Between Green Lantern, Superman, The Flash, and Batman, it was tough to picture any villain that could give the Super Friends trouble. Asking a cartoon writer to come up with a reasonable threat for them was a challenging, almost pointless endeavor. Understandably, this is why so many of them went insane. It's also why the Super Friends writers inv
Between Green Lantern, Superman, The Flash, and Batman, it was tough to picture any villain that could give the Super Friends trouble. Asking a cartoon writer to come up with a reasonable threat for them was a challenging, almost pointless endeavor. Understandably, this is why so many of them went insane. It's also why the Super Friends writers invented a technique many of us still use today: totally not giving a shit. And here are their villainous creations who gave the least. Oh, and here are the rules to The Super Friends Drinking Game if you're looking to get tore up while you enjoy cartoons.
Dr. Hirem Gulliver
In the '70s and '80s, you'd find most superheroes trapped in spider webs or flying toy airplanes because every villain they ever faced invented the shrink ray. Batman and Robin have spent more time in jars than they have in healthy relationships. However, in the episode Gulliver's Gigantic Goof, they faced an enemy trying to use his shrink ray "for good." It was a common theme in the first season of the show to have villains who were less terrorist and more retarded scientist. The first season also featured Marvin, Wendy and Wonderdog-- two children and a dog whose entire contribution to the team can be summed up here:
Here's the plot: Gulliver and his unexplainedly intelligent cat Igor started shrinking the world's people, and when the Super Friends tried to stop him, he shrank them too. He even got his cat involved:
Oh, the other thing about the first season of Super Friends is that it was an hour long. Which meant that in this episode, the stars of the show spent 40 fucking minutes trapped in pickle jars and listening to a madman explain how a planet of two inch people would solve our food shortages and make our beaches less crowded. He wasn't completely batshit, though. He mentioned how he'd leave a few people regular size to drive tractors or whatever. What's weird is that the man who invented the world's 1,328th shrink ray didn't consider all the problems being two inches tall would cause. For example, chili is now served like the world's worst hot tub. A broken lock on a hamster cage is an extinction level event. And everyone's 14 inch dildo now just looks ridiculous.
And hear me out-- if wrapping a blanket around a baby is a good idea then WE MUST PLACE ALL BABIES IN THE EARTH'S MOLTEN CORE!!!
Batman and Robin flew a paper airplane into the cat's head that was, no bullshit, the hardest impact against a super villain in the entire history of the show. Meanwhile, Aquaman sat around wishing he wasn't in a dry, fishless basement and all of these plans somehow came together to zap Gulliver with his own ray and help him see that shrinking people against their will is wrong. At first I thought this might be some preachy anti-American propaganda about not imposing your superior values onto others. However, as Superman went on and on and on about it, it became clear that there was no allegory or metaphor. The lesson being taught to children here really was that you should never shrink anyone. And more importantly, you should never get a job writing cartoons when your main hobbies are recreational drugs and head injuries.
The Moon Man
The episode was called Man in the Moon, but right off the bat they hit you with a huge plot twist:
The only thing greater than the opening of this cartoon is that the shrieking creature was obviously sitting there waiting to hatch at the exact moment a cosmonaut realized he was standing on an egg.
It's understandable that this children's cartoon didn't deal much with the catastrophic results of a monster ripping its way out of a moon right next to our planet. I give them the artistic license to ignore that. Watching millions die under tidal waves and lunar debris would be depressing and hard to draw. Then again, they might have no idea what planets and stars are. For instance, when the moon monster spits Superman into the sun and he lays there complaining about how he's being turned into hydrogen... that's something you'd write after you had to look up "the sun" in a dictionary. "I've got to resist 28 percent of me becoming helium, and fast!"
Look, we get that everyone on the team who isn't you is a little bit pointless, Superman, but when you're being attacked by something big and you're standing next to the guy whose power is exactly that, shouting "THIS IS A JOB FOR SUPERMAN!" is a lot like saying, "You're only here for the Native American employee tax incentives!"
I don't think they did, actually. All they did was blindfold it and throw it back into the Moon, which is what it ripped in half during its very first second of being alive. And more importantly, we still haven't dealt with the issue of the moon being an egg.
W-what laid it!? And more importantly than that, why would the only man who can grow to incredible height also be the only one in an outfit that doesn't cover his balls and taint?
The Termites From Venus
Talking, awesome, alien termites are blasted to Earth from a volcano on Venus and within four minutes, every building on the planet has been devoured. The animators didn't draw any actual people being eaten the termites, but it'd be pretty stupid to assume the death count was anything less than hundreds of millions. Superman, Samurai, Batman and Robin do the only thing that makes sense-- they fly to a remote area of the world and discuss how fucked they are. Through sheer dumb luck, they fall into a pit, encounter the leader of the space termites, and the rest of the cartoon is spent running from him. I'm not a psychologist, but was this script shrieked at rescue workers while a writer was being eaten alive by termites?
"Wait a second, Batman. If this bat insect repellent is useless against insects, why have we been carrying tubes of it around in our body cavities? Batman? I deserve an answer, Batman."
Early in the episode, Superman wadded up a few million termites and threw them into space, but decided it was pointless since they were multiplying faster than he could toss. Granted, that might be because touching a swarm of insects that can curse at you in English probably gets really gross really fast. Luckily, at the end of the episode, Samurai turned into a tornado and threw a bunch of the termites into space while everyone joked. That ought to do it, right? No! It won't! Everyone's dead! Worse than dead! They have space termites wrapped around their remains and you just flung them into the cosmic void!
Colossus, A Giant of Giants
Like most people, I didn't pursue a lot of science after 9th grade stopped requiring it, but I'm pretty sure this episode was delivered to us from a universe with a completely different set of thermodynamic laws. It is biblically deranged. A giant rubs Earth in his beard and throws our planet into his purse... why would you even write something like that if you weren't trying to prove your grade school teachers were wolves? It's either a prank on the viewers or a prank on Hanna Barbera studios. All I'm saying is that if I was a Korean animator, drawing this nonsense is exactly how I would tell an American cartoon writer to fuck himself.
Here, let me sum up the episode in two panels:
It's good to know that after the Earth collides into cosmic facial hair, it will only take two professional super heroes and a computer several minutes to figure out what's going on. Apache Chief and Superman are looking right at a picture of Earth in a beard and they're still puzzling their way through it. "Superman. Earth's buildings are being demolished by pubic lice. There are trace amounts of soup in the atmosphere. My people do not grow hair of the facials, yet my Indian senses are warning me... this! May be a beard!"
If you know anything about Native Americans, it was pretty obvious how they were going to stop Colossus the second he showed up. Apache Chief uses every part of the buffalo, including the shrink ray:
The Martian Convicts
Three martian convicts named Omo, Jabu, and Never Mentioned steal a Mars probe heading back to Earth and immediately begin kicking ass. And I mean that in the hardest possible way-- they don't simply attack monuments or declare themselves king-- they start eating an aircraft carrier, leave Superman and Green Lantern on the bottom of the ocean, and steal three F-18s.
Here's what I love most about them. As they climb into the complicated jets they couldn't have possibly seen before or known how to fly, they instinctively take a moment and give a silent pre-flight thumbs up to each other. Why would they do this? Why would someone draw it? Only two of them even have thumbs! Because fucking A, that's why.
I mentioned earlier that a cat being hit in the head with a paper airplane was the hardest shot anyone's taken in the history of the Super Friends. I wasn't kidding. Kids today are spoiled with punches to the face and flying kicks but in the '80s cartoon action heroes weren't allowed to commit any direct violence. So how did they fight? Well, the two most common forms of combat were mind rays and passionate embraces. This episode uses both, and it led to one truly unexplainable fight scene.
You know, a lot of what these guys are doing makes more sense once you realize they don't know what colors are and they can't count past zero.
No way is anyone on this planet beating anything as tough as the Martian Convicts. Superman realizes this and comes up with the fantastic plan of putting them somewhere else. He flies over to NASA and demands their best rocket. They don't have one, so he builds one in about five seconds. Wait, how lazy is Superman? He'd rather watch the Earth get eaten than throw termites into space for more than a minute, and he'd rather nag a guy for a free rocket in twice the time it would take to build his own? He is a genius, though. His plan was a success and the Martians left in their new rocket. Your problem now, space! The Super Friends win again!
Rock and Roll Space Bandits
I don't know what I could explain about the Rock and Roll Space Bandits that isn't already made clear by their name. You already know you're not ready for them and they don't give any kind of a shit.
The episode starts with them arriving at Earth and ready to rock. They immediately ignore the effects of the Bat Photon Immobilizer, defeat the Super Friends by playing guitar at them, and use their music to take over the minds of every Earthling in an eight foot radius. Oh, and spoiler alert: they suck.
The Rock and Roll Space Bandits are already balls deep in your brain before you bring your skull backstage.
How do you think? The Wonder Twins turned into a giant lobster and an ice satellite dish, of course.
Actually, that didn't work. In order to explain what happened next I'll have to use the sentence I've been waiting my entire life to type: One of the Rock and Roll Space Bandits switched to keytar mode and rocked the mind of a construction worker into hitting the giant lobster with a crane. Batman switched on his Batjet's Bat Sound Absorber and it neutralized all of their hypnotic music. Strangely, it did not neutralize any of the conversation that took place afterwards, which means the Bat Sound Absorber only absorbs rock n' roll from outer space. Holy crap, let that sink in. Still, it saved the day and it's as close as any Bat Device has ever come to working as intended.
And now, I really hope you deserve this, reader... The Rock n' Roll Space Bandits:
