The Origin of Vulturo

Been ego surfing this lazy Sunday afternoon. Courtesy of socialmention, I stumbled upon two wonderful videos featuring Vulturo, Prince of Darkness.

Many new people I meet me often ask me about the origin of this internet handle. I had already documented this over at my 1.0 blog, but that has long since been destroyed.

Guess this is as good a time as any to do it again: Vulturo is a Hanna-Barbera super villain from the late sixties, who appeared on a few early episodes of Birdman, and was then since revived in Cartoon Network’s parody spoof Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.

As kids, my little brother and me often watched Cartoon network for hours on end – the non desified variety, remember the Yogi Bear era? – and had numerous disagreements about the stuff that came on air. One of the most common ones was my brother choosing to root for the good side while I chose to side with evil, often out of awe, and sometimes just to spite him.

For example, my brother rooted for the Centurions while I did so for Doc Terror. There was Autobots vs Decepticons too. Birdman was this extremely annoying series which we often watched with ambivalence. Brother always rooted for Birdman, I didn’t care. Then Vulturo came along, a formidable adversary for the irritating Birdman, and I became an instant fan.

Here are those nostalgic videos:

Vulturo, Prince Of Darkness

Birdman’s sinister foe Vulturo suddenly appears at an astronomic conference and threatens the whole assembly unless Birdman agrees to meet him in a duel that will match Birdman’s superpowers against the awesome powers that Vulturo has devised. He even has a match for Avenger, a mechanical bird called Dirth. Fighting off each attack, Birdman’s powers begin to fade; he flies evasively, but finds out that the lives of the scientists at the conference are under threat of a time-bomb. Given back some strength by a passing comet, Birdman rushes to the scientists, as Vulturo escapes.

The Return Of Vulturo

An old enemy begins operation revenge by luring Birdman’s young companion, Birdboy, to his laboratory. First weakening him, he puts Birdboy on a conveyor belt directed toward a bottomless pit and waits. When Birdman arrives, the schemer causes the sky to cloud over to keep out the sun’s energy, locks him in with a paralyzing ray, and puts him on the conveyor belt too. Avenger stops the motion of the belt to allow Birdman time to wrench himself free, intercept the revengeful Vulturo, and have him locked up.

Come to think of it, the classic episodes don’t look so cool, and come across as frankly, quite stupid and cliched given the advances in animation and changes in modern sensibilities. But they were released in 1967/1968, more than 40 years ago, and were still entertaining for us Indian kids in the 90s.

Memorably enough, certainly, for me to choose Vulturo for an internet handle on IRC in early 2000, followed by MSN Chat, Blogger and everything else.