The Wonderfully Cheesy World of Filmation’s JUSTICE LEAGUE
THE FILMATION FILES: Celebrating the late Lou Scheimer’s birthday… — UPDATED 10/19/26: The late Filmation impresario Lou Scheimer was born 98 years ago, on Oct. 19, 1928! Perfect time to reprint this piece, which first ran in 2017. Dig it! — Dan — I’ll let you in on a little secret: I don’t really love Super Friends. It’s not like I actively dislike it or anything and I know it sounds heretical to anyone who, like me, grew up in the ’70s. Though I dug the whole Legion of Doom schtick, Super Friends was a staple mostly because it was often the only superhero game in town on Saturday mornings. Filmation? That’s another thing entirely. I love Filmation’s DC Comics cartoons from the ’60s, which I discovered through the magic of syndication. Part of it is because Filmation’s cartoons are unapologetically schlocky in a way that Super Friends isn’t. Super Friends, with its contrived teenage interlopers, derivative animal sidekicks and “Health” segments, feels more annoyingly earnest. Even the name “Super Friends” is condescending. Filmation had no such pretentions: They’re adventure cartoons starring my favorite superheroes, done on the cheap, cheesy in the best possible way. Why am I mentioning all this now? Simple: The big-screen Justice League is out next week (11/17, officially) and I can’t help but think back to the first time the League banded together on screen — in three shorts produced in 1967 as part of the Superman-Aquaman Hour of Adventure. Quick bit of background for the uninitiated: Filmation struck it big with its Saturday morning The New Adventures of Superman cartoon in 1966 — a good year for TV superheroes — on CBS. The next year, they expanded with Aquaman cartoons, which may be the best Filmation ever produced. But they also added a series of “guest-star” shorts featuring solo adventures of the Atom, Flash, Green Lantern and Hawkman, and two teams: the Teen Titans and the Justice League of America. Each got three shorts apiece. I wasn’t really exposed to those shorts when I first watched Filmation’s DC cartoons in the early ’70s. But now, they’re a frequent source of background noise at 13th Dimension headquarters. They’re easy to get, either on disc or online. (Click here.) As it happens, those JLA cartoons are the weakest of the bunch: Three nondescript adventures — Between Two Armies, Target Earth and Bad Day on Black Mountain — feature our...
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