Saturday Night Showcase> Blue-Skying: Linkara’s Blue Beetle Retrospective

When I decided that my Saturday slot in “Yesterday’s” Comic would be the Fox Features Golden Age comics it was because I was listening to the Blue Beetle radio dramas and wanted to see the comics from that period. I ended up going with the earliest of their anthologies to feature superheroes and crimefighting, Wonder Comics, later renamed Wonderworld Comics even though Blue Beetle debuted in Mystery Men. I was going to go through Fox’s offerings the way I had DC and Marvel even though they didn’t have a shared universe…and I wasn’t touching the romance comics. Well, Wonderworld Comics has lost me because out of all the stories featured in the anthology only about three characters interested me.

So I’m going back to the original idea of going through Mystery Men unless that also gets boring and I’ll just jump to the solo titles for Blue Beetle, The Flame, and Green Mask, the only superheroes they seem to have with their own series. As I was going through my “Watch Later” list for Saturday Night Showcase offerings I came up another of Linkara’s collected retrospectives, like last week’s examination of the Marvel Comics Transformers run. “Blue-Skying” covers the early history of rookie patrolman Dan Garrett, his re-imagining into an archaeologist by Charlton Comics, and his two replacements, Ted Kord and Jaime Reiz, the latter appearing to be the only Blue Beetle to get a live-action counterpart and only the last two having animated appearances. Garrett just got the radio drama. I thought this would be a good one to use as a sort of preparation for me returning to the the reason I started with the Fox Features comics in the first place. So let’s listen in as Lewis Lovhaug, aka Linkara, looks into the history of a comic character Frederic Wertham once believed actually turned into a giant beetle to fight crime, because Seduction Of The Innocent will haunt me forever, and follow his replacements…one of whom turns into a giant beetle to fight crime.

Note that the original multi-part retrospective was created in 2016 and will not update any events after that.

However, it should be noted that he missed one, but I don’t know if he ever appeared in comics.

I don’t think it’s ever been looked into but for some reason PBS’s original The Electric Company created a comedic hero to go along with their license of Spider-Man from Marvel. He was also called the Blue Beetle as wasn’t very good as superheroing in his sketches. Then again, he didn’t get a storyline segment like Spidey did, the influence for the Spidey Super Stories comics. This was the only video that came up when I did a YouTube search for this version, and I would love to know if anyone at the Children’s Television Workshop knew about the character, that I think would have still been at Charlton at the time before being sold to DC Comics. It’s a lost bit of Blue Beetle trivia.

(Bonus trivia: There was also an animated superhero tale called Letterman that was narrated by Joan Rivers, and Superman appeared on Sesame Street, voiced by Bob Hastings and done by Filmation. I also had a book-and-record where The Electric Company character Paul The Gorilla became Paul The Super Gorilla to stop an invasion of letter e’s. He kind of bungled that.)