Ah, sweet, sweet nostalgia. Back in the days of yore before the advent of cable and satellite made cartoons available 24-7 my young life, and those of pretty much all of my friends, revolved to a frightening degree around Saturday mornings. You couldn’t drag me out of bed any other day of the week but on Saturdays I would set my alarm for six in the morning to be sure not to miss any of my favorite shows. I had all of the major network schedules down cold and though it would later be supplanted by the superior animation of Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends – you know, the one where Spider-Man has Ice Man and Firestorm for sidekicks – my major super hero fix came from The Super Friends.
For sheer super hero star power it couldn’t be beat. Where else could you see Superman, Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman and Aquaman, plus a slew of visitors from the DC Comics world, in the same place every week? Sure there were obvious weaknesses – the repeating backgrounds and poor frame rates that mark all Hanna Barbera productions were in full effect here and obvious even to my young eye and the created-for-the-show Wonder Twins and their pet monkey are pretty much the most useless super heros in the history of the genre – but for all the flaws the Super Friends were just plain fun.
Coming back to the show now, better than two decades after I last watched it broadcast, I’m struck by a few things. The Hanna Barbera connection is unmistakable. Though the character designs were pretty much set in stone due to the characters already being well established the background art, story lines, and blank expressionless faces are all vintage Barbera. As for the story lines themselves they come across like the bastard children of Scooby Doo and the old Sherwood Schwarz live action Batman, complete with hyper dramatic voice overs, closing act reveals and goofy shots of the Wonder Twins laughing at whatever silly thing Gleek the monkey did this time. Progressive plot lines? Character arcs? Our heros ever actually feeling threatened? These things are all the product of a later generation: these Super Friends are childhood wish fulfillment, plain and simple. Yep, the plots are simple and formulaic but in that repetition comes a certain amount of comfort, the feeling that you know what’s coming next and that your heroes will always win the day. Yeah, I’m reliving my childhood right now but what can I say? These cartoons are the product of a simpler time and they still tap into the simple enjoyment of having your good guys be good, your bad guys bad, and just wishing more than anything else that you can fly. They’re not high art but they never wanted to be and they hold up incredibly well as what they are.
Warner Brothers obviously knows that there are a good number of people out there just like me – children of the seventies who have refused to really grow up and now have reasonable disposable incomes – who will suck these up like candy if they’re done well and they are. The extras are limited to a Wonder Twins music video and a promo reel of middle aged, pseudo-famous geeks in their pajamas talking about their own childhood memories of the show but the shows themselves have been cleaned up to a gleaming shine. The restoration is truly top notch with the shows looking far better on DVD than they ever did in broadcast. The fold out packaging is quite nice as well. Yes, it would be nice to have more in the way of extras but I seriously doubt much of anything has survived from that era and as long as the shows themselves are handled as well as these are I’m happy. The set includes eighteen complete episodes and I can’t wait to try ‘em out on my own super hero obsessed boy. He’ll dig ‘em.