6 Super Friends Villains That Didn't Give a @#%*

Between Green Lantern, Superman, The Flash, and Batman, it was tough to picture any villain that could give the Super Friends trouble. Asking a cartoon writer to come up with a reasonable threat for them was a challenging, almost pointless endeavor. Understandably, this is why so many of them went insane. It's also why the Super Friends writers invented a technique many of us still use today: totally not giving a shit. And here are their villainous creations who gave the least. Oh, and here are the rules to The Super Friends Drinking Game if you're looking to get tore up while you enjoy cartoons.

#6. Dr. Hirem Gulliver

In the '70s and '80s, you'd find most superheroes trapped in spider webs or flying toy airplanes because every villain they ever faced invented the shrink ray. Batman and Robin have spent more time in jars than they have in healthy relationships. However, in the episode Gulliver's Gigantic Goof, they faced an enemy trying to use his shrink ray "for good." It was a common theme in the first season of the show to have villains who were less terrorist and more retarded scientist. The first season also featured Marvin, Wendy and Wonderdog-- two children and a dog whose entire contribution to the team can be summed up here:

Here's the plot: Gulliver and his unexplainedly intelligent cat Igor started shrinking the world's people, and when the Super Friends tried to stop him, he shrank them too. He even got his cat involved:

Oh, the other thing about the first season of Super Friends is that it was an hour long. Which meant that in this episode, the stars of the show spent 40 fucking minutes trapped in pickle jars and listening to a madman explain how a planet of two inch people would solve our food shortages and make our beaches less crowded. He wasn't completely batshit, though. He mentioned how he'd leave a few people regular size to drive tractors or whatever. What's weird is that the man who invented the world's 1,328th shrink ray didn't consider all the problems being two inches tall would cause. For example, chili is now served like the world's worst hot tub. A broken lock on a hamster cage is an extinction level event. And everyone's 14 inch dildo now just looks ridiculous.

And hear me out-- if wrapping a blanket around a baby is a good idea then WE MUST PLACE ALL BABIES IN THE EARTH'S MOLTEN CORE!!!

Batman and Robin flew a paper airplane into the cat's head that was, no bullshit, the hardest impact against a super villain in the entire history of the show. Meanwhile, Aquaman sat around wishing he wasn't in a dry, fishless basement and all of these plans somehow came together to zap Gulliver with his own ray and help him see that shrinking people against their will is wrong. At first I thought this might be some preachy anti-American propaganda about not imposing your superior values onto others. However, as Superman went on and on and on about it, it became clear that there was no allegory or metaphor. The lesson being taught to children here really was that you should never shrink anyone. And more importantly, you should never get a job writing cartoons when your main hobbies are recreational drugs and head injuries.

#5. The Moon Man

The episode was called Man in the Moon, but right off the bat they hit you with a huge plot twist:

The only thing greater than the opening of this cartoon is that the shrieking creature was obviously sitting there waiting to hatch at the exact moment a cosmonaut realized he was standing on an egg.

It's understandable that this children's cartoon didn't deal much with the catastrophic results of a monster ripping its way out of a moon right next to our planet. I give them the artistic license to ignore that. Watching millions die under tidal waves and lunar debris would be depressing and hard to draw. Then again, they might have no idea what planets and stars are. For instance, when the moon monster spits Superman into the sun and he lays there complaining about how he's being turned into hydrogen... that's something you'd write after you had to look up "the sun" in a dictionary. "I've got to resist 28 percent of me becoming helium, and fast!"

Look, we get that everyone on the team who isn't you is a little bit pointless, Superman, but when you're being attacked by something big and you're standing next to the guy whose power is exactly that, shouting "THIS IS A JOB FOR SUPERMAN!" is a lot like saying, "You're only here for the Native American employee tax incentives!"

I don't think they did, actually. All they did was blindfold it and throw it back into the Moon, which is what it ripped in half during its very first second of being alive. And more importantly, we still haven't dealt with the issue of the moon being an egg. W-what laid it!? And more importantly than that, why would the only man who can grow to incredible height also be the only one in an outfit that doesn't cover his balls and taint?

#4. The Termites From Venus

Talking, awesome, alien termites are blasted to Earth from a volcano on Venus and within four minutes, every building on the planet has been devoured. The animators didn't draw any actual people being eaten the termites, but it'd be pretty stupid to assume the death count was anything less than hundreds of millions. Superman, Samurai, Batman and Robin do the only thing that makes sense-- they fly to a remote area of the world and discuss how fucked they are. Through sheer dumb luck, they fall into a pit, encounter the leader of the space termites, and the rest of the cartoon is spent running from him. I'm not a psychologist, but was this script shrieked at rescue workers while a writer was being eaten alive by termites?

"Wait a second, Batman. If this bat insect repellent is useless against insects, why have we been carrying tubes of it around in our body cavities? Batman? I deserve an answer, Batman."

Early in the episode, Superman wadded up a few million termites and threw them into space, but decided it was pointless since they were multiplying faster than he could toss. Granted, that might be because touching a swarm of insects that can curse at you in English probably gets really gross really fast. Luckily, at the end of the episode, Samurai turned into a tornado and threw a bunch of the termites into space while everyone joked. That ought to do it, right? No! It won't! Everyone's dead! Worse than dead! They have space termites wrapped around their remains and you just flung them into the cosmic void!