The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians

It's hard to believe how over the course of 12-13 years animation could change. As a boy one of the mainstay staples of Saturday morning television was the ever-reliable "Super Friends", one of ABC's longest-running and most successful Saturday morning animated series. Beginning in 1972, the "Super Friends" - which initially consisted of Superman, Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and their teenage sidekicks Wendy and Marvin - went through numerous incarnations and expansions, taking from the numerous DC Comics titles of the era. By the late 1970's the series began to get a little more mature in its storytelling, with more sophisticated plots and adventures that excited kids of all ages. I was definitely one of them. I grew up with this series. It began when I entered first grade, and it ended during my freshman year of college. How time flies.

By the 1980's the "Super Friends" seemed almost passe' in the realm of animation. While the "Superman" feature films were taking off, and plans were in the works for a "Batman" feature film, the animated series was winding down. As animation began to move from traditional hand-drawn cels into the very new realm of realistic animation and the then-experimental form of computer animation (first seen in "Star Trek II" and "Tron"), traditional animiation and simplistic flights of fancy no longer interested young viewers. They wanted newer heroes with more elaborate powers and strengths, with internal issues and problems.

By 1984 ABC took another stab in revamping the "Super Friends" with "The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians", which would be the final animated incarnation of the long-running series. By this time Firestorm was already a part of the team, having been introduced into the series the previous year as part of "Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show", along with original creations such as Apache Chief, El Dorado, Samurai, and Black Vulcan (no relation to Tuvok, of course!) which were designed to bring in a more diverse ethnic culture to the series. With the addition of Firestorm the year before, another hero made his animated debut in the form of Cyborg, a character from the popular "Teen Titans" comic book series of the 1980's. More machine than man, Victor (Cyborg) Stone became a valuable addition to the Super Powers Team.

But things didn't stop there. Along with the addition of new cast members to the series, the look of the series drastically changed. For years Hanna-Barbera relied on the same tried and true look of the characters to drive the series. But animation, like comic books, were entering into a new era of more graphically realistic animation. To this end they turned to DC artist Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez to redesign all of the characters for the series, giving them incredible facelifts and providing a fresh look to the heroes and villains of the series, bringing them closer to their comic-book counterparts. And this was shortly before DC Comics itself was to experience a true makeover of its own with "Crisis on Infinite Earths", "The Dark Knight Returns", and "Superman: The Man of Steel".

Over the course of the ten segments produced in 1984 the Super Powers Team battled classic villains such as Lex Luthor, the Joker, the Penguin, the Scarecrow, Bizarro, and intergalactic space baddie Darkseid. And in one of its penultimate segments, "The Death of Superman", the series took a very mature theme and brought it to life (years before Doomsday did the unthinkable). But with the series on its last legs, even this fresh revamp wasn't enough to bring it back for another season. With this final incarnation, the Super Friends passed into history.

Now Warner Home Video has brought the entire "Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians" series to DVD in a two-disc set that presents each animated segment in its original broadcast aspect ratio and in Dolby 2.0 sound. The animation is clean and crisp, and for a 20-year-old series it looks pretty good, better than I remember catching it on Saturday mornings. Bonus features are limited to just a single featurette - "Super Powers Redux: Galactic Guardians Retrospective", which profiles the making of the series with DC writers and artists and also shows some vintage storyboards and even a copy of the ABC mandate regarding "The Death of Superman" - and a pair of trailers for other animated products.

"The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians", which followed the earlier "Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Team" release, is a great way to remember the final years of one of ABC's most popular and successful animated series. I'm looking forward to seeing the remainder of the "Super Friends" series arrive on DVD in coming months!