Superfriends vs. Justice League
When a child first sees a cool new superhero, the first question is usually “What does he do?”
This is a fitting query regarding characters of action, but it is no way to structure a TV show. And yet, it is seemingly how the producers approached the structure of Superfriends. In contrast, the producers of Justice League took the “What does he do?” question for granted and instead asked the far more important question “Who is he?” The characters in Justice League are individuals with points of view, motivations and personalities, the characters in Superfriends are merely agglomerations of abilities.
The cape is not the man, and this, I opine, is the basis of why Justice League will be treasured for generations to come while Superfriends will always be regarded as a camp classic fit only for the simple.
In Superfriends, Batman has a computer and a cave full of gadgets, Wonder Woman has a magic rope and an invisible plane, Green Lantern has a magic ring, Flash is fast, Superman has his multitudinous powers, Aquaman talks to fish. Those are all fine attributes, but they do not, in and of themselves, constitute character. If all that mattered was the number of powers, Martian Manhunter would be a more popular superhero than Superman. What the producers of Superfriends chose to do is give all their heroes the exact same personality, whether they are the Last Son of Krypton, the Dark Knight, the Amazon Princess or The Guy Who Talks to Fish. The heroes of Superfriends are uniformly game, brave, chipper, chatty, easily startled and, paradoxically, unflappable. No sooner do they exclaim “Great Krypton/Hera/Gotham/Neptune!” than they pull some improbable solution out of the air and calmly implement it (as Seanbaby mentions, this solution often involves “spinning around” the bad guy/explosion/missile/lava/monster/lava-monster until the spinning affects it somehow). This conceptual blunder, not the dumb plots or the cheap animation, is why Superfriends is so reviled. Television can soar on dumb plots and cheap animation, it cannot survive without characters. This is why episodes of Superfriends feel so shallow, repetitive and lame; there are seven main characters and they all think and act exactly the same way. Think about it: Hanna-Barbera actually gave the members of the Justice League less personality than they gave to the members of the Mystery Gang.
Because their protagonists have no personalities (or, if you like, they all have roughly the same personalities as Batman and Robin do on the Adam West Batman show, the source of Superfriends‘ most likely inspiration) there is no dramatic tension in the scripts. That means that the writers must come up with ever-more-improbable, ever-more-lame, ever-more-fantastic, ever-more-bizarre plots of exhausting, spiraling action to put their heroes and their various abilities through their paces. These plots can be wonderful diversions, but they do not constitute drama.
The producers of Justice League, coming from the success of their Batman and Superman animated series’, understood from the beginning that it actually doesn’t matter what a superhero’s abilities are; what matters is who the superhero is.
Take Green Lantern. The beauty of Green Lantern is not that his ring can make anything happen, it’s that his ring can make anything happen within the bounds of his imagination and that that magic is limited to the force of his will-power. Green Lantern is not about a magic ring, it is about Imagination and Will. If the wearer is a dullard, he makes a very poor Green Lantern indeed, and his ring is useless if one can wear down his will. (The creator of Green Lantern borrowed the magic-ring idea from Arabian Nights; the first Green Lantern’s name was originally to be Alan Ladd, off of Aladdin.) Green Lantern’s appeal lies not in his ring, the ring is a tool, like a badge or a gun; Green Lantern’s appeal lies in the personality of the man/woman/space-creature wearing the ring. Like a western or police drama, it’s doesn’t matter that one carries a badge, what matters is who carries the badge. One can be a great policeman, a corrupt policeman, a shy policeman, an incompetent policeman, a sly policeman, a duplicitous policeman. The same principle applies to doctors, lawyers, detectives and space explorers, to name only the most prevalent of TV professions. And yet, in the minds of the producers of Superfriends, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Mike Hammer, Jim Rockford and Barnaby Jones are all the exact same person.
In Justice League, what was important to the producers about Wonder Woman is not that she’s super-strong or has a magic rope, but that she’s a princess who has led a coddled, innocent, priviledged life apart from man’s world. The strength and the rope are tools that happen to be sitting around, useful in fighting alien menaces, but the point is that her naive personality and optimistic attitude give rise to drama as she clashes not with bad guys but with Batman’s scowling cynicism or Hawkgirl’s brazen forthrightness (favorite Hawkgirl line: “Less talking, more hitting!”). The producers of Justice League didn’t get around to mentioning that WW’s lasso is a lie-detector until the third season, and even then it was total surprise to WW. What makes Flash work in Justice League is not that he’s fast but that he’s a careless goofball. What makes Batman work is not that he’s a brilliant detective but that he’s bitter, remote and scornful. And, as I’ve mentioned before, what makes Martian Manhunter a different character from Superman is not his powers but his soul. The characters in Justice League aren’t a bunch of superheroes, they are a bunch of people who happen to have super-powers. This seems like an obvious distinction to make, and has been in the comics since their inception, but it never occurred to the producers of Superfriends.
When any seven people are thrown into a high-stakes, high-pressure situation, drama inevitably occurs. While the plot contrivances of Justice League are more carefully, logically and elegantly presented than those of Superfriends, they are not more interesting or believable. A talking gorilla, an evil computer or an alien overlord are of the same narrative value whether they are designed by Alex Toth or Bruce Timm. What keeps Justice League alive is the drama that arises from the clash of personalities responding to the crisis.
