Super Friends (1973)
Our Review
Super Friends started all of it: the 1973 ABC series that took the Justice League characters, softened them for Saturday morning under Hanna-Barbera’s hand, and wired them permanently into American pop culture. The season under this entry is the original 16-episode run where the team answers the emergency hotline at the Hall of Justice, whose exterior is the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, which remains the funniest set decision in cartoon history.
The honest review is that these are low stakes stories with a monster of the week structure, the Wonder Twins and Marvin and Gleek filling whatever gap the network thought the heroes left, and an earnestness that is not an act. The plots are flimsy, the animation is limited, and the famous deadpan sincerity is the whole brand. What it still has going for it is the bench itself: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Flash in their first ensemble cartoon, treated with a reverence every later Justice League show is still negotiating with.
As artifact, essential. As television, a museum piece. Watch one episode with kids and you will understand why four generations of Justice League cartoons have been, one way or another, arguing with this one. Sixteen episodes, one season, and the emergency hotline still works.
