; not only is this an apt description for a cartoon that starred characters who first collectively hit newspaper comic pages in the 1930s, but the observation might explain Stan Lee's apparent enthusiasm for the project. Lee, at the time part of Marvel Productions out in California, not only wrote the first issue of Marvel's DotE tie-in comic, but the (admittedly quite catchy) lyrics to the show's themesong.
