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The All-New Super Friends Hour

Season_2,_Introduction

Season 2, Introduction

Series 2, Introduction


The second series of Hanna-Barbera's Super Friends was entitled, The All-New Super Friends Hour. It aired four years after the original incarnation.


Series Summary[]

Al new super f

Origin of image unknown.


Episode Lengths: 30 minute adventures, 7 minute shorts, 4 minute morality plays & 6 minute adventures

The fall 1976 – spring 1977 reruns of the Super Friends in a half-hour format proved successful enough to cause The All-New Super Friends Hour in the 8:00 AM timeslot.

It ran from September 10, 1977 to December 16, 1977 the ABC Network.

This was the big revival series that would help make the Super Friends a must watch series on Saturday mornings for the next few years.

The fact that SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE was being filmed for release the following year, The NEW ADVENTURES OF WONDER WOMAN TV show with Lynda Carter airing Friday nights on the CBS Network, and The New Adventures of Batman (February 5, 1977 - May 21, 1977), a new Filmation cartoon with the voices of Adam West and Burt Ward airing on CBS Saturday mornings, were probably some contributing factors to the Super Friends making their big comeback.

More young children and teenagers than before tuned in, making The All-New Super Friends Hour a huge ratings success. The success prompted the ABC television network to plan a new and even more innovative series for the fall of 1978.


Format[]

The hour differed from the previous show, in that it had a different format:

  • First up were seven-minute adventures featuring two members of the main Super Friends’ team.
  • Next were four-minute morality plays starring the Wonder Twins (who replaced the first series’ Wendy Harris, Marvin White, and Wonder Dog). These youthful trainees were aliens from Exxor: Zan (male) and Jayna (female) with their pet monkey Gleek. The twins also wore Teen Trouble Alerts allowing endangered teens to signal them.
  • Next was a one half-hour adventure with all of the Super Friends.
  • Along with these stories were several 30-second pro-social tips for the home viewing audience: safety tips, craft-building and magic trick tips, and decoders which gave kids the opportunity to guess a mystery word pertaining to that day’s half-hour adventure. A health-oriented spot concludes each episode.
  • There was also the addition of a few multicultural heroes invented by Hanna-Barbera exclusively for the show: Black Vulcan (who was based on stolen from the DC Comics character Black Lightning), Apache Chief, and Samurai. These characters were created to add racial and cultural diversity to the show.
  • Last but not least were six-minute adventures teaming a Super Friend main team member with a guest Super Friend as they dealt with threats of nature or disasters such as volcanoes or storms. Several of the guest stars were the above mentioned new network-created ethnic superheroes.


Syndication/cable[]

The 15 hour-long shows[1] were later cut into half-hour installments for local syndication[2] in the early 1980s; episodes from the 1977 series were included in The Superman/Batman Adventures, which aired on the USA Network in 1996 and later on the Cartoon Network and Boomerang Network, which would air the original hour-long shows from 1977 in their full-blown entirety (save for the next-week previews) in July 2004, and again in June 2008.


Notes[]

  • Three somewhat minor DC villains did appear in this series.
  • In addition, the before mentioned, Filmation’s the The New Adventures of Batman, marked the first time any cartoon characters (namely Batman and Robin) ever appeared on 2 different networks on 2 different shows by 2 different companies, voiced over by 2 different pairs of actors at the same time.
  • The SuperFriends also got a new narrator in the voice work of William "Bill" Woodson, who would narrate most of the SuperFriends series all the way to SuperFriends: The Legendary Super Powers Show of 1984. If you watch any episode of the SuperFriends between 1977 and 1984, you will definitely recognize that dramatic sounding narration.
  • Superman was absent for three episodes.
  • Batman and Robin were absent for one episode.
  • Wonder Woman was absent for two episodes
  • Aquaman was absent for two episodes.


Cast[]


Cast[]


Junior SuperFriends:


Also starring[]

Villain Cast:[]


Episode List:[]

    Ep #         Shorts and Full Length Segments         Air Date    
Hour
01
1a. The Brain Machine
1b. Joy Ride
1c. Invasion of the Earthors
1d. The Whirlpool
September 10, 1977
Hour
02
2a. The Secret Four
2b. Tiger on the Loose
3c. The Mysterious Time Creatures
2d. The Antidote
September 17, 1977
Hour
03
3a. Invasion of the Hydronoids
3b. Hitchhike
3c. City in a Bottle
3d. Space Emergency
September 24, 1977
Hour
04
4a. Doctor Fright
4b. Drag Race
4c. Day of the Plant Creatures
4d. Fire
October 1, 1977
Hour
05
5a. The Monster of Dr. Droid
5b. Vandals
5c. Superfriends vs. Superfriends
5d. Energy Mass‎
October 8, 1977
Hour
06
6a. The Enforcer
6b. Shark
6c. Planet of the Neanderthals
6d. Flood of Diamonds
October 15, 1977
Hour
07
7a. The Invisible Menace
7b. Initiation
7c. Coming of the Arthropods
7d. River of Doom
October 22, 1977
Hour
08
8a. Attack of the Giant Squid
8b. Game of Chicken
8c. The Water Beast
8d. Volcano
October 29, 1977
Hour
09
9a. The Collector
9b. Handicap
9c. The Mind Maidens
9d. Alaska Peril
November 5, 1977
Hour
10
10a. The Fifty Foot Woman
10b. Cheating
10c. Exploration Earth
10d. Attack of the Killer Bees
November 12, 1977
Hour
11
11a. Forbidden Power
11b. Pressure Point
11c. The Lionmen
11d. The Day of the Rats
November 19, 1977
Hour
12
12a. The Man-Beasts of Xra
12b. Prejudice
12c. The Tiny World of Terror
12d. Tibetan Raiders
November 24, 1977
Hour
13
13a. Frozen Peril
13b. Dangerous Prank
13c. The Mummy of Nazca‎
13d. Cable Car Rescue
November 26, 1977
Hour
14
14a. The Marsh Monster
14b. Runaways
14c. Will the World Collide?
14d. Time Rescue
December 3, 1977
Hour
15
15a. The Protector
15b. Stowaways
15c. The Ghost‎
15d. Rampage
December 10, 1977


DVD / Media info[]

Warner Home Video (via DC Entertainment, Hanna-Barbera Productions and Warner Bros. Family Entertainment) released The All-New Super Friends Hour - Season 1, Volume 1 on DVD [3] on January 8, 2008 containing 7 episodes (28 cartoons). However the episodes are not in the order they originally aired on ABC.

On January 27, 2009, Warner released The All-New Super Friends Hour - Season 1, Volume 2 featuring the remaining eight episodes.

DVD Name Ep # Release Date
    Season 1, Volume 1         7 (28 cartoons)         January 8, 2008    
    Season 1, Volume 2         8 (32 cartoons)         January 27, 2009    

For More DVD Info See:[]

  • SuperFriends (1977) The All New Super Friends Hour Vol. 1, DVD Set
  • SuperFriends (1977) The All New Super Friends Hour Vol. 2, DVD Set

Official DVD releases from amazon.com:[]

The two-part DVD set of all the series is available through Amazon. They are re-mastered, uncut and complete with their PSA and decoder segments, which were mostly edited out of syndication.


External Links[]


See Also[]


References[]

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