Wendy, Marvin and Wonder Dog

Wendy Harris and Marvin White, two teen-age sidekicks of the Super Friends who, along with Marvin's pet dog Wonderdog, first appeared in the 1973 Super Friends cartoon. Because of the success of the Super Friends cartoon, a Super Friends comic book was also created, in which Wendy and Marvin made their first comics appearance.

The duo has recently been re-introduced in the Teen Titans comic book as the caretakers of Titans Tower.

Fictional Character Biography

Superfriends

These two sidekicks were created in an era in which many cartoons featured main characters saddled with useless sidekicks who were supposed to serve two purposes: comic relief and viewer identification. However, most viewers instead found such sidekicks to be uninteresting, uninvolving, and even somewhat irritating as even young children could tell when they were being patronized.

In the cartoon, the reason for Wendy and Marvin hanging around with the Super Friends was never really explained. In the comics, some additional information was given. Wendy is the niece of Harvey Harris, a detective who once trained Batman when he was still a teenager. It was postulated in an editorial column that she may have been the Earth-One version of Wendi Harris Tyler, wife of the first Hourman. Marvin (who was given the last name of White in the comics) was the son of Diana Prince, the nurse whose name Wonder Woman took when she came to Man's World, and her husband Dan White. Thus, Marvin had a sort of familial connection to the Super Friends. The Super Friends were designed to help teach young crimefighters how to be superheroes. While wendy never wore any special costume, Marvin was always dressed with a cape and a big letter "M" on his chest.

Marvin, like Wendy, however had no special abilities, with the exception that, once on the cartoon, Marvin was shown "practicing" flying, though not very well. In fact, on the cartoon, Marvin was shown to be somewhat bumbling (and often needing to learn the day's moral), though in the comics, Marvin and Wendy's cleverness and resourcefulness made them invaluable to the other Super Friends. The one notable resource Marvin provided to the Super Friends was his pet dog, Wonderdog (or just "Wonder" for short) who was preternaturally intelligent, though bumbling as well, much like Scooby-Doo.

After two seasons of the Super Friends cartoon, it was cancelled, though re-runs were shown through 1976. When the show returned as The All-New Super Friends Hour in 1977, Wendy and Marvin had been replaced by two other teenagers, Zan and Jayna, the Wonder Twins, along with their pet, the alien monkey Gleek. Marvin and Wendy never appeared again on TV, and they were likewise replaced by the Wonder Twins in the Super Friends comic after "graduating" from the Super Friends as full-fledged superheroes. According to the comic book, Marvin went on to study at Ivy University, the fictional university where fellow superhero the Atom worked as a professor. Wendy and Marvin appeared again in a later issue of the Super Friends comic to aid the Wonder Twins, posing as Zan's and Jayna's human diguises, "John" and "Joanna", to fool a criminal who had deduced the Wonder Twins' and Batman's secret identities. Marvin made a brief cameo in the Kingdom Come series, taking place in the future and featuring cameos of a surprising number of characters.

Teen Titans

Template:Spoiler In 2006, in Teen Titans #34 it was established that a brand new version of the Wendy and Marvin characters work as "caretakers" of Titans Tower one year after the events of the Infinite Crisis crossover. The pair (now fraternal twins)seem to be technical geniuses; Wendy mentions that she and Marvin graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on their sixteenth birthday. It was established that Marvin is the older twin, by five minutes. The twins' last name has yet to be mentioned.

This new Wendy and Marvin team has been perceived by many fans as a "fusing" of the concepts of Wendy and Marvin and the Wonder Twins, as the original Wendy and Marvin were not related. Though this is not necessarily true, particularly because the Wonder Twins are already established characters in the DCU.

External links

• Cosmic Teams Profile: Wendy and Marvin
• E. Nelson Bridwell comments on Wendy and Marvin (transcription from the comicbook Super Friends #1)]
• Obscure characters: Marvin and Wendy
• Titans Tower: Wendy and Marvin