Super Friends (1980)
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Super Friends is an American animated television series about a team of superheroes which ran from 1980 to 1982 on ABC. It was produced by Hanna-Barbera and is based on the Justice League and associated comic book characters published by DC Comics. It was the fifth incarnation of the Super Friends series following the Super Friends (1973 TV series), The All-New Super Friends Hour, Challenge of the Super Friends and The World's Greatest Super Friends.
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[edit] Format
With Super Friends, the series abandoned the production of half hour episodes (which was the case for the previous two Super Friends series), in favor of the production of seven-minute shorts.[1] Each hour long episode of Super Friends would feature a half hour rerun from one of the previous six years along with three of new shorts. Meanwhile, the second season from 1981–1982 was a shorter season due to a writers' strike.[2]
[edit] Main characters
These new adventures featured appearances by the core group of the five classic Super Friends (Aquaman, Batman, Robin, Superman and Wonder Woman) along with Zan, Jayna & Gleek. There were also guest appearances from members previously depicted in Challenge of the Super Friends as well as the original Hanna Barbera created hero El Dorado (debuting in the second season), who was added to the show to make the Super Friends more culturally diverse.
[edit] Reruns, cancellation, and lost episodes
For the 1982-1983 television season, ABC continued to run a half-hour of reruns from the previous seasons called The Best of the Super Friends. It also should be noted that none of the seven minute shorts were rebroadcast. By 1983, Hanna-Barbera had created a syndication package (that was distributed by LBS Communications and ran from 1983-1986) of the earlier Super Friends series. These episodes were picked up by various stations across the United States and were typically broadcast on weekday afternoons.
Not wishing to compete with the syndicated programming, ABC dropped the series from the 1983-1984 Saturday morning television line-up, and for the second time in its run, Super Friends was canceled. However, during this period of time, Hanna-Barbera continued to produce new episodes of Super Friends.
In total, 8 episodes (24 cartoons) of the so-called "Lost Episodes" were animated but not aired in the United States that season. The series did appear in Australia uninterrupted. One of these episodes were aired when Super Friends returned to Saturday morning ABC television the following year. The remainder of the episodes finally aired in syndication in 1995 as part of the Superman/Batman Adventures show on the USA Network.[3]
[edit] DVD release
In April 2009, Warner Home Video announced their plans to release the lost episodes of this series in August of this year. They will be released as a DVD set, titled Super Friends: The Lost Episodes, on August 11, 2009.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
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