You’d think that DC Comics and Warner Brothers would eventually run out of old Super Friends cartoons to put onto DVD. You’d think that Wonder Woman has lassoed every kind of dinosaur and/or alien invader, and that every Justice League member had faced their own evil doppelganger, or that Superman would just freakin’ stop putting himself in Kryptonite-likely situations. You’re thinking wrong.
The most recent DVD set from Warner Bros. is called ‘Super Friends : The Lost Episodes‘. While this might imply that there are a handful of episodes that never aired due to the show ending, or because Wonder Woman was animated without a top for a few seconds, these are definitely all episodes that saw the ol’ TV screen long ago. This collection of 24 episodes consists of a series of cartoons that were animated as the previous Super Friends series was ending, and were later shoehorned into the ‘Superman/Batman Adventures’ show in 1983 – but ‘Super Friends : Stuff That They Showed After The Main Show Was Over’ just didn’t have the same ring.
Once again, I must admit that Super Friends aired before my time – which is not to say that I didn’t experience my own Cartoon Network reruns, back when CN was a paragon of innovative cartoon revolution and classics. This batch of episodes seems to embody everything that I love about the Silver Age of comics, even more so than any of the previous collections. It’s not too long before you get Jayna turning into a giant crab to battle space robots the size of toys, and Superman being forced to garden by the awesome Mr. Mxyzptlk (which the show pronounces ‘Mix-Ull-Plik’… for shame). The screencaps for just about any scene in this collection are just beautiful examples of how absurd and great these cartoons were. They might not be the most amazingly plotted, voiced, or illustrated, but they provide more than enough ‘What The Eff?’ moments to make me happy.
It’s not as if the Super Friends are ever going out of style, either. Mattel recently offered a Zan and Jayna action figure 2-pack exclusively at San Diego Comic Con that people went insane over – and even more so when the remaining 2-packs were sold without their pet monkey, Gleek, on Mattel’s website later. And Gleek is definitely one of the most reprehensible things to ever happen to animation. Aside from that Bratz cartoon.
The DVD set is light on bonuses, featuring only a couple of scripts that can be downloaded from the internet using the DVD, but at this point, I’m sure that the extra features have been exhausted. To the best of my knowledge, and using the wisdom of TVShowsonDVD.com, WB has one more Super Friends related set to release, entitled simply ‘Super Friends’. This iteration featured teenagers Wendy and Marvin, who were precursors to Zan and Jayna, and was the very earliest Super Friends cartoon from 1973.
Pick it up. We’re almost at a point of completeness when it comes to collecting these old JLA cartoons, and even if they hold no nostalgia for you, they’ll be sure to tickle your modern animated sensibilities into submission.
