Many black children definitely looked up to The Brown Hornet, much like Fat Albert and his gang did. This superhero gave them another black man in their life to look up to...especially for those kids who didn't have a black man in the home to look up to, but had the TV close by.
The Brown Hornet Info Page gives this brief summary of the character:
The Brown Hornet first appeared on the CBS cartoon Fat Albert and The Cosby Kids. The Brown Hornet was idolized by Fat Albert's crew and his was one of the voices done by Bill Cosby himself...They often took guidance from The Brown Hornet, whose adventures appeared in a separate segment of the show, and often paralleled what was going on in the neighborhood so that his actions were able to point the way to the correct choices. And just to make sure the young viewers got the point, Cosby himself would hammer it home in live-action commentary...Gold Key Comics did a comic book adaptation of it, which ran 29 issues, from 1974-79.
The '70's were the decade of discos and afros. Black culture was seen as something to be celebrated and many people grasped onto the music, dance moves, slang, and fashions of the black community.
The Harlem Globetrotters were very popular and even had their own "superhero" cartoon made about them: "The Super Harlem Globetrotters". Sometimes, though, this image of blacks as entertainers was still seen as racist, so cartoons such as this didn't last long...for one reason or another.
It was in the '70's that the famous "Blaxploitation" films like Shaft and Foxy Brown were in theatres.
(Photos courtesy of Blaxploitation.com)
To date, as shown on The Museum of Black Superheroes DC Comics boasts 40+ stand-alone, along with several other black, comic book characters; Marvel Comics celebrates 78+ along with countless others listed at the above site; and Milestone Comics, a division of Marvel that made black comics and ceased publication in 1997, had 11. So as times have changed and blacks have come into their own in American culture, their images have changed and been more widely accepted.
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