I don’t know why I started thinking about this or why I am bothering to post anything about it but I started thinking (again) about the distribution of powers of the Super Friends [for the purposes here, I will focus on Challenge of the Super Friends.
I remember noticing this as a kid, that the powers of members of the Justice League were comparable to the powers of members of the Legion of Doom (seriously, who decides that their headquarters needs to be a big, flying, Darth Vader helmet). Now, I think “how convenient.” The most egregious of these, to my mind, is the paired powers of Apache Chief and Giganta (who also have the most amazingly descriptive names). The Justice League has a member who can get HUGE, so obvious there must a villain with the same power; otherwise Apache Chief would just get HUGE and win every fight (then a tear would roll down his face as he would lament the litter that was now covering his land). Though, to be precise it was Apache Chief who was added in order to balance Giganta.
But seriously, there are others: Aquaman and Black Manta (who wore his bubble helmet even under water and whose back story in comics is seriously messed up) both lived in the realm of water (imagine me saying “water” with a deep, meaningful voice). Green Lantern had Sinestro (who really should have won more often considering that the yellow ring had no weakness unlike the green ring). Superman has Bizarro. So far these have all been comparable powers. Then you’ve got The Flash and Captain Cold, who have reciprocal powers. You’re getting my point.
The thing is, there are tons of them that don’t fit into this category. Toyman, Brainiac, Lex Luther, The Riddler, The Scarecrow, Solomon Grundy, Gorilla Grod, and Cheetah.
What’s weird is, if you look at it, the villains are generally speaking more intelligent than the heroes, they just overreach more often. Like, Gorilla Grow, Toyman, Brainiac, Lex Luther, and the Riddler are all brilliant. Most of the heroes are born into their powers or come into them through some other mechanism. Really, only Batman lives by his wits.
I suspect that this discussion has serious flaws in it. And, I suspect that folks who are more familiar with the show have much more to add to this account. Mainly, this is just a distraction.
Um. How does the Flash’s speed powers match up with Captain Cold’s freeze-gun powers? And . . . what’s your point, exactly? I agree that far too often the creators lapse into the “easy” option by creating inherent opposites–most notable with Sinestro, who has recently been revisited in great form, with the dichotomy actually heightened: now there’s a Corps of evil fear-inducing yellow-ring wearers to battle the good fearless green-ring wearing Corps.
Apache Chief and Giganta were, to my recollection, made expressly for the cartoon. And I recall Grant Morrison writing to pretty hilarious effect that he could have taken the easy way out with his vegetarian Animal Man character in the 90’s by having him battle some sort of carnivore (a cop-out he avoided).
But most of these characters were simply imported from the comics. A “negative” image of a protagonist is always a pretty standard storytelling device, from Darth Vader (who is almost literally the evil Luke Skywalker) to Captain America’s Nazi enemy the Red Skull.
C’mon man! Don’t you remember all the times that Captain Freeze stopped the Flash dead in his tracks? The immobility of cold is an obvious counter-point to the speed and heat of the Flash.
About Giganta; I remember in the cartoon (in some flashback episode) that Apache Chief got his powers as part of some ritual but, unbeknownst to him Giganta witnessed the event and coveted his power. She stole it. However, when I looked this stuff up today, it turns out that she is a traditional nemesis of Wonder Woman (starting way back in 1944), which is why I ended up reversing the causal relationship.
My point, before I talked myself out of it, was to bag on the balance of powers: everybody paired up. Then after looking at the collection, it became clear that only some groups were paired up and that, in reality, most of those bad guys are enemies of the same few individuals (Superman, Batman, and the Flash), which is probably owed to the long history of each of those comics. But, then I noticed that the bad guys were just generically smarter than the good guys, and that it was their greed, not being dumb, that got in the way of their victories.
By this point I had ceased to have a point altogether. What? A guy can’t just talk about something?
Solomon Grundy, by the way, is a nemesis of Green Lantern. Alan Scott Green lantern, which makes sense because of the most absurd weakness in comic history (note the hyperbole): wood (Grundy, having been reanimated after floating in a swamp for 50 years was made up, in large part, of wood).
I have decided, by the way, that almost every single comic character sounds way the hell cooler when you give their life history as a 3 paragraph synopsis. Check out “Super Friends” on wikipedia, the only characters that sound dumb are the ones created by Hanna-Barbara (Black Vulcan, Apache Chief, Samurai. note: none of the villains seem to have been created for the show).