In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, find out whether a classic episode of Super Friends was a backdoor pilot for a new Batman cartoon show.
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and twenty-eighth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.
NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I’ll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!
COMIC LEGEND:
The Super Friends episode, “The Fear,” was a backdoor pilot for Batman animated TV show.
STATUS:
Technically False, but Very Close to Being True
While Batman’s origin was first revealed in Detective Comics #33, I am personally partial to Batman #1’s version, because they change the first panel so that it is not a teaser for the main story from Detective Comics #33. It always kind of weirds me out that Batman’s first origin has a big panel for an unrelated story at the start of the page…
It remains probably the greatest origin in superhero comic book history…
And the amazing thing is that the origin was never shown outside of the comic books until September 1985!!!
That is when the Super Powers: Galactic Guardians (the new name for the final season of the Super Friends animated series, designed to tie in with the Super Powers line of action figures) episode, “The Fear” debuted on September 28th, where Batman reveals to Robin and Wonder Woman his origin for the first time…
It’s pretty heavy duty stuff for the Super Friends, which has led people (including reader Mike G., who wrote in with the suggestion) to believe that it was a backdoor pilot for a new Batman animated series.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, a backdoor pilot is when an episode of a TV series is really secretly a pilot for a whole OTHER series that would spinoff from the main series (the theory being that if you disguise it as a regular episode of a popular series, people will be more likely to watch it and then hopefully get invested in the new character/situation that you introduce in the episode). I have a whole feature spotlighting backdoor pilots. “The Fear,” which was written by the brilliant animated writer, Alan Burnett (who was later part a key part of Batman: The Animated Series in the early 1990s as a writer and producer and later co-created both The New Batman Adventures and Batman Beyond), sure FEELS like it is meant as a pilot for a new TV series, as it is so much darker than a typical Super Powers episode and it specifically spotlights just one character, Batman.
The truth is, though, that it was not intended as a backdoor pilot, but that’s only because it had already been shut down as a backdoor pilot before the episode was animated. It was originally WRITTEN as a backdoor pilot, but Hanna-Barbera turned it down, so it was rewritten to make it more of a Super Powers episode, with Vicki Vale’s lines being rewritten for Wonder Woman.
My buddy John Trumbull had the details in his amazing oral history of Batman: The Animated Series in TwoMorrows’ Back Issue #99. However, while it wasn’t technically a backdoor pilot, it ultimately sort of worked that way, as it proved that you COULD do a dark Batman story for kid’s television and that was a key part of making it clear that Batman: The Animated Series could work seven years later.
Thanks to John Trumbull and Alan Burnett for the information!
CHECK OUT A MOVIE LEGENDS REVEALED!
In the latest Movie Legends Revealed – Was John Wayne seriously offered the role of Dirty Harry in Dirty Harry before Clint Eastwood ended up with the role?
MORE LEGENDS STUFF!
OK, that’s it for this installment!
Thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don’t even actually anymore, but I used it for years and you still see it when you see my old columns, so it’s fair enough to still thank him, I think.
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is [email protected]. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well! Also, if you have a correction or a comment, feel free to also e-mail me. CBR sometimes e-mails me with e-mails they get about CBLR and that’s fair enough, but the quickest way to get a correction through is to just e-mail me directly, honest. I don’t mind corrections. Always best to get things accurate!
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