Damn, Where've I Been?

I seem to remember promising something of such monumental proportions that it could cause your skull to explode just from hearing about it secondhand from a friend who saw it on YouTube. Well, people, brace yourself. It's time.

It's time for Superfriends: Man-Beasts of Xra!

Yeah. You read that right. I'm about to grab you by the ears and completely rock your face in half. Okay, maybe not that much, but you get the general idea. And, as promised, this one is coming in parts as too much of it at one time could give you psoriasis. Or gangrene. Definitely jaundice at the very least.

Tonight's installment starts with a break-in at the New Orleans zoo, as using a zoo in a town that wasn't considered more dangerous than 1916 Germany just wouldn't make any sense. The Superfriends have received word that people, or even worse, mean people have been taking animals from the zoo and using them for...well, god knows what, really. It's the Superfriends. There's every possibility that they needed the animals to teach them the history of butter carving. So shut up, you're distracting me.

Batman and Robin are dispatched to the scene, where Robin runs around in tights while Batman dusts for prints. Batman suddenly cries out, stating that these fingerprints aren't human fingerprints! They must be coming from some sort of man-beast monstrosity. Mind you, the World's Greatest Detective is kinda forgetting that humans, apes, and monkeys are the only creatures that have fingers in the first place. So, how could he determine that they weren't of human origin? Why, the big-ass claw on the end of the fingerprint, silly! 'Cause, I don't know about you, but without that kind of deductive reasoning, I'd have had to wait until the inevitable surprise attack on the Dynamic Duo before I could figure out that the giant gouges in the iron freakin' bars weren't made by man hands. But thankfully for Robin and the 1970s TV-watching populace, a man with the head of a panther, the tail of a panther, and the black skin of a--wait, black skin? Oh, that's right. The animation budget wasn't going to allow for people to draw fur! And PETA definitely wasn't going to allow that sort of thing to happen. Not without throwing paint on the panther...

So, Batman and Boy Wondermous escape and run to tell the Superfriends what they found. I'd try and give you some of the dialogue, but every time I attempt to remember some of it, I wake up in a puddle of blood, and I can't be sure it's mine. Suffice to say that Superman decides that the Caped Crusader needs some watching or he's going to screw up a major plot hole and have the whole thing start to make sense. And we can't have that now, can we?

After breaking and entering into a lovely antebellum mansion in NOLA, Superman and Batman come across more man-beasts! attempting to do...well, something. They never really explain that. Probably ran out of blotter paper at that point. Superman draws the ire of a man-lion hybrid thingy and gives Batman enough time to pull out a freeze capsule off his utility belt that he uses to turn the man-lion blue, thereby informing the whole world that he's frozen solid. Robin, being the 12 year old mental giant that he is, walks up to the frozen entree and pounds on it with his fist, causing the hollow clang-clang sound of something that's frozen and made of metal, apparently.

This would be enough to make normal men run screaming from the room, but not I! I had a vested interest in seeing just how much dumber this could get without turning New Orleans into a city over a vast, subterranean network of caves and tunnels that would defy everything that's known about the Pearl of Louisiana and, well, physics. To my delight, I found that it couldn't get any dumber without turning New Orleans into a city over a vast, subterranean network of caves and tunnels that would defy everything that's known about the Pearl of Louisiana and, well, physics. That's why they turned it into a city over a...you know what? I'm sure you get the gist.

And then...it got dumber than that. As Superman and Batman, with Robin in tow, went into the caverns, they were faced with five animals in cages: a lion, a tiger, a panther, a something, and a something else. I can't remember the last two because my eye starts twitching and blood starts to spurt out of my nose. Superman backs away from the animals with the justification, "I don't wish to harm these creatures." Superman, the man who got so angry at a man that he punched him through a planet. Superman, the man who got so angry that he caused an entire dimension to cease to exist. Yes, this Superman, who apparently had to go to sensitivity training before they'd let him around Diana Troy, had to instead cause the animals to end up leaping back into their cages, whereupon Batman shut the cage doors and moved on. It should be noted that this is the same Batman who punched a man so hard it made his head explode. The same Batman who hurled, and connected with, a car battery to a mugger's torso in a junkyard. Pansies.

The three finally stumble, through no fault of the writers, into the lair of the evil Dr. Xra! The mad genius who masterminded the theft of so many animals from the zoo for demented experiments! The...woman with blue hair to show just how evil she could be. Score two for diversity right there, kids. Xra looks up and sees the Superfriends in her lair, and she has the nerve to act shocked and alarmed at the intrusion. Nevermind that you could have heard the three of them shouting at each other at the top of their lungs to be quiet throughout the vast, connecting caves and tunnels, even if you were deaf.

Xra jumps to the immediate conclusion that she must finish her plans, and that not even Superman would be allowed to stop her. I'll do you the favor of translating that line for you: Superman is going to end up stopping her plans, foiling her getaway and in a bold move, carrying her, her henchman, and her boat to the police station, where the police will presumably throw the evil overlords into jail and their evil speedboat into the impound. Damn you, impound. Damn you.

Tune in tomorrow...or whenever I get the chance to write it for the second in our Superfriends saga. It'll make you think you've got a shot with a hot woman in a see-through vehicle...

It's Coming...

Where've I been? Researching, son, researching. And what have I been researching? The most senses-shattering single episode of the Superfriends ever put on televsion, that's what. How much will your face explode from this? Let me give you an example: This one episode will encompass four, possibly even five, posts over the next several days, with each post capturing the pure essence of each segment of the episode. Dumbness has a new name. And it's name...is the Superfriends.

You've been warned.

Not for the Faint of Heart...or Brain

Once upon a time, when the world was more innocent, when the threat of nuclear annhiliation was prominent, when breakfast cereals were made of 98% sugar and 2% corn syrup, the Superfriends were always there to make sure that kids in the 80s stayed so confused that there was the possibility that their tiny little brains would blow up in their skulls. So, let's harken back to a time when polyester ruled, when afros were big, and Saturday morning cartoons made absolutely no freaking sense as we shatter your will to live with:

Superfriends: The Legendary Superpowers Show Presents: Island of the Dinasoids!

It makes my heart weep when I see the title of a show running longer than most novels nowadays.

Anyway, the episode starts with Batman's $40 million Batplane crashing down on an island without any outside interference because, as you well know, Alfred don't know jack about jet propulsion. In the Batplane with Batman is Professor Stein, the nerdy half of Firestorm. Just wait, it gets better. Carrying with him is a machine called the Omnicaster, a device that would allow anyone with, oh, I don't know, a death ray or a sonic disruptor or Pat Boone records to rain down fiery destruction to the entire planet through the use of Satellite Beams! This device was only made for good, mind you, which is why it's not going to be used like that today. Bats and Stein find a fortress (!) in the middle of the jungle (!!) where a Doctor is using a Genetto Beam (!!!) to turn animals into dinosaurs (wait, what?). The good Doctor Korwin, being not at all crazy as a bat-shit salad, shows them how the device works, eyeballs the Omincaster! and shows Batman and Professor Stein to two rooms that they can use. The crazy part of this hasn't even happened yet.

Meanwhile, Ronald Raymond, the beefcake portion of Firestorm, starts to wonder what in the hell is taking two people in a supersonic bat-shaped jet so damn long to get back to the Hall of Justice. He talks Wonder Woman, Robin and Apache Chief into helping him look for them. Remember, this is in the 80s, so this apparently wasn't a ploy to stay in close proximity to a 6' tall Amazon with blue eyes and perky...perkiness for several hours. Nope. Not at all. The quartet hop in the Invisible Jet (so named because nothing about four people in a sitting position traveling at Mach 2 would cause suspicion) to find out where Batman and Stein have run off to. They come across the island, land and are taken immediately into the fortress where they find out that Batty and Steiny are now dinosaur/human hybrids called Dinasoids. Turns out that wacky Dr. Korwin is a Dinasoid himself, having walked into the path of the Genetto Beam when it was in the process of turning a rhino into a triceratops. Because nothing says lab safety like walking in front of a glowing beam shooting out of a box toward a creature with the intent purpose of changing its molecular makeup to something that got killed by a meteor 65,000,000 years ago. Crazy science, I tell ya.

While all this is going on, Apache Chief has been wandering around outside to look for clues, in an apparent case of not realizing that he's not a detective, or, to put a finer point on it, none too bright. He finds the Doctor's former assistant, who relays the backstory of Korwin going old-school. Chief then decides that the rest of the gang are in trouble (mainly because he's not there, therefore they couldn't button their pants without help), grows to 40 feet tall and sets off to rescue a master detective, an Amazon warrior, two men who merge to create a being that can alter the basic building blocks of matter itself, and a kid in green speedos with a cape. Why? Because he can grow 40 feet tall, and they were all about the quota, son. All about the quota.

Anyway, back to the plot. Apache Chief busts in like a 40 foot tall Native American hellbent on busting into something, finds what's happened to everyone, and in a plothole so large that even a man screaming Inekchok couldn't wedge through, the Doctor's assistant finds a way to reverse the polarity of the Genetto Beam when it's about to be hooked up to the Omnicaster! to turn the entire world's population into a devolved race of dinosaur/human hybrids as dumb as the Superfriends. The assistant changes the Superfriends back into normal-ish human beings, changes the Doctor back into a stark-raving lunatic and evolves the dinosaur population back into more mundane instruments of death and destruction, otherwise known as nature. Korwin learns a lesson about messing with Darwin, the Superfriends learn a lesson about just leaving people where their expensive toys crash-land, and Batman learns that he needs a better flight crew if he's going to be taking the Batplane out for a joyride. Superman, it's rumored, refused to be in this episode because the writers owed him big-time for making him appear in The Planet of Oz, considered by my 3 year old son to be completely unwatchable. And if that doesn't tell you something about humanity, then nothing will...