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Thursday, April 17, 2008

Super Powers VHS Ad - 1985

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Warner Bros. Home Video must have sold approximately seventeen billion VHS cassettes of these 1960's Filmation cartoons, because you can still find them in plentiful supply on sale eBay. I even saw them on sale in a big box store, who unbelievably still bothered to carry any sort of VHS stock as recently as a year or two ago.

This ad (which ran in lots of DCs at the time) is colorful and dynamic, but of course that's what you get when you use Jose Luis Garcia Lopez stock art.

Having someone this good draw your stable of characters tends to bring the "lesser" characters up a notch, because everyone looks so cool. Hence, Aquaman doesn't seem out of place with Globally Recognized Icons Superman and Batman. Superboy's presence amid his future self, to the non-comic book fan, just seems odd.

Hard to remember a time when a VHS tape cost twenty-five bucks, isn't it?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Check this out
Dreamworks options rights to 5 part comic series Atlantis Rising

According to the Hollywood reporter, Dreamworks has procured the film rights to Atlantis Rising, a cool looking 5 part comic series by Platinum Studios about an epic clash between us puny human mortals and an ancient civilization of underwater hot heads. The live action film will be produced by Star Trek co-writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, who are making quiet a name for themselves lately working on Transformers 2 as well as with LOST co-creator J.J. Abrams to executive-produce Fox's two hour SF drama pilot Fringe.

Anonymous said...

I had the Aquaman and Batman tapes of these. I still have Aquaman, but I don't know what happened to Batman. You should feature the tape itself, too, Rob. It had cool Lopez art and a groovy color scheme. It just LOOKS real good, besides the fact that the episodes are fun. I to this day still sometimes find myself humming the opening horn riff that you hear over the title credits.

Anonymous said...

I used to rent these all the time in the late 80s since I couldn't swing the high price tag. They had them in Suncoast for years and years, still at around 20 bucks. I never bought them, but was tempted.

Now if only WB would release the rest of the Filmation DC toons to DVD.

Chris

Hatter J said...

I bought the Aquaman tape a few years back for $2 at Big Lots or someplace like that. After watching the mashed up episodes on Cartoon Network featuring some of these cartoons, I just had to buy it. Usually when I replace VHS with DVD, I donate it or sell it off. I just didn't have the heart this time. The JLGL art alone made it a keeper, which was one thing that saddened me about the DVD release of the series. While I I felt that the new artwork was good, it was still not as good as it could have been.

Plaidstallions said...

Bought a copy of this for my neighbour kids birthday (where he got the Superfriends Aquaman set) at Wal-Mart two years back for $0.99!

rob! said...

russell-

i did post about the tape itself, way back in the early days of the shrine:

http://aquamanshrine.blogspot.com/2006/11/super-powers-vhs-tape-1984.html

...sometimes i think i should revisit some of the stuff i posted in the early weeks of the shrine because that was long before most people knew the blog existed. :)

and hatter, i agree, the DVD art should've been the JLGL stuff, at least partly.


when i worked at a video store, every so often i would look these up in the inventory, and be amazed they were still not discontinued (meaning we could still order copies from the manufacturer), even though most kids tapes had been long ago.