CROSSOVER MADNESS

 

RETURN OF THE BAD MEN is an efficient B-western in which one of Randolph Scott's usual stolid heroes is forced to contend with a gang of famous outlaws, including several who never knew one another in history: the Daltons, Bill Doolin, Billy the Kid (a very brief appearance), the Youngers, three bandits I'd never heard of, and the standout Sundance Kid, portrayed by Robert Ryan as a cruel sociopath. Anne Jeffreys plays a fictional lady outlaw, niece of Bill Doolin, and when she's challenged for being in a man's business, she name-checks Belle Starr as her model. This was a loose sequel to another outlaw-teamup, BADMAN'S TERRITORY, which I have not been able to re-screen yet.  

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 I've just reviewed the 1951 pirate-spoof DOUBLE CROSSBONES, which includes such legendary pirates as--

Blackbeard.

Anne Bonney.

And Alan Napier as Captain Kidd.

MONSTER MASHUPS #155

 I liked the first crossover between the DC Universe and the Monster-verse, but a second one sounded like gilding the lily.

I did rather enjoy King Shark becoming a kaiju.

 Giant Shark gets to fight Godzilla while Giant Croc fights Kong.

JLA mixes it up with LEGION OF DOOM.

 

Interesting tete-a-tete with Black Manta and Cheetah.

Harley says "hi" to Big Bat.

New appearances of King Ghidorah and Rodan (or variants thereof).

Cheetah also gets kaiju-ized.

Some unnamed monsters appear, as well as Skar King from the sequel.

All in all, not quite as good as the first one, but a decent read.  

 

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 In 1964 Disney launched a comic co-starring The Beagle Boys and "Mad Madam Mim" from THE SWORD AND THE STONE. This story, "By Hook or Crook"  from DONALD DUCK #96 tosses in a third crossover, that of PETER PAN's Captain Hook as well.

The Captain also plays a more standard villainous role in "Voyage to Azatlan" (DD #119, 1966), opposing Donald and the marine mallard Moby Duck.

 

THE WEIRDIE FILES

 Here's a "DC Gothic" that, like DEADMAN, preceded my previous candidate for the company's second non-anthology "weird feature," which I had previously pegged as the SHOWCASE debut of the Phantom Stranger: the CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, a failing book that the company strove to shore up with spooky content.

     One issue during this run had the heroes encounter both DC's private eye character Jonny Double and their high-wire haunter Deadman.   

CROSSOVER MADNESS

Whereas the Disney animated shorts usually only crossed over characters who had appeared in the cartoons, the Disney comic books, usually published by Dell, felt free to intermingle any characters any Disney project had adapted-- thus providing a "mass crossover" universe some time before Marvel Comics did so. In this 1960 tale "Bad Deeds' Club Annual Picnic" (DELL GIANT #33), Gyro Gearloose not only encounters a bunch of disparate villains-- the Big Bad Wolf, the Wicked Witch, Black Pete, Captain Hook and the Beagle Boys-- the story also works in Peter Pan, the Seven Dwarves, the Three Little Pigs, Mickey Mouse and Uncle Scrooge.                         

     The same issue also includes a Pluto story, "The Dancing Dog,"  in which the dopey dog encounters the satyr Pan but also Stromboli from PINOCCHIO.                                                                                       

From DELL GIANT #30. there's "Hook and Crooks." Uncle Scrooge and Gyro Gearloose chase the Beagle Boys to Neverland to recover the billion dollars stolen from Scrooge, only to find that the Beagles have joined forces with Captain Hook.                                                                                         

    Modern gender politics are well served by "The Scary All-Girl Safari," taking Daisy Duck, Minnie Mouse, Grandma Duck and Clarabelle Cow on a jungle cruise.                                                            

In "The Tiny Trouble Shooters," Chip and Dale ally with Scamp (a product of LADY AND THE TRAMP) avoid Monstro the Whale and help Pinocchio and Gepetto against a Giant who looks familiar though I can't place him from anything earlier.                                         

On a minor personal note, I remember having read these comics in real time, when I was about five years old, give or take a year, and upon re-reading them sixty-plus years later, I still remember some of them pretty well.   
 

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 The Egyptian wizard Ibis encounters both Celtic and Greek boogiemen in IBIS #4 when he squares off against both Morgan LeFay and Cerberus.

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 The 1990s MASK cartoon had at least one villain-crossover, the half-hour "Convention of Evil." At least six villains-- Pretorius (Tim Curry), the Stinger (Stuart Pankin), the Tempest (Bud Cort), Lucifer (Jonathan Harris), Kablamus (Jim Cummings) and Gorgonzola the Cheese Witch (Cree Summer) -- had already appeared on earlier episodes, as is illustrated by clips from those shows.

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 A noteworthy though short-lived hero-team book was the All-Winners Squad, which was a belated attempt by Timely to ape the successful Justice Society feature.

This story, pitting the All-Stars against a time-traveler named Future Man and his contemporary aide Miss Death, was pretty bland except for the villain showing off his invention of "atomic fire," fire that could burn anything made of atoms.

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 From my review of CAPTAIN KIDD AND THE SLAVE GIRL:

Of the other "name pirates" standing alongside Kidd and Bonney, only Blackbeard (Mike Ross) has anything much to do. The names of Calico Jack, Stede Bonnet and James Avery are tossed out haphazardly and with no real characters attached, while another famous pirate, Bartholomew Roberts, gets both of his names farmed out to two separate characters, a Captain Bartholomew and a Captain Roberts. I guess the writers got a short list of famous pirate-names and ran out. Anyway, as far as crossovers of legendary historical characters are concerned, only Kidd, Bonney and Blackbeard rate. 

 

THE 100 GREATEST CROSSOVERS OF ALL TIME #62

Since I'm making up for not having done many villain-crossovers, I'm obliged to state that "Almost Got 'Im," the 1992 episode of BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES, is easily the best villain-cross in that series, if not in all Batman cartoons of all time.

"Almost" only has one close rival: "Mayhem is the Music Meister" from BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD, which I mentioned in GREATEST #43. In any case, that one's less notable for its villain-crossovers than playing Batman off such familiar heroes as Black Canary, Green Arrow and Aquaman.

THE WEIRDIE FILES

 In keeping with my new determination of "weirdies" as a subcategory of crossovers, THE WEIRDIE FILES are dedicated to this literary phenomenon. 

I'll start with the most recent iteration of JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK.

The superordinate ensemble is made up of Wonder Woman, Zatanna, Swamp Thing, Man-Bat, and Detective Chimp.

The subordinate ensemble consists of The Demon, John Constantine, Blue Devil, and the late great Zatara.

Subordinate guest stars with stature include Zauriel, Deadman, Phantom Stranger, Madame Xanadu, Andrew Bennett, and five Justice Leaguers. A few such characters show up for one panel and have no lines.

Subordinate guest stars possessed of only charisma are Traci Thirteen, Klarion the Witch Boy, Morgaine LeFey. Felix Faust, Nabu the Wise, Mordru, and the demonic trio Ghast, Rath, and Abnegazar. Traci, daughter of the ghost-buster Doctor Thirteen, attained a little stature in the backup series ARCHITECTS AND MORTALITY but I'm not sure it's consequential enough to designate her a stature-type.

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 

I've completed my review of GOTHAM SEASON 2 here.

As explained therein, the season consists of two separable story-arcs. But the first, "Rise of the Super-Villains," only has intermittent crossover-episodes, given that the Big Bad of the story, Theo Galavan, is not an icon emulation of a comics character. Thus crossovers only exist in the arc when a "new" villain crosses over with an "established" villain, as in the three-part opener featuring Jerome "Maybe-Joker" Velaska, and the episode "By Fire," in which Catwoman and Firefly explicitly team up to pull off a crime.

The entire eleven-episode arc "Wrath of the Super-Villains," qualifies as an ongoing crossover, in which mad scientist Hugo Strange is responsible for creating or empowering such template deviations as Mister Freeze, Firefly, Clayface, and Azrael. (Also, the comics character Cornelius Stirk appears for a small role as an Arkham inmate.) The concluding episode suggests other, unspecified menaces released on Gotham thanks to Strange, but until I've watched the other seasons I can't determine if any of those shown in that episode are later specified.

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 

Going by the logic of my discussion of superordinate and subordinate ensembles in ICONIC BONDING PT. 4, the first episode of the first season, "Pilot," qualifies as a crossover in that this show introduces the show's versions of Penguin, Catwoman and Riddler as permanent members of that superordinate ensemble. 

ADDENDUM: I neglected to add "The Court of Owls," whose presence is only implied in the first episode, but who are later identified as the killers of the Waynes. They too are "crossovers" only for the first episode, albeit by implication only.

There are only two other crossover possibilities. One is the minor character of Victor Zsasz. In the comic books, he's an independent serial killer, but the TV series, emulating the film BATMAN BEGINS, turned the character into a hitman for the mobster Carmine Falcone. In the show he also works under Oswald Cobblepot, aka the Penguin, In both capacities, he's semi-bonded to the service of his bosses, and so is subsumed by their natures, just as, in Kirby's NEW GODS, villains like Kalibak and Desaad are subsumed by the long shadow of Darkseid.

The other potential crossover appears in just one episode, "The Blind Fortune-Teller," where Gordon and company encounter Jerome Velaska, a circus clown who confesses to murdering his mother. Had the show's producers never done anything more with Velaska beyond this episode, I would deem him to be merely an unreasonable facsimile of the Joker, not unlike a similar one-shot figure in Season 2. But at the start of Season 2, Velaska gets bumped up to full supervillain status, and that makes him a "strong template deviation" of the original character, not just a doppelganger. 

CROSSOVER MADNESS

Since I ventured into POPEYE criossovers in my last post, I may as well note that I'm aware of one "super-villain team-up" in the sixties POPEYE TV cartoons executed by King Features. In "Private Eye Popeye" (a title already used for one of the Paramount theatrical shorts). Brutus, a creation of the King animators, teams up with The Sea Hag, a product of the comic strip.

They also appear, though not as a team, as participants in a scheme to get Popeye to show up on a "This is Your Life" program in the episode "Strange Things Are Happening."

In my previous post I mentioned that I wasn't sure if Popeye in the comic books ever crossed over with the separate E.C. Segar creation O.G. Wotaschnozzle, a mad professor. But "Strange Things" also uses a scientist by that name, even though he's terribly off-model, not even having his distinguishing oversized schnozzola.

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 The 1948 B-film BELLE STARR'S DAUGHTER is another of many "one-shot crossovers." The titular daughter Rose was played by Ruth Roman in her first feature-film lead, though the poster is misleading in that she hardly ever draws iron.

Isabell Jewell plays Belle for about ten minutes before her character is offed to provide Rose with a mission for revenge.

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 Here's my review of 1931's DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON, which is a "spin-off crossover" in which Fu Manchu's daughter Ling Moy gets her own one-shot feature, and Fu himself is demoted to being part of Ling's support cast-- the opposite fate to the prose daughter's fate, since Fah Lo Suee is always subordinate to the prose "devil-doctor." Because Ling Moy has her own automatic stature by virtue of being the star, this counts as a high-stature crossover.

CROSSOVER MADNESS

In addition to the revived-hero guest stars in Archie Comics' THE FLY, three issues played host to a multi-villain cabal out to destroy the hero and his partner Fly Girl. Said cabal, "the Anti-Fly League," was mostly made up of one-shot villains except for the Fly's closest thing to an arch-nemesis, The Spider. Fiends included two Earth criminals, Linda Drake and Karl Rance, and various visitors from other times and planets such as Dovi, LXO III, Bra-Kr, and Roxr, and one cherub who wasn't a "repeat villain" but a "you killed my brother" duplicate of said villain. (The first guy was called "The Metal Master," while the second fellow was "The Metal Monster." Nice of the writer to keep them distinct.)

The serial lasted only three issues, #21-23, and then pooped out so that only The Spider, Dovi and LXO III got to set insidious traps for the Dropsophilidae Duo. It may be that the writer got bored with the trope, or realized that he'd written himself in a corner by including Linda and Rance, who in their one-shot appearances only provided a threat to the super-powered heroes because they the crooks acquired accidental super-resources. Hard to say if this group was influenced by the similar sounding Superman Revenge Squad, which appeared at DC the same year. About two years later Marvel used the trope more memorably in the first SPIDER-MAN annual, in which the Sinister Six also considerately took turns attacking the hero instead of ganging up on him en masse.

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 One generally overlooked "villain crossover" appears in the 1938 serial FLASH GORDON'S TRIP TO MARS. 

Now, had Azura of the FLASH GORDON comic strip started out as a flunky to Ming, I would not deem any teamup between the two a crossover. But the original comics appearance of Azura, examined in this essay, shows that her realm was independent of Ming's, and even in the serial Azura seems her own woman, and not a henchperson. This may well be the only crossover in American serials, since most co-villains do not sport such independent charisma.

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 Presumably to better promote the "Fantasyland" section of Disney's theme park, MICKEY MOUSE IN FANTASYLAND (1957) crosses over some of Disney's best known animal-heroes with figures from stories steeped in magical fantasies. In one such tale, Mickey and Goofy take the air in a two-person flying machine and end up in Neverland, where they aid Peter Pan against Captain Hook. Tinkerbelle, the Indians, the mermaids and the Lost Boys all appear.

In the next story, Donald Duck goes into the fishing business with Pinocchio (still a puppet for whatever reason). The two fishermen rescue a castaway who informs them of a place to reap a harvest of "jolly berries," but the two sharpers from Pinoccio's film, the fox and the cat, horn in on the deal. For good measure, the fearsome cetacean Monstro also turns up but gets tamed by a dose of the berries.

In an even more expansive crossover, Dumbo the Elephant flies Chip and Dale all the way to the cloud-domain of Willy the Giant from MICKEY AND THE BEANSTALK.

In an even more improbable crossover, Snow White and her dwarf-buddies want to get the (still living) Wicked Witch off their backs, so they hire Uncle Scrooge to lure her away from her evil plans with a cushy job. Oddly, Scrooge's hardheaded Scots realism limits the effect the Witch's magic has on him.

Then Huey, Dewey and Louie help Casey Junior battle a hard-headed ram.

The final story is the only non-crossover, since all the characters are in the "Mickey Mouse" cosmos, with Mickey and Goofy in an Arthurian milieu, saving Princess Minnie from frequent Mickey-villain Black Pete.