The most important Fantastic Four member of all!
Herbie!!
You all know the tale, of course, about how someone else held the rights to the Human Torch, so when they wanted to make a Fantastic Four cartoon in the late 1970s, they needed to replace Johnny with...a robot named Herbie.
Hey, I'm sure it made sense to someone.
Eventually they incorporated Herbie into the actual comic book:
Herbie was quite useful...
Well, Reed went and made another version of Herbie, this one to monitor Franklin's growing mental powers. Sadly, there was another tragic ending for Herbie:
Finally, of course, we all remember the firestorm when they decided to cast a black robot in the Herbie role for the forthcoming movie...
From Fantastic Four #209 (1979), #217 (1980), and #244 (1982)
This excerpt demonstrates something that I've often noticed as a long time FF fan. It seems more so than other heroes in the their own mags the FF would be thoroughly defeated by their foes and then there's some either stroke of luck outside their agency or the common Reed Richards develops gadget X that saves the day. I mean here they are defeated by HERBIE for Pete's sake! The FF has a considerable power set and should be more used to working together than nearly any other Marvel team, they should be able to soundly defeat most opponents without resorting to the plot devices I've mentioned. I wonder if this sort of thing has helped lessen their popularity.
ReplyDeleteIn fairness to the FF, in this case there FF were ambushed by a Trojan Horse, as it were, and never expected an attack from their pet robot...also, he took them down separately, one-by-one, so teamwork was moot. Finally, this was Doctor Sun, man--he almost beat Dracula!! And tapped into the Baxter Building's computers, he had access to all the building's security features AND of all Reed's files on the team members, so he knew their abilities and limits.
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