Fan-Made Arrowverse Super Friends Animation Unites the Justice League

Nearly three years after the original teaser dropped online, David M. Jones — the artist behind the popular “Arrow Jedi” viral fan videos and an animator and graphic designer who later worked with Stephen Amell’s Nocking Point Wines — has finished and released his animated Arrowverse Super Friends short. Bringing together the Justice League as seen at the end of the 2020 Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover (with a couple of extra faces for good measure), the short mimics the style of the classic Super Friends cartoons, reimagined to feature the heroes of Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, Batwoman, Black Lightining, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.

The animation is inspired by the fact that, in the final scene of “Crisis on Infinite Earths Part Five,” the newly-formed (and still unnamed) Justice League sits around their conference table in the Hall of Justice, only to hear a crash and the sound of a monkey hooting. The camera pans away from the team to reveal a broken cage with the name “Gleek” on it, as the classic Super Friends theme plays in the background.

“I started this project way back in July 2019 and finally finished it last week,” Jones told ComicBook.com in a Discord message. “Set on Earth-73, this reimaging of the classic Super Friends cartoon has been updated to feature the CW Arrowverse characters.”

You can see Jones’s video below.

The Arrowverse Super Friends animation is kind of a sequel to Jones’s Arrow ’66 animation, in which he did an Arrow-inspired riff on the Batman TV show opening.

“I’ve had this idea as a follow-up to my Arrow-66 for a while, and thought the ‘Crisis’ crossover was a good way to tie it all together,” Jones told ComicBook.comback in 2020. “I originally had a different lineup of heroes, but changed it after the ‘Crisis’ finale.”

At the time, Jones planned to get the animation finished within a month or so, but after he started getting a lot more paid work, Arrowverse Super Friends kept getting pushed back.

Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) may have laid the groundwork for the Arrowverse Justice League, but he didn’t get to be a part of it, because the character died in “Crisis on Infinite Earths.” Part of the reason the team came together in the Hall of Justice was to memorialize their fallen friend, hanging his costume in front of an eternal flame in the vacated STAR Labs facility. That facility, modeled after the Hall of Justice from Super Friends, had first appeared in the Invasion! crossover a few years prior. Jones’s decision to move the animation to “Earth-73” allowed Green Arrow to have a real presence on the team.