S:TAS reviews: Double Dose

Double Dose is possibly the sleekest that Superman: the Animated Series has ever looked. The colors are appropriately bold, the backdrops often muddled and damp and allowing the cobalt and aqua that consumes Livewire’s body dance and flicker on the screen, as well as the striking intermingling of darkened primary colors that overlay Superman's costume and Parasite's hulking purple mass that takes possession of the frame space whenever he becomes the focus. But Livewire is the centerpiece, and here she manipulates her powers with more finesse than in her debut, and instead of garish globs of untempered electrical energy, she fires concentrated musket balls of dazzling light that careen across the screen, slow down, and then impact with a seismic jolt. Every action has its own acrobatic flair, as the animators dissolve every object in motion into streaks of pigment and fashion each new pose with extreme foreshortening.

Perhaps most important is Livewire’s design. She looks the same as in Livewire, but she is no longer weighted down by blocky movements and ugly framing. We get more close-ups of her face, now fastidiously accentuated with seductive grins and playful glances. She exaggeratedly swings her hips as she walks and arches her shoulders when she stands. This is important because the entire plot of Double Dose, however shapeless, is unified by associations between sexual desire and power hunger. From the opening scene, in which Livewire garners a young janitor’s sympathy and persuades him to let her listen to his Walkman and extracts its electricity, writer Hilary Bader slowly molds a story about how sex is a stand-in for any representation of power or dominance, and this metaphor gets played up in a multitude of amusing ways.

Livewire’s absorbing the Walkman’s electricity is a precursor to Parasite’s desire to absorb her power, and each of these power transfers is obtained by a different mode of sexual exploitation. Livewire uses her femininity to seduce her prey, and this attribute is highlighted even when her subjects are unwilling to relent, as when she plants a kiss on Dan Turpin’s mouth. Parasite’s power hunger and the means by which he satiates it are, by contrast, strictly masculine. He has no penchant for cunning and depends instead on brute force to get what he wants. For all of the harm Livewire inflicts, the power she absorbs comes straight from electronic devices and so she does not rob anyone of what is intrinsically his. Parasite’s abilities depend directly on depleting the powers of others, and his lust for Livewire’s energy and third-act betrayal becomes symbolic of the dynamics of rape.

Bader does not extend her analogy to generate any worthwhile discussion or even afterthoughts about sexual dominance in contemporary society, but it’s probably for the better. Unencumbered by the cautionary tightrope of social commentary, Bader lets her premise expand into unexpected moments of risqué humor, dirty asides at their subtlest and the equivalent of visual puns at their most barefaced. By the latter I am chiefly referring to Superman’s arrival at the power plant where the duo are wreaking havoc. Inspired by Lois’s poncho, he shows up equipped with insulated rubber coating that looks like skintight see-through latex, and the immediate mental reaction of more jaded viewers is that he is dressed as a giant condom, a reaction supported by Livewire’s sarcastic comments (“Well what do you know? The Boy Scout brought protection.”) and sure to elicit many a guffaw.

For all it’s jumbled incoherency, Double Dose at its best has the feel of a suggestive romantic comedy out of Hollywood’s Golden Age, made possible only through censorship loopholes and several hefty dollops of innuendo, and made immeasurably more delightful in how it toys with its confinement.

S:TAS reviews: Mxyzpixilated

Paul Dini’s signature S:TAS episode addresses a curious question. How would Superman react in the face of a mere annoyance instead of a threat? Mxyzpixilated spans several months, and the challenge posed by the magical fifth dimensional imp lacks any immediacy. What then, is the fun of an outing with no seriousness beyond a word game, and where most of the source material comes from comic strips as opposed to comic books?

As in The Main Man, Dini loves making the otherworldly hilariously familiar. Mr. Mxyzptlk’s comedy is two-fold. First is the fact that a mystical trans-dimensional ‘superior’ being is practically Gilbert Gottfried incarnate, an obnoxious funny looking loud-mouthed man. Though he professes to be above Earthly concerns, in his trivial pleasure-seeking and hoping to drive Superman batty with his irritating games, Mxyzptlk ends up going obsessively mad, whining like a child, and declaring revenge, ever prone to a wide spectrum of human faults and vices. The funniest of these is his sexual appetite, communicated in classic Warner Bros. fashion in the final scene, which in turn begs questions about his seductive girlfriend and their chic art deco apartment.

Secondly, the logic of Mr. Mxyzptlk’s powers and abilities is constantly vacillating. Initially we view him as having power without limits, restricted only by the limitations imposed by his enormous ego. If he wanted to, Mr. Mxyzptlk could destroy Superman in the blink of an eye with merely a thought. But when, out of rage, he is convinced to get rid of the Man of Steel, we see him slaving away for the entire three month sojourn in his own dimension, to which he is subjected if Superman gets him to say his name backward, on a massive robot suit, complete with oversized Swiss Army knife and zipper, which naturally fails to pay off. Mr. Mxyzptlk, for whatever reason, is bound by an arbitrary logic in his seemingly illogical world, evoking the ambiguous rules of physics and reality that governed old Looney Tunes cartoons (as in Baby-Doll, the fun of Mr. Mxyzptlk is that his cartoon design is like a remnant from the heyday of Warner Bros., visually at odds with Timm’s usual streamlined figures).

Almost as enticing as the weird antagonist is that Superman finally gets his time to shine as a human being, quick-witted, pestered, and prone to wry shoulder shrugging and satisfactory smirks. The appealing thing about Clark Kent is that despite his soft-spoken civility stemming from his guarded disposition, he is by nature a funny guy, whether he’s toying with Lois by sarcastically admitting that he’s Superman or beating her to the by-line, or simply sneaking in a sip of coffee when he’s supposed to have a broken arm. In Mxyzpixilated he makes do as a devious trickster in his own right, capable of verbal sparring and, at the end, indulging in uncharacteristic false modesty with a condescending grin plastered on his face.

Paul Dini has a blast with Mxyzpixilated; fans often complain of his decline from writing hard-edged dramas to farcical comedies, but upon close inspection one realizes that both are equally sophisticated.

S:TAS reviews: Action Figures

Metallo, like Bizarro, is born of an endlessly recycled sci-fi archetype. Also like Bizarro, and also because of his own sci-fi mold, that of a man made machine, he is characterized as the victim of an identity crisis. It is a rather standard crisis exhibited in The Way of All Flesh, complicated by Corben’s amorality and thusly the framing of his loss of self in sensory, more specifically tactile, terms as opposed to emotional ones. The chilling thing about Corben’s iron mold is that he is not in the least bit bothered by the loss of his humanity per se, but by the loss of pleasure. If anything, one could say that Metallo is a reversal of the usual metal man figure, because he starts out robbed of the morality one might associate with an immersion in machinery and yet the very human emotions that yield destruction, anger and vengefulness, remain intact.

Action Figures begins with a Metallo, stricken with amnesia, wandering listlessly until he arrives on a volcanic island inhabited by a research team and the head scientist’s two naïve children. This is identity crisis in its purest form, destruction of self-image (his skin has been entirely ripped off) and amnesia yielding a Tabula Rasa emptiness with a slight pang of remembrance. Like Amazo of Justice League, but without obsequious devotion to a ‘maker,’ Metallo becomes the puppet of the children. The episode’s preferable characterization is that of an action figure, and in that context the children’s inability to distinguish between their playthings and a robot, except in the sense that the latter is autonomous, becomes potentially horrifying. Of course when Metallo regains his memory the episode loses the dimension of a child’s dangerous perception of reality, but it retains its suspense, in that one gets the sense that Metallo’s amorality has serious potential to harm the children he now finds at his beck and call in a 180 degree role reversal.

The denouement is circular in recalling the opening images of Metallo aimlessly walking after the fallout of an enormous disaster. This time, he is in full possession of his memory but without any desire of being John Corben again, softly repeating “I am Metallo.” If there is anything problematic about this ending it is that there never was much distinction between Corben and Metallo, and if this affirmation of a cyborg self is supposed to imply a loss of scruples and inspire a shudder then it sadly fails. However, in stripping away the basis of most stories that attempt to differentiate between man and machine, that which is rooted in our own self-perception as a moral and ideological species, then this finale can be viewed as an ominous look ahead to future stories that have the potential to demonstrate even more atypical implications of such a transformation. Sadly, this never happened.

What makes Action Figures is its climactic fight scene, and its only tie-in to the major theme is that, from the vantage point of Lois and the two children, Superman and Metallo do look like two action figures sparring with one another, flailing limbs and all. It is one of the most brutal fights, a mixture of camerawork, environmental interaction and a preference for actual fight technique over an endless series of consecutive blows. The fight’s signature moment occurs when Metallo uppercuts Superman, achieving such an impact that his Kryptonite-proof helmet flies off. The camera swings upward in conjunction with Metallo’s fist with the same vigor that Superman’s head suddenly swings backward, with the vertical tilt serving a secondary purpose in that we see the helmet catapult into the air and subsequently vanish. The direction team at TMS always seemed prepared to pioneer new and dynamic ways to communicate violence, and the premise of two titans sparring in the midst of a volcanic eruption seemed too good not to go wild.

S:TAS reviews: Target

Middle-of-the-road Superman can often be a surprising integration of unlikely parts, i.e. over-the-top camp and sophisticated drama. Target is almost unanimously considered average at best, a redundant mystery with a silly line-up of suspects and hammy no-holds-barred finale. But I cannot deny a strange satisfaction I got from this seeming standstill waste, and that was a satisfaction almost exclusively associated with what Manny Farber calls Termite Art, network charting, expansive works of wonder disguised as garish melodrama and trite action.

After Superman rescues Lois the first time, during the awards ceremony, there is an immediate cut to their return drive, the sort of in-between sequence rarely indulged in flash-bang superhero cartoons. Naturally this immediately turns into another Lois-in-jeopardy scene, and before the first act is over Superman has come to her rescue on two separate occasions. The subsequent acts alternate between mystery solving and more tiring rescues, the latter compounding as fast as the list of suspects. Slicing it a different way, it is an alternation between campy silliness and refined character intermingling. In the realm of the silliness are Lois’s demurely obnoxious journalistic competitor that flaunts his red herring status, Lytener’s geeky murder motivation, and the endless barrage of flying elevators (“I believe this is your floor”) and out-of-control cars. In the latter category are the sense of well-founded paranoia that might plague a hunted journalist with a long line of potential malefactors, the brief, realistic exchange between Lois and Lex that aptly characterizes their tinted relationship, and of course the final payoff that transforms the running rescue gag into low-key romance.

I’m still indifferent in spite of my momentary spurts of excitement. Structurally it is still a messy sine graph of ups and downs and the cheese doesn’t always jive with my comic sensibilities. Though it is impossible for me to take the mystery seriously, I still cringe when Lytener reverts from mild-mannered lab worker to histrionic, browbeating spurned lover with an insatiable schoolboy crush. The entire third act fight is silly to me, especially Lois’s nervously standing within a ring of vertical lasers waiting for it to end, her impatience mirroring my own as Superman and his body-armored nemesis trade repetitive blows.

It appears that if the final reveal and subsequent fight is Target at its lowest, then Luthor is its saving grace, clouding our villainous perception of him in his sincere concern for Lois’s well being. Though it is Superman who comes to Lois’s rescue, fists raised and ready for battle, one must not forget that it is Luthor who slips Clark the revelatory information. In stark contrast to his appearance in Identity Crisis, in which he is played up as either a mad scientist or a source of dry comedy, Target grounds him as a real person with indelible virtues and remnants of past feelings scattered luminously throughout the darkness at his core. It is appearances like these that make the character’s series spanning arc such an intriguing phenomena, as we can trace how these virtues slowly, and almost tragically, diminish.

S:TAS reviews: Identity Crisis

Though Identity Crisis is an admittedly contrived piece of work—doppelgänger, clones, secret laboratory, noble idiot—one has to admire that the producers never miss a chance to play with expectations. If the main plotline is only fair, then the patronizingly moralistic opening minutes that tonally contradict the bulk of the story demonstrates how even such a banal entry is atypical of Saturday morning television. Serving a two-pronged purpose, this opening, which is not entirely implausible as S:TAS filler, also raises certain expectations in the viewer who, aware of the inconsistency of all television, might shrug his shoulders and conclude that this will amount to little more than cloying didacticism in the vein of The Underdwellers of B:TAS, unprepared for the jolting scene in which Superman rescues Clark Kent from a plunge off the side of a cliff.

The episode doesn’t entirely supersede its opening segment; no matter how enjoyable Bizarro’s character is and no matter how snappy the one-liners, Identity Crisis is little more than condensed, watered-down variations on classical themes, as well as rife with implausibilities. Bizarro is fun, but does he represent much more than the usual clone/doppelgänger baggage of standard science fiction instinctively slapped on by writers penning a story that practically writes itself? Lex Luthor’s wry humor doesn’t disappoint, but his seemingly indefinite sojourn in his mountainside laboratory comes across as unlikely and it stands as one of the few times in Superman that Luthor fails to amount to more than a mere domineering mastermind. The climax is a gallery of clichés, managing to incorporate a timed bomb, sudden epiphany, and heroic sacrifice before closing on a trite, affirmative appraisal of said heroism.

But what proves fascinating about Identity Crisis is the titular crisis, in one sense one of the various riffs on archetypal sci-fi storylines but in another abject from them. Bizarro believes himself to be Superman because he is a defective clone programmed to think as such, but his perception of himself conforms to a very simplistic rubric of basic virtues. Superman rescue building. Superman fix bridge. Superman save Lois. Unlike other versions of the charmingly dumb hero, Bizarro’s childish stupidity is not a prerequisite for his heroism; his heroism exists in spite of his stupidity and lack of better judgment, both of which lead primarily to destruction. While so often the noble idiot stands angelically apart from those around him, whose intelligence seems to have automatically endowed them with bitterness, Identity Crisis presents a far more open view of what it means to be a hero, ultimately deciding that the will to do good is the highest virtue, and that it is not selective. The biologically deterministic moral perspective is shaky (“he came from good stock”) and would seem to contradict my conclusion (and it is also the very thing that the DCAU’s grandest statement, Epilogue, sets out to rebut), but it is not authoritatively insisted upon.

Bizzaro’s World, a superior sequel, will come along to stretch Bizarro’s self-perception to its most emblematic, arbitrary extremes, in a sense doing away with the sentimental morality in favor of a comic-surrealist extravaganza. Even so, Identity Crisis is too sincere to discredit, and even directs its grounding theme of identity confusion towards the development of Lois’s and Superman’s relationship, which starts off brazenly and winds up in a state of subdued, unspoken awareness.

S:TAS reviews: Speed Demons

Speed Demons, like much of the series, is a glorious tribute to the Silver Age of comic books. It takes its premise from a 1967 issue of Superman in which the Man of Steel and the Fastest Man Alive competed in a charity race. As the Flash would appear to rain on Superman’s parade, ever a cocky smirk on his face and never missing a chance to show off, the story thrives on clashes between their personalities. The judicious Boy Scout miffed by his competitor’s egocentrism and immaturity. As is predictable from the outset, the story isn’t about the race, as to crown a single winner runs contrary to superhero ethos, in which everyone who takes a stand against evil comes out a hero. And naturally by the end, Superman and Flash are best of friends, bound together by their unfailing heroism.

The episode is justifiably founded on the notion that buddy film conventions are all the grounding needed for a superhero team-up. The eye candy is the main attraction; Speed Demons is the most convincing demonstration of super speed in the DCAU. Instead of Justice League’s insisting on flashbulb repetitions of figure to relay rapidity to the viewer, which is counterproductive and merely clogs up the line of action with an all too noticeable ‘effect,’ Tokyo Movie Shinsha and director Toshihiko Masuda instead juggle the classical tradition of speed lines and abstract gusts of color with painstaking attention to the surrounding physics. From a distant vantage point we see the evocative stripes of blue and red and from a close-to-the-ground, worm’s eye perspective that views the figures first in long shot before they accelerate straight into the camera, we see the force with which their feet plant themselves into the earth and the resulting geyser of dust and gravel that spews out from under the friction. Wisps of wind, trailing eruptions of ocean water, flittering debris, and flailing of fabric are other examples of the appeal to the physical reactions of their hyper-fast sprinting.

In a lesser show, the villain who comes to pose a threat and thus spur our heroes to action would be an arbitrary no-good interventionist, or else a rogue overtly linked to the guest star (Reverse Flash would be the most prime candidate). The Weather Wizard occupies a gray area. He seems chosen because he’s a fairly well known Flash adversary, but I feel his link runs much deeper. He is predominantly associated with the elements, and since so much of the thrill of watching the Flash and Superman in action is how their enhanced speed is rooted in actual physics and how their deviation from what is scientifically normal affects their surrounding environment. The Weather Wizard is also concerned with altering the natural environment via acceleration of a similar kind, and so there is a certain theme of disharmony of nature whenever the two collide. To be even more analytical would be to observe that the Weather Wizard mans a man-made machine from a sterile enclosure, while Flash and Superman not only possess powers that are naturally ingrained, but are interact directly with the environment instead of digitizing it into holographic representations.

Finally, I don’t believe any of these strengths are necessarily compensation for the conventional story, as I don’t see anything wrong with this episode’s almost road-movie contrivances. Watching Speed Demons as a child, I didn’t mind the overbearing emphasis on duality: Superman vs. the Flash, streams of red vs. streams of blue, and the aforementioned clash of personality, neither getting the better of the other. I was excited to see the Flash, one of my favorite heroes, and such a bifurcated competition is the ideal, if a bit pedestrian, format for a superhero team-up. At the risk of sounding platitudinous, that’s the way it has to be.

S:TAS reviews: Livewire

The DCAU has always existed in a vague contemporary vacuum. There is plenty to ground it in the modern world, but it also encompasses odd anachronisms, futuristic technology and retro architecture, microchips and black-and-white TV sets. Livewire is the first brazen attempt to appeal to modern culture; the producers wear their intentions on their sleeves by nature that Livewire, the titular villain, is an original creation, the S:TAS equivalent to Harley Quinn. However, she is a far less complex and enjoyable character, a trash-talking controversial shock jock with an axe to grind and a public to rally.

Since the mid-nineties, when this episode first aired, shock jocks have become a relentlessly skewered pop culture phenomena; because they are the bottom of the barrel of popular culture, many television shows have taken it upon themselves to paint negative pictures of these polarizing provocateurs, even though they are usually every bit as part of the commercialized dumbing down of American culture as their easy satirical target. Even in the mid-nineties, these anathemas could hardly count as interesting, relevant subjects for assault, and in Superman: the Animated Series, which has proven itself capable of lightly commenting on more universal social and political ills, this flash-in-the-pan, clear-cut critique of media mouthpieces who savor the attention feels maddeningly out of place.

If there is anything exciting about the elongated first act that depicts media personality Leslie Willis spending her morning on the airwaves digging into Superman and creating a rift between the public in the process, it is the image of a Metropolis unified by media. Willis’s hate rant pervades the entire city, and we get a glimpse of how it affects various bystanders, whether they reside on the wharf or operate a crane atop a skyscraper. Until the usual mechanistic disaster that calls Superman from, of all things, an on-air interview with Willis, we have a rare look at a city of divvied up into sectors, further divided, ironically, by media, the universal leveler and the only uniform entity that spans across the entire city. Furthermore, though it is pedantically conveyed, we are finally introduced to the notion that there is a wide-reaching populist contempt for Superman. We have already seen such hatred and xenophobia within the context of corporate America (Luthor) and the US government (General Hardcastle); now we finally have a much-delayed overview of the outcry among the common people.

The first act concludes with Willis getting electrocuted at a show held during a thunderstorm and miraculously gaining the power to harness electrical energy, though of course the parameters of her powers are shakily defined. The background paintings of Metropolis’s equivalent to Central Park doused by rain and lit by lightning are impressionistically rich with the subdued palette of an overcast late evening. This first-act climax (and as far as I’m concerned that of the entire episode) is dazzlingly animated, both Superman’s and Willis’s electrocutions a swirl of wispy lightning that emits a bright fluorescent blue monochrome, the jumpy, flickering flashes of electricity energizing the scene with kinetic shadows and the overall feeling of elemental chaos.

Unfortunately, her subsequent plan and eventual demise are utterly contrived, the action suddenly becoming a series of dryly animated long-shot sequences instead of the intense close proximity of the first-act action. The second and third acts run together as the show devolves into an endless series of scuffles. The breadth of Metropolis exhibited in the first act becomes constricted to a Times Square district and a few spare interiors. A promising first act that was just prepared to extend its ideas of media ubiquity and do away with the grating shock jock routine fizzles out into a glob of villain-of-the-week tepidity.