A Classic Comes to DVD
I’m a big fan of classic cartoons like the Superfriends. I’m not an expert on these old shows, but I respect and enjoy them and they still appeal to generation after generation. While the stories and political correctness might come across as lame to some viewers today, there’s little doubt that the quality of the show in terms of characters, animation, replay value, and good natured fun is much higher in older cartoons than today’s offerings.
Hopping down off of my soapbox now, let’s take a look at this new collection from WHV. As the back of the box informs me, when the Superfriends cartoon ended some thirty years ago, an additional twenty-four unaired episodes were “lost” until they aired more than a decade later as part of the Superman/Batman Adventures. This DVD set includes those twenty-four episodes in their original full screen format as well as giving you two downloadable comic books as extras.
What are these lost episodes, you might ask as I did when I first heard about the set? They are:
Mxyzptlk’s Revenge
Roller Coaster
Once upon a Poltergeist
The Krypton Syndrome
Invasion of the Space Dolls
Terror on the Titanic
The Revenge of Doom
A Pint of Life
Day of the Dinosaurs
Playground Of Doom
Space Racers
The Recruiter
with Disc 2 containing:
Warpland
Two Gleeks Are Deadlier Than One
Bulgor the Behemoth
Prisoners of Sleep
An Unexpected Treasure
The Malusian Blob
Return of the Phantoms
Bully for You
Superclones
Attack of the Cats
One Small Step for Superman
Video Victims
Now while that may look like a lot of content, it does only add up to 172 minutes. The Wonder Twins episodes, which often play out like the GI Joe “Knowing” PSAs, are pretty short and the weakest episodes of the bunch, while the remaining episodes are all solid and have a lot of replay value. These episodes are great for children and for just some excellent “background TV” while you’re tending to other matters.
Both discs feature a straight-forward menu with options to play all episodes, select an episode, or to adjust a couple of options like audio track (English or Portuguese) and subtitles (English/French/Portuguese). The second disc also includes two comic books from the DC Vault, “The Mindless Immortal” and “Wendy And Marvin Meet the JLA” in PDF.
In terms of presentation quality, WHV did a nice job here. Everything from the box to the menus to the video and audio quality of the episodes is very nice and I have no complaints.
Ultimately, this is a pretty basic DVD set in terms of the amount of content and extra features, but the quality of the content is more important. I’m pleased to see these classic cartoons, most of which I haven’t seen in years since last seeing them on Boomerang, on DVD for collectors like me to enjoy.