In the old Aquaman cartoons, he used to ride around on a seahorse and emit these psychic beams from his head to tell fish what to do. Fish always understood him and did what needed doing, no matter how needlessly complex it was. They would swim in perfect synchronization in these endless June Taylor Dancer routines, or swim right into the propellors of Black Manta's submarine, or lift a sinking nuclear sub to the surface.

It begs the question of how smart these fish are supposed to be. I mean, they never seem to have any trouble understanding what Aquaman needs them to do, so they had to have been pretty smart. And yet fish never would think to do these things on their own.

Talking to fish is a pretty lame superpower if you ask me. Did the fish ever talk to him? What did they say?

"Hi, Aquaman."
"Hi, Swordfish."
"Nice day, huh?"
"Yeah, lots of, um....water down here..."
"I'll say! I'm in the mood for some seafood, how about you?"
"Um, sure...as long as it's something so small that I'm never going to need to ask it to do something for me later on."
"I'm not sure I follow you."
"Like the time I ate that crab, the other crabs were so pissed off they wouldn't help me save Aqualad from the Sea Pirates the next week."
"Sorry, you lost me. I'm just a fish, man. I swim and I eat other fish."

Aquaman's main villian was the Black Manta, who was just as lame as Aquaman but at least had a cooler costume. His girlfriend was Mera and his sidekick was Aqualad. There was no Aquamobile but he did have a stupid-looking jet ski.

Aquaman lived on the ocean floor, where water pressure is measured in tons-to-the-square-inch, and yet he wasn't squashed flat. He looked just like a regular guy. You would think that this would make him as strong as Superman when he came to the surface, but this didn't seem to be the case. When Aquaman joined the Super Friends, all they ever used him for was to talk to fish.

"It's the TroubleAlert, Batman! There's trouble at the University! Let's go! Oh, and, can I, um....catch a ride with you?"
"I can handle this, Aquaman! You stay here in case there's trouble at the docks, or someone
robs a pet store, maybe you can get a description of the suspect from a goldfish! Let's go, Robin!"

Of course, the Aquaman in the Super Friends was much different than the one in the earlier, solo cartoons. The solo Aquaman could only stay out of the water for an hour at a time. You would think that this would severly limit the types of adventures he was able to have, yet he always seemed to keep busy. He did have a whole undersea world to protect, after all.

The criminals he fought on land all seemed to know about his weakness, even though if I were Aquaman and I came to the surface, that would be the kind of thing I would want to keep quiet. Not him, though. He told everyone. He would preface every sentence with "Since I can only stay above water for an hour at a time..." And then the bad guys would always trap him in cages under heat lamps so that he couldn't get back to the water. This seemed needlessly cruel, and unnecessarily complicated, seeing as how they could have just shot him. But they would trap him, tell him their plans, and then leave him there, and he would always fall down and go "Got to...get out....of cage....after all, I can only stay above water for an hour at a time....unnngh..." And then of course he always got out.

Come to think of it, I can't remember anyone ever shooting a gun at anyone in those cartoons, unless they were shooting Superman. Which is totally ironic since bullets would have killed any of the others. It seems strange that a criminal's first reaction to Batman is "Look! It's Batman! Hit him!" and yet to Superman it was "It's Superman! Shoot him!"

Superman was just too powerful, anyway. What did he even need Batman or Aquaman for? You know, everyone seemed to have a sidekick, like Robin or Aqualad or Wonder Girl. But Superman didn't. It's not that he didn't need one, it's that Batman and Aquaman and Wonder Woman were his sidekicks.

No one ever wanted to be Aquaman when we played Super Friends. Kids never dreamed of being Aquaman, or even having Aquaman as a best friend. If they thought about him at all, it was just as tagging along with the rest of the Super Friends. It's hardly fair when you think about it. After all, Aquaman may have had lame powers, but at least he had powers. Not like Batman. And yet everyone loved Batman, and wanted to be Batman. Sure his powers were lame and his costume was, well, orange and green, but at least he could do something cool, like breathe underwater. And yet kids would rather be Batman...hell, kids would rather be ROBIN. There is one person I feel worse for, though, and that's Aqualad. Not the world's lamest superhero, but sidekick to the world's lamest superhero. That's like being the understudy of the Ty-D-Bowl man, or personal assistant to a crack whore.