Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities The Apache Chief (Star of the Super Friends) Thread

Is the Apache Chief EDE's favourite League member?

He gives good hugs:



He crushes Aquaman



He makes Superman look small and annoying.



And this action figure is amazing:

He's had a whole lot of cameos!

Loved the Young Justice spin on him, as Tye Longshadow.

The giant astral form was an incredible visual, compared to the already impressive visual of size-changing.

As for the original Apache Chief, dudes who grow to sixty feet tall need to not wear skirts to work. 'Cause nobody wants to see that.

I think he was the only of the TV-only Super Friends to get an actual origin on the series:

I remember the scene in one episode where he uses his ginormous hands to divert a flashflood from a small town. Go Apache Chief!

Being designed for the cartoon, it seemed like Super-Chief was intentionally visually dynamic, in a way that pre-existing heroes like Batman and Aquaman couldn't readily compete with.

Samurai, doing his whirlwind trick, and Black Vulcan turning into lightning, also had very visually dynamic effects when they appeared on-screen.

And then there was El Dorado.

Gah, trapped myself with my own link, just lost 30 minutes of my life laughing hysterically at Seanbaby's thoughts on the various Super Friends...

That was hilarious, Set! Thanks for sharing.

So in terms of powers, El Dorado is kind of like original Tyroc?

... okay, I just read Samurai. And Samurai ALSO seems to have the "I can do pretty much anything will my ill-defined powers" syndrome.

All of them were, it seems.

Samurai could turn invisible, immolate himself, turn into a human-headed whirlwind and create illusions.

El Dorado could lift heavy weights and go toe to toe with super-strong foes, possibly fly (at least levitate), teleported a lot, maybe had telepathy and, like Samurai, could create illusions.

Black Vulcan could turn into lightning to fly around 'at the speed of light*,' but also create lightning bolts that damaged things, that harmlessly wrapped people up like ropes, or that he could even spin around himself to travel through time.

*Lightning, generally, travels fifty times slower than light, but, Bill Nye the Science Guy, this was not.

Apache Chief generally just had the one power, originally to grow to fifty feet in height, although he later used knowledge from the Atom to learn to grow first 1/5th the size of the Earth (to repel a giant monster attacking the planet) and then later to many times the size of the Earth! Yikes!

The more I read about these dudes, the more impressed I am by the characters created for the Super Friends *comic book,* such as Godiva, Green Flame, Icemaiden, Tuatara, Bushmaster, Thunderlord, Wild Huntsman, Jack O' Lantern, Olympian, Impala, Dr. Mist, etc. who went on to become the Global Guardians.

Gosh, I'd love to see them again.

Yeah, I read Samurai's entry before I saw your reply. And now I've read Black Lightning's. Whew!

Have to agree with you, the comics Global Guardians were a lot less like caricatures! Many of them were fully-dimensional. It's sad that so many of them were slaughtered, they made such a good team.

You have to remember that, on Super Friends, even the characters taken from the comics would suddenly develop the ability to fly or super-strength when it was convenient for the plot!

I grew up watching the old Super Friends shows and liked when they added the international characters. Sad to see the only created for the show character to ever make it into the comics, and only in a few cameos, was Samurai.

Infinite Crisis Hardcover added scenes


Justice League of America #46 (August, 2010)

It really is shame that, instead of some of the more inept efforts DC has made at adding diversity to their line the past few years, they haven't drawn upon the resources of these existing characters.

Anyway, Super Friends fans take note:

I now have in my hands Showcase Presents: The Super Friends, featuring the first 24 issues of the Super Friends comic book!

Expect reviews in the near future!

Ooh, very cool. I remember only two storylines, the one introducing the someday-to-be-named Global Guardians, and one involving some sorcerer named Sandor Fane turning four people into elemental heroes (Sylph, Gnome, etc.)

I don't think I've ever read any of them! But I've been looking forward to reading the first issue featuring Villain sidekicks for ages!

Apache Chief's write up at a very satirical website (with salty language!).



Bouncing through that site, I should also warn that the humor there is pretty much offensive to everyone human... So, caveat emptor, and all that.

I should watch the series then! I've only really watched a handful of episodes.



Thanks for sharing this, Elvar! I totally missed this, even though I had read JLA 46.

Samurai is Japanese and has wind powers. He has all the makings of a favorite of mine!

By the way, "Kaze" is Japanese for "wind". and I think "Hayaku" means "fast".

The "Challenge of the Super-Friends" season (with the Legion of Doom) is highly recommended, along with the last two "Super Powers" seasons.

I must have watched the Batman origin episode 'The Fear' in the Galactic Guardians series about a hundred times. That was such a good half hour of animation.

I'm not into the New Gods characters so I found many of the other episodes in that series less interesting, which is a shame because I think the animation and story-telling really stepped up in that series, not that the early series' weren't full of their groovy goodness; I share EDE's love for 'Challenge of the Super-Friends'.

And I echo others' disappointment that DC never made better use of their Super-Friends characters by bringing them over to the main DCU. Black Vulcan may have been unnecessary because of Black Lightning, but Apache Chief, Samurai, El Dorado and Rima were all ripe for exploration. I wonder if there were rights issues involved?

P.S. I had no idea Samurai had made those appearances in the DCU. Was he a villain? Since he appeared in Geoff Johns and James Robinson written comics I wouldn't be surprised if he was graphically dismembered a few pages later.

Rima is actually an interesting case, because she was originally featured in adventure novels in the early twentieth century, before starring in her own short-lived DC Comic in the mid-70s, and then appearing on Super Friends because of that.

I've wondered about the rights issue for the other characters myself, but I would think that since Hanna Barbera, which produced the Super Friends, is now under the same big corporate umbrella as DC, I wouldn't think there would be any problem.

If I remember right, in that story various metahumans with elemental powers were going crazy because of the Starheart. I'm not sure if it was firmly stated he was a hero, but I'm leaning towards that. Other scenes showed the likes of Fire and Ice going berserk and fighting their fellow heroes.



Thanks for the recommendations, EDE!

Most of the other powers that Samarai randomly display can probably be explained as corollaries of his basic "air elemental" abilities. He occasionally turns invisible, but that could be thought of as turning his body to a gaseous state. Even his occasional random ability to set things on fire could be explained as the result of his control of oxidation.

His origin... a professor empowered by a beam of energy sent by the New Gods... always reminded me a bit of Doctor Light.

Those are interesting and creative extensions of wind powers, EDE. The most I had thought of would be a sort of telekinesis, where he uses fine control of the wind to move objects; and using control of the air to make people dizzy or asphyxiate them )non-fatally of course!) And of course the usual sound-related abilities (using the wind to carry sounds).

He was a hero in the Infinite Crisis Hardcover extra pages. As Brainiac stated during his Justice League appearance both heroes and villains with magical and elemental powers were being driven crazy by the Starheart's energies.


Apparently in the mainstream DC Samurai's origins differ a bit from his Super Powers limited series origin though still connected to the New God Steppenwolf. In Justice League of America 80 Page Giant #1 (November, 2009) The Lord of Time disperses the Justice League throughout time where Superman and Doctor Light end up in Japan in the year 1223 to witness the origins of the original Samurai (Toshio). The powers may be passed down through the generations?

Black Vulcan, Samurai and Apache Chief also made a brief cameo in DC One Million 80-Page Giant (August, 1999)