Interview: Marvel's Head of Television Jeph Loeb

While the likes of Iron Man and Wolverine were born in the pages of Marvel's comic books, they've since gone on to be major multimedia properties, from feature films to video games to animated series. Their next frontier: the world of anime with tonight's launch of G4's "Iron Man" and "Wolverine" followed by "X-Men" and "Blade" later this year. One of the guiding forces in said multimedia journey is Jeph Loeb, the head of Marvel's TV division. I recently had the chance to sit down with Loeb during Comic-Con International this past weekend.

Brian Ford Sullivan: Since Marvel TV is a new division, is part of your job untangling the legalese with regards to what characters have been optioned and where?

Jeph Loeb: No, it doesn't work like that at all. Really the fun of my job is being able to find the right properties for wherever we're going to be. Some of those are being set up as features. And when that's the case it's not something that we're going to be doing. And some of them you've just got to be realistic as a producer as what can be done in the medium, whether it's live action or whether it's animation. What's the best way of presenting it? I think one of the things that is the most exciting things about Marvel Television is there really hasn't been a television division before. And so we're very lucky to have the partners that we have whether it is in animation over at Disney XD or whatever it is on the live side with ABC and ABC Family.

BFS: Do you find that networks and studios approach you to develop specific properties or do you go out with ones specifically in mind?

JL: Marvel works in conjunction with our partners and we determine what those properties are.

BFS: How then did the G4 deal come about?

JL: Actually Simon Phillips who works in the Worldwide area of Marvel originally came up with this idea that being able to see Marvel Animation in a very unique light. And that was something that was more intended for the worldwide audience and it would be very different from the things that we do with say "Super Hero Squad" or "The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes" or "Ultimate Spider-Man." So he spearheaded a partnership between us and Sony and Madhouse Animation.

My daughter wants to know who invented the television?

The origins of what would become today’s television system are traced back as far as the discovery of the photoconductivity of the element selenium by Willoughby Smith in 1873, and the invention of a scanning disk by Paul Nipkow in 1884. All practical television systems use the fundamental idea of scanning an image to produce a time series signal representation. That representation is then transmitted to a device to reverse the scanning process. The final device, the television, relies on the human eye to integrate the result into a coherent image again.

While electromechanical techniques were developed prior to World War II, most notably by Charles Francis Jenkins and John Logie Baird, all-electronic television systems relied on the inventions of Philo Taylor Farnsworth, Vladimir Zworykin and others to produce a system suitable for mass distribution of television programming. Commercial broadcast programming, following years of experimental broadcasts seen only in a few specially-equipped homes, occurred in both the United States and the United Kingdom before World War II.

The first television broadcasts with a modern level of definition (240+ lines) were made in England in 1936. Television did not become commonplace in United States homes until the middle 1950s. While North American over-the-air broadcasting was originally free of direct marginal cost to the consumer (i.e., cost in excess of acquisition and upkeep of the hardware) and broadcasters were compensated primarily by receipt of advertising revenue, increasingly television consumers obtain their programming by subscription to cable television systems or direct-to-home satellite transmissions. In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, the owner of each television must pay a licence fee annually which is used to support the British Broadcasting Corporation. Color tv was invented by Mexican Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena in 1940. http://www.faqfarm.com/Q/Who_invented_the_color_television

Hope this helps you answer your daughters question!

1876: Boston civil servant George Carey was thinking about complete television systems and in 1877 he put forward drawings for what he called a “selenium camera” that would allow people to “see by electricity.” Eugen Goldstein coins the term “cathode rays” to describe the light emitted when an electric current was forced through a vacuum tube. 1924 – 1925: American Charles Jenkins and John Baird from Scotland, each demonstrate the mechanical transmissions of images over wire circuits. Photo Left: Jenkin’s Radiovisor Model 100 circa 1931, sold as a kit. Baird becomes the first person to transmit moving silhouette images using a mechanical system based on Nipkow’s disk. Vladimir Zworykin patents a color television system. 1927: Bell Telephone and the U.S. Department of Commerce conduct the first long distance use of TV, between Washington D.C. and New York City on April 9th. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover commented, “Today we have, in a sense, the transmission of sight for the first time in the world’s history. Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect, and in a manner hitherto unknown.” Philo Farnsworth files for a patent on the first complete electronic television system, which he called the Image Dissector. 1936: About 200 hundred television sets are in use world-wide. The introduction of coaxial cable, which is a pure copper or copper-coated wire surrounded by insulation and an aluminum covering. These cables were and are used to transmit television, telephone and data signals. The 1st “experimental” coaxial cable lines were laid by AT&T between New York and Philadelphia in 1936. The first “regular” installation connected Minneapolis and Stevens Point, WI in 1941. The original L1 coaxial-cable system could carry 480 telephone conversations or one television program. By the 1970′s, L5 systems could carry 132,000 calls or more than 200 television programs. 1937: CBS begins TV development. The BBC begins high definition broadcasts in London. Brothers and Stanford researchers Russell and Sigurd Varian introduced the Klystron in. A Klystron is a high-frequency amplifier for generating microwaves. It is considered the technology that makes UHF-TV possible because it gives the ability to generate the high power required in this spectrum. 1939: Vladimir Zworykin and RCA conduct experimentally broadcasts from the Empire State Building. Television was demonstrated at the New York World’s Fair and the San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition. RCA’s David Sarnoff used his company’s exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair as a showcase for the 1st Presidential speech (Roosevelt) on television and to introduce RCA’s new line of television receivers – some of which had to be coupled with a radio if you wanted to hear sound. The Dumont company starts making tv sets. 1946: Peter Goldmark, working for CBS, demonstrated his color television system to the FCC. His system produced color pictures by having a red-blue-green wheel spin in front of a cathode ray tube. This mechanical means of producing a color picture was used in 1949 to broadcast medical procedures from Pennsylvania and Atlantic City hospitals. In Atlantic City, viewers could come to the convention center to see broadcasts of operations. Reports from the time noted that the realism of seeing surgery in color caused more than a few viewers to faint. Although Goldmark’s mechanical system was eventually replaced by an electronic system he is recognized as the first to introduce a broadcasting color television system.

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