The celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Super Powers toy line and related tie-in media continues! In part 2, host Chris Franklin and panelists the Irredeemable Shag, Derek William Crabbe and David Gallaher discuss the final two seasons of the long-running Super Friends animated series, and its evolution into Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians! How did the infusion of new creative staff and the addition of Darkseid, Firestorm and Cyborg change the course of the show, and what impact did it have on future DC animated endeavors? Plus, thoughts on the Super Powers toys from the Fire and Water Network’s newest All-Star, Sean Ross!
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Guest Links:
Derek William Crabbe’s Fanholes Podcast
David Gallaher’s Amazon Author Page
- Will Rodger’s Ultimate Super Friends Companion books on Amazon
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Clip credits:
Music and clips from various seasons of Super Friends/Super Powers, by Hoyt Curtin. Special thanks to Isamu Hidekai Yukinori and Xum Yukinori.
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Chris and His Super Friends – Another great episode! Thanks for letting me join in and for playing the promo for Peace Bound and Down: A Wonder Woman Podcast.
My time with the Fire and Water Network may be short-lived when I admit this, but I didn’t love Adam West taking over voicing Batman on the show. Now, I love Adam, but he didn’t click for me in this setting.
It’s fun to hear how, for our generation, this show sparked a love for Firestorm and Cyborg. I know seeing Cyborg on the show reinforced my choice to collect Teen Titans.
Sean
Your story of the toys being sacrificed is your supervillain origin stories. Things make sense again.
Sean, sean. We’re all friends here, and are entitled to our opinions. Except that one. Get out.
No seriously, I get it. I know I probably rankled some feathers by admitting I wasn’t a huge fan of Olan Soule’s Batman voice! Thank you so much for your great (and harrowing!) contribution.
Another stellar episode. I must admit, by the time the SF show reached these seasons, I felt a little old to be watching Saturday morning cartoons so I would check in with the show every so often, telling myself it was because I was a comic book fan and I needed to see ALL this kind of stuff.
Yes, Aquaman really got shunted aside, but as you guys mentioned, he got a ton to do in the early seasons. It makes sense for HB to try and freshen things up with newer characters. If anything, I wish they had gone further, and just kept “the big three” and added all new heroes from the DC stable. If you tied it in with the toy line, we could have had animated debuts for Dr Fate, Mister Miracle, Martian Manhunter–how cool would that have been?
Shag talking about his classmates discussing the plot intricacies of the New Teen Titans comic just makes me shake my head, for that’s a world of acceptance I only dreamed about when I was a kid. The jealousy, it still burns.
It makes no sense! “He doesn’t know who Cyclotron is! Get ‘im!”
The mind boggles if those characters made it onto the series. I’m kind of surprised they didn’t given how other toyline-related shows from this era really worked hard to cram nearly every toy, vehicle and playset into their respective tie-in shows, sometimes sideways! I guess the show came first, so that may be the difference.
Yeah, I will never understand the Bizarro “nerd-ruled” universe Shag hails from. I think we’re all just insanely jealous.
Firestrom was my third fave dc hero and definitly the dc I had the most issuses of but PROFESSOR stien should’nt sound like BATMAN!
I’m glad it gave Olan Soule work. Although he didn’t continue in Galactic Guardians, which we failed to mention in the discussion. I was reminded of this perusing through Will Rodgers’ Ultimate Super Friends Companion, Vol. 2 book. I don’t think the 2nd Prof. Stein has ever been quite identified.
The various Super Friends/Super Powers episodes from the time period discussed were appointment television for me when they aired. I remember liking Firestorm, but it was mainly Darkseid and his minions that were the draw for me. By that point I was all about the heroes having a big bad to fight and I can still hear the voices of Darkseid, Kalibak, and DeSaad.
The episode I remember the most was The Fear. I remember watching it in my parents’s bedroom and feeling like this one was different. I can’t say it felt more “adult” because I never thought about it in those terms, but I knew it was one of the best episodes of the Super Friends I had ever seen. All these years later and it is still Top 5 of all the series.
Great discussion. This celebration is shaping up to be one for the ages.
Thanks Mike! I was a weird kid, and could detect if shows were skewing older than what I was used to. It seemed like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends was a little more clever, a bit more quippy and sarcastic than the earlier Super Friends seasons. Today I don’t see as much of a difference, because some of the Spider-Friends episodes are plain goofy, but I did pick up on it then. Same for Transformers and G.I. Joe. They were a bit more sly than Filmation’s He-Man and MOTU, which seemed to skew a bit younger. Sunbow/Marvel’s Transformers was much slicker and seemed just infinitely cooler than the HB-produced Go-Bots (although I still liked that show too.) The Super Powers seasons, especially Galactic Guardians really seemed to age up a bit, and break from that somewhat stagnant HB-mold.
Needless to say, everyone on our panel (and everyone I’ve ever spoken to about it) agrees on “The Fear”. Just a tremendous episode.
Fun show, Uncle Chris and panelists. It is interesting to hear about the first impressions of a cartoon that I watched on DVD in my youth decades after it first aired on TV.
My dad had interviewed Constance Cawlfield (as well as B.J. Ward) in the late naughties about her experience portraying Wonder Woman on this series for the defunct Comics2Film website — so the final articles were never produced. I came across his interview notes with Ms. Cawlfield a few years ago while packing up Dad’s personal effects, and this is what I remember from my reading of them:
1. Ms. Cawlfield’s voice credit as Wonder Woman during the Legendary Super Powers Show season wasn’t publicly known until 2004. For the previous two decades many printed and online articles assumed the role was portrayed by B.J. Ward. This is likely why your podcast panel thought the same.
2. Ms. Cawlfield had no idea that Shannon Farnon was also re-auditioning for the Wonder Woman role that season, and was very surprised when Dad told her that during the interview. Ms. Cawlfield was under the impression that the reason Wonder Woman auditions were being held was because Ms. Farnon decided to not come back for the new Super Friends season.
3. Ms. Cawlfield had a benign nodule on her vocal chords that was affecting her voice at the time of the audition, but she went to the audition anyway at the urging of her agent. She ended up getting the role because her voice was so distinctive, so she held off on getting treatment for the nodule until she was done voicing Wonder Woman for the season. This was very strenuous, and I think her wanting to finally get the nodule treated was part of the reason she didn’t continue voicing Wonder Woman the following year (I would need to dig out the deeply packed notes to be sure).
4. Ms. Cawlfield was involved in a lot of stage play productions at the time this season was under production, so she voiced her Wonder Woman lines through a phone patch. She did not attend any Hanna Barbera studio recordings and (I think) had never met any of her Super Friends costars (at least before the time of Dad’s interview…).
5. At the time, Ms. Cawlfield was not familiar with all of the Greek and Roman mythological references in Wonder Woman’s dialogue. She told Dad a funny story about her wondering what the heck a “Suffering Sappho” was. She soon saw the cartoon mascots of a Dow Scrubbing Bubbles advert and pictured them as being what “Suffering Sapphos” would look like…
I recall fewer notes from Dad’s B.J. Ward interview. The biggest one was his scratched-out “awkward” (his word) question to her about Shannon Farnon’s assertion that her relationship with voice director Gordon Hunt helped her get the Wonder Woman role in the Super Powers Team season (stated in a Starlog interview as well as Dad’s interview with Auntie Shannon that was published by ToonZone). He had an all-caps note to REWRITE the question in the finished article, because he wanted to retain her very professional response that the studio chose the voice actress, not her then soon-to-be-husband.
Interestingly, Ms. Ward was initially approached by Cartoon Network to be the voice of the Super Friends Wonder Woman for their “retro” channel promos in the 1990s, even though they were planning to use the 1970s character design. Ms. Ward told CN that Shannon Farnon was still alive and working and that they should reach out to her, which they did.
Ms. Ward also told Dad that she tended to be cast as “Michael Bell’s girlfriends” (referencing Snorks and G.I. Joe). This was related to a question about her voicing Jayna the Wonder Twin in the Legendary Super Powers season, which he read in a few articles published in the 1980s and 1990s. However this “fact” was also an error, as Ms. Ward had never voiced Jayna. Michael Bell told my dad that he always worked with Liberty Williams on anything that featured both Wonder Twins (save the Adult Swim spoofs), and if Jayna’s voice seemed slightly different in the Legendary Super Powers season, it may be due to her being older, or her doing a slightly different take given the other changes being made on the show that season.
As always Isamu, thank you so much for this fantastic information. I had heard ONE of the Wonder Woman actresses was accused of a bit of nepotism, but I didn’t want to mention it on air, since I didn’t have any kind of source to back it up.
I was curious why Cawlfield didn’t continue, but I honestly I preferred B.J. Ward. I do wish they had just continued with Shannon Farnon, because she still sounded great, even years later on the Cartoon Network bumpers you mentioned.
I know there’s some question over who was Jayna in the Legendary Super Powers season, so thanks for help to clarify that at the very least Michael Bell (who should know) says it’s still Liberty Williams. People’s voices change over time, and I know there was some question if Mark Hamill voiced the Joker in the recent Crisis on Infinite Earths Part 3 film, because he sounded quite different. But apparently it has been confirmed that’s Mark Hamill, working with Kevin Conroy as Batman one last time.
This is a fantastic miniseries, and I especially like this episode because I grew up with Super Friends. You did a great summary of the series, and I like how you intersperse the music. One of my favorites is the light music they’d play during the short interstitial segments; it reminds me of the innocence of a Saturday afternoon as a child. I was four when the first season of Super Friends aired and I remember watching it from the beginning, even the Friday night preview that aired before the first episode. And although I was in high school by the time of the Super Powers seasons, I still watched it every week.
I like both Olan Soule and Adam West as Batman. Adam West is my all-time favorite Batman portrayer, although I really think of Olan Soule’s voice as the Super Friends Batman. Soule had a warm fatherly-type voice which fits the Silver Age Batman, which is how Batman was portrayed on Super Friends until the Super Powers years.
I agree that the Galactic Guardians season was very strong and had more grown-up stories that stand up well even watching it now. I kind of liked how some episodes involved long journeys through deep space. My only criticism of Galactic Guardians is I would have preferred a little break now and then from Firestorm and Cyborg dominating almost every episode (with a couple exceptions like The Fear). I would have liked to see more of Green Lantern, Hawkman, Flash, and Aquaman, but it’s true they were featured heavily in earlier seasons. But I can never get enough of the Super Friends version of Green Lantern, with his tan and deep authoritative voice!
Credit for the presence of that great SF background music must go to our Nephew Isamu who commented up above. The music cues he sent me really helped to liven up the series, and bring back those great memories we all have. It’s the soundtrack of my subconcious.
As Shag pointed out (somewhat jokingly, but it’s true), Super Powers became the Firestorm/Cyborg buddy cop show. One thing I forgot to bring up, in “Seeds of Doom” the premiere episode of SPT: GG, Firestorm mentions to Prof. Stein it will be great having someone his own age on the team. How old is Robin supposed to be? Quite a bit older? Surely not younger? I did find it odd that they didn’t work in more connections between Robin and Cyborg, considering their established friendship in New Teen Titans.
I can’t believe Shag started the show by saying Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends was the better show.
Ha! He may have actually said it, but no one could hear him over the overpowering soundtrack of that show, cranked up to 11.
Nostalgia for the Super Powers collection is what brought me to the Fire and Water Network.
I happened upon 2 early episodes of Rob and Shag talking about the toyline and I was hooked!
I enjoyed the Super Friends cartoons as a kid.
This led to my love of the comics.
I was ecstatic at how beautifully the Super Powers figures resembled the comics!
When the cartoon was repackaged with the Super Powers branding AND they brought in Firestorm I thought there was for a more comic-accurate show.
And when I saw DARKSEID as the main villain, just like the toy line, I knew they were heading in the right direction.
They even had the Delta Probe 1 in the opening sequence!
Two gripes:
1. Darkseid constantly wanting to marry Wonder Woman?
Not only was it creepy, but I felt like it belittled both characters.
2. No Dr. Fate, Green Arrow, or my favorite Martian Manhunter!
In my own head cannon, El Dorado is actually J’onn J’onzz in disquise.
Anyway, I am really enjoying this miniseries!
You all are great!
Thanks Rudy!
As we discussed, the Darkseid/WW thing seems very…icky now for some folks. But I’m not sure it was ever a good idea!
I think the seemingly very popular “El Dorado is Martian Manhunter” theory may have been where Dan Jurgens got the idea for Bloodwynd in the early 90s!
Thanks for listening!