How Green Was My Villainy

Counter-clockwise from left: Ming the Merciless by Hal Foster, Flash Gordon,
March 15 1936; Dr. Julius No as played by Joseph Wiseman, Dr. No, 1962;
The Mandarin by Don Heck, Tales of Suspense #50, February 1964.

So here's a snapshot of an unusual and short-lived trend in animated adaptions. You had these villainous characters across three franchises who were inspired by the original "insidious Oriental," pulp villain Dr. Fu Manchu: Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon, Dr. Julius No in James Bond, and the Mandarin in Marvel Comics' Iron Man. All were fairly major antagonists - two were essentially the heroes' arch-villains. You couldn't leave them out of an animated adaption, but their original portrayals were maybe not so audience-friendly in more enlightened times. What do you do?

Apparently, you make them green.

Son of Unstable Molecules: Spidey Super Stories

Orange shirt, brown sweater vest? Yeah,
this is 1974, all right. (From issue #1. Art
by Winslow "Win" Mortimer and Mike
Esposito.)

I have very briefly touched on Spidey Super Stories in a previous post. To the uninitiated, the series was a tie-in comic to a 1970s PBS educational program called The Electric Company, which I have never actually seen because it was before my time. To my knowledge, it is mainly known today for starring a very young Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno.

However, one thing I do know about The Electric Company is that it featured Spider-Man as a recurring character in its segments. The catch was that he would not actually speak: instead, comic-style dialogue balloons would appear above him, which the children at home would read. Spidey Super Stories was thus launched to, well, cash in on this new-found media exposure he'd gained, and presumably to get kids into the idea of reading comics (as the stories and dialogue in SSS were much simpler than in the mainstream Spider-books).

Being launched in 1974, though, meant the series was at the whims of '70s fashion trends. Thus, we were treated to the rebirth of Peter Parker's fascination with the sweater vest, and his apparent new-found fondness for yellow and orange.