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The Superfriends, part 2: Wonder Twin powers, activate!

© Jeff Sparkman

The first season of the Super Friends did well enough to get itself rerun a few times, but it still dragged. On September 10, 1977, four years after the SF debuted, a new show debuted – The All-New Superfriends Hour.

Instead of a single episode lasting the entire time, four smaller episodes comprised the hour. Also, mercifully, Wendy, Marvin and Wonderdog were gone. In their place were a brother and sister team, the Wonder Twins. Zan and Jayna hailed from the planet Exor, where it appeared that everyone hung out in those cool purple pajamas.

Whereas Wendy and Marvin were normal human teens, Zan and Jayna actually had super powers – not that this made them that much more useful, but they were much more memorable. To use their Exoran powers, they touched fists (not rings as many assume) and said “Wonder Twin powers, activate!” Jayna could take the form of any animal, and Zan … well, Zan could turn into water. Or ice, snow, fog … you get the idea.

And if the Wonder Twins weren’t wacky enough, they also had with them their blue space monkey, Gleek. Gleek’s only function, apparently, was to get in trouble and supply weak comic relief. Still, many kids could swear that they could understand his monkey chatter.

If the idea of two teens and their monkey helping out superheroes sounds familiar, you might remember Space Ghost’s teen sidekicks, Jan and Jace, and their monkey, Blip. Coincidentally (sarcasm alert), both shows were produced by Hanna-Barbera.

This season was a vast improvement over the first. The episodes usually broke down into four segments: A Superfriends adventure with the whole team, a smaller team-up segment, the Wonder Twins solo adventure and a final team-up, usually with a lesser-known hero. The variety seemed to break up the monotony, although with more new Superfriends to deal with, the writing and art was sometimes inconsistent.

Making their appearances as guest heroes this season were Flash, Hawkman (not seen since guest solo cartoons in the 1960s Filmation Aquaman series) and Hawkgirl, Green Lantern, the Atom (both likewise not seen since the Filmation cartoons), Rima (a Tarzanesque heroine) and a trio of new heroes: Samurai, Apache Chief and Black Vulcan. Samurai could turn into a living tornado, a mass of flames, or simply invisible just by saying some magic words. Presumably, these were the Japanese words for turning him into his various states, but I don’t know Japanese. Apache Chief was able to grow, presumably to whatever size he wanted.