There are a lot of DC Comics superhero DVDs out there, and even as a professional nerd, I find myself confused a whole heck of a lot. I mean, you have 1973’s Super Friends, 1977’s The All-New Superfriends Hour, 1978’s Challenge of the Superfriends, 1985’s Super Powers Team, 1988’s Superman, and everything in-between. Well, it’s time to throw one more DVD onto the pile of awesome. Do it gently though, as pure, unexhausted Awesome is known to explode.

What? It’s on the periodic table. Right between Gnarlium and Radiclon.

While I was growing up, Filmation was known as two things : those guys who did He-Man, and those guys who did that ‘not-as-good’ Ghostbusters cartoon without Slimer. Everyone knows two fundamental things about monkeys : they can’t swim, and they can’t catch ghosts. It’s simple biology. Get with the program.

In the halcyon days of 1967, long before irreparably altering the direction of my childhood and compelling me to tear around my back yard bellowing ‘I HAVE THE POWER!’, Filmation took a whack at a variety of DC Superheroes. This DVD collection of eighteen 7-minute episodes originally appeared before and after Filmation’s ‘Superman / Aquaman Hour’ (released by Warner Home Video previously). These Super Heroes cartoons are divided by hero on the DVD, with three dedicated episodes for each one : The Atom, The Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, The Teen Titans, and of course, the whole Justice League of America.

Being an excitable Green Lantern fan, I skipped right to the GL episodes, only to find him with a Venusian sidekick named Kairo, who would be a ridiculously offensive stereotype of SOMETHING were he not clearly from Venus. This was the Silver Age of comics, mind you – everyone was picking up extraneous youthful wards, and crazy pseudo-science was taking over comic book plots where basic crime tales once ruled. It was really a great time to be reading – visits to other planets, alien life forms and ridiculous machines were beginning to redefine comics, as well as the cartoons based on them.

It’s also worth mentioning that the creative climate of cartoons at the time tended to focus on quantity over quality, so studios would re-use animation, backgrounds and even plots as much as possible. While Filmation is usually regarded as the very worst offender and prolific re-user, it’s amazingly charming in retrospect. Long, slow pans over large, lush background paintings became a trademark of theirs, as these shots took up expanses of time without the expensive process of actually animating anything, or moving still characters across backgrounds. Still, these money-saving approaches to animation are brimming with nostalgia (are occasionally, hilarity), and current cartoons like The Venture Bros. have made segments purposely mimicking this limited animation style for the nostalgia effect. And you HAVE to love the quickly designed one-off monsters and bad guys who flounder around without real background or purpose and bad helmets. Well, at least I have to.

About 2 minutes into the classic Green Lantern episode ‘Sirena, Empress of Evil’, the best thing ever happens. Ever.

See, Sirena is SO evil that she’s designed a complex device that uses a magneto-beam to locate Green Lantern anywhere on her evil planet. By pulling a lever, the magneto-beam’s wavy lines search out the brainwaves of ol’ Hal Jordan. This, in itself, isn’t evil, but Sirena pulls another lever and a dopey-looking red bird is revealed. It’s purpose? Well… just watch.

Someone call PETA. Or help me train a bird to do that, because it is amazing. The sheer, open-ended bizarreness of the DVD drops unexpected, circuitous bombs like this every few minutes, along with a bevy of classic Burt Ward-ian exhortations, like ‘holy galaxies!’ or ‘great merciful sappho!’ or ‘jumping armadillos!’ Unfortunately, there’s not a Batman in sight, as this Justice League is comprised of the DVD’s aforementioned main stars, plus Superman.

The absolute best part of the DVD is the 40-minute documentary on Lou Scheimer and how he and two friends built Filmation from scratch, subterfuge and pure ingenuity, watched it create wonderful things and form a family, and eventually collapse. It’s surprisingly moving and emotional, and it conveys a newfound appreciation of Filmation’s approach to animation. They’d bring you in, give you a job for life if you wanted it, and teach you how to do whatever you wanted to know… and it was exciting! It was the Pixar of its day – interested employees creating things that they believed in, full of expression and wonder.

Within the documentary, Paul Dini articulates the appeal of Filmation’s cartoons best : they’re organic. You can see the process, you can see the hand of the artist and the brushstrokes. As more and more animation was sent overseas for production, Filmation kept almost all of their work within the US, and at one point, within the same building – from sketching to voiceovers to final product. It’s that insular, close environment that genuinely created a family, and if you watch carefully, you can see it in their cartoons. (Parents, use mild caution – the documentary involves one instance of medium-level profanity.)

I was prepared to laugh my way through the DVD’s continuity errors, mis-painted heroes and strange plot twists, but while I still can’t help but notice the amusing weirdness, it’s now easier to see the hands behind it, and that adds a whole new dimension to the experience.

The DVD holds an important part in any animation collection as it features some of the very first ‘Saturday morning’ cartoons. And, of course, birds flying into peoples’ heads. What’s cooler than that?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 2:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.