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Super Friends, Volume Two
It's difficult to not sit here and simply trash this two-disc collection of 16 episodes of Super Friends. But it's even more difficult to find something positive to say, and even more difficult than that to sit through this garbage. Childhood nostalgia not withstanding, there's not way around the fact that these episodes are just plain terrible.
Okay, now before any of you fly into some sort of rage and send me pissed off emails about how much you love the Super Friends, let me explain a few things to you. During the 1978-79 season of the show, when it was called Challenge of the Super Friends, the show ran for a full hour. The first half of the show featured our favorite superheroes battling the nefarious Legion of Doom. The second half of the show was made up of a series of lame-ass episodes that found the Super Friends in outer space, at the Earth's core, or on alien planets where they battled dinosaurs, monsters, and robot cowboys. These episodes show the influence Star Wars was having on Saturday morning cartoons, as over half the shows either take place in outer space, or feature creatures from another planet. You've got "Rokan: Enemy from Space", "The Demons of Exxor", "Sinbad and the Space Pirates", and "The Pied Piper from Outer Space" to name a few of the laughably bad science fiction themed episodes. In one particularly bad episode – "Attack of the Vampire" – the Super Friends go toe to toe with Dracula. (Of course back in those days network censors wouldn't stand for a Dracula biting people on the neck, so he uses magical dust to covert his victims into blood-suckers.) In "Battle at the Earth's Core" our team of heroes are mysteriously sucked down a whirlpool to the center of the earth, where they battle evil men made of tar, a giant jelly fish, and discover the lost civilization of Atlantis. Let's forget for a moment that lifetime Super Friend member Aquaman is from Atlantis; there is never any sort of explanation of what forces brought our heroes to center of the Earth in the first place. And therein lies one of the key flaws of these 16 episodes: in addition to the terrible animation that defines this era of Hanna Barbera cartoons, the shows are just plain stupid. Sure, the writing was meant for kids, but as an adult you shouldn't rewatch these shows and think, "What retard would be entertained by this crap?" Which is exactly what you'll think as you suffer through this brain-rotting dreck.
And don't think for a second I've forgotten about Zan and Jayna – the insipid Wonder Twins – and their annoying pet space monkey Gleek. As if this show didn't have enough strikes against it, the Wonder Twins were the extra funky stink on the shit – the odor that lingers long after you've flushed the toilet. All of this isn't to say that the various incarnations of the Super Friends television series sucked, because there were some great episodes. It's just that none (and I meant not a single one) of the good episodes can be found on either of these two discs. Don't be fooled into a sense of childhood whimsy and nostalgia by this collection – it sucks.
Video:
Super Friends: Volume Two is presented full frame. The picture quality varies from episode to episode, ranging from good to did-they-find-this-video-master-buried-in-the-back-yard.
Audio:
Super Friends: Volume Two is presented in Dolby Digital, and when all is said and done, the sound is probably the best part of this collection. Of course the writing is so terrible and the music is so annoying that you really won't want to listen to anything.
Extras:
There are two bonus features – one of each disc. Disc 1 features a music video, "The Ballad Zan and Jayna". If you can sit through the entire song you're a better person than me. Disc 2 features "Pajama-rama Super Friends Retrospective" – don't even bother to turn this nonsense on. Chew tin foil instead.
Final Thoughts:
I'm all for reliving childhood memories. And I'm perfectly aware that sometimes the things we love in our youth don't withstand the test of time all that well. But there's no beating around this bush: the 16 episodes that comprise Super Friends: Volume Two are just plain terrible. You'll be better off spending your money on one of the other Super Friends collections, or better yet, the more recent Batman series which is finally making its way to DVD.
David Walker is the creator of BadAzz MoFo, a nationally published film critic, and the Writer/Director of Black Santa's Revenge with Ken Foree now on DVD [Buy it now]
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