Just let Grundy Lead the Legion

Okay, so once again I made what was probably a huge mistake and I watched one of the old Superfriends episodes. (Yes, I am extremely addicted to the Boomerang network.) Now, this particular episode was titled "The World's Deadliest Game," and the plot was about as stupid as one might guess.

The episode begins with a scene from within the Legion of Doom, and what were all of these supervillains doing? If you guessed plotting the destruction of the Superfriends, then give yourself a standing ovation. Yes, I said give yourself a standing ovation and not a mere pat on the back. That was a tough question to answer.

Now Solomon Grundy was the first person to speak, blabbering something completely nonsensical. Truly if you are the Legion of Doom, at what point do you realize that it makes absolutely no sense to have an idiot zombie at your evil planning meetings? After Grundy said whatever it is that he said, and thankfully it seemed that most if not all of the Legion of Doom acted as if Grundy did not even say anything, Brainiac came up with a simply brilliant plan. He (or it, since Brainiac is a computer after all) noticed that Wonder Woman, Hawkman, and Black Vulcan were in space helping to repair a space station. Brainiac decided that he would use his cloaking device to make the Earth seem to disappear from those three Superfriends. At this point, the Toy Man chimed in and said they would then send some sort of distress signal that would lead the three to think that the Earth was light-years away, causing the Superfriends to journey to a planet covered with Toy Man's toys. And then after this, it was the Riddler's turn to tell everyone that he would use a series of riddles to lead the other Superfriends "out of the universe" where their three comrades were located. It was a brilliant plan, and it almost worked because I've noticed that the Superfriends somehow collectively start out every episode even stupider than the Legion of Doom, but seem to have a very steep learning curve that takes roughly fifteen minutes to traverse.

So Wonder Woman, Hawkman, and Black Vulcan do get very confused when the Earth disappears and they get tricked into pursuing the false distress signal light-years away. And when they get out to the place from where the signal is emanating, wouldn't you guess it, they get sucked into a black hole. I'm going to try to keep the physics talk to a minimum here, and I'll allow for the Superfriends to actually survive this fall into the black hole. However, once again, as I have pointed out before about some of these Superfriends type shows, there are some inconsistencies that I think are horrendous.

First of all, I guess that I'll allow for the possibility that Black Vulcan can fly faster than the speed of light because otherwise the Legion of Doom would have had to wait longer than the length of time that the Superfriends aired to even see if this stupid plan was going to work considering that this fake distress signal was coming from light-years away. Once inside the black hole and on the planet of toys, Black Vulcan noted that even he wasn't able to escape the black hole's pull flying at full speed. Okay, I'll go along with this, I guess. Black Vulcan can fly faster than the speed of light, but just not fast enough to escape the black hole. I guess this is possible in theory. (Actually it isn't possible in theory to fly faster than the speed of light, but I suppose it is possible in Superfriends theory.) However, what is truly troubling is that while these Superfriends are being pestered by Toy Man's toys, Toy Man is able to monitor what is transpiring on the planet and control the toys remotely from Earth. Let me say that again. He is able see things precisely as they are happening light-years away, hear exactly what the Superfriends are saying, and provide near instantaneous remote controls to the toys. I'm sorry, but this is absolutely ludicrous. To me you cannot force Black Vulcan to be kind of, sort of bound by the laws of physics, but then allow Toy Man's planning to more egregiously violate those laws. (By the way, how did Toy Man even set up his planet of toys in the first place? And when did he set up this planet?)

Okay, so I'll skip most of Riddler nonsense, but in short, the rest of the Superfriends find themselves light-years away in outer space very near to the black hole. Superman and Green Lantern realize that they are the only ones powerful enough to venture into the black hole to save the others. This should have been bad news for the rest of the Superfriends not venturing into the black hole since Green Lantern was using his power ring to transport them through space and protect them from the vacuum, but whatever I guess... So Superman and Green Lantern fly into the black hole, they do some sort of trick where they combine powers (meaning that there is some sort of creepy fusing of the two), and then the Superman/Green Lantern super super being flies out of the black hole, telling the other three to wait three seconds before following him/them out. I'm not sure why they were told to wait three seconds to follow Green Superman Lantern out of the black hole. It makes little sense, and besides, they could have just as easily given this new Superman/Green Lantern fused being the power to just teleport Wonder Woman, Hawkman, and Black Vulcan into the Legion of Doom headquarters, but I guess that would have seemed implausible. Once everyone is outside the black hole, somehow the black hole seems to just explode or dematerialize.

Then the Superfriends all fly back to Earth where they stop the Legion of Doom as they were in the process of collecting all of the world's money from the terrified populace. My question is this, if you are an overtly evil organization like the Legion of Doom, why do you even need money for anything? Are you going to acquire this money and then use it to pay for the supplies you might need to carry out your evil schemes? Or will you just go and steal the supplies you need for your evil schemes?

Wow, cartoon writers had tremendous talent back in those days!