Superfriends was one of the first superhero shows I saw as a kid. I was probably three or four years old. My favorite character was Robin, probably because he was the youngest superhero. Sometimes, my older brother and cousins and I used to reenact the episodes in the playroom. It felt so magical and epic, watching the goodhearted superheroes save people's lives, defeat the bad guys and visit strange worlds. Sometimes the episodes were a bit scary as well, with giant monsters and weird villains, but the episodes always had a happy ending. The episodes I remember the best are the ones from "The World's Greatest Superfriends", like "The Lord of Middle Earth" and "Superfriends meet Frankenstein". I miss good, clean shows like Superfriends, where the heroes behaved like heroes and inspired kids to do good. They didn't torture or kill the villains. The villains didn't have to skin people alive for us to know that they were evil. Shows like Superfriends and He-Man had positive messages and moral characters. What do the most popular shows these days have? Yelling and screaming, weirdness for the sake of weirdness, crude jokes, disturbing images...Fortunately, most of the episodes have been released on DVD. I can finally watch them again, with my own kids. Who knows, maybe they'll reenact the episodes in their own playroom?

I was in the second grade when the World's Greatest SuperFriends kicked off the Saturday morning lineup. I loved the intro and originally, this was an hour long show and it was followed up by another Super Hero variety series starring Plastic Man. Unfortunately, in terms of new episodes, Hanna Barbera only made 8 new ones. I guess to compensate, they blended them in with reruns of the All New SuperFriends Hour of 1977 replacing some of the 30 minute episodes of that year with these new shows. My favorites consist of the premiere episode: Rub Three Times For Disaster, Lex Luthor Strikes Back which has nods to the Superman movie, and the Space Knights of Camelon. These shows mostly were inspired by books of great literature, like Aladdin, King Arthur and the Kights of the Round Table, the Hobbit, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Frankenstein, and the Wizard of Oz. And Mr. Mxyzptlk returns at the end of the season, just like he did before. I didn't care for the Lord of Middle Earth, but I did love the Universe of Evil with the SuperFriends evil counterparts. The only problem I had with the last three episodes were absentee SuperFriends. However, it's interesting to meet the Kandorians from the Bottle City of Kandor in Terror at 20,000 Fathoms, and we actually get to see Robin go from sidekick to super powered Super Hero in SuperFriends Meet Frankenstein. Although this series doesn't meet up to the likes of its predecessor, Challenge of the SuperFriends, this is still a memorable series.Since the IMDb has no page for this one, I have to comment on what followed. From 1980 to 1983, the SuperFriends had episodes that were 7 minutes in length. These are the 80's shorts. The 1980 segments ran with reruns in a show called the SuperFriends Hour. These new shorts were combined with 30 minute reruns. Then they made a shorter set of shorts in 1981 and SuperFriends became a half hour show from then on. That year, they introduced as Hispanic Super Hero named El Dorado, who I thought was real cool. They made one more set in 1983, but wouldn't you know it, they didn't air here in America because ABC chose to replace the SuperFriends with pathetic shows like the Monchichis, Rubik the Amazing Cube, and the Littles. It wouldn't be until the 1990's when we would finally see these lost episodes on the butchered and edited Superman/Batman Adventures syndication package that has been running on USA, Cartoon Network, and now Boomerang. Some of these lost episodes are real good, but some others are quite dreadful. I strongly feel that following the World's Greatest SuperFriends series, the show went downhill. But I think it got better when it tied in with the Super Powers lineup of the mid 80's.

My all time favorite episode is The Superfriends Meet Frankenstein. All I can say is that it was THE one all time favorite episode of that show, being that Mary Shelley, the original author of Frankenstein, would be stunned and very pleased that the nice people would do a good job in updating the Frankenstein legend for short attention spans. In my opinon, it would also encourage the young people to read the original book at their library or at the bookstore.

They had a great thing with Challenge of the Super Friends. Though this show had some interesting stories, this show was not nearly as creative as the Challenge show. Some of the shows were stale and campy and was not able to capture the sense of creativity and adventure Challenge did. It was kind of a let down.