"But first, we’ll have a little flipper action!"

§ September 9th, 2008 § Filed under Uncategorized § 1 Comment

So the other day, I saw a little bit of the Super Friends episode from which this clip was taken:


The set-up: Hawkman, Wonder Woman, and Black Vulcan are doing some work in orbit when Brainiac uses some device to cause the Earth to disappear. When the heroes notice this, they attempt to contact their teammates at the Hall of Justice. Brainiac’s Legion of Doom partner the Toyman mimics Superman’s voice, and sends then on a mission to a distant world.

Upon arrival at the coordinates given to them by “Superman,” the trio finds no planet, but do find a black hole that sucks them in and deposits them on a world within, filled with traps set up by the Toyman.

  • When Hawkman, Wonder Woman, and Black Vulcan depart Earth’s orbit for the distant planet, they just sorta fly off. They don’t take a ship or anything…they just kinda hold hands and zoom off under Vulcan’s lightning power. Should only take about, oh, a hundred thousand years to get there. Pack a lunch!
  • Is there a more annoying Legion of Doom member than the Toyman? How Gorilla Grodd kept from pinching this guy’s head off, I have no idea.
  • And just dig this guy’s smirk. SERIOUSLY:

  • I didn’t watch the entire episode, but I believe the plan was to get all the heroes off-world or incapacitated or whatever, leaving the Legion of Doom free to blackmail the world and rake in the dough. And yet somehow the Toyman…the Toyman…had the resources and tech to set up a planet filled with elaborate traps and weaponry inside a black hole. (Okay, maybe Brainiac helped…but more on Brainiac in a second.)
  • And don’t get me started on the “inside a black hole” business.
  • Wonder Woman trapped inside a clear plastic pinball, being bounced from bumper to bumper, is a fetish for someone, I’m sure. Thus, these pictures:


    Hello, internet traffic!

  • “WONDER WOMAN IN THE HOLE!” sounds a lot dirtier than it is.

    “But first, we’ll have a little flipper action!” is as dirty as it sounds.

    Hello again, internet traffic!

  • Black Vulcan says, when being pursued by the Wonder Woman pinball, that the gravity of this world is to heavy to allow them to fly. Except in the scenes prior to and after this clip, when he flies.
  • Also, during that first attempt, Black Vulcan zips up into the sky, then comes back, saying the black hole won’t even let out light. Not that we’re dealing with hard, accurate science here or anything…but how is the Toyman getting that transmission from the black hole planet?
  • Okay, now Brainiac…I caught a bit near the end of the episode (not in the above clip), when the villains, having apparently disposed of Earth’s heroes, are working in an air traffic control tower, directing in their planes full of money! Says Brainiac over the radio to one plane: “You are cleared to land…as long as you’re carrying ten million dollars!”

    Now, Brainiac is a machine from another planet, whose deal is flying around and shrinking and stealing cities. What’s he doing, stealing money on Earth? Seems a little…beneath him, somehow. I suppose it’s possible he’s stuck on Earth and needs the scratch, or he’s just being a good teammate. But it just feels like Brainiac’s slumming, really.

  • The animation is typical Super Friends — i.e. awful — but the shot of the Grand Canyon at the end of the clip is nice. And I gotta be honest…that voice for Superman is damn near iconic, and I like it a lot more than some of the voices for animated Supermen we’ve received recently.

Also seen recently: my very first exposure to the ’90s Hulk cartoon, featuring the voice work of Mark Hamill as the Gargoyle, Matt Frewer as the Leader, and, most brilliantly, Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk. Hulk encounters monsters in the desert, mutated animals exposed to the same gamma radiation that created him, and there’s a lot of mayhem and things blowing up and the Leader trying to steal the Hulk’s power and it was all loud and annoying. Rick Jones (voice: Luke Perry) seemed to reflect the Peter David culturally-aware version of the character from the comics, somewhat, if only that Jones makes a minor pop culture reference (to “Trekkers”) during the course of the story.

Ultimately, though, it didn’t do much for me. Just too loud and shrill for my tastes. NOT BUY.

Another cartoon caught for the first time was the Fantastic Four cartoon from a couple of years back. I remember seeing the character designs, and thinking they looked awful at the time…seeing everything in action, the character appearances began to grow on me a bit, aside from Johnny’s Heat Miser hair. The plot’s one we’ve seen one or thrice in the funnybooks before, where Doom manages to switch his mind with Reed, thus gaining control of his body and causing hijinks to ensue. Done about as well as one could expect.

I also caught a couple of episodes of the ’90s Spider-Man cartoon, which took one of the greatest Spider-Man stories of all time and crapped it up to the point where any and all emotional impact is completely gone. The bit of that Wikipedia article which notes “the only difference [between the cartoon and the original story] being the boy was changed to a girl” is a lie, forgetting to mention the Doctor Octopus/Madame Web/Spidey being brainwashed/sassy Caribbean taxi driver plot points that were squeezed in.

Also, at one point we hear a television news broadcast stating that Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus have teamed up to wreak havoc on the city, and it was then I realized that the TV news in the Marvel Universe must be a lot like having professional wrestling on all the time.

And that’s enough of watching these silly kids’ cartoons. I’m going back to watching my Land of the Lost DVDs.

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