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.