DVD review – Super Friends: The Lost Episodes
Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and friends are back in “Super Friends: The Lost Episodes,” a group of episodes produced by Hanna-Barbera when the “Super Friends” show was temporarily canceled by ABC in the early 1980s. Most of the episodes weren’t aired in the U.S. until a decade later.
What’s lost is not always treasured. The 7-minute episodes that make up “The Lost Episodes” feature some of the wackiest, most out-there Super Friends storylines. Superman alters his own timeline in a pretty unexplainable – and actually cruel – way in “The Krypton Syndrome.” While that’s the most egregious of the episodes, many of them are odd or downright silly.
Earth is nearly taken over by alien toys in “Invasion of the Space Dolls,” and the Titanic is raised, and then turned into a sea monster, in “Terror on the Titanic.” Bizarro captures the Super Friends inside a 1980s-style video game world in “Video Victims.”
Still, the episodes can be nostalgic fun, if you can ignore occasional lapses of superhero judgment. The set contains all 24 of the 7-minute episodes. The special features are downloadable issues of the “Super Friends” comic. One comic, perhaps ironically, features Wendy and Marvin, the teen sidekicks who were brushed away to make room for the Wonder Twins Zan and Jayna. The Wendy and Marvin “Super Friends” episodes have yet to be released on DVD.
- Matthew Price
From Friday’s The Oklahoman
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At it’s best, Super Friends was still goofy. The powers that were could never quite break away from the camp idea. For some reason the show had more episodes about giant women than seems necessary, but there was at least one rabid fan who wrote in to encourage more, suggesting scenarios of an oversized Wonder Woman stepping on tanks and cannons and so on.