B:TAS reviews: Terror in the Sky

(9/01/09)

A common strategy used in churning out action cartoons is to bring back an old villain and cast him or her in a half-baked story, the only purpose of which is to emphasize ‘the return’ of whomever the hell it is. This time the Man Bat is spreading his wings again, feeding on fruit transports and the like, and it is up to Batman and the charmingly dysfunctional (not really) Langstrom family to solve the mystery.

The allure of On Leather Wings, the Man Bat’s first appearance, lay not in the villain, but in the sublime sense of style that permeated it all. The Man Bat plot was but a rice-cake laden with the toppings of slick action, crisp animation, and that ubiquitous art deco design style. Sumptuous smoke and shadow ooze out of it lusciously. The drama of the Langstrom family was of little concern.

But alas, Terror in the Sky is a soap opera, a bored exercise in marital disintegration that lacks the necessary development such stories deserve. Without the fine gradations of breakdown, we are left with a shrieking Francine and an exhausted Kirk, and the actors who play them give wonderfully hammy performances. As an art critic I demand more development and as a little kid I demand less melodrama. The story seems have written itself, as it consists of so many generic back-and-forths that pass as essential plot points.

But I do not hate Terror of the Sky. As a matter of fact I feel its action is directed with adroit timing and a spatial sensibility. This may be the starting point for every aerial showdown to be seen in the DC Animated Universe, and to study these skirmishes between Batman and the Man Bat is to get a feel for the skills that would become intuitive for the directors as such sequences became the norm. There are tracking shots with animated backgrounds, wide-angle perspective shots, and tilts of backgrounds that view the city from any number of high or low angles. Batman combats his air bound opponent first on motorbike, and then takes to the air in the Batwing, and both set pieces pay off handsomely.

I feel that Tyger, Tyger is more ambitious in its foray into the consequences of man-beast transformations. The implications are gravely detrimental for social bonding and maintaining a firm sense of identity. But for Langstrom the only fear lies in how such a monstrosity might affect his marriage, little concern for the drastic wears and tears on the human soul. The true failure lies in the fact that the characters we care for in Batman are those with psychological maladies, not those with hollow personal predicaments. Langstrom’s only explored trait is his association with the Man-Bat serum; the writers were mistaken in thinking that we might care about other areas of his life.