Super Duped

 I started in the other day about Super Friends. When you start with Superman, that makes some pretty obvious sense. Wonder Woman? Sure. She's got all that strength and agility and stuff. Batman and Robin got to come along because, well they were super well-funded. They were pretty solidly in the gadget corner. Aquaman? He could talk to fish. And hold his breath for a real long time. So what I'm suggesting here is that there is a distinct drop-off in super-ness after Supes and the Amazonian princess. 

I believe it was someone in marketing who must have felt that adding Wendy and Marvin along with their Wonder Dog. None of these individuals had any special abilities to speak of, but they did let Marvin and his mutt wear matching green capes. I'm sure this was an effort to give us kids someone to "relate to." Yes, marketing director,  we kids are tuning into your Saturday morning cartoon featuring super humans to keep track of the exploits of a couple of a couple of teenaged hangers-on and their pet. Wonder Dog, as in "I wonder why they think a dog was necessary," was probably stuck in there because of the runaway success of Scooby-Doo. This little trio was primarily on the scene to be rescued by their super-patient custodians, without the perks of being made a ward like Dick Grayson. The only logical conclusion is that the title "Super Friends" only applies to that special bond between those with special abilities and those who they felt oddly compelled to put up with for extended periods of time. 

When ABC decided to reboot the Super Friends after a three year hiatus, Wendy and Marvin were gone, as was Wonder Dog. In their place were the Wonder Twins, Zan and Jayna. And just to keep their toe in the animal sidekick water, we got their pet monkey, Gleek. The Wonder Twins not only stepped into the game in matching purple unitards, but Gleek had his own flashy costume. With a cape. Gleek had no special abilities of his own, but he was blue. Zan and Jayna could turn into water in any state, and any animal respectively. It was up to the writers to determine just how useful these talents were in battling crime. If the rest of the Friends De La Super were unavailable, The Wonder Twins could cause enough commotion to discourage your second-tier supervillain. Their powers were scaled back probably by the same executive that brought us Wendy and Marvin, in order to keep them from somehow overshadowing those legitimately in preemptively Super. 

Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman: They have all had their own big screen iterations. Because Wendy, Marvin, Wonder Dog and even those Twins of Wonder were not Super enough to make the leap. It would be another ten years before someone in marketing figured out you just needed to take the Super out of it, and thus Chandler, Monica, Rachel, Ross, Joey and Phoebe were born.