I have to be honest. I am not sure if I will ever be able to keep all of the different Super Friends series straight. Seriously, there have been so many different incarnations and combinations that I wouldn't even know where to begin sorting them out. Even when it comes to Warner Brothers releasing of the various series they are not exactly going in order.
I generally went by the characters that made their appearance. You see, there were the ones with Wendy and Marvin, the ones with Zan and Jayna, and the ones that had a larger group of Friends that included the likes of Apache Chief and Hawkman. This doesn't even touch on the episodes that had one-off villains versus the ones that had the Legion of Doom.
Back to the release at hand. The All New Super Friends Hour was the second in the long line of DC team up cartoons. It ran from 1977 to 1978 and replaced the teen duo of Wendy and Marvin with the super shape-shifting siblings (phew) Zan and Jayna, along with their space monkey named Gleek (replacing the Wonder Dog). The episodes ran for one hour and were broken down into four adventures: two adventures each featuring a pair of the Super Friends, one focusing on the siblings, and one that brought the whole gang together to battle some super-menace. There were even a variety of bumpers interspersed through the adventures that would teach kids magic tricks, safety tips, and engage their brains to figure out code words.
I am sure you are wondering how well they hold up after all these years. I have to say they do pretty darn well. Of course, they bring a high nostalgia factor, reminding me of those years gone by when I would waste away my Saturday mornings eating sugary cereal, when you couldn't escape the animated goodies that were always on TV. Actually, it makes me long for those days. It seems like so long ago when Saturday mornings were wall to wall cartoons. It is rather hard to find them now, not to mention the weekday afternoon cartoons that I would run home for after school.
Watching the episodes now, the stories seem rather simplistic, the dialogue corny, and the safety tips and magic tricks obvious, but what do I know? I am way past the target audience now. However, I still derive a lot of fun out of watching these cartoons. They will also provide hours of entertainment for those kids out there. There is a certain timeless quality to them. It does not matter how old we are, superheroes and their adventures will always hold a fascination for us.
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