Saturday Morning Cartoons #5 “The Super Friends”

The Super Friends, the most awesome cartoon ever. If I missed it when I was a kid, my whole day was shoot. One thing you have to ask is who was better, Wendy, Marvin, and Wonder Dog, or the Wonder Twins and Gleek? The name changed over the years, but it was still a great show. Let's hear what you have to say.

7 Responses to Saturday Morning Cartoons #5 “The Super Friends”

  1. Calvary_Red says:

    i’m sure i speak for many of us when i say this cartoon was my first experience with superheroes. As a kid Batman and Superman were my favorites, probably because they had their own series in the 90’s. But this series still sparked my interest in Green Lantern, the idea of a superhero who could create anything he could imagine, but was powerless against the color yellow was so silly i was immediately drawn to it, though i am glad that they’ve removed the yellow impurity since then.

    One of the things that stayed with me the longest though, was the episode were Superman died. It was a powerful episode. Maybe not as much as some of his comic book deaths, but when you’re a kid and the idea of any hero dying has never crossed your mind, it makes an impact.

  2. RobM says:

    This is the one that immediately comes to mind when anyone mentions Saturday morning cartoons.

    FYI – I recently read an Adventure Comics back issue from the late 1960s that had one of those two-page ads for a particular network’s Saturday morning TV lineup and they had six (6!) hours of cartoons on the schedule.

  3. Myro says:

    Yeah, watched a ton of Super Friends growing up. As Calvary Red had mentioned, they were pretty much my first foray into the superhero world. For quite a while, this was the cartoon I looked forward to watching the most on Saturday morning.
    I almost don’t remember the era of Wendy, Marvin, and Wonder Dog. As much as I didn’t care much for them, the Wonder Twins and Gleek (man, I can’t stand that stupid monkey), were far more memorable.

  4. Yep, The Super Friends kicked off my Saturday mornings. Though, I couldn’t stand any of the teen heroes. Sure, they were supposed to appeal to kids and provide comic relief, but they were just annoying.

    Later episodes started to get a more serious tone especially with the Legion of Doom. Even though the crimes were implausible if not outright silly. The show grew with the fans. Which had great appeal.

  5. barbario says:

    yeah i cant ever remember seeing marvin and wendy. but i hated the wonder twins.

  6. Renxin says:

    Eight words can sum up my childhood saturday mornings: “IN THE GREAT HALL OF THE JUSTICE LEAGUE”!

    Ah, how I loved (and still love) this show! This was my first exposure to superheroes as well, and I ate it up like candy. There’s something about bright costumes and crazy plots that border on absurdity (if they’re not outright absurd in the first place) that just calls out to kids. And that narrator’s voice, love that voice! Even as a kid though I didn’t so much care for the teen sidekicks and Wonderdog, and would just wait out their hijinks until the real action began. The Wonder Twins were okay, though I always felt kind of sorry for Zan because he could only turn into random, rather lame things like buckets of water, whereas Jayna could turn into tigers and pterodactyls and other awesome creatures. (One of the all too rare instances where the girl has the better powers!) Gleek was more or less in the teen sidekick category for me, and I’d just ignore him until something better happened.

    And here’s a little thing I found on Youtube a while back which I think everyone will enjoy.

  7. Nick Hentschel says:

    To some degree, I’ll always think of Danny Dark’s voice, when I think of Superman or read his dialogue in a comic. That’s right, even ahead of my beloved Christopher Reeve; no other voice has sounded quite right, ever since.

    This was the purest, most sincere depiction of the heroic ethic on Satruday-morning TV in my youth, period. That helps make up for a lot of its other flaws.

    The 1982/-83 version, with the main heroes, the ethnic ones PLUS El Dorado, and interspersed occasionally with old Wonder Twins adventures, will always be the “home” version to me, because that was the first one I saw (more or less).