The 7 Most Offensive Adaptations of Classic Comic Books

7 Legends of the Superheroes, or the Live-Action SuperFriends Turn Racist

Yes. Yes, you can go wrong with a bunch of well-known superheroes. Horribly, horribly wrong.

Legends of the Superheroes was the name of two one-hour specials inspired by The SuperFriends, the cartoon loosely based on the Justice League comics. And it was a variety show. With a laugh track.

The cast included Batman, Robin, Captain Marvel, Green Lantern (the better-known one this time), Hawkman and The Flash. The only reason Superman and Wonder Woman didn't show up is that they had a movie and a series in production. Adam West and Burt Ward reprised their roles as Batman and Robin -- except that this was in 1979, more than 10 years after their show went off the air, which means that Batman is now over 50 and the "Boy Wonder" is in his mid-30s. The unintentional result was a Dynamic Duo that looked like it had fallen on some hard times.

The first episode features the heroes trying to discover the location of a doomsday device, but then the second one was, inexplicably, a celebrity roast of the superheroes hosted by Ed McMahon.

But it gets worse: At one point, McMahon tells the audience that there are other less well-known superheroes, "especially in the minority area." From that point the show spirals into a politically incorrect nightmare:

That's right, the only black superhero in the entire show had to be called Ghetto Man and come from the projects. After he's done performing his sassy stand-up act ("I'm sorry, but we don't feel the Green Lantern qualifies as 'colored people' "), he flies away by opening his arms and legs and shouting "KAREEEEEEEEM!"

We'd say that 1979 was a different time, but we're pretty sure that episode qualified as a hate crime even then.

6 Archie Returns to Riverdale, Deals With Depression

Most of the (puzzlingly enduring) charm of Archie Comics lies in their complete inability to change with the times, retaining the same innocent view of teenagers since the 1940's. That's also what makes Archie: Return to Riverdale, a TV movie that aired in 1990, so amazing: It takes a massive turn to the dark side by featuring Archie and the gang decades later, as a group of badly adjusted adults dealing with their depressing lives.

The story shows the characters reuniting for the 15th anniversary of their graduation from Riverdale High -- because if there's one thing more depressing than high school itself, it's high school reunions. All their lives have taken turns for the worse: Betty is a small-time schoolteacher trapped in an abusive relationship; Veronica is a four-time divorcee with an implied sex addiction problem; and the once fun-lovin' Jughead had his soul crushed by his ex-wife and now struggles to connect with his son.

Archie himself was doing fine, with a hot fiance and a promising career as a lawyer in the big city, until he came back to Riverdale and saw this:

Like an addict falling off the wagon (and being run over by it, then defecated on by the horse it's tied to), Archie finds that his feelings for both Betty and Veronica resurface, putting in jeopardy the only healthy relationship he's ever had. It doesn't help that the home-wreckers don't give a crap about ruining his life and openly pursue Archie despite being fully aware of the existence of his fiance.

Archie ends up being dumped and throwing his career away to move back to Riverdale, which is the most depressing outcome we could think of. But there are also some light hearted moments, like this scene where Jughead and his son finally bond over a 90s hip-hop remix of The Archies' "Sugar Sugar" ...

... but, of course, that only serves to highlight the song's inappropriate sexual overtones, with lines like "You laid your ever-lovin' stuff on me" and "I'm gonna rock your world complete." Yeah, we're thinking the people who made this thing freaking hated the Archie comics.

They apparently hoped it would spin off into a series, which thankfully never happened. If it did, we're pretty sure Jughead would have hanged himself by the fifth episode, and the season finale would have involved Veronica being convicted for gutting a hobo.

5 Coming Out of Their Shells: The Ninja Turtles Form a Boy Band

After the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles utterly dominated the 80s, getting their likenesses plastered on lunch boxes, pajamas, sleeping bags, action figures and basically everything else outside of feminine hygiene products, their makers were almost out of ways to really run the franchise into the ground.

Thus in 1990, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles released their first and only pop-rock/rap album, kicking off a nationwide tour that must have been attended primarily by curious people wondering how the fuck that was possible.

It was the worst possible answer:

The show featured actors dressed in turtle suits, like the ones from the movies, except cheaper-looking and now featuring denim jackets. They were lip-syncing to 90s pop-rock while pretending to play instruments like guitars, bass, drums and, as if this whole thing wasn't horrible enough already, keytars. During other songs they simply forgot about the instruments and performed elaborate choreographed dances, like in a Madonna concert.

The venerable Master Splinter makes an appearance to tell his pupils that they "can do more good with music than with any pair of nunchuks" -- because apparently real ninjas are less about violence and more about ripping off the New Kids on the Block. Later, the Shredder crashes the concert to tell everyone how much he hates music, which he does by performing a song called "I Hate Music."

The Turtles even appeared on Regis and Kathie Lee to promote the show, in what must be the lowest point in two separate franchises.

The whole concert was released on VHS, but even stranger was the "making of" documentary included. What could have been an interesting look at the behind-the-scenes stuff (because, seriously, how the fuck does this happen) turned out to be a bizarre Spinal Tap-style mockumentary that pretends the Turtles are an actual rock band. While this could have been clever idea for a five-minute sketch, unfortunately it goes on for 30 minutes. It includes interviews with real-life managers and producers who somehow had nothing better to do, plus a scene with the Turtles in the studio laying down a track for their album.

The recording engineers even go out of their way to explain how the turtles can play instruments with only three fingers. Donatello, we learn, has extra-thick keys on his keytar, while Leonardo plays a one-string bass.

Because if there's anything fans of the Ninja Turtles crave, it's logic. Sure, a quartet of turtles exposed to ambiguous radioactive goop can be trained as ninjas and speak like California surfers, but if those same turtles also learned how to play musical instruments? Well, that's a little far-fetched.

Like most entries on this list, this low-budget movie was produced in the hopes of creating a live-action series. Unlike the other entries, this one was considered so bad that it has never aired in the U.S. But that's why the Internet exists. So we can watch awful things.

Justice League of America (1997) shortens the teams' all-star roster by getting rid of dead weight like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, and keeping guys like The Atom (whose power is making himself little), Green Lantern (not even the most famous one) and the Martian Manhunter. The Flash is also on the team, but he looks like this:

The movie features costumes that look like they were designed by nerds to wear at Comic-Con and sewn together by their mothers.

The main character is Tori, a meteorologist who gains superpowers by being the worst lab assistant ever and spilling water on an experimental device, electrocuting herself. She's abducted by the Justice League and soon given a membership on the team. Yes, all it takes to get an invitation to join the mighty Justice League of America is proving that Darwin was wrong.

It's an odd mixture of superhero story and sitcom, and the script awkwardly tries to balance drama with comedy by showing the characters' dull normal lives side by side with their dull superhero exploits. One reviewer called it "Friends with superpowers," but that's giving it too much credit. It's more like "Perfect Strangers with superpowers," and with every character played by Bronson Pinchot.

The whole thing is intercut with interviews with the characters, implying that this is a documentary and that these guys are incredibly bad at keeping their secret identities.

The secret underwater headquarters of the Justice League is accessible only through an elevator located under a bridge, where no one could ever notice a group of brightly costumed individuals walking together and disappearing.

Once they're down there, they meet the Martian Manhunter, who is pretty much a full-bodied version of Zordon from the Power Rangers here. Despite having telepathic powers, the Manhunter summons the members of the Justice League only through beepers, a technology that was already outdated by the time this movie came out.

The villain is a guy called "Weather Man." Out of the 500 villains the Justice League has fought in the comics, they had to choose the one who sounds about as menacing as Al Roker. We'd like to think that if they didn't use better characters it's only because they weren't available, because otherwise the choices that led to this thing are pretty puzzling. We've seen plenty of examples of adaptations where for some reason they leave a lot of important characters out of the movie, but you couldn't possibly go wrong if you had a bunch of well-known superheroes, right?

3 The Wholly Unremarkable Spider-Man

Twenty-five years before Hollywood spent millions in special effects trying to make Tobey Maguire look like a teenager, Spider-Man starred in his first live-action adaptation, a low-budget TV movie that spawned a short-lived CBS series.

The show came out in 1977, back when all the funky vibes and cocaine particles permeating the air made it physically impossible to compose a theme song that didn't sound like it belonged in a porno. This was no exception:

The series jettisoned Spidey's entire supporting cast under the age of 70, leaving only Aunt May and Peter's boss J. Jonah Jameson. Except Jameson has been made so mellow (or, as Wikipedia puts it, "avuncular") that he's practically a different character.

Even worse: None of Spidey's villains were featured in the series, probably because the budget was so low that they could only afford to rent one cheap Halloween costume at the time. So instead of fighting Dr. Octopus and the Green Goblin, Spider-Man spends all his time tracking down and catching anonymous thugs, meaning this is basically Law & Order: Asshole in Pantyhose Division.

And of course, no 70s action series is complete without awkwardly choreographed kung fu high jinks.

You'll notice that Spider-Man spends most of those fights jumping out of the way of the henchmen instead of, you know, fighting them. The closest thing to a display of superpowers in the entire show is the part where a thug lifts Spider-Man in the air, and his body magically morphs into a dummy between shots.

Even Stan Lee (who received a "story consultant" credit on every show) was publicly critical of the series, calling it "too juvenile." This is the same guy who praised the bizarre Japanese rip-off in which Spider-Man commands a giant robot. Say what you will about that one, at least it looks like they were TRYING to make a superhero show.

2 It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's ... The Shittiest Musical Ever

Here's how much the world has changed in 35 years: In 1975, you could sit down, turn on your TV and see a lavish musical about Superman. Actors were paid to star in it. A TV network paid for it. Advertisers paid money to have their commercials shown during it.

There is some background here; before It's a Bird ... It's a Plane ... It's Superman was a TV special, it was a Broadway show. This was in 1966, and by then the Man of Steel was in the same spot as the Ninja Turtles in the 80s: Musical theater was the only medium he hadn't yet appeared in.

And really, a stage show about a guy going around punching criminals isn't necessarily a bad idea, but in this case it totally was. Why? Look at it.

The show also starred a particularly vacuous version of Lois Lane, a Superman-hating reporter called Max Mencken and the geriatric Dr. Abner Sedgwick as the main villain of the piece. Lex Luthor couldn't appear because he was too busy staying away from this silly shit.

But hey, at least we got some memorable new characters, like Office Worker Who Breaks Into Song #3.

At one point, in a fit of despair over being called a "freak," Superman tries to kill himself -- not by ingesting kryptonite or having his atoms dispersed by a black hole, but by jumping off a bridge. Either he's stupid and forgot who he was, or he's a huge attention whore intentionally trying to make a scene.

Superman is eventually saved by two happening hippies who let him know that "there's nothing wrong with being a freak, as long as you freak in the right direction." After this not-so-subtle come-on, Superman flees the scene as fast as he can, a little flattered, a little curious.

Then there's the musical number where Superman battles a handful of henchmen in a laboratory while singing and dancing around the room, occasionally throwing punches in their general direction. It's very difficult to accurately lip-synch as you're mime fighting, as we all know, so the actor playing Superman compromises by focusing on neither of those things.

Anyone tuning into Generation X hoping for an adaptation of Douglas Coupland's novel must have been sorely disappointed -- but nowhere near as disappointed as the throngs of X-Men fans hoping to finally see their favorite characters realized in live-action.

Airing in 1996, Generation X was an X-Men adaptation that featured none of the popular X-Men (like, you know, any of the 20 that appear in the recent movies), focusing instead on minor characters like Banshee, Jubilee and Mondo, who according to Wikipedia looks like this:

The villain is some guy called Russell Tresh, a wildly out-of-control advertiser who, as an example of his new mind-control device, causes a whole board of executives to suddenly erupt into an orgy of flatulence.

Instead of Professor X we get Emma Frost, a powerful psychic who looks like a retired stripper and who has access to the so-called "Dream Dimension." The villain's evil master plan is to take over the dream realm and exploit it to sell video games and deodorants.

Because mutant brains are essential to Tresh's plan, he starts visiting the teenage X-Men in their dreams, calling himself "Uncle Russ" and acting like a cross between Freddy Krueger and Gary Glitter. When he finally manages to lure a mutant kid into his lab he quickly traps him inside a weird S&M device, complete with ball gag ...

... and then pulls out a straight razor and threatens to circumcise the 17-year-old strapped to the table. Seriously. We have video:

Yeah, about the villain ... in the first (real) X-Men movie, Bryan Singer had Magneto played by Ian McKellen, an accomplished Shakespearean actor who could bring a level of pathos and dignity to the role. For Generation X, they cast the guy who played Max Headroom. And then they had him play the most disturbing villain the history of crappy low-budget TV movies.

By the way, Tresh's plan to use his dream device to plant ideas in unsuspecting brains strangely mirrors the plot of Inception -- if Christopher Nolan had written it at age 13.

Anthony Scibelli is a handsome stand-up comedian and comedy writer. When he's not thinking about cartoons, he's updating his comedy blog, "There's No Success Like Failure."

To see low-budget knock-offs that are still better than these turds, check out 9 Foreign Rip-Offs Cooler Than The Hollywood Originals. Or check some out that'll just straight rape your brain, in The 6 Most Psychotic Rip-Offs of Famous Animated Films.

And stop by Linkstorm (Updated) to see Emma Frost in her days before tutoring mutants. (Her strippin' days.)

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