Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles

Did You Know?

• On April 26, 2011, Warner Home Video released the complete series on DVD via the Warner Archive Collection as a Manufacture-on-Demand release.
• A Blu-ray version of the complete series was released on January 28, 2025.

Characters and overview

Airing on CBS Saturday mornings starting September 10, 1966, this Hanna-Barbera show split its time between two segments. Each episode typically featured two adventures of The Impossibles, with a Frankenstein Jr. story sandwiched between them. The Frankenstein Jr. segment was set in Civic City, where boy genius Buzz Conroy and his father Professor Conroy battled supervillains with the help of a giant robot named Frankenstein Jr. Buzz built the robot and activated him using an energy ring.

The design of Frankenstein Jr. was similar to the anime character Tetsujin 28-go, also known as Gigantor. The Impossibles were a trio of superheroes—Multi-Man, Fluid-Man, and Coil-Man—who disguised themselves as a rock band inspired by the Beatles. Their powers matched their names: Multi-Man could create copies of himself, Coil-Man could turn into a springy coil, and Fluid-Man could change his body into any liquid. They received their missions from a character called Big D, who contacted them through a receiver hidden in the base of Coil-Man’s left-handed guitar.

During development, the group was originally called The Incredibles, but the name was changed before production. The show was among several criticized for violence in children’s television during the late 1960s, and it was pulled from reruns in 1968, a year after its initial run ended. The Frankenstein Jr. segments later returned in the 1976 series Space Ghost and Frankenstein Jr., which aired on NBC from November 27, 1976 to September 3, 1977, replacing the canceled Big John, Little John.

Other appearances

Buzz Conroy and Frankenstein Jr. first turned up together in a Yogi's Space Race episode, "Race Through the Planet of the Monsters." Frankenstein Jr. later made a solo appearance on Johnny Bravo in "Johnny Makeover" and in the 2013 film Scooby-Doo! Mask of the Blue Falcon. He was also featured on a Halloween parade float in the 2020 film Happy Halloween, Scooby-Doo! and had a cameo in the end credits of Scoob! that same year. Buzz and Frankenstein Jr. returned as Warner Bros. 3000 Server-Verse inhabitants watching the basketball game in Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021). Buzz Conroy has appeared in the third season of Jellystone!, with Frankenstein Jr. also set to appear in that season.

Adaptations

In 1966, Gold Key Comics put out a single comic issue tying into the TV show, with its stories later collected in the 1968 UK annual from Atlas Publishing. The two comic tales were called "The Image Invasion" and "Frankenstein Jr. Meets the Flea Man," while the annual also featured a brand-new text story, "A Spook in his Wheel." A Big Little Book, "Frankenstein Jr.: The Menace of the Heartless Monster," came out the same year. Decades later, in 1996, Archie Comics brought the character back in "Hanna-Barbera Presents" #8, whose cover showed Frankenstein Jr. fighting the Impossibles, a clear nod to the cover of Marvel's Fantastic Four #1.

The Impossibles' secret identities later turned up in another Hanna-Barbera show, "The Super Globetrotters," where the Harlem Globetrotters played undercover heroes. In that series, Nate Branch became Fluid Man or Liquid Man, with a flippered costume and powers like the Impossibles' Fluid-Man; Twiggy Sanders stretched as Spaghetti Man, similar to Coil-Man; and Geese Ausbie, as Multi Man, had nearly identical powers and costume to his Impossibles counterpart.

A major 2016 DC Comics series, "Future Quest," featured Buzz, Frankenstein Jr., and the Impossibles alongside characters from other Hanna-Barbera cartoons. There, the team added a new female member named Cobalt, and Big D was reimagined as a woman, Deva Sumadi, who also went by Falcon-7.