Classic TV Comic Book Tie-ins

Merchandise tie-ins and other licensing deals have been an essential marketing tool for decades. For movies, it dates back at least to Walt Disney, who made a licensing deal with a Switzerland company for Mickey and Minnie Mouse handkerchiefs in the late 1920s. Another example is William Boyd’s Hopalong Cassidy films, which began in the 1930s and led to dozens of tie-in products such as kids’ lunch boxes.

Television made a huge splash in the merchandising game in the 1950s with Superman, The Lone Ranger, and Fess Parker as Davy Crockett on the Disneyland TV series. Not surprisingly, savvy television producers were quick to partner with comic book publishers. Dell Comics and later Gold Key Comics led the way with tie-ins of popular shows. Many of them were based on youth-oriented TV series (e.g., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea), but there were also comic book tie-ins with adult fare like Dr. Kildare, Mission: Impossible, and Burke’s Law.

In fact, a recent Café post on Burke’s Law inspired my sister to look for some of the classic TV comic books she bought as a youth. I had a blast looking at these covers and wanted to share them with Café readers.

You can enlarge any of the covers by clicking on them. Note the German officer pictured next to Chris George in The Rat Patrol cover is Hans Gudegast. He later changed his name to Eric Braeden and gained fame as Victor Newman on The Young and the Restless.

Chris George and The Rat Patrol

One of the most iconic images on television in the late 1960s was of a jeep flying over the top of a sand dune and--thump!--landing on the ground. Why was that so memorable? Well, there was a guy standing on the back of the jeep holding onto a machine gun! This eye-catching opening let viewers know that The Rat Patrol was going to be anything but boring. At a scant 30 minutes per episode, this World War II action drama never lets up.

The premise wasn't exactly believable. It followed a squad of four Allied soldiers (two per jeep) who conducted raids aimed at disrupting Rommel and the Germans during their operations in the Sahara. The four leads could be identified easily because they all wore different hats: Sergeant Sam Troy (Chris George) donned an Australian bush hat; Sergeant Jack Moffitt (Gary Raymond), the British member of the squad, wore a beret; Private Mark Hitchcock (Lawrence Casey) favored a Civil War cap; and Private Tully Pettigrew (Justin Tarr) usually wore a helmet.

My favorite was Chris George...and it wasn't just because he was incredibly handsome. The first year of the show was filmed in Spain and, during one of the stunts, a jeep fell over on Chris. I read about the incident in the newspaper, which mentioned the name of the hospital. I tracked down the address and wrote my first fan letter. He sent a great photo, signed in blue ballpoint (no stamped signature for Chris) and it hangs on a wall in my home to this day.

My favorite episode is from Season One and is called "The B Negative Raid." Moffitt is seriously wounded and has a rare blood type. Troy needs to find a donor. The only one he can find with the rare blood type is in bad guy Hauptmann Dietrich's desert headquarters and the guy just happens to be an American deserter. (The deserter dies in the end protecting Troy and Moffitt, so he redeems himself...just so you know what happened.)

When The Rat Patrol was over, I still followed Chris George’s career, whether he was low-budget flicks like The Day of the Animals or featured in a supporting role in a John Wayne film like El Dorado (he and the Duke were friends). Chris and his wife, Lynda Day George, also appeared regularly in made-for-TV films. Sadly, Chris George died of a heart attack in 1983 at the age of 52.

The other members of The Rat Patrol had modest careers after the show ended its two-year run in 1968. However, Hans Gudegast, who played the show's heavy, changed his name to Eric Braeden and became of one daytime television's highest-paid actors on The Young and the Restless.