S:TAS reviews: The Prometheon

The story plods along like the lumbering star of the show, the giant Prometheon, whose every feature has the cumulative look of craggy terrain. A plotless, entertaining connect-the-dots giant-monster extravaganza, The Prometheon is a much-needed chapter in Superman. Not every episode can be nuanced or explorative; if the series is to acknowledge its hero’s lengthy history charting back to the early days of simplified sci-fi monster brawls, then surely another small-scale narrative can be postponed for something so appealing to that raw human desire for spectacle.

Many fans slight this episode not necessarily for its subject matter, but for its lugubrious pace and the absence of any riveting physical confrontation. For me, the appeal lies in the creature’s extensive animation, how every cast shadow across the ravines of his face or bodily craters moves in correspondence to his hulking motions. By nature that this monster is so meticulously animated he is made to fully embody his voluminous physical presence; see Justice League’s Metamorphosis for an example of a giant monster whose monumentality is underplayed by a dearth of detail. He isn’t merely a separate entity squeezed into a preexisting landscape, two different masses of image unconvincingly rubbed against one another. Every step makes the earth tremble and a gust of gravelly smoke emit from the impact.

Of course the creature is a tribute to Jack Kirby, whose allegedly gruff personality already has a vessel in Dan Turpin. Hallmarks of Kirby’s dynamic style manifest in the Prometheon’s protruding brow, fluorescent eyes nesting within thick black outlines, and rough, rocky exterior. His defined lower lip is characteristic of all of Kirby’s brutes, from The Hulk to The Thing to everyone in between. The star of The Prometheon is this design, a grueling labor of love that occupies a daunting physical space and hearkens back to a great era in adventure serial comic book art.

Besides this animated feat is a narrative strand that is both referential and foreshadowing, one General Hardcastle who stands for all of the prejudicial political and military higher-ups of Marvel Comics, most recognizably General Ross of The Incredible Hulk. At the same time he is a seemingly isolated homage to yet another element of a typical Kirby comic book tale, he does reappear sparsely throughout the rest of the DC Animated Universe for more complex political commentary on the relationship between superheroes and government. Charles Napier is ideal for the general, drawing out each tangential statement and self-absorbed command with passive-aggressive relish.

I will never understand the popular hatred for The Prometheon. In addition to what I have already mentioned, there are tremendous, stellar set pieces. A subjective glimpse of Metropolis renders it a dazzling dreamlike lightshow, a mirage-like Las Vegas resting amid a dry and desolate landscape. From the monster’s nosedive into the harbor comes a deafening quake that extends the animators’ skill at putting homogenous elemental entities into motion to the foamy tidal wave that comes crashing down on a nearby yacht. The finale is abrupt and thusly concentrates the catharsis into a powerful shot of the alien’s frozen arm reaching out of the reservoir; for whatever reason I find this instantaneous incapacitation an inevitably haunting conclusion.

S:TAS reviews: Two's A Crowd

Two’s A Crowd dodges both clichés and the snares of overbearing psychology, and is left as a savory stew of various unrelated elements, all of which amount to one of the most original adventure stories I have yet seen in cartoons. Before the events of the opening, a bomb has already been planted somewhere in Metropolis and the perpetrator, a villainous professor, has already solidified a scheme whereby he is to receive a few million big ones. Holding a city ransom is a banal scheme for a mastermind, and so the creators have fun by complicating it and then dressing up their convoluted creation with all manner of amusing oddities.

Over the opening credits we are subject to a standoff between the police and a fantastical castle armed to the teeth with fatal gizmos. Superman’s foray into the mansion interiors, which seem half gothic and half sci-fi in design, always strikes me as surreal. A more contrived approach would have inserted a preconceived substitute for a mastermind’s lair, perhaps an underground headquarters or a lab facility, but there is a sense of boundary-crossing fun here, wherein the creators feel inclined to dazzle the viewer with unlikely scenarios and imaginative contraptions. After the professor’s capture, which renders him unconscious, the stakes get interesting, and what should be so straightforward, interrogating the captive from an advantageous position, is instead made difficult by his state of unconsciousness.

The conventions of every city-for-ransom story now begin to dismantle, as the ball soon lands in Garver’s court, and then afterwards continues alternating sides with frustrating forbearance. When Superman and Professor Hamiltion employ Parasite to extract the information they need, the tables are turned when Garver unexpectedly ends up at the helm of Parasite’s body. But Superman and his companions remain in control by informing him that he may be near the site of his bomb for all he knows, prompting him to reluctantly comply.

The climax takes place in an abandoned subway construction site, the project having been abandoned due to a massive hole that seems to go straight to the center of the earth, yet another of those weird sci-fi phenomena that would only exist in such a wildly inventive pastiche of a cartoon as this. The ensuing fight between Superman and Parasite should be viewed side-by-side with their first battle in Feeding Time. The choppiness of the former that forces awareness of the storyboarding gives the character-specific movements and actions of Two’s a Crowd a comparative finesse. Parasite ravenously charges at Superman with flailing limbs and a locked-in wrist, fully prepared to drain the life out of him, while Superman’s struggling has never been portrayed so well. Of course all is resolved with help from the big gaping abyss.

One might think that there would be no satisfying way to put the cap on such a madcap tale, but the final few shots of Rudy receiving his gift of a television in his cell as Garver bitterly trudges through the corridors of Ryker’s seems to champion the simple wisdom of the ordinary man, no matter how rotten he is, over the egomaniacal ambition of the mad genius.