(8/11/09)
I vowed once before that I would never view this again. Last night I revisited it out of necessity. It was worse than I remembered it. Cat Scratch Fever is a mishmash of ugliness, poor plotting, and nonsense the series has ever seen, and mind you this is the series that gave us I’ve Got Batman in My Basement.
Now I don’t slight an episode for not looking fantastic. After all, the producers obviously could not afford to treat every show to TMS or Spectrum. But AKOM is a studio that had no business being on the roster. It was a studio intended for simplified cartoons and not action spectacles. When a studio cannot even animate moving lips without creating something hideous, it is clear that harsh criticism is warranted. Cat Scratch Fever is, quite simply, an eyesore. And that’s not all, folks.
Oh how chance would have it that the worst animation befell the worst script. Note the cloying depiction of animal mistreatment, the cold ruthlessness of the corporation that abuses them, and the noble heroism of Catwoman. The absence of a gray area in this black-and-white story removes all sense of nuance, and it is what made Sean Catherine Derek such a patronizing script supervisor. If I am going to watch a social commentary on a show I watch for cinematic direction and dramatic narrative, I at least want it to be handled without condescension and banality.
We value fluidity of development and logic in the stories we watch, and on this simple level that should apply to any narrative, despite Derek’s obvious feeling that children’s cartoons warrant simplified plots, it is a failure yet again. Note the lack of suspense or transition, and the jumpiness that takes us from Daggett Labs to Selina’s hideout, then to the labs again, and then back to the hideout. And what motivates these jumps? Catwoman breaks into labs, is hurt. Batman rescues her. Batman returns to labs, retrieves vaccine. He simultaneously topples Daggett’s plan and saves Selina in the nick of time. Yes, this story has all the driving motivation of tasks in a video game.
And of course there is a laundry list of logical errors. Machine gun bullets hit the ice behind Batman in order to complete the ring. Selina is bewildered to find out that the two thugs had a Daggett Industries attorney, despite the fact that ‘Daggett Industries’ was labeled bluntly on their van. Selina drives to the compound and parks her car in plain sight. And the courtroom proceeding that opens the episode is a mockery of the American justice system.
But wait, there’s more. The dialogue is a goldmine of clichés. The thugs, whom it seems the character designers intentionally tried to make as generic and ugly as possible, refer to Catwoman as ‘pussycat’ in shrill obnoxious voices. Catwoman, on the verge of fainting, plays a pun on the term ‘hot,’ which makes for a moment of eye-rolling embarrassment. In one scene, Selina even has to give Bruce the ‘we’re just friends’ talk, which implies more than is necessary.
Picking apart this episode is an effortless task, and hence the final area in which the episode fails: it cannot even incite worthwhile criticism. It is a waste of time if ever there was one.
In every episode that features a shameless depiction of the evil corporate tycoons, I tend to emphasize how one-sided and stereotypically evil a portrayal it is. Here, it gets worse. Daggett is again the target of the episode’s attack on the wealthy businessman, but this time the commentary is much more manipulative. The premise is that Daggett and his evil henchmen are capturing defenseless animals, giving them a virus, and sending them out into the streets to contaminate all of Gotham, so that Daggett can sell the cure and make a large profit. It’s terribly manipulative and excruciating to have to sit through. Many shots just show the animals being tortured and lashing out at people and it’s an incredibly exploitive way to call attention to animal mistreatment.
The next problem is that it’s another Selina Kyle episode, and this one is even worse than her first episode. While ‘The Cat and the Claw’ had a handful of fun chase scenes to counterbalance the animal rights activism nonsense, here it is tackled at full force, with no charm to Kyle’s character whatsoever. She’s nothing more than an activist who spits out bad dialogue. Catwoman was always intended as a fun contrast to Batman; Sean Catherine Derek, on the other hand, turned her into a tool for propaganda.
The dialogue is particularly atrocious. There is one scene that is often cited by fans as one of the worst puns ever written into a cartoon show, the infamous Batman line “you’re hot”, to which Catwoman replies, “now you notice.” All kinds of things hurt this episode, logical shortcomings, the most stereotypical henchmen ever invented (Dr. Milo in particular), and another pointless appearance by Maven. Just like ‘Eternal Youth’, the episode, in its strenuous effort to call attention to yet another current issue, doesn’t offer anything even enjoyable for the children to whom it’s supposed to appeal. All the fight scenes are overshadowed by the hideous animation on the episode.
Speaking of the animation, it’s easily the worst the series ever churned out. The rest of AKOM’s resume looks beautiful compared to their work here. Out of the many things I’ve read in my life, few surprise me as much as the fact that this is the episode that pushed Timm to drop AKOM as a studio. The designs look horrible; Selina Kyle in particular is given the puffiest and most unappealing lips I’ve ever seen, and that’s just one tiny nitpick amid a vast expanse of ugly animation and direction. The fight scenes are bad to the point that it would have been far more fun were they replaced with boring exposition. Usually animation plays a small factor in my evaluations, but here the animation takes an already bad episode and makes it an abomination.
As much as I harped on ‘The Forgotten’ and ‘I’ve Got Batman in My Basement’, I still can’t dislike them with near as much vitriol as I do this one. Having seen this episode a good three times, I honestly have no intention of ever watching it again. I just have to say thank you to Bruce Timm, for never making another episode this bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment