The All-New Super Friends Hour
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[]
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.
- Hanna-Barbera's writers experimented with team composition as well: the Flash (Barry Allen), Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), and Hawkman (Katar Hol) who were members of the Justice League of America.
- There was also the addition of a few multicultural heroes invented by Hanna-Barbera exclusively for the show: Black Vulcan (who was
based onstolen 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.
- Aquaman’s arch enemy, Black Manta, was watered down and simply called Manta in this series.
- Hawkman’s arch enemy, the Gentleman Ghost also turned up at the end of the season to battle the SuperFriends.
- Shark, an enemy of both Green Lantern and Aquaman also appears in one episode this season as "Captain Shark," a very different version of him.
- 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[]
- Narrator – voiced by William Woodson (1977-1978)
Cast[]
- Superman – voiced by Danny Dark
- Batman – voiced by Olan Soule
- Robin – voiced by Casey Kasem
- Aquaman – voiced by Norman Alden
- Wonder Woman – voiced by Shannon Farnon
- Wonder Twin, Jayna – voiced by Louise Williams
- Wonder Twin, Zan – voiced by Michael Bell
- Gleek – voiced by Michael Bell
Also starring[]
- Hawkman - voiced by Jack Angel (2 episodes)
- Hawkgirl - voiced by[?]
- Black Vulcan - voiced by Buster Jones
- Samurai - voiced by Jack Angel
- Apache Chief - voiced by Michael Rye
- Rima the Jungle Girl - voiced by Kathy Garver[?] (2 episodes)
- The Atom - voiced by Wally Burr
- Green Lantern - voiced by Michael Rye
- The Flash - voiced by Michael Rye
Villain Cast:[]
- Lucifer - (1 Appearance, Invasion of the Earthors)
Episode List:[]
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.
- Part 1: The All-New Superfriends Hour: Season One, Vol. 1
- Part 2: The All-New Superfriends Hour: Season One, Vol. 2
External Links[]
- The All-New Super Friends Hour entry at the Internet Movie Database (IMDB)
- The All-New Super Friends Hour entry at TV.com (episode titles)
- Superman Homepage: Hanna Barbera's Super Friends - The All-New Super Friends Hour
- The All-New Super Friends Hour at the Big Cartoon DataBase
- The All-New Super Friends Hour @ Legions of Gotham
See Also[]