In 1954, Ray Patterson left MGM to start Grantray-Lawrence Animation with former MGM colleague Grant Simmons (Grantray is half of Grant's first name and half of Ray's) and Robert Lawrence. They first did some low budget commercials for Winston. In 1957 they did a short film called "The Hope Jack Built". Soon in 1966, Grantray-Lawrence helped out with Krantz Film's (Who distributed most of their shows) "Rocket Hood Robin" between 1966-1967 altough they were uncredited. In that same year, Grantray-Lawrence did there their first TV series for Marvel Comics: "The Marvel Super Heroes", which was Marvel's first cartoon series. The show featured Captain America, The Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and Sub-Mainer. The series was a weekly series (Here's in order above). GLA used a lot of Xerography and extremely limited animation. The animation was bad, but I love the series. I recently got it on DVD. What won it fans was all the stories, animation, and art (GLA had images taken directly form the comics showing Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Don Heck art work on screen) was from the comics. The series was syndicated, ran for 3 months, and had 65 episodes (each hero had 13 episodes and 39 chapters). After "The Marvel Super Heroes" ended, GLA (along with Krantz Films) did an educational series called "Max, The 2,000 Year Old Mouse". GLA used limited animation again in this series. Soon in 1967 GLA got the rights to Spider-Man and he got his own Saturday Morning Cartoon. Spider-Man used more full animation, although they frequently re-used scenes. After Spider-Man's first Season ended, GLA went bankrupt and closed. After that Ray Patterson got a job at Hanna-Barbera. Spider-Man was continued by Krantz Films and Ralph Bashki. And that's the story!
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