Animator Tom Cook -- known for his work on such cartoons as The Smurfs and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe -- recently spoke to working on Super Friends during his salad days at Hanna-Barbera, revealing that he actually animated early episodes of the DC Comics-based television show inside an airplane hangar.

During an interview with PREVIEWSworld's newsletter Scoop, Cook explained that he developed an interest in art after collecting comic books like Spider-Man as a kid. Later in his life, while working as a bus driver, Cook began taking a comic book class at a local college. Cook's professor happened to work for Hanna-Barbera as a storyboard artist, and explained to him that the studio was looking for people with a penchant for drawing superheroes to work on a new cartoon called Super Friends. The rest, as they say, is history.

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"Well, when I first started at Hanna-Barbera they had hired a lot of people," Cook said. "In fact, they would have hired me a little sooner, except they didn't have any room for us. No room for desks or anything. So, they rented an airplane hangar at Burbank Airport, which was maybe about five miles away and just stuck a bunch of desks in this airplane hangar. That's where I sat for the first two or three months working there.

"We were just out in the middle of this hangar, there were no cubicles or anything," he continued. "There were like six of us. Then they had the ink and paint department, those are the ones that paint the cels. So, there were probably about 80-100 of them sitting in this airplane hangar. We were kind of separated from them because we were a bit noisier. You were allowed to put headphones on and listen to music. Whatever you wanted to do. Early on, I would bring a TV and watch TV while I was working."

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Super Friends premiered on ABC in September of 1973. The show ran for a total of 109 episodes across nine seasons, concluding its run in November of 1985. In addition to featuring established DC characters like Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, the show also introduced brand-new faces like Wendy, Marvin and Wonder Dog, as well as the Wonder Twins. The show was technically a spinoff of the Hanna-Barbera series The New Scooby-Doo Movies, on which the characters of Batman and Robin guest starred in a duology of backdoor-pilot episodes in 1972.