For large swaths of television history, superhero content was tragically thin. Younger viewers with a passion for spandex were forced to search the channels, panning for gold in shows like The Greatest American Hero and the barely-animated 1966 cartoon series The Marvel Superheroes. Cartoons were the most painful. They promised greatness but delivered crude animation and gorillas unconvincingly shaking Superman.
Superhero shows have come a long way since the 1951 Adventures of Superman series, and cartoons like Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, and Young Justice have proved that superhero animation can thrive. So how did we get so many turkeys? There's some stiff competition, but these are the worst superhero cartoons ever to blight airwaves.
10 Banana Man
In entertainment the cardinal sin is tedium. This British cartoon was supposed to be about a funny hero, but it gave viewers stilted dialog and a smug Superman rip-off. The hero barely ever did anything, and even though he faced theoretical threats like Apple Man, no real conflict ever resulted either. It takes more than a guy with a yellow cape to make kids laugh, and while the voice work on this series was decent, nothing else was worth mentioning. To its credit, each episode was incredibly short.
9 Super Ted
Even further down the British TV wormhole was Super Ted, a teddy bear who, we assume, was bitten by a radioactive Kryptonian. To be fair, this show targetted younger viewers, but the low stakes in every episode made it hard to watch. Super Ted was roughly as powerful as Superman, and his main enemies were literally a cowboy, a fat guy, and a skeleton. The skeleton (named Skeleton) was the worst. He was an undead monster, but he did nothing but run away from the hero.
8 Sport Billy
We all knew people in high school who thought 'good at sports' was a superpower. This show is about a time-traveling jock who based his heroic career on that same premise. Billy was basically a teenage decathlete who carried around an "Omnisack," letting him produce any piece of sports equipment. Instead of fighting evil he pole-vaulted over it. He did have a fairly decent arch-villain in the form of the time-traveling Queen Vanda, but she was so hampered by her reliance on a 4-foot-tall incompetent named Snipe that she never felt like much of a threat.
Sport Billy was created to promote fitness and teach history, but it says a lot that one of its most watchable episodes was about King Arthur and soccer.
7 Super Globetrotters
The basketball-comedy stylings of the Harlem Globetrotters are well-known today, but in the 1970s they were a media sensation. They were found everywhere from Scooby-Doo to Gilligan's Island. It almost makes sense that they were a superhero team. Almost.
The 1979 Super Globetrotters series featured the team moonlighting as world-saving heroes. In a formula so bad it's an amazing treasure, the heroes used basketball-specific powers to combat Evil. For some reason, Evil always wanted to stake everything on a basketball game with the Globetrotters. Not the Super Globetrotters, mind you, but the regular ones, who scored 0 points against their opponents in the first half of the game. Every episode, the entire world was shocked when the Super Globetrotters emerged from the Globetrotters' locker room and won the day.
To its credit, this series featured some creative character designs for villains and heroes. Less to its credit were names like "Spaghetti Man" and, um, "Aquaman."
6 The Robonic Stooges
No one knows why government money was spent to transform Moe, Larry, and Curly into incompetent super crimefighters, but this series proposes a world where that happened. While they remained dense and clumsy, The Stooges actually dialed way back on their trademark slapstick violence. This team was a significant step towards perfecting the incompetent animated super, as Team Stooge all sported telescoping robotic necks and limbs as well as super clumsiness. Relying mostly on self-defeating villains, they were nonetheless roughly halfway to creating Inspector Gadget.
5 Inch High Private Eye
Oh, look! Gadget's other half! After Get Smart was ended in 1970, the show's star and his incredible voice had trouble finding other work. An opportunity of sorts materialized in 1973, Hanna-Barbera's Inch High Private Eye. The series was sort of Doll Man meets Inspector Gadget meets Scooby-Doo, as the titular detective wandered into random criminal conspiracies alongside his teenage niece, her boyfriend, and her dog. Yoiks.
Being tiny is almost a superpower, but like Junior from Young Heroes in Love, Inch High couldn't grow. He was slightly stealthy as a result, but mainly "solved" crimes by showing up in time to claim the credit. Inspector Gadget would appear in 1982, and like Inch High would sport a trenchcoat, rabid incompetence, a helpful niece, and Don Adams' voice.
4 The Nitwits
Another link in the chain of incompetent heroes was Agony Nine, a geriatric hero who could fly with the help of a sentient cane named Elmo. Weirdly, the character was based on Arte Johnson's dirty old man character from Laugh-In. Voiced by Johnson, Agony would mumble and stumble his way through heroics while his wife Gladys would steal in and save the day. In this, The Nitwits were a lot like their fellow pseudo-competent, Hong Kong Fooey, but without the implicit racism. It still wasn't exciting for kids to watch an old dude's failing powers give out any time he tried to fight crime, like an octogenarian Captain Caveman.
3 The Kid Super Power Hour with Shazam
In the days before Hogwarts, Hero High was a refreshing concept, but this show managed to mix itself into an incredibly confusing pudding. The Saturday morning series was 1-part Shazam cartoon, which was slow-paced but occasionally involved genuine superheroic action. There were also short cartoons about a cast of juvenile heroes studying at Hero High. These were extremely uneven, and felt like Archie Andrews' friends working as superheroes. They even had their own Reggie Mantle in the form of Rex Rotten.
The Hero High kids fought occasional villains but mostly spent their time sabotaging each other. If the show had only divided its time 2 ways, things might have been okay. However, the show also included a segment's worth of live-action stand up comedy routines from adult actors dressed as the cast of Hero High, acting out half-baked skits, again reminiscent of Laugh-In. The overall result was disjointed and hard to follow, promising pay-offs that never came.
2 Fred and Barney Meet The Thing
As awe-inspiring as a mash-up of The Flintstones and John Carpenter's The Thing would be, that's not what this was. No, Fred and Barney were who you think they were and had their own segment on this show. The Thing, though, was a facsimile of Ben Grimm from the Fantastic Four. Really, he was Grimm re-imagined as a child with a magic ring. For unknown reasons, chanting "Thing Ring, do your thing!" temporarily transformed the kid into the familiar orange rock monster. He used this power to face menaces like... camping trips and the circus? Barely villains like Decepto the Great also made appearances, but mainly the best thing about the show was Grimm being mistaken for a polite pile of rocks by a nearsighted neighbor.
1 The Super Friends (1973)
The Super Friends was one of the greatest betrayals of incipient superhero fans. In later incarnations, however, the misnamed Justice League at least faced enemies like Darkseid and The Legion of Doom. In its first season, it was mostly superheroes hanging out with nerdy teenagers.
Marvin and Wendy weren't the cool kinds of nerdy teenagers, either. The Scooby Gang wouldn't have returned their calls. They wore blankets-as-capes and named their canine Wonder Dog. For some reason, this entitled them to Superman's, Batman's, Robin's, Wonder Woman's, and Aquaman's undivided attention. Inexplicable to children and adults alike, the adolescents led the Super Friends into adventures facing A Guy Wearing Too Many Clothes On A Hot Day and similar mysterious menaces. Okay, that episode was actually about Global Warming, decades before it was a thing, which almost seems prescient now. Even so, non-menaces like the Balloon People from Balunia plagued the series, and completely one-note villains like King Plasto anticipated the worst elements of shows like Captain Planet. The Super Friends super stank, y'all.
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