How did ABC get away with a show where heroes and villains actually — gasp! — fight? Here’s how… The latest RetroFan — Issue #27 — includes the usual assortment of awesome and for our EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT, we pick up where we left off last time, with Andy Mangels’ ongoing history of Super Friends. The latest installment focuses on the show’s third season, whose hour-long episodes featured fairly typical half-hour segments, followed by 30-minute adventures that are probably the series’ most popular — Challenge of the Superfriends, co-starring the Legion of Doom. But how did Hanna-Barbera pull that off, given ABC’s desire to stay away from violence and outright conflict? Read on — but first check out the table of contents: — By ANDY MANGELS ABC’s Challenge of the SuperFriends was designed to be radically different than other entries of the show. The subtitle was, for a brief time, “Battle of the SuperHeroes,” but everyone knew that opening word would never make it past ABC’s Standards & Practices. Gone for this incarnation were the Wonder Twins, and the group was now called the Justice League more often. Members included Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Black Vulcan (gone too were his pants!), Apache Chief, and Samurai, but while Hanna-Barbera had diversified its cast by featuring the minority heroes more regularly, it short-shrifted its female viewers, now offering them Wonder Woman as the token female. Fighting against the heroes was the Legion of Doom, whose headquarters in a swamp, the Hall of Doom, blatantly resembled Darth Vader’s helmet from the year-old theatrical megahit Star Wars. The 13 well-known comic-book villains included Lex Luthor, Brainiac, Cheetah, the Riddler, the Scarecrow, Toyman, Sinestro, Black Manta, Captain Cold, Bizarro, Gorilla Grodd, Solomon Grundy, and Giganta. For those keeping count, that was two females, and no villains of color… unless one counted magenta or lime-green aliens (the African-American Black Manta never unmasked). But the villains’ line-up was not always the same 13 bad guys. Alex Toth was the legendary lead designer and storyboard artist on the series, and he visually controlled almost everybody’s look (though Andre LeBlanc did some for this season). Toth did design sheets for most of the villains, some of which never made it into the series, including Catwoman, Riddler, and Scarecrow. Early presentation art for the “Legion of Evil” (also called “League...