In
“The Time Trap,” Grod the Gorilla invents an “interspatial time conveyer” to raid various historical time
periods. Aquaman and Apache Chief travel
together through time -- 70 million years
into the past -- to prevent Giganta and Black Manta from plundering
historical sites.
But
it is all a trap! Our heroes are left stranded in a prehistoric age.
Meanwhile,
Green Lantern and Samurai end back in King Arthur’s Camelot, to stop Sinestro
and Captain Cold.
Grod
and Solomon Grundy, in turn, tramp Batman and Robin in Ancient Rome.
As
its title suggests, “The Time Trap” concerns a crime spree through time itself,
as the Super Friends pursue agents of the Legion of Doom, throughout history.
Intriguingly, the presence of the Super Friends in epochs past doesn’t seem to
impact or pollute our timeline. Thousands of Roman citizens see Superman fly down into a Colosseum, fend off a tiger, and rescue Batman and Robin.
And miraculously, no Roman poet or politician
ever wrote or spoke of such a remarkable and spectacular occurrence.
Actually,
Superman is out of action for most of the episode, before performing that heroic rescue. The episode writer sends him
off to “Check the perimeter of the Milky Way to check things out.”
Yep, that’s a mission that could take a log
time.
The
baffling thing about “The Time Trap,” and many Challenge of the Super Friends
episodes, actually, is that the series straddles so arbitrarily the line between stupid
and clever.
On the clever side, consider Aquaman’s radio/walkie-talkie trick for a moment.
He realizes that it runs on a nuclear battery (!) with a life of 100 million
years. So if he buries it in prehistory -- in the exact spot where the Hall of
Justice will be built -- then in the 20th century, it will still
send out a signal.
Smart
idea, right?
The
stupid part is the timing, and how it plays out. The Hall of Justice has been around for some time,
and it seems like the nuclear battery would have been detected earlier in the
time line, rather than at the exact point in the timeline that the Legion of
Doom is launching its time raids. After all, the walkie-talkie has been there since the prehistoric age.
Once
more cataloging our familiar lines of dialogue, I see that this episode has
Captain Cold barking “That’s what you think, Green Fool,” to Green Lantern. And
Robin comments on “Holy Vanishing Acts!”
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