Kid Super Power Hour, or Hero High, was awful, make no doubt about that.
My brother liked Space Sentinels more than I did, so I watched along, but I remember there just wasn't a lot of delivery to that show, a lot of emptiness to the episodes.
As it is, he doesn't even recall the show now, even after I've sent him pictures.
I have no idea what clicked with me over Hero High, as I was also older by then. Perhaps it was real life people dressed as heroes, campy as they were, and I've also always liked the idea of half-real life, half-animated depictions, whether they were merged or not, like Roger Rabbit, or just depicted separately, as Hero High did.
Upon getting the dvd in the past year or so, I was surprised to learn the live actors did their cartoon voices, which I thought they did not do.
And I now hear it was supposed to be superhero Archies, which fell thru, and I've always liked the ARchie depictions, so subconsciously that may have contributed to my teen appeal.
As well as it may have been the cartoon strike at the time that caused me to watch Hero High, with a minimum of any new cartoons out there.
It's also surprising to me how none of the cast went on into anything else. They all virtually vanished, especially the leads, who I thought could have done other things.
But then so did Holly from Land of the Lost.
I've seen two cartoon episodes, one Space Sentinels, the other Plastic Man, which gave alien portrayals I always remembered, but couldn't recall what show they came from.
On Space Sentinels, the bald alien woman wanted gold for fuel on her planet. Turned out she was a phony, but a robot went berserk or something. When she took off the bald mask, I always thought she looked like Barbara Rhoades.
The one in Plastic Man, the aliens said something about diamonds growing on trees on their homeworld.
I always remembered these alien lines, but couldn't remember which cartoon they came from. Glad to have pinpointed them now.
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grendelkhan
9 years ago
The Shazam cartoons, from the Kid Power Hour, were, mostly, pretty good. they captured the flavor of the better comic book stories (the 70s Shazam commics were very hit and miss and the best issues were often reprints of old Fawcett stories). They also had better writers, as Paul Dini(of Batman TAS fame) had an early story on there.The Hero High cartoons were fairly forgettable, with little in the way of plot. The live action stuff tended to have more personality.
I first heard about the Archie connection in Darrel McNeil and Michael Swanigan's book, Animation by Filmation. It talked about how Filmation pitched the idea to Archie, with whom they had had a long relationship (back to 1968, for The Archie Show); but, the company turned them down (no idea why; it's not like they had other cartoons out there). It probably would have been better if they had used the Archie characters, though the parallels to the alterations are pretty obvious.
Young Sentinels/Space Sentinels was a great premise and I loved the cartoons as a kid; but, there were really only a handful of really memorable stories, with Morpheus being the best of the lot. I still recall when they changed the title card to the Space Sentinels; and, even then, it was obviously to further cash in on Star Wars.
Fortunately, Ah keep mah feathers numbered for just such an emergency!
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