If The Last Son of Krypton was a sweeping epic intended to establish the major benchmarks of the Superman mythos, then Fun and Games is a more focused episode that gets into series routine. The first villain-of-the-week story, it boasts perhaps the most psychologically complex of Superman’s rogues gallery, a man whose human vulnerability, juvenile fixations, and unusual crimes set him up for knee-jerk psychoanalytical evaluations from tabloid shrinks, but also for very real and well earned pathos.
Toyman most certainly harkens back to Batman’s rogues gallery, but it is worth noting the differences between Metropolis and Gotham in how each city reacts to antisocial deviants. Gotham specializes in perturbed individuals; it is in its most harrowing portrayals a ghastly, crime-ridden No Man’s Land that houses its expressionistic monsters in a castle on a hill. Metropolis, a larger-than-life metropolitan haven, overlooks the threat of the silly little man, and Lois’ reactionary fluff piece about him is symptomatic of this big-city expedience. It is of course telling that her callousness in pursuing a sensational story leads to her capture.
Another curiosity is that the writers don’t play the sympathy card for Toyman, and yet sympathy is what naturally follows (Lois can’t help but feel sorry for him in spite of her kidnapping). He is intended to make the viewer squirm, dressed as a doll and voiced by an uncomfortably sinister Bud Cort. He elicits a horrific kind of infantilism and is jarringly frightening as he slowly hobbles forward to meet his victims. And yet a fervent telling of his story, that of the fatherless boy with no childhood, makes him understandable in the vein of Clayface or Mr. Freeze, and just as in Feat of Clay and Heart of Ice, the true villain is a grubby, contemptuous opportunist.
It is the lack of pause for psychological dramatizations—Toyman’s storybook scene is intercut with essential exposition—that keeps Fun and Games a vibrant Superman story and not a return to the ground already covered in Batman. While Toyman is an understandable adversary afflicted with psychological pain and suffering, he remains a demonic abstraction whose shattered mask at the end recalls the ending of Read My Lips in its foreboding. Since his complex is more implied than extensively dwelt upon, the rest of Fun and Games allots time to wickedly fun action scenes that utilize explosive physics and a wide variety of new environments.
A lot of the visual extravagance is owed to TMS, which not only animates roughly a third of all Superman episodes, but which also assigns direction to an in-house professional. The studio’s trademark qualities can be glimpsed all over, from the way the armored car briefly pauses going into a sharp turn before careening forward at a deafening speed to the slow motion shots of floating debris that follow the cannonball impact of Toyman’s accelerating bouncy ball on warehouse crates and wall generators.
By the end of Fun and Games, perhaps most importantly we get an idea of how the most physically frail of villains can pose a threat to Superman, a hero many frown upon for his immense physical strength. In each individual skirmish we see him not only dealing with weird anomalies like skin-digesting goo, but also having to account for his alter ego when a telephone booth isn’t nearby.
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