Super Friends: The Complete Collection
52 hrs., 22 min. / Color / 1.33:1 / SDH
DC/Warners BD $119.99
No, don’t get concerned, we didn’t watch this for 52 (and a half) hours straight; we would be seeing invisible planes in our sleep. But what an epic set of no less than eight Super Friends programs covering well over a decade and featuring the legendary Justice League of America, including a dog and a monkey (but not Krypto or Beppo, and that’s an aside to my fellow DC Comics geeks).
Aging myself, early childhood favorites included the Batman TV show (1966-1968 and then forever in reruns), the popularity of which led to Superman and Batman Saturday morning cartoon programs, which led to my particular favorite, The Superman-Aquaman Hour of Adventure, which featured guest stars from the world of DC Comics, including Green Lantern, Flash, Atom, Hawkman, and the Teen Titans. Those shows were produced by Filmation. But enough about me.
By 1970 or so, the super-hero craze had been replaced by Saturday morning musical cartoons (The Archies) and then by young people traveling the country in their psychedelic van, solving mysteries with a large dog with a speech impediment. ABC omitted the music but added two crime-solvers and their dog to the Justice League for the premiere of Super Friends in the fall of 1973, producing 16 one-hour shows that the network repeated for four years. The Friends included Superman, Batman & Robin, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman, plus new pals Marvin and Wendy and Wonder Dog, none of whom had any powers (or much personality). A treat for these episodes is the occasional inclusion of an outside-the-Hall-of-Justice heroes, including favorites Green Arrow and Plastic Man.
The success of live-action primetime shows featuring four-color stalwarts Wonder Woman and The Hulk inspired ABC to retire the reruns and approve The All-New Super Friends Hour, which ran for 15 episodes 1977-78 and then on into perpetual reruns. This time, the kids and dog are gone and our heroes are joined by the Wonder Twins, Zan and Jayna, who can transform themselves into various useful crime-fighting things, and their space chimp, Gleek. Unlike the first series, each episode was broken down into smaller factions with team ups, lessons for the kiddies at home watching, and even puzzles and games, and Justice League guest stars appeared in most episodes.
The show was revamped the following year as Challenge of the Super Friends, and this time, the popular (but nefarious) DC Rogues Gallery appeared to challenge the Super Friends, including Luthor, Scarecrow, the Riddler, and Gorilla Grodd. By this stage, we suspect that the entire enterprise was floated to sell toys as well as comics.
Both of those incarnations totaled 16 episodes each, heavily rerun, and for 1979 the show was cut to a half-hour and renamed The World’s Greatest Super Friends (to match the Justice League newspaper comic strip that debuted that year, called The World’s Greatest Super Heroes). More gadgets and characters were introduced to hawk toys, too.
For 1980, it was back to an hour, although each episode consisted of shorter cartoon episodes including several from previous seasons, and the name reverted to simply Super Friends. This amalgam ran for three years and 22 shows (each featuring three new short cartoons) with a generous mix of comic book friends and foes. Earlier Super Friends episodes were syndicated, and ABC cancelled the Saturday morning show, so 22 cartoons (8 episodes) didn’t air in the U.S. for 15 years (they’re called the “lost episodes” and they are included here).
The next generation celebrated the show’s 10th anniversary with a tie-in to the line of Kenner Super Powers action figures, a collection of Jack Kirby’s New Gods villains and Justice League heroes, plus the comic book of the same title. For the clumsily-titled Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show, new members included El Dorado for South of the Border integration and Firestorm (nice toys, they), plus by this era of the series, a big bonus was Adam West as the voice of Batman. The format of shorter adventures that could be mixed and matched and rerun was continued.
The final season, 1985, featured only eight new half-hour episodes, introduced additional comic book characters that matched new offerings in the Kenner toy line, and included the Wonder Twins only as an afterthought. It’s rather surprising that there wasn’t a further revival of the show, except that Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie inspired a new generation of TV super-hero cartoons, including a series of updated, classier Justice League adventures.
Warner’s DC Super Friends: The Complete Collection is a well designed 16 disc set that’s color coded and logo-labeled for ease of finding the episodes you’re looking for, with each episode boasting impeccable picture and sound, far beyond the few DVD episodes I've seen. This show wasn’t part of my childhood so a nostalgia factor is missing, but that also means that the episodes are new and fresh to me and fun to watch with the kids. Various featurettes are carried over from previous DVD releases; an intro to each new series with the info I described above would’ve been nice, though. I’m sorry nobody at WB thought to include the Super Friends musical number performed by Supergirl and the Flash on a crossover episode of their live-action TV series. I can’t think of everything!
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