Batman and Robin on the SuperFriends

A few weeks ago, I saw a few episodes of the first season SuperFriends on the Boomerang Channel. It was interesting to see how very differently Batman and Robin had been portrayed back then. Neither one of them ever hit anyone, in keeping with the sanitized standards of the seventies. Nevertheless, they were written in a much more appealing way than in subsequent SuperFriends incarnations.

In most of the subsequent seasons, Batman and Robin would always win battles by swinging from one place to another and wielding whatever outlandish Bat-paraphernalia happened to be convenient. (An umbrella in your utility belt, Robin? Really?) Not so in the first season. The gadgetry was kept to a minimum. Instead of using some elaborate Bat-pulley mechanism to traverse some ski lift cables, for example, they simply slid down using their batarangs.

And they were written so as to focus on their intellect rather than their gadgetry. That was great.