Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show


Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show is an American animated television series about a team of superheroes which ran from 1984 to 1985 on ABC. It was produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions and is based on the Justice League and associated comic book characters published by DC Comics.

Format

Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show was the first Super Friends series in a new format since 1979's The World's Greatest SuperFriends. Continuing the previous three years' policy of producing short stories, this series' format was two 11-minute stories per half-hour. Furthermore, the Wonder Twins were largely supplanted as audience identification figures by Firestorm, a well-established teenage superhero in the DC Comics universe, but they were paired with other Justice League members, as opposed to always teaming up with Wonder Woman or Batman and Robin. In "Case of The Shrinking Super Friends", they are teamed with Firestorm and Robin. In "Uncle Mxyzptlk", they work with Firestorm and Samurai. In "Village of The Lost Souls", they work with Wonder Woman and Apache Chief.
For the next season, the show was retitled The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians.

Toyline tie-in

Unlike the previous series, Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show was produced to tie in with the Super Powers Collection toyline produced by Kenner, hence the name change. The general story, as detailed in the mini-comics that accompanied the figures, was that the major heroes of Earth had teamed up to fight Darkseid and his villains.

Characters

Super Friends/Justice League of America

The Super Friends consist of 13 heroes:
According to DC writer/historian Mark Waid, Aquaman's sole appearance in The Legendary Super Powers Show is in the opening credits. The same is true for The Flash. This was the first time Wonder Woman was animated with the W symbol on her costume instead of the eagle design; this carried over into the final series, Galactic Guardians. Shannon Farnon was unable to reprise her voice work for Wonder Woman because the new voice director cast his girlfriend Connie Cawfield in her place. The series was also noteworthy for using Adam West as the voice of Batman, two decades after the end of his live-action television series of Batman. West replaced Olan Soule and would continue through the subsequent Galactic Guardians series.

Villains

  • Darkseid: Appearing outside of comics for the first time, Darkseid was still attempting to conquer Earth, but also had a secondary goal, of making Wonder Woman his bride. Darkseid brought a degree of seriousness to a show that had largely lacked it.
  • Kalibak: His appearance was not as brutish as in later TV incarnations, more like the original Jack Kirby design for the character. He was almost always depicted as boastful, dull-witted, and ineffectual against the heroes.
  • DeSaad: A master torturer and one of Darkseid's acolytes.
  • Brainiac: The mechanical version of Brainiac appeared in the episodes "The Wrath of Brainiac" and "The Village of Lost Souls". In "The Wrath of Brainiac", Brainiac reveals that he shed his earlier appearance when he worked alongside Darkseid.
  • Mirror Master appeared in an episode entitled "Reflections in Crime". Despite Mirror Master being a Flash villain, The Flash does not appear in this episode. In the episode, Mirror Master sets about trapping the Super Friends in this particular episode inside mirrors called the sixth dimension. The Super Friends managed to escape and trap Mirror Master in a House of Mirrors.
  • Lex Luthor appeared in the opening and the episodes "No Honor Among Super Thieves", "Case of the Shrinking Super Friends" and "The Mask of Mystery".
  • Mister Mxyzptlk: In this series, Mxyzptlk's name is pronounced as Miks-ill-plik and he takes to tormenting all the members of the team, even when Superman is absent.
  • The Robber Baron and Sleeves
  • Dollmaker
For this series, Lex Luthor and Brainiac were revamped to resemble their comic book counterparts.

Cast

Note: Beginning with this version, Adam West replaced Olan Soule as the voice of Batman.

Home media

  • On August 7, 2007, Warner Home Video released the complete series of Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show on DVD, featuring all 16 episodes of the eighth Hanna-Barbera-produced Super Friends series on a 2-Disc DVD boxed set, uncut and unedited, presented in its original broadcast presentation and original airdate order.
DVD nameEp No.Release date
The Complete Series16August 7, 2007