Marvel Studios revealed the cast of its Fantastic Four movie on Wednesday, confirming Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Marvel’s first family. But another member of the team is apparently also coming to the Marvel Cinematic Universe: HERBIE, the Fantastic Four’s robot sidekick, who has an unusual origin story.
In the casting reveal poster for The Fantastic Four, The Thing is being served a cuppa joe by a little white-and-blue robot that appears to be HERBIE.
HERBIE, which stands for either “Humanoid Experimental Robot, B-type, Integrated Electronics” or “Highly Engineered Robot Built for Interdimensional Exploration,” depending on the era, was created in 1978. He made his first appearance in the animated series The New Fantastic Four. (Marvel created a previous animated series called Fantastic Four that aired in 1967.)
The lineup of the short-lived 1978 cartoon included Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Girl, The Thing, and HERBIE. The Human Torch was not part of the team. According to Mark Evanier, veteran writer, comics historian, and one-time assistant to Fantastic Four co-creator Jack Kirby, Marvel couldn’t put the Human Torch in its animated series due to rights issues.
Image: John Byrne and Joe Sinnott/Marvel
A longstanding urban legend, seemingly fueled by misinformation, claimed that Marvel and NBC chose not to put the Human Torch in The New Fantastic Four out of fear that kids watching the show might try to imitate Johnny Storm and set themselves on fire.
Evanier’s explanation, posted on his personal website, says the real reason Human Torch was kicked out of the New Fantastic Four lineup was because Universal wanted to make a live-action movie based on the character.
In 1977, Marvel made a deal that licensed a number of their characters to Universal Studios to be developed as live-action TV-movies and potential series. The Incredible Hulk TV show (the one with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno) came out of that deal, as did TV-movie/pilots of Dr. Strange and Captain America that never became regular series. The Human Torch was one of the characters that Universal wanted to develop, and a teleplay was written but never produced.
This meant that, the following year when NBC wanted to buy a new, animated Fantastic Four series, the rights to the Torch were encumbered. Universal — which was not to be involved in the cartoon show — would not make a deal that would allow the Torch to be included. Therefore, he was replaced by a robot named H.E.R.B.I.E., conceived and named by Stan Lee and designed by Jack Kirby.
Evanier says that fears of kids doing an at-home “Flame on!” were “abetted by a few statements from folks who worked on Marvel animated projects” who either “had short memories or figured there was some P.R. benefit to claiming that.”
While HERBIE’s cartoon career was short-lived — The New Fantastic Four ran for just 13 episodes — the robot was integrated into Marvel Comics in 1978 with Fantastic Four issue 209. That comic introduces HERBIE as a creation of Reed Richards and Master Xar, the chief scientist of the planet Xandar. HERBIE, Reed explains, was designed to process intensive calculations, originally to track Galactus’ hyperspace travel.
Amusingly, in that issue Reed also explains why HERBIE exists in The New Fantastic Four cartoon:
Image: John Byrne and Joe Sinnott/Marvel
Yes, according to Marvel Comics canon, The New Fantastic Four cartoon was licensed by the Fantastic Four themselves, bur Johnny Storm wasn’t around to sign away his likeness. So Reed suggested that HERBIE — who waived all likeness rights, apparently — stand in for the Human Torch.
HERBIE has a long, storied history in the lore of Marvel comics, where he’s eventually revealed as a sleeper agent of the evil Doctor Sun, and is later reimagined as a babysitter of sorts for Franklin Richards, the super-powered son of Reed and Sue.
Whether HERBIE will actually appear in The Fantastic Four when it hits movie theaters on July 25, 2025 is currently unclear. But if he does, there’s already a perfect voice actor to fill the role: Frank Welker, the voice of Scooby-Doo, Garfield, and Megatron from the Transformers. Welker voiced HERBIE in the The New Fantastic Four, and is still performing today.