The Fantastical Four-igins of Danny Phantom
There have been four iconic characters in all the history of comic books: Batman, Superman, Spider-man and the Fantastic Four. All other comic book superheroes have been influence by these four, either in emulation or in opposition. Danny Phantom reflects parts of both the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man.
At first I was going to argue that Danny resembles Johnny Storm, the Human Torch of the Fantastic Four, as in deed some ways he does, but upon further reflection I see that Danny is modeled more closely on Peter Parker, the Spider-Man.
In the origin of Spider-Man Peter Parker is a high school student. He was a gifted student in the sciences but utterly lacking in friends and picked on by the in-crowd. During a class visit to a research lab studying nuclear physics a spider was irradiated with nuclear energy and soon after bites Peter. As a result Peter Parker discovers that he has the great strength of a spider, a spider's ability to cling to walls and a mysterious sixth sense that warns Peter of danger. (In actual fact spiders only seems strong because they are so small and the loads they are lifting are so small. If they were enlarged to human size they would have little more strength than humans have. Likewise their ability to cling to walls is due to their very light weight and adhesive on the pads of their feet. If they were human sized they would weight way too much to stick to the ceiling. But it makes for a good super-hero comic.
Peter Parker is an orphan living with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben. They are poor so Peter gets an idea to raise some money by entering a wrestling contest in a masked costume, which becomes his Spider-Man costume. In the end Peter is ripped off by the contest manager. So when a thief robs the manager moments later Peter / Spider-Man watches him run by, doing nothing. After all, what has the manager done for him lately. But Peter's Uncle Ben works as a bank guard and gets killed when the same thief tries to rob the bank. Heart-broken, Peter puts on his costume and goes after the crook, vowing to never turn a blind eye to injustice again.
The points of agreement with Danny Phantom include both being high school students, both are outcasts, both are picked on by the in crowd of jocks and cheerleaders. Also, in what is probably a stretch, one of Spider-Man's arch-villains is Venom, an organic version of his costume that turned evil which could be compared to the way his ghost-half turned evil in The Ultimate Enemy. But that's a stretch. A little more credible is the comparison of Val, the Ghost Hunter to Spider-Man's Green Goblin. Both ride fancy jet hoverboards and are armed with an extensive arsenal of weapons. Both are fanatical about killing Danny Phantom / Spider-Man. Now the Green Goblin turned out to be the father of Peter Parker's best friend and died in a freak accident while Spider-Man was trying to capture him. In time Peter's friend discovers his father's secret and knowing that Spider-Man killed his father sets out to complete the revenge as the Hobgoblin. Val's father lost his highly-paid job as a security consultant because of Danny Phantom, which is Val's motivation for wanting to destroy him. So Val closely resembles the Hobgoblin. Her flying board also resembles the flying board of the Silver Surfer, a character from The Fantastic Four. So let's turn to them...
The success of Spider-Man was unexpected and encouraged Marvel comics to follow up with other super hero comics. One of the first was the Fantastic Four, a team comic at a time when there were few team comics. The Fantastic Four bears a striking resemblance to an earlier strip at rival DC Comics called Challengers of the Unknown. This shouldn't be surprising because the same man created, wrote and drew both comics - Jack Kirby. Now this isn't official Marvel history because Stan Lee, the Editor in Chief at Marvel claims to have created everything. But when you look at who was doing what Kirby was the idea man and Lee the nuts-and-bolts guy. What I mean by this is that with the singular exception of Spider-Man Jack Kirby draw the first episodes of every other Marvel character and often continues for doing layouts of the stories for other artists to finish. Moreover Lee was pretty open about the "Marvel Way" of producing comics which began with a brainstorming session to come up with a plot. Then the artist went away and drew the strip and only afterwards did Lee, the "writer" come around to writing dialog to match the story. This wasn't just a liberating role for the artist, this was a clear acknowledgment that the artist was controlling the strip.
In Challengers of the Unknown four men survive incredibly deadly accidents. Concluding that they are living on "borrowed time" they join together to battle against the monsters hidden in the far corners of the world. Each man had his own special talent - mountain climbing, scuba diving, and so on. And for some reasons they decided to all wear matching jumpsuits. Jumpsuits in the late 50s-early 60s were quite the rage.
In the Fantastic Four, four people launch an experimental rocket into space only to become bombarded with cosmic rays. They survive a deadly crash-landing only to discover that their exposure to radiation had mutated them into four very different superhumans. During their flight they wore jumpsuits and afterwards, when they decided to band together to fight the monsters hidden in the far corners of the world they continued to wear identical jumpsuit based costumes.
The members of the Fantastic Four include Reed Richards, the inventor of the spaceship and a thousand other gadgets. He organized the group on the top floors of the Baxter Building in downtown New York. The Fantastic Four's complex includes a launch silo for their rocketplane and portal to the Negative Zone. The Fenton Works building is a whimsical variation on the Baxter Building.
Reed himself became "Mr. Fantastic" a rather dumb name for a guy who can stretch himself into countless shape like so much silly-putty. One of his favorite tactics was to stretch himself into a large square sheet stretched between two building and capture whatever is being tossed at the rest of the group. Jack Fenton's large square shape isn't just fat. There are other fat people in the show and they are all round. Jack is the only one who is square so I think is a reference to Mr. Fantastic elastic net maneuver.
Reed Richards is an older man so he has a touch of grey in his hair above his ears. So does Jack Fenton. And like Reed Richards, Jack Fenton has invented countless devices. The major difference is that Jack is played as an idiot who doesn't believe his gadgets work, usually because he forgets to turn them on.
At the start of the Fantastic Four Reed Richards was dating Sue Storm, a pretty blonde much younger than Reed. (Well, Reed is old enough to have white in his hair but Sue has a teen-age brother which would place her in her mid-twenties but Reed in his late thirties. Never mind) When the comic book came out in 1962 women were not expected to get physical so Sue Storm's power was turn invisible. She could sneak up on villains and trip them up and stuff. She called herself Invisible Girl. A really sucky name that I think she's still stuck with. In Danny Phantom there's a running joke about people calling Danny "Inviso-Bill" I tend to think this is a little joke playing on Invisible Girl.
As the series developed, and feminism grew in the culture readers became dissatisfied with Sue Storm's weak sister act so she was given an upgrade. It was "discovered" that her invisibility power stemmed from her projecting force field, and that became her new power. She could use the force field defensively as a shield, or she project a force field like a battering ram. This powers up-grade actually makes her the most powerful member of the group.
A friend to Reed Richards and pilot of the spaceship was Ben Grimm, a gloomy gus who turned into an animated lump of rocks, The Thing. While perhaps the most powerful being on the planet he moans the loss of human relationships.
Sue's kid brother, Johnny Storm is the last member of the group. Johnny was a hot head, rebellious teenager who becomes the Human Torch. As the Human Torch Johnny pretty much becomes pure flame. He can fly and when he changes used to call out "Flame On," much the way Danny says, "I'm going Ghost." Johnny liked to impress the ladies with little success much the way Danny wants to get Paulina to notice him and not as the Ghost Boy. (Clark Kent / Superman faced the same love triangle with Lois Lane, at least back in the old days.) And in general Danny tends to find being the ghost boy liberating from his usual hangdog emotions. In this he somewhat resembles both The Human Torch and Spider-Man.
Characters like Jazz and Maddie, Sam and Tucker have no obvious parallels in the Fantastic Four or in Spider-Man.
The Fantastic Four is best known for their villains than the characters in the group. One of their greatest villains is Galactus, a monumental space creature, two or three hundred feet in height whose power demands are so great that he is forced to devour whole planets at a time. Galactus has not appeared in Danny Phantom but he has appears a couple times in Butch Hartman's other animated show, The Fairly Odd Parents. Once he appeared as a monster Timmy dreamed up to force his parents to give up their super-powers. The other time was when Mr. Crocker, Timmy's teacher, captured one of the fairies and become ruler of the universe. His costume was inspired by Galactus.
What we have in Danny Phantom is one gadget and one main villain. The gadget is the Ghost Portal. As the Fantastic Four moved into its third or fourth year its storyline became increasingly "cosmic," hence Galactus, but also a door into "sub-space" which Reed was determined to explore. An episode or two on Stan Lee got confused and called "sub-space" The Negative Zone, which was actually something else at the time, but the change stuck. The Negative Zone is a chaotic realm of floating asteroids and exploding planets, supernova-ing stars, and so on. From time to time monsters from the Negative Zone would escape and reek havoc on the city of New York. Reed Richards had vehicles for exploring the Negative Zone, just as Jack Fenton has a flyer for the Ghost Zone.
This is the nut to the whole thing. The Negative Zone The Ghost Zone. Butch Hartman has made changes, chiefly by making convention super-hero powers into "ghost" powers, but this is the point from which Danny Phantom springboards from the Fantastic Four.
The last link is with Vlad Masters.
In the Fantastic Four one of their earliest villains was Dr. Doom, a brilliant scientist whose face was hideously scarred by a laboratory accident. He hides himself behind an iron mask and plots the rule of the world using high tech gadgets that rival Reed Richards. But in time we learn that this is more than a technoogical rivalry between the two. When in collage Reed Richards was lab partners with Victor von Doom and was there when the lab accident destroyed von Doom's face. Doom's hatred of Richards isn't just professional, it's personal, just as Vlad's hatred of Jack stems from the lab accident that ruined his chances with Maddie and give him his ghostly powers. In the Fantastic Four Reed knows that his old college buddy is out to get him. Making Jack Fenton a oblivious idiot is one of the lamentable conventions of children's television.
So there you have it. From Dr. Doom to the Negative Zone, from the Baxter Building to the battle cry, Danny Phantom is a re-mixed take on the Fantastic Four. My dad told me about all the similaritys so I wrote them down.
