S:TAS reviews: Blasts from the Past

We open to a garish utopian image, vegetation spurting up outside a high-tech lab facility. As we move into STAR Labs, we find that Emil Hamilton is the only researcher on staff, and after a barebones, incredulous catalyst—a top professor is foolish enough to tinker with alien technology and release a vicious arthropod monster—Superman chases the beast into Metropolis, on whose dreary sepia uniformity is plastered a pair of busy telephone-wire repairmen, the only visible sign of life in the city. Blasts from the Past is an atmospheric misfire, sacrificing any traceable conception of living, breathing places for humid vacancies and stock backgrounds. This insatiable opening is only the beginning of an extensively hollow forty-four minutes.

If there is any grandiose topic that must be inevitably watered down for the sake of a cartoon series, it is fascism. Jax-Ur and Mala seek to rule Earth with an iron fist, power-hungry inter-galactic terrorists out to domineer a fragile planet. But naturally the writers’ approach is ham-fisted, as only it can be. Among the many disagreeable inferences we are to draw from the first part is that the world is, for the most part, a peaceful place before Mala releases Jax-Ur from his imprisonment. Superman seems without any other obligations for the first fifteen minutes or so, and by the time he is finally ready to do something heroic, he restricts his focus to an alleyway bank robbery. It is as if Superman has no worthwhile ambitions, cleaning up petty crime as befits his Gotham City counterpart. It is only the emerging totalitarian takeover that can disrupt the Earth’s apparent utopia.

Once that takeover does occur, the Daily Planet becomes a microcosm of mass anxiety, and the UN becomes the shopworn symbol of the world’s collectivity. Five minutes at the most are allotted to Jax-Ur’s and Mala’s global usurpation. They have transported Superman to the Phantom Zone in faux-suspenseful plot contrivance, and the ensuing illustration of how the fascist state emerges is a straightforward affair of wreaking havoc followed by mandate signing. Naturally Superman arrives at the last minute to lead the two tyrants on a wild-goose chase and back into the Phantom Zone from whence they came. Given the demonstrative failure of this attempted lambaste of fascism in superhero cartoon form, I find it curious that the producers’ returned to it again and again, more than likely because the story of dictatorial overthrows and suppression of freedom has one of the most deeply embedded prototypes in popular fiction. Thankfully the creators would find ways to morally complicate the topic in Justice League.

All trace of recognizable humanity is stripped from what is largely a story of tireless exposition. Superman only once appears as Clark Kent; his true role is in playing the pundit for world liberty, going from puppy-training Mala to spewing out platitudes about caring for the Earth’s inhabitants. Storyboarding is at an all-time low. Never mind the perpetually robotic facial features and body language of Hamilton and Superman; anytime the directing crew needs to exhibit an emotion (usually anger), they resort to hyperbolic shortcuts, an exaggerated canted frame or a character spreading apart his or her limbs to brash extremes.

That said, I maintain that not one episode of Superman is a total disaster; Blasts from the Past is full of convincingly violent fight scenes; regardless of their stiff animation and awkward physics, the force of the blows is always aptly conveyed and their unfolding often incorporates lengthy stretches of well-defined urban space. The attempted cracking of Superman’s skull constitutes one of the most painful, and by extension memorable, instances of unique sound design in the series so far. Part two is the superior half if only because there is rarely a respite from the action; in such a meandering go-nowhere episode, the show-stopping brawls are usually the most salvageable portions of the story.

Finally, not all of the exposition is dispensable; we do learn a little bit more about Kryptonian mythology, and the Phantom Zone now becomes a key emblem of that mythology, another trophy for the Fortress of Solitude, which is finally named as such by Professor Hamilton.

TNBA reviews: Old Wounds

When one thinks of strong female characters in the DCAU, the list only really extends to Lois Lane, Harley Quinn, and possibly Hawkgirl of the Justice League. Most of the others run into some trouble, tending to be of secondary importance to the male characters, or in some way dependent on them. Some don’t even earn the privilege of secondary status; they are sex objects, plot devices, or embodiments of generic female character traits. Even a character as long-lived and iconic as Wonder Woman could not acquire a third attribute after her amusing stranger-in-a-strange-land exoticism and exaggerated masculinity.

Batgirl is the worst example of the series’ perpetual marginalization of women. She began in B:TAS as a naïve, idealistic upstart who dived into costumed heroics when her father needed her and came to be characterized by her romantic longing for Batman. The seeds were planted for character development, but they only bore fruit belatedly. Come TNBA, her character would be a literal-minded sidekick sporting the occasional nudge of comic relief and the voice of Tara Strong, who assisted in the minimizing of the character’s dramatic importance by lacking anything distinctive in her impassive vocals that have since become a dull standard for femininity in animation.

Old Wounds transports us to the temporal gap between B:TAS and TNBA, where we learn about why Dick abandoned one mantle to take up another and why Barbara Gordon decided to fill his shoes as Batman’s plucky sidekick. Even though Barbara is in a relationship with Dick and her new partnership with Batman is posited as one of the reasons for his departure, she seems dispensable to the larger goings-on. Dick and Bruce are interlocked in a father/son clash of cosmic proportions. Barbara can be nothing more than moral support, a damsel in distress, or a supplier of reaction shots. Her role should be of primary importance, not sidelined.

The actual catalyst for the breakup, provided after a mere one or two minutes of laying the groundwork with Dick’s college graduation and Bruce’ relative indifference, is a heated incident in which Dick’s disillusionment is brought directly to the surface. Batman has pinned a hoodlum named Connor to the wall of his apartment in front of his family. Connor’s small child looks on in disbelief, echoing Dick’s own bewilderment at Batman, who exhibits plain disregard for the man’s family as he unnecessarily brutalizes him. This effective showstopper ends the first act with plenty of time to spare, most of which pertains to a negligible plot by the Joker that has more to do with deflecting the story’s accumulated angst than with posing an actual threat.

The tendency for television to turn every chunk of programming buffered by commercials into a self-contained narrative with its own climax turns damaging here; Fogel can’t help but make the first act the tensest and most suspenseful of the three, and the actual second-act cliffhanger comes off as simpleminded by comparison. Dick rescues Barbara from falling off the highest point in Gotham, single-handedly combining one of the oldest superhero clichés with Barbara’s objectification as a helpless woman in need of a savior.

The moment that Dick finally walks away comes well after we get the gist of things. The dramatic impact is further deflated by Batman’s inability to act as Dick’s dialectic counterpoint. Dick flings accusations and telegraphs his intentions from the get-go, and Batman seems adrift in his own ultra-pragmatic world of overturning the latest Joker scheme. It can possibly be argued that Batman’s seeming disinterest in anything that transpires is further fuel for Dick’s anger, and yet the ending seems to nullify all of the charges leveled against him.

To contextualize: Old Wounds is structured as a flashback. The old Robin has just finished explaining this story to his replacement. And so naturally one expects the ending to construct some kind of relationship between the events of the past and those of the present. At the same time, one would imagine that the can of worms opened by this story, the uncomfortable moral light in which it places the series’ eponymous hero and the dialectical split between two costumed crime-fighters, each possessing the same willingness to do right, would not so quickly be shut. After all, what is the point of a tale with such visibly long-lasting reverberations if not to stand as a near-permanent alteration in the lives of those involved?

As it stands, the ending seeks to destroy the moral ambiguity that the narrative has taken so long to explicate. Dick and Tim stumble upon Connor, who explains that the joint efforts of Batman and Bruce Wayne have helped him turn his life around. Though it is a heartwarming scene when taken on its own terms, Fogel regretfully exaggerates its importance, positioning it as the end-all penitence for Batman’s sins and restoring Dick’s faith in his old mentor to the extent that the last few shots imply a jolly reunion.

So much of Old Wounds rings true, and yet it is told with such ham-fisted artifice, hollowed out characterizations, and moral grandiloquence that the whole enterprise ultimately crumbles. As a half-successful, faintly convincing telling of an essential tale, it provokes only the most lukewarm of responses from me.

TNBA reviews: Animal Act

The Mad Hatter makes for such a sinisterly self-assured crime lord that it is some shock that he had his roots as an awkward, submissive, sympathetic little man who espoused love instead of greed. Even after plunging into the depths of madness, he sought after a platonic fantasyland, acting on desires not criminal but childlike in nature. He was an oxymoronic fusion between scientific prowess and fantastical illogic, his great technological achievement directed towards wafting away reality in favor of his own imagination.

Alas, he took the first misstep in The Worry Men, a passable yarn that proceeded too mechanically to reflect the mind of Jervis Tetch. Though his intention was ultimately to achieve the isolated utopia of self-indulgence that has always been his goal, he did so through common thievery, as if his deliriously warped mind could fashion no more creative a scheme. In Animal Act, the limits of his creativity extend only to clownery, and the mind control that has symbolized his compulsion to shape the world in his image is reduced to villainous gimmickry. How ironic, too, that the Hatter’s devolution as a character corresponds to a redesign that renders him even more socially debilitative—hunched over and sickly pale with ghastly yellow eyes. As a visual specimen he cries out for interpretation, answered by the writers with second-rate circus tricks.

Animal Act’s structure matches each act to a set piece, beginning with a gorilla chase, progressing forward to a skirmish with two bears, and culminating in a circus tent spectacle where all the carnival misfits congregate to do battle with our heroes. Each set piece is buffered by an appearance by the incognito Mad Hatter, poorly disguised as one of the clowns at Haley’s Circus. As a whodunit mystery, the episode lacks the jazzy spontaneity and red herring freewheeling of A Bullet for Bullock, preferring instead a pre-written rubric that telegraphs the answers from the beginning.

If screenwriter Hilary Bader does seek to counteract the more immature elements of the story, it is in the unearthing of Dick Grayson’s childhood in the presence of the still-touring Haley’s Circus. Acting on the false principle that evocations of a character’s mythological history equates to an increase in artistic legitimacy, Bader draws on the big-top community as a well of nostalgia over which Nightwing fondly reminisces. Naturally, this sense of longing is nothing more than a way to convolute the mystery by establishing a suspect with emotional ties to one of the detectives. Batman implicates Miranda as the likeliest culprit; Nightwing defends her on the merits of childhood friendship.

Once the mystery is solved, this manufactured tension all but evaporates, leaving Bruce and Dick with nothing else to do but amicably pay a visit to the circus as spectators. It is quick-fix episodes like Animal Act that make one wonder how any character, from the Mad Hatter to Nightwing, keeps hold of his character-defining traumas and disturbances for too long. Such ruses make the belittling moniker of ‘action cartoon’ an acceptable label for a series that should strive for something greater.

TNBA reviews: Cult of the Cat

Catwoman’s transformation from morally troubled kleptomaniac with a wildlife activist slant to a full-fledged femme fatale with nary a moral concern is both beneficial and problematic in varying respects. Beneficial because it delivers her from the preachy tepidity of animal rights crusades; problematic because it hollows out her character into something unbendingly amoral, an almost ghoulish abstraction who never fails to get her way, even when cornered by multiple opponents. The love affair between Batman and Catwoman that seemed plausible but unlikely is now jettisoned as a ludicrous impossibility.

Cult of the Cat places this new hedonistic, thrill-seeking and self-serving Catwoman front and center in a superfluous thriller involving a cult of cat-worshipping, blood-lusting zealots out to get her, either for the purpose of her bodily sacrifice or her conversion. Naturally Batman gets caught up in the chase, trading didactic aphorisms in between punches as he attempts to help Catwoman worm her way out of her mess. For the most part, the first two acts are breezy action fluff, the cult barreling onward like minions in a brainless action flick and every supposed pause a setup for a more explosive surprise. The incipiently irksome animation recedes in the wake of non-stop bravura storyboarding, so that one’s sense of animation quality is gradually displaced by a passive enjoyment of ceaseless movement, fluid or not.

Unfortunately this all comes screeching to a halt when Catwoman is captured by the cult and confronted by its leader, Thomas Blake. The story, and the devious allegiances and flagrant lies on which it rests, is ultimately boring and transparent. When Batman and Catwoman do an iteration of the same morality play they have been doing since The Cat and the Claw, the only apparent rearranging of their dynamic comes with Catwoman’s dispositional change from morally conflicted to morally indifferent. Batman, apparently unable to keep from investing his hope and trust in someone so perpetually dishonest, becomes the unlikely victim of a not-by-any-means unforeseeable double cross.

A third act gladiatorial fight with a giant, mutated cat monster doubles back to the brainless action fun of the first act, but it trades in fast-paced kinetics for subdued spatial confinement. If the prospect of a concentrated fight in an underground arena seems promising, that is only because fixed locations are usually accompanied by worthwhile visual décor. Without anything particularly grabbing to justify such an extended sequence—the surplus of analytical editing growing particularly tiresome—the fight reads more as a videogame boss battle than a high-stakes act-closer. The only integral information nested within is Catwoman’s obligatory betrayal of the cult to come to Batman’s aid.

By the time she commits a third backstabbing reversal of allegiance, escaping to Paris with a vast sum of jewels stolen from her former captors, it becomes apparent that her playful sociopathy is here to stay, if of course we didn’t reach that conclusion in the episode’s first few minutes.

TNBA reviews: Critters

Batman as a character has survived hundreds of different incarnations spanning several decades. Some fans appreciate the character and the DC franchise for the versatility that accompanies constant reinvention, while others are slightly more closed minded. In recent decades, Batman has epitomized a popular flavor of psychological anarchy, excess darkness and realism, and anti-authoritarian coolness. When something like Critters pops up daring to merge American Gothic placeholders for rural America with outrageous biological experimentation, in the result yielding stampeding insects and a barrage of verbal and visual puns, then many fans react as if insulted or slighted. To them, the tonal exclusivity of Batman’s universe rules out such scenarios unconditionally.

I am of a different mindset entirely. Versatility is key not only to the enduring fascination, but also to the accessibility of the DC Animated Universe, and challenges to the internal stability of Batman are posed all the time, both in terms of continuity and atmosphere. In addition to the obligatory continuity errors that crop up from time to time, there are questions of whether visual redesigns make a dent on believable narrative continuity, or whether the immense technological disparity between the world of Superman and that of Batman mars the realism of either, or how the Batman of Justice League can possibly be the same as the Batman of Batman: the Animated Series, and so on. As far as atmosphere goes, the range of genres and storytelling modes would seem to destabilize what many fans perceive as a fixed state of dark realism.

Critters is a difficult episode because it defies categorization and doesn’t appear to market itself as a unique genre piece or comic escapade. Insofar as Farmer Brown is an unambiguous bad guy who is out for revenge and as Batman and co. are out to stop him, Critters is a typical villain-of-the-week offering with no obvious fourth-wall breaks or similar meta-textual veneers. On the grounds of character motivations or interactions, suspense, pacing, etc. Critters wavers between bland conventionality and flat-out incompetence. From an immediate transition between a genetically modified cow’s rampage and the ensuing trial that condemns its engineer to lose all research funding to an out-of-nowhere stampede of havoc-wreaking praying mantises, Critters does little to nurture believability or suspense, and the collective dullness of the Bat-family never quivers.

But it is not at a loss for conceptual aplomb, taking its bizarre foundation to even more radical extremes. If the fact of a genius biological engineer who just happens to be a gaunt farmer with a hillbilly daughter isn’t enough to disarm the viewer with originality, or at the very least queerness, then there is a smorgasbord of other things that will. From Farmer Brown’s artificial farm boxed into a giant offshore silo to a talking goat that breaches the defenses of Police Headquarters, Critters is almost uncomfortable in how many unpredictable turns it takes. Fiddle and blues guitar fill in the rural horror on the soundtrack while TV Western actor Peter Breck calmly and authentically channels Joe R. Landsdale’s distinguished genre-specific dialogue.

The backlash against Critters isn’t entirely a reactionary outrage over its refusal to play by the rules; it is stiltedly directed and very poorly animated, all while preferring spectacle to characterization and nuance. But as spectacle, Critters is exceptional. It offers sights and sounds that defy all sense, and on a first viewing, no matter how egregious it may appear to the mortified viewer, I would gambit that it is impossible not to follow it with bewildered curiosity to the very end.