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Rating: Country: USA Release Date: August 12, 2008 Distributor: Warner Home Video Related Sites: · Read The-Trades exclusive interview with Lou Scheimer! Grade: B

Before Justice League, before even Super Friends, there existed a handful of animated short adventures from Filmation, featuring not only the Justice League of America, but also their individual members in solo adventures. While not a complete collection of the DC Comics owned cartoons (Superman and Aquaman's adventures are currently available in separate collections, and one hopes that Superboy as well as the Batman and Robin adventures are also forthcoming), this set does include the rarer episodes that fans have up to now been forced to view through bad videotaped copies or uploaded YouTube clips.

The size-changing Atom kicks things off with three power-packed adventures, followed by a trio of stories starring the Flash (who is joined in two of the three by his teen sidekick, Kid Flash). The Atom battles beetles from space and a master of plant life (although not the Floronic Man whom he faced in the comics), while Flash fights off a giant ant, a robot, and a super-speeding alien named Blue Bolt.

Closing out the first disc is a set of three Green Lantern adventures, notable in that they include the (caucasian) Guardians of the Universe on Oa, while Green Lantern's pal Thomas Kalmaku was replaced by a blue-skinned teen from Venus named Kyro. The Green Lantern adventures are also notable because they have the only episode of the set to feature an established villain -- Evil Star.

The second disc of the set introduces Hawkman as a scientist (not an archeologist) who flies in his Hawkship, his only companion being a hawk who follows his commands. The bad guys are always aliens, with perhaps the most interesting being a pair of pranksters exiled from Jupiter (yes, every planet in the solar system is inhabited in the DC/Filmation world) who send Hawkman into the 23rd Dimension.

Animated Heroes. The Justice League (top) and Teen Titans (bottom) star in these animated shorts from Filmation.

Atom, Flash, Green Lantern and Hawkman are then joined by Aquaman and Superman for team adventures as the Justice League of America. The writers were careful to give each character a chance to use his abilities in the course of righting each wrong, and for the most part all the abilities matched up with what viewers had seen in the comics (although Atom did tend to appear to have Superman-like powers when he was smaller, seeming to sometimes fly and certainly burrow like the Man of Steel). Each of the JLA adventures involved fending off alien attacks that always seemed to have Earth in their sights -- a prime piece of real estate is our little blue marble, it seems.

Capping off the adventures is the set I'd been looking forward to seeing again: the Teen Titans. Featuring Wonder Girl, Speedy, Aqualad, and Kid Flash (with a redesigned red and yellow costume and jet black hair), and noticably missing Robin the Boy Wonder, the Teen Titans fought off robots, space creatures, and pterodactyls in the course of their day.

Okay, so perhaps the stories aren't as intricate and involved as some of the animated shows of today. But the villains and scenarios do serve as a portal into the mindset of the time. Human villains tended to wear brown military-style uniforms, evoking the Communist army, and the crazy aliens and rocketships -- all bent on attacking nuclear facilities, it seemed -- reflected the American space race while remaining keenly aware of the atomic threat we all feared. These stories, narrated by Ted Knight, and written by comics notables like George Kashdan and Bob Haney, deserve to be preserved and treasured, even if they lack the sophistication and artistry of their descendants.

The second disc also includes a bonus feature, "Animation Maverick: The Lou Scheimer Story," a forty-minute biography on the man who founded Filmation. Lou, his daughter Erika Scheimer, and friends Andy Mangels, Hal Sutherland, Tom Tataranowicz, and others, tell Lou's story from birth forward, telling the story of the founding and ultimate demise of Filmation along the way.

On a weird note, whomever designed the main and sub menus for these discs seems to have confused Hawkman with Birdman, who inexplicably appears alongside the Atom, Flash, and Wonder Girl.

Audio on these discs can be set to English or Portuguese, with optional subtitles available in both languages.