In 1973, Hanna-Barbera brought the second (and most popular) animated version of DC Comics’ Justice League to animated life under the title Super Friends. While the series enjoyed immense popularity and aired in various incarnations until 1986, this first attempt missed the mark. Still, Super Friends! Season One, Volume Two is worth picking up if you a Super Friends fan.
The oddness of this incarnation is noticeable right away. Hanging out with the Super Friends in their Hall of Justice are two teens who look like they should be rejects from the late 60s hippie movement. Wendy, Marvin and their sidekick Wonder Dog are constantly hanging around the most powerful beings on the planet, but yet it’s never explained how they earned this privilege.
Despite the presence of the un-powered hippie teens and their dog, the show does feature some of the best Justice League members. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, along with Robin and Aquaman make up the active roster. Also putting in appearances in episodes in the season are Plastic Man, Green Arrow and the Flash. Their appearances are short, but they offer a bright spot in an unusually dull season.
My biggest complaint about the show is it’s lack of real villains. Not a single DC Comics villain makes an appearance on the show. Instead, in each show the Super Friends are menaced by aliens, animals and mad scientists. At this point in time, DC and Hanna-Barbera had 50 years of DC stories to pull villains from and they couldn’t do that for a single episode. To top things off, each episode was 49 minutes long. The one-hour length really stretched some stories and made enduring the bad villains even worse.
Still, it’s an interesting show and one that Hanna-Barbera certainly looked at when it finished airing after only 16 episodes. They definitely took a look at the faults I mentioned because they were all replaced in the follow-up series The All-New Super Friends Hour that aired in 1977-1978. Comic book villains were used, Wendy and Marvin were gone and the episodes were made up of four shorts that ran around 12-minutes each. The success of this series paved the way for the next nine years of the Super Friends. None of this would have happened without the 1973 Super Friends series.
Episodes
- The Balloon People
- The Fantastic FERPs
- The Ultra Beam
- The Menace of the White Dwarf
- The Mysterious Moles
- Gulliver’s Gigantic Goof
- The Planet-Splitter
- The Watermen
- Bonus – Super Friends Trivia Challenge
