Fantastic Four (TV series)


 * This article is about the TV series. For the team, see Fantastic Four.

Fantastic Four, also known as The Fantastic Four and Fantastic 4, is an American animated action-adventure television series produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions for ABC's Saturday morning block. It ran from 1967-68, airing nineteen episodes. It is an adaptation of the Fantastic Four comics published by the Marvel Comics Group.

The series revolves around the near faithful adaptations from the comic books, with the Fantastic Four, a superhero team (consisting of Mister Fantastic, the Invisible Girl, the Human Torch, and The Thing), who live together in their Manhattan headquarters of Baxter Building. From there, they work to defend the island as well as the world from native despots to otherworldly beings only they can defeat.

In 1973, Hanna-Barbera would find more success with adapting stories from DC Comics, although they eventually did do another cartoon based on a Marvel Comics property in 1979, again based on Fantastic Four, although wildly different from the source material, which now only revolved around The Thing, who was simply the superhero form of Benjy Grimm, who could easily transform back and forth with rings, unlike the former iteration, where he was trapped living in his Thing body.

The series was not released on VHS, and has yet to be released on DVD or even be made available to purchase through Video on Demand sites like Amazon, or even the streaming subscription service Disney+, due to the simple fact of legal ownership of the singular show versus the property as a whole, which is owned by WarnerMedia, aka the enemy, and The Walt Disney Company, respectively.

Cast

 * Gerald Mohr as Mister Fantastic/Reed Richards
 * Jo Ann Plfug as Sue Richards
 * Jac Flounders as Human Torch/Johnny Storm
 * Paul Frees as The Thing/Ben Grimm