Comic book writer-artist Jack Kirby worked on the production design for the show. While many people believe that Kirby was the primary designer of the show (mainly due to his similarly themed Kamandi: The Last Boy On Earth), the main characters were in fact designed by fellow comic book writer-artist Alex Toth, who also designed the popular character Space Ghost for Saturday morning television. Toth, however, was unavailable to continue working on the show, so most of the wizards and other villains and secondary characters that appear on the show were designed by Kirby. He was brought onto the show at the recommendation of comic writer Steve Gerber and comics and animation veteran Mark Evanier, who realized that the same imagination that produced Kamandi could contribute significantly to the series. Indeed, the evil wizard Gemini, the only repeating villain on the show, resembles Darkseid, an infamous Kirby villain. The show itself was actually the creation of Steve Gerber, creator of Marvel Comics’ Howard the Duck.
Wow. Some pretty big names, there.
3 Comments
If you’d been reading my blog and clicking all the links you would have known this months ago!
To bad the show sucked.
@TJIC - I can’t believe I missed it! I can console myself with the knowledge that I probably read the OTHER 189 FREAKING POSTS that month!
;-)
@JMD - yeah, that’s vaguely my recollection. I don’t think I had TV then, so would only have seen it once in a while at my grandparents’ house. OTOH, there wasn’t much better on TV in those days, was there? Even anime was lame back then (although we were probably getting stuff at least 10 years after it was made…).