In the 1960s Filmation studios produced the Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure. An hour is an awful lot of time to fill so the studio took some of the friends of the daring duo who starred in the show and made some short adventures of each of them.
From 1962 till 1989 Filmation studios would have a steady slate of animated adventures pouring out of it. From 1967-1968 CBS would air the Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure. To spice some of it up some filler was needed between the adventures of the Man of Steel and the Man of Eel.
Filmation was commissioned to produce a series of seven-minute cartoons featuring some other DC Comics superheroes. So the Atom, The Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Justice League of America, and the Teen Titans would spring to the screen to the delight of kids slurping cereal and sitting in from of the tube.
Again to the delight of those kids at heart the in-between adventures have been collected together so that they can relive the nostalgia of yesteryear. Now quality has come a long way than when these were aired so they do seem somewhat more primitive than the animation that we see today, but they do have a charm all their own.
As kids you probably didn’t care and as an adult you may laugh at how they reuse some stock footage over and over again.
Disc one features The Atom (Invasion of the Beetle-Men, The Plant Master, and The House of Doom), The Flash (The Chemo-Creature, Take a Giant Step, To Catch a Blue Bolt), and Green Lantern (Evil is as Evil Does, The Vanishing World, and Sirena, Empress of Evil).
Disc two has the adventures of Hawkman (Peril from Pluto, A Visit to Venus, and The Twenty-Third Dimension), Justice League of America (Between Two Armies, Target Earth, and Bad Day on Black Mountain), and Teen Titans (The Monster Machine, The Space Beast Round-up, and Operation: Rescue).
All of the cartoons are presented in fullscreen. Special features only include one thing, but it’s well worth the price of admission. The 40 minute “Animation Maverick: The Lou Scheimer Story” looks at the found of Filmation and provides a history of the company. There are also some trailers for other Warner Brothers animated product.
The cartoons may not have aged particularly well, but it will bring back memories of Saturday morning, though this collection only total about 2 hours thanks to the brevity of each adventure. For the adult, there’s the fascinating documentary on the studio and its found. Really it’s the best of both worlds.
DC Super Heroes: The Filmation Adventures is now available at Amazon . As of yet, there is not a release date for the UK. Visit the DVD database for more information.
Your Talkback on this Story