This episode kicks off with "The Monster of Dr. Droid", featuring Superman and Wonder Woman, featuring your typical well-meaning but-horribly-naive scientist who wants to bring world peace:
Aquaman gets to headline the De-Coder feature:
The Super Friends get the call, and Aquaman offers to handle it ("A giant octopus should be no problem for the King of the Sea!", offers Batman, constructively), but its a little tougher a problem than it at first seems:
With the Super Friends now searching for him, the aliens drag Aquaman to their lost city, and drop him in the middle of a giant arena, led by their king, named Tyrannus. Once the paralyzing ray wears off, Aquaman frees himself:
The Super Friends, using Aquaman's communication device, find where he is and head there. The Wonder Twins, thinking only they know where Aquaman is, head there, too, but the sub containing the aliens that kidnapped Aquaman zaps them all with the same paralyzing ray, and are brought to Oceana.
As amusement for Oceana's king and its people, they are compelled to fight each other! But Superman manages to melt the ray, freeing themselves of its control.
But knowing they could re-paralyzed by the portable ray guns each of the aliens are carrying, they fake a fight, giving themselves time to figure out what to do:
Aquaman's battle--held inside a giant water tank--with Serpentine grows so fierce that the tank is cracked, causing the monster to break free and attack anyone in sight, including the citizens of Oceana!
It goes after the king, but the Super Friends stop it, and finally subdue the creature.
The Super Friends school the citizens of Oceana for letting King Tyrannus cause all this destruction. One of the aliens says the coliseum, now destroyed, will not be rebuilt, but its wreckage will stand as a monument, to "Remind us of the evil ruler who gave us monsters and games, instead of freedom" (thus ending the ruling ambitions of King Tyrannus' brother Jeb).
Next, Superman then teaches us how to make a telescope out of household items. Then, the team-up segment stars Batman and...The Atom!:
Finally, Wonder Woman teaches us about always having important phone numbers--like the police and fire departments--on hand in case of an emergency.
...and so ends another fun episode of The All-New Super Friends Hour!
Even though Aquaman pretty much just appears in the group segment, he gets a lion-share of the action, and the setting is almost entirely underwater. For my money, I can never get enough of Aquaman fighting giant sea-monsters.
This episode's Aqua-Content: High
5 comments:
I just watched this one last month (I got the set out of the library) and thought it had a pleasantly surprising amount of Aquaman. I have to wonder, though, why the Sea King couldn't just tell that octopus to buzz off, instead of getting other sea creatures to help.
...maybe if he'd had a knife!
Also, I desperately wanted to make that spyglass when I was a kid, but all my mom's spools still had thread on them and she said "No dice".
Sounds like a cool episode. That is one crazy-looking fish up there with Aquaman in the De-Coder segment, it looks like half-Sturgeon and half-Planarian worm.
Who knows what weird and fantastic denizens populate the dark reaches of the deep?
Aquaman knows!
Andy, you're kidding, right? It's a dolphin he's playing "matador" with. :-)
I need to break out this disc and watch this episode again. It sounds cool. Plus I'm a sucker for a good Atom story. Really, I'm a sucker for any character who didn't actually make it on Challenge of the Super Friends.
I remember seeing this when it first aired in '77. Typical fare of the period. Now, if they could remake this in the here & now...!
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