Challenge of the Super Friends: Season 1

This amazing DVD box set is a time machine. It will instantly place any viewer over the age of about 30 back in front of their TV set on Saturday morning chowing down on the Crunchberries in their pyjamas out in the living room, absolutely rivited to whatever cushion or bean bag they had at their disposal as the fate of the whole world would be battled over week after week. This is hand-drawn animation for TV at it's attention deficit disordered best, with fantastic color that provides instant wish-fulfillment for any other grown up 11 year old who like myself was forced to grow up with the cruelty of black & white TV as some obligatory punishment for an offense that was never quite understood. All the cool kids had color, we had B&W, but you know, I think we maybe enjoyed it a bit more because we had to use our imaginations to color what we were seeing in grayscales. The original Superfriends were great of course, and as a classmate from grad school pointed out to me once, one of the important things about the show is that these super heroes were FRIENDS before all else. Yes they worked together to fight crime and protect the American consumer culture which spawned them, but they cared about each other just like the rest of us care about our friends & family. It made them more human, and even apprentice super heroes Marvin, Wendy (one of my earliest crushes) along with the annoying Wonder Dog and later Gleek the Super Chimp always came across as actual people. With "Challenge of the Superfriends" the core Justic League outfit was expanded with the addition of several other DC Comics heroes. There were even ethnic super heroes added for cross-cultural appeal, all of them incorruptable, honest, modest and totally devoted to upholding justice. BUT THE REAL STARS OF THE SHOW WERE THE VILLAINS!! and that's where this particular 16 episode series really outshined all other incarnations of The Superfriends. Without a good villain super heroes can be kind of boring, even silly, and this series' creators were well aware that while we may have been rooting for The Flash & Green Lantern, the real reason we kept tuning in week after week was because of the fantastic array of super villains they populated this series with: Black Manta and Solomon Grundy were always my favorites. They had a Dark Side mentality to them that allowed the kids watching to actually precieve a threat that required Superman or Wonder Woman to intervene on the behalf of mankind lest our whole planet be doomed. Super villains also require super plots at global domination to make them memorable, and this show had plots to set the world on fire, send it back or forwards into time, enemy invaders from the cosmos who were indifferent to the meek, humble ordinary humans populating the planet. No nation was safe from the chicanery of The Riddler or Captain Cold either -- the Russians, Chinese and Arabian nations were just as likely to be clobbered by some super plot as the USA, linking those of us on the world together in needing to oppose tyranny from wherever it came. The USSR may have been bad news but they weren't as bad as the Legion of Doom. Gone are the days of hand-drawn animated cartoons of this nature, and this DVD set is a treasure trove of material that continues to look fresh and exciting when placed next to the computer rendered animation of today. Sure some of it was goofy, the repetitive, over-excited music gets kind of routine after a while, and some of the plots border on the ridiculous: Trapping the Superfriends in the classics of literature anyone? It may have been clumsy but ultimately that episode might have encouraged young viewers to read the books in question, so in the end you wound up learning something even if it wasn't as cool as "Swamp of the Living Dead" or "Revenge on Gorilla City". I simply cannot recommend this box set enough: Any kid will be delighted and any parent will be oddly compelled to go out and find a box of Quisp or Freakies to wolf down. Just remember to get an extra box of cereal for the kids too, since traditions are best handed down from generation to generation intact.