Super Friends

While this time they do fight some super villain type characters(none I've ever heard of), there's still plenty of well meaning scientists/inventors and alien races thrown into the mix. The Wonder Twins are even worse than the original kids. Thankfully they are mostly kept to their own short segments where they teach kids important lessons like don't go joyriding in airplanes. The segments were the best thing about this series. Instead of a tedious one hour story, we are treated to 3(sometimes 4) shorter tedious stories. Other than that, it's the same as the original.

As a kid I used to watch this show every Saturday morning on ABC. This show featured Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Batman & Robin, and the Wonder Twins, Zan & Jayna, with their pet monkey Gleek. I did like the Wonder Twins but Gleek was annoying. Aquaman was my favorite character, although he was unfortunately relegated to flying around with Wonder Woman in her invisible jet whenever the action took place on land or in space.

A previous reviewer was correct in the format used: there were three mini-episodes, approximately 10 minutes in length, with one half-hour episode. The first mini-episode featured a pair of the Superfriends battling evil scientists or scheming enemies. The second mini-episode featured the Wonder Twins in stories about adolescents who were either up to no good or were in dangerous predicaments. The third was the half-hour episode with the entire cast, generally battling aliens or other life forms from far away galaxies. The final mini-episode paired one principal Superfriend with a guest Superfriend such as Green Lantern, Flash, Apache Chief, Samurai, Black Vulcan, Rima, Atom, or Hawkman & Hawgirl.

The stories were good but were definitely preachy. I liked the mini-episodes that paired Aquaman and Superman together. My favorite half-hour episode dealt with an evil zombie woman named Minerva or Medusa or something like that(she didn't have any eyeballs, just white eyes!) who, along with her other female assistants, planned to transform all the women of Earth into similar zombies in order to use them to help her rid the planet of all men by changing them into microchips to be stored on tape so that she could ultimately conquer the world. When Wonder Woman and Jayna, thinking they would be undetected as females, infiltrated her base of operations, they were transformed into zombies with white eyes. They then transformed Aquaman, Batman, Robin, and Zan into microchips and stored them on tape. They thought they also did that to Superman, but he had substituted a statute of himself; he then singlehandedly saved the other Superfiends, changed all the women of Earth back to normal, saved all the men by reversing the deeds of the zombies, and finally caught the main zombie woman.

Also, there originally were several brief spots throughout each program that featured the Superfriends dispensing health advice and safety tips to children and teens.

This was an even better season, with improved art and animation. With the introduction of Cyborg to the TV, the stories seemed to improve both in characterization and plot. For Batman, it became less about the utility belts and more about the man. For Wonder Woman, she finally got to flex her muscles (I think she did last season, too.).

And some of the stories were risque for the time, most notably in "The Fear," which retold Batman's origin and the murder of his parents (The writer of this and the Fox/WB Batman series says he can't believe TPTB let him do it), and "The Death of Superman."

Why they let this series end after one season is beyond me. I truly loved this show and I'm glad Cartoon Network has been rerunning them, even if they *are* on the thin line between Saturday night and Sunday morning.

I'm not really sure what they were going for here. It seems like they wanted this to be their version of The New Scooby-Doo Movies but it seems like they couldn't get the rights to use any of the characters. They have the Thief Of Zagdad and Dr. Frankenschtein. The Middle Earth episode seems like it was written by someone who had only seem that awful Hobbit cartoon from 1977 or South Park's parody of it. Despite all that, the stories are actually better than most of the Super Friends series. Except the time when Zan and Jayna wake up their stupid monkey because he was snoring. Zan says "You must have been having some dream!". Because he was snoring? ugh. There is no spoiler, the mods clearly don't read these.

This was an hour long show that was actually two shows put together. Half of it was a continuation of The All-New Super Friends Hour but just a half hour this time. The second part is them fighting the Legion Of Doom. That's the series I remember seeing the most as a kid, it was probably re-run by itself later. This is the only series that came close to the comic book, they even go to the Bat cave. I would highly recommend not watching any series that came before this one.