S:TAS reviews: Monkey Fun

When viewers complainingly refer to Prometheon as a soporific, plodding go-nowhere story, they should really be directing these criticisms towards the far more lumbering and aimless Monkey Fun. Prometheon pulled out all the stops in its slowly paced miniature epic, seasoning its stew with a tense oppositional dynamic between Superman and the xenophobic US military, animated tribute to a rightly idolized comic book artist, and deft, scope enlarging visual/auditory combinations. Monkey Fun doesn’t share half that episode’s sophistication.

Both episodes are based on simple premises, both essentially about giant monsters that pose a threat to the inhabitants of Metropolis, but while Prometheon is expansive, Monkey Fun is hopelessly reductive, ironic given its central character a monkey undergoing massive growth spurts. It begins with a flashback to Lois’s upbringing on a military base, where she and her little sister had grown attached to Titano, a monkey intended for space travel. In the flashback, her father takes Titano away and submits him to the space voyage, which goes haplessly wrong and leaves Lois sad at the fate of her monkey pal.

This flashback’s ultimate purpose is to hammer home that the means of defeating Titano lies in the past, when as a child it was calmed by a toy monkey that chimed the tune ‘Pop Goes the Weasel.’ The ulterior motive it serves is to provide some insight into Lois’s past, a fruitless endeavor given that no information is provided that is not already inferable and that this then-tragic incident fails to register as a key moment in her life. When Superman finds Titano in the present, Lois can only express casual excitement, and her closing attitude to Titano is one of humanitarian affirmation rather than deeply rooted childhood affection.

Monkey Fun’s gambit is its title, which seeks to justify its endless meandering by rebilling it as a kind of wandering, adventure-seeking excitement. Titano’s rampages through Metropolis and the plethora of standoffs and screaming civilians aren’t really inserts intended to fill up space; they reflect the central figure’s animalistic curiosity and constitute a larger ambience. In essence, the lack of plot or point is supposed to be fun! If the episode achieved the kind of amusing atmosphere it advertises, perhaps a tongue-in-cheek Avery-like tale of a monkey’s unstoppable growth that whimsically pokes fun at the absurdities of one of comic book lore’s most trademarked storylines, then I would have been all for it. The episode we got instead is a tonal conundrum, shyly trying for sentimental character development, stakes-raising drama, and head-shaking comedy bits without cohesion.

The most Monkey Fun can boast is the occasional redemptive moment. For some it might be the brief look into Lois’s childhood, for others the well-crafted background designs of the Metropolis zoo, and for others yet the rare moment when the story approaches the fringes of the self-aware mode of absurdity it should have aimed for from the start. But as is implied by the term redemptive, these rare tidbits of interest only stand out because the rest of the show is a sterile mess.