TNBA: The Ultimate Thrill

After the contemporary flair of Torch Song, The Ultimate Thrill launches us back into the impossible-to-pigeonhole period nebula of B:TAS, clearly taking place in modern times but making do with subject matter almost entirely out-of-date. Roxy Rocket is a retro-outfitted aviator who used to star in series of adventure films (in the same way the entire Batman mythos owes part of its existence to old live-action serials, they often play key roles in these similarly serialized cartoon series) who took her job as a stuntman to daring extremes before directing her fearless talents to underworld freelance. But what endears her to us more than her nostalgic evocations is her unadulterated sense of fun.

What proves fascinating about The Ultimate Thrill is that it expertly, if unintentionally, divides its audience’s allegiances between two equally attractive characters. One may sneer at it on first glance for being a catalogue of stylish chase sequences (to which one may inquire why this is in anyway a bad thing), but on closer inspection it proves itself as a succinct recapitulation of the central character dynamic in The Cat and the Claw without any of its pseudo-political baggage. The opening of The Cat and the Claw is one of the sleekest and most sexually charged pursuits that ever opened a superhero cartoon. Unfortunately, that belabored two-parter soon dissolved into bad feminist pedantry. The Ultimate Thrill picks up where that episode left off, deploying the same zesty sensual overtones in its chase sequences and maintaining the same level of energy the whole journey through. The result is a glorious crescendo that culminates in a transfixing innuendo-laden sequence of raw sexual excitement that compares the euphoria of a near-death experience to that of an orgasm.

What makes The Ultimate Thrill successful is that Roxy is a bubbly and likable character whose unsuppressed love for fun is foiled against her employer’s debonair villainy. Because Bader frames her run-ins with Batman more as play than as pursuit, it becomes apparent that finally apprehending Roxy is analogous to cutting short a great party. Do we side with Batman’s moral rationale or pray that Roxy stays one step ahead in the name of uproarious fun? I doubt it can be said that Batman in good conscience should remain on Roxy’s phallic flying rocket with a smirk on his face as it approaches the side of a cliff for no better reason than to demonstrate his ability to play her game, but it allows both her exhilaration and ours to persist for just an instant longer before the perfect stopping point, by which time we have all been adequately satiated. It is Batman’s most entertaining compromise.

It’s worth a reminder that the sexual sparring only suffuses life into set pieces that are bedazzling enough without the extra charge. One of the best takes place in an underpass, where Batman, flying by means of his tailor-made jetpack, attempts to subdue his opponent. The action takes place from several vantage points, thanks to Batman’s losing control in the highly congested thoroughfare, and extreme angles that replicate the look of a wide-angle lens shot distort the tunnel into a bizarre rotunda. These expressionistic moving spaces are inter-cut with Batman’s own subjective vision as he plummets through eighteen-wheeler storage trucks, and the entire sequence is cleanly but fiercely edited to yield one of the most successful of all of the series’ action extravaganzas. The other chase scenes carry the same vigor, be it through the keen feel for aerodynamics or the gorgeously composed cityscapes against which they take place.

TNBA reviews: Torch Song

An oft-disparaged episode, Torch Song emulates S:TAS’s Target with less success, abandoning its camp overtones and spending more time rallying our hatred for a warped sexual predator. TNBA again proves that it is, more often than not, lamentably inadequate at constructing for its villains anything other than bloated, breast-beating despair or psychotic shrillness. In his casting sickly, beady-eyed stares and stalking his prey with burly, hunched shoulders, Garfield Lynns is postured as an obsessive geek to be feared and derided from the outset. Unlike the similarly twisted Lloyd Ventris of See No Evil, who had soft, redemptive qualities and sieved into the rhythms of his tale, Lynns is a blunt object that deflects all closer inspection, jarringly jutting out of an already dissonant cluster of events.

Because character arcs are nearly impossible to develop across twenty-two minutes, Lynns begins as a real-world lunatic with a Madonna-whore hang-up on pop sensation Cassidy and swiftly turns into a more cartoonish lunatic, less human and more spectacular in his efforts to claim her as his own. As a character, he operates as a pendulum, swinging between the drive for total control over his idol and the destructive impulse to eradicate her. And like Baby-Doll and Mr. Freeze before him, Firefly is under the impression that igniting a citywide apocalypse equates to some form of therapeutic or spiritual cleansing, a leap that has only remotely made sense when applied to Freeze’s nihilistic misery. That several episodes seem to arrive at fusion bombs and other doomsday devices indicates a laziness on the part of the writers, who ride every villainous motive to this hash-brained outcome without possessing the verve to try something with more personalized stakes.

One might expect from Torch Song some type of thematic intermingling of subject matter and key motif, in this case fire, ever signifying passion or destruction. It partly fulfills these expectations, but unlike Heart of Ice, where ice and snow functioned as touchstones of pristine beauty that lyrically extended the sadness of the protagonist to the episode’s décor, Torch Song doesn’t seem to do much aesthetically with fire, indulging it for little more than bad puns or brusque figurative standbys for jealousy and contempt. I can give the episode credit for traipsing from an image of fire as a cheap entertainment draw-in to something more elemental and psychologically imprinted, but this is more than likely accidental and isn’t enough to significantly alter my evaluation.

The most significant aspect of Torch Song, then, is its swerving away from the period vacuum of the series that precedes it, which was an amalgamation of styles from various decades integrated for widespread purposes, to appeal more to the nineties. Cassidy is a nightclub superstar whose performances rely more on pyrotechnics than on her vocals to sell them and who embodies all the offbeat, sex-symbol mania of the eighties and nineties music scene. Unfortunately, Torch Song does little in the way of saying anything incisively amount music or the industry, nor does it even feel obliged to partake in any fun, referential pastiche in the vein of a director like Godard or Tarantino. Instead it stumbles through a misshapen pattern of daily investigations and nightly skirmishes, until culminating in a weak-willed jab at the music industry and a bit of faux-poetic psychological trauma.

TNBA reviews: Love is a Croc

Outsiders and misfits are impelled to cling together, even if the basis for the affiliation is little more than the surface trait of being different. Baby-Doll, now a hotel clerk, finds herself drawn to Killer Croc because she mistakenly believes that, even though his murderous behavior could not be anymore apparent, he is wrongfully accused and marginalized by a conformist society, a point that the writers incredulously attempt to make plausible through the brief prejudicial asides delivered by miscellaneous pedestrians that follow Croc’s outbreak from a courthouse. This line of thinking is soon overturned when Croc’s charisma as a dockside ladies’ man negates any of his chronic inability to relate to other human beings. Baby-Doll ends up as the only one of the two who has any real claim to being an outsider and, as we soon see, the only character with any claim to being remotely developed.

Love is a Croc almost remedies Sideshow’s silly echoing of classical tragedy in its third-act plea for sympathy, having us believe he deterministically kills and thieves because it is who he is and can’t be changed. But it falls short by falling on another extreme of creating for him a profile of irrevocable, unfiltered brutality without indulging in the comic or human potential he showed when voiced by Aaron Kincaid. As a non-character, he is partially culpable for this episode’s destabilization when it was at least showing some moderate sophistication as another exploration of Baby-Doll’s regression into a romantic, television fantasy, here translated into a misfit Bonnie and Clyde duo. Croc reveals himself as so caricatured and goonish that Baby-Doll’s loneliness may as well be chalked up to her sad existence as the only developed character in a world without a capable righter to elevate plight to the level of tragedy. Without sturdy characters to situate her, she winds up shrill, pathetic and psychologically disfigured beyond all sympathy or comprehension.

Further prohibiting any fluidity or sensibleness from seeping into the story is the absence of Batman, or any of his new team, as voyeur, sympathizer, and audience stand-in, a function he tends to serve in episodes featuring villains that find themselves in dire need of emotional or psychological help. Unlike in Baby-Doll, where Batman aptly fulfilled all of these roles, here, as in many TNBA episodes, he is more stolid and strictly functional; the disparity between his appraisal of the events and our own, given shape by our exclusive access to the turmoil of Croc’s and Baby-Doll’s underground hideaway, becomes too large for us to identify with him, which, in effect, prevents us from adequately identifying with anyone. Batgirl, ever by his side, is as one-note as she’s ever been. Baby-Doll remains the protagonist, but our interest in her struggles diminishes with her troupe of stock supporting players whose job it is to generate her conflict and direct its trajectory.

Love is a Croc can only boast a surprisingly awkward pairing that seems initially exciting on the grounds of its own arbitrariness. It also exemplifies the downsides of the series’ revamp between B:TAS and TNBA. Starting with Batman’s brawl with Croc in the Gotham streets, Love is a Croc makes a show of being strung together more by its fight scenes than by its story-focused junctures, allowing every minor transgression to propel the ever-fragile state of affairs into a brainless action sequence. The worst B:TAS episodes owe their poor quality to miscalculations of character or social commentary of the most patronizing sort. Not one of them exhibits such thrill-happy, knee-jerk escalations of chaos that yield plot developments so perplexing and meaningless that it’s straining even to muster up a sympathetic response to a character’s total emotional devastation.

TNBA reviews: Growing Pains

Growing Pains assumes the gravitas of a feature-length film through its economical storytelling that subsumes temporally condensed, but emotionally charged sequences that tacitly fill in narrative gaps and wipes that elide all that is unnecessary with greater efficiency than straight cuts or dissolves. Growing Pains has neither the time nor artistic license for lengthy introspection or extended lyricism, but in its watercolor backgrounds and midpoint interludes that distill a humble social awareness it comes close to the poetry of the very best youth films by Nicholas Ray and Dennis Hopper, and echoes them thematically in its handling of muddled father/son relationships and in its inevitable convergence on catastrophe.

The premise is that Robin has become obsessed with a lost, amnesiac girl tentatively dubbed Annie out of a combination of pity, empathy, and teenage romance. Dini and Goodman do little to mollify her straits, starting the episode out with a biker convoy of would-be rapists who encircle her in an alleyway and bait her with degrading come-ons. Robin comes to her rescue in a triumphant sequence of adolescent valor that immediately dissolves into awkward intrigue for her. That Annie’s confused loneliness corresponds to Robin’s own murky childhood as a mobster’s son and that Robin is for a rare moment alone in his actions as a savior immediately conjures expectations for romance, or at the very least deeply involved friendship, and these expectations are immediately dashed by a signal from Batman roughly akin to a sudden tug on a dog leash. As in Never Fear, Batman is a domineering, unsympathetic and constrictive father figure that has multiple unflattering parallels in the story. Robin is the only one of the two seeming to carry a spark of basic human feeling for Annie, who is filtered almost completely out of Batman’s radar of more pressing priorities.

Robin’s nocturnal trek through the ruination of Gotham’s poverty-stricken sectors, arriving soon after Annie is revealed to have a father (in a riveting sequence at a bus station that utilizes intersecting lines of both architecture and processions of people to characterize Annie’s frantic aloneness), is the centerpiece that, in a unique instance, encourages time for reflective pause. For all of the cartoon archetypes that Annie fulfills, especially those attributable to anime, Dini and Goodman are earnest about making us believe her as a human being, and these somber observations of poor people thematically associated with Annie and strewn about crumbling tenements do wonders to evoke the kind of lamentation one would only expect to find in more challenging works of art.

The irony of the lengths the writers go to make Annie feel more human than the rest of our cast is that she isn’t human at all. Though it may be a disappointment to some that the plot takes a turn for the fantastical when the story seemed so focused on real-life issues, the revelation that Annie’s father is Clayface escalates the drama exponentially, raising relevant and almost unanswerable questions of ethics that make the proposed antagonist a man of justifiable principle and Robin, the proposed protagonist, at a loss for how to reconcile his gut-feelings to a sadly mixed-up reality that can’t quite account for his easy solutions. We agree with him in his beliefs that Annie deserves to be treated as a human being and Clayface as a monster, and yet neither one can be successfully argued with any degree of closure.

The paroxysmal finale in which Clayface reabsorbs Annie, whom we find was merely an extension of his will before she blacked out and became autonomous, not only pays homage to Akira and its ending of similarly self-destructive elemental chaos, but also stands as the DCAU’s definitive moment of moral limbo. The boundaries that govern the definition of murder and the rights of an organism (and this counts for both Annie and Clayface) are blurred irrevocably, resulting in a denouement of grown-up frustration that marks both a coming-of-age story in the best sense and an indelible sign of maturity in a series currently undergoing a watershed period of boundary-pushing and rediscovery.

TNBA reviews: Joker's Millions

There are few episodes of Batman where the Joker is not predetermined to boast some form of victory, laughing uproariously in the face of death or defeat. In his otherworldly resilience and archetypical presence as Batman’s inverse in morals and mannerisms, he seems more ethereal than human, and this simultaneously promotes mythical readings of the characters’ never-ending power-struggle and supplants any stab at realistically looking at the nature of evil with an iconographic abstract of a character that resembles Hannibal Lector in his apparent immortality and undeniable enticement.

The New Adventures of Batman represents a period in the Joker’s animated history where his supernatural ghastliness is whittled down significantly to expose a more whimsically human specimen who just happens to be Gotham’s most notorious psychopath. In Joker’s Millions he is just as much a victim of plot twists and surprises as the rest of the characters, no longer equipped with his usual unconditional and unexplainable superiority to the laws of chance and physics and life in general. Paul Dini intersperses his script with comical suggestions of the Joker’s non-mythical existence, a whirligig examination of the many vicissitudes of a working-class criminal. Strapped for cash, a tenant at the down-and-out Chelsea Arms apartment building, and oddly vulnerable, the Joker reveals yet a new dimension to his usual plastered-smile extravagance that comes with Dini’s love of creating sit-com scenarios and familiarizing his favorite characters within their comparatively down-to-earth contexts.

Complementing the light-hearted plotline is an unprecedented barrage of tricks and veneers that elevates Millions from the buddy comedy likes of Harley and Ivy or the Honeymooners lampooning of Harlequinade to an embrace of 90s comedy customs. As such, the feeling is less screwball and more contemporary. Not only are there freeze-frame gags and subtle background touches à la The Simpsons, but the satire of political corruption that manifests in ironic, deadpan delivery and digs at topical controversies (the appearance of a Johnnie Cochran caricature seems to associate the Joker with O. J. Simpson) is similarly modern in its jaded deprecation. And yet the pace is so jumpy that these drive-by political jabs mesh within a jovial schema of colorful montages and cartoon vivacity. In short, Dini has a handle on divergent forms of humor that blend effortlessly in his screenwriting.

This fusion of old-hat and modernist comic sensibilities ultimately says something about the Joker and Dini’s particular skill as he strives to constantly reinvent the character. The contradictory modes of comedy function as an extension of the tonal contradictions of his previous Joker/Harley comedies, which satisfied both grim, psychological realism and screwball zaniness. Joker’s Millions, after boiling it down, is an adaptation of a Silver-Age Joker adventure in a series that typically plays him for ghoulish menace, yet another oxymoronic creative decision and the one that most aptly reflects Dini’s boldness in his decree that multiple versions and interpretations of the same character coexist in streamlined continuities. The Joker of Joker’s Millions conflicts with that of Mask of the Phantasm, but this illogical flexibility compensates by fostering an immensely satisfying range of unpredictable personas and dimensions of character that seeks to demolish our dogmatic precepts about serialized continuity.

Dini is a formidable artist working within the humble art of television screenwriting who feels free to mix and match seemingly incompatible genres and formats into wildly inventive wholes. This defiance of the established order is what has made him so hard for certain fans to accept as he inevitably veered away from straightforward melodrama (not that he has not successfully tried his hand at them since) and into more formally adventurous terrain.

S:TAS reviews: Heavy Metal

Not since Jimmy Olsen’s quip about Barney the Purple Dinosaur in Feeding Time has Superman: the Animated Series been so caught up in capturing some kind of cultural zeitgeist, and no, this is not the zeitgeist captured by anyone with the competence of Frank Tashlin in the fifties—the rise of comic books, rock and roll, and television—but rather that of bad nineties sitcoms and superficial surveys of black culture. Heavy Metal’s hip posturing begins with its title and worms its way through slapdash representations of the ghetto, a bizarre synth beat set to a bank robbery, and a sass-talking niece thrown in for good measure.

Like Father’s Day, Heavy Metal flounders along a string of shoddily animated fights in a neighborhood that sloshes around in its wavering spatial layout. Thanks to its warbling pace and a surfeit of over-ambitious moving camera shots that strip all semblance of stability from the environments, Heavy Metal is even less cohesive than Father’s Day, which at the very least had concentration on its rambling brawl. It’s hard to tell where exactly certain actions take place in relation to others, given the rotating geography of the ironworks neighborhood and the zip-line car chases that seem to go in circles. Metallo’s spidery movements are not only the best part about the fight scenes, but also the best part about his character.

Action Figures left off with an ominous mirror reflection that contrasted the obsessive embrace of a new identity with amnesiac identity confusion, a bit of presumptive sci-fi foreshadowing that could have very well opened the floodgates for any kind of meditation on the cyborg phenomenon. An already amoral monster that just happened to be human was stripped of even that categorical moniker, leaving the viewer to wonder about the ramifications such a change might entail. Heavy Metal peremptorily cuts off any further discourse on the subject to have Metallo regress even further beyond the intimidation he exhibited as the terrorist in The Last Son of Krypton to become a common thug and shameless mouthpiece for street-smart lingo, including such commonly used phrases as ‘back in the hood’ and ‘super-fly.’ While The Way of All Flesh and Action Figures gave one the impression that A-list actor Malcolm McDowell was matching an excellent series with his superlative voice talents, Heavy Metal removes all doubt that he’s doing his work for an easy paycheck.

Character is non-existent in this pop culture grab-and-go. Steel, voiced by a monotone Michael Dorn, doesn’t in twenty minutes move beyond the stolid rigidity of his first appearance in Protoype, while Superman spends most of the time straddling fire escapes or supine on a recovery bed. The pair of square-jawed heroes foils with Metallo and Irons’ niece Natasha—an emotive, comic relief duo—and vice-versa until each figure occupies some grotesque extreme. As the two heroes finally shake hands, the intended effect is of a ritualistic adding on to a roster of ever-expanding heroes. But since the designated upstart lacks any discernible significance beyond his surface attributes as a basket-ball jersey wearing ghetto representative with a cool-looking getup, the resonance of that effect withers in place of a gracious relief that the only remotely dramatic event after twenty-two minutes of listlessness has finally happened.

S:TAS reviews: The Late Mr. Kent

As Superman stands overlooking his own funeral while delivering the beginning of a monologue that spans the length of an episode and evokes the noirs of Billy Wilder in more ways than one, the first thought is that The Late Mr. Kent is an ambitious genre exercise. But as the plot unfolds, one may very well get the even stronger impression that the writers are taking advantage of a breach in censorship enforcement for bold, politically conscious directives, a wave of social critique towering above the series’ usual ripples of action fantasy that somehow takes precedence over its own narrative stylishness. Following Prototype, which glorified an instrument of hi-tech militarism, The Late Mr. Kent treats its charged subject matter with a frankness and seriousness that is disconcerting for any viewer, let alone its intended audience, and it is this audaciousness that makes it the series masterpiece, even among works of equal quality.

All throughout The Late Mr. Kent, many surprising series firsts abound, and the most integral to an assessment of the episode’s politics and how its politics tints our perspective of series convention is its treatment of everything beyond Superman’s existence as a real-life phenomenon. Instead a super villain, the antagonist is a corrupt cop, that essential American archetype that didn’t even rear its head in the grimy streets of Gotham. In confronting his real-life adversary, Superman functions primarily as his real-life counterpart, Clark Kent, acting on his exclusive knowledge that small-time thief Ernest Walker is not, in fact, guilty on one count of murder, his strenuous efforts to exonerate the innocent man reminiscent of the portrayals of Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men and all that that film did to revere ambitious, moralistic journalists as the keys to dismantling political corruption. Shots of Clark working late in the empty pressroom surely arise from the film’s milieu of vast, empty interiors dotted only by the two tireless heroes thanklessly working away. The Late Mr. Kent is more engaging, devoid of ‘historical relevance’ but full of introspection that raises moral questions about the volatile commingling between the altruism and self-righteous opportunism inherent to using one’s prestigious occupation to right a wrong. Clark’s ego peers through the cracks in his one-upmanship with Lois and desire to drive straight to the governor’s office to claim a victory for his career when Superman could have cleared the man with far less of a hassle.

The device of Clark delivering a monologue about his investigation, another first, is not merely an implicit way of gaining stature for narrative exceptionalism, but it also permits a voyeuristic identification with the series protagonist not to be found anywhere else. The results simultaneously engage our sympathy for our victim of investigative shortsightedness in following the efforts of his benefactor and create uneasy questions about the egocentricity that his status as both superhero and professional journalist entails. In clearing Walker, he finds an opportunity to claim an intellectual victory instead of a superheroic one, and this achievement means more to him than his moral objective. In fact, neither Clark nor Superman seems to show much warmth or sympathy toward Walker, as if he is following an ideological procedure without demonstrating any care for the person in jeopardy.

This is almost nothing compared to the less-than-admirable depictions of Lois and Jimmy. In the only moment that doesn’t quite ring true due to Lois’s typical skepticism of corporate and political higher-ups, she and Jimmy succumb to a bout of conservative complacency, writing off an innocent man’s execution because he ‘probably’ did it. Given that the supposed killer is a black ex-con living in a low-rent apartment, the class observation couldn’t be any more acute. With implicitly shady moral judgments of our usual heroes, screenwriter Stan Berkotwitz calls attention to deep-rooted social biases and ambivalences in people we tend to accept as the good guys and allows us to meditate on how ingrained certain social ills are in our society without ever quite placing us in disquietude.

The crux of the episode is the announcement of Clark’s death, which in addition to posing some nice psychological queries about how living the life of a human is key to Superman’s psychological and presumably moral well-being, it also gives Superman, the only fantastical element in an otherwise real-world episode, incentive to intervene. His intervention begins to jigsaw our straightforward imaging of how Superman’s immense power meshes with the convoluted mainframe of legality and political legitimacy. Further still, this pivotal moment acts as a counterpoint to the off-screen murder of the woman supposedly killed by Walker; if her death is unable to garner our emotional involvement, then Lois’s reaction to Clark’s death fills the void, and continues to ground the story in a kind of grim, fatalistic world where death is a reality, despite what convention tells us, and the institutions we tend to trust can very well be what brings it about.

After Superman regains the upper hand and learns that Bowman is the true killer—an ingenious move given that Bowman has appeared in the series before and therefore possesses some precursory reasons for the audience to doubt his culpability—he shows up at the governor’s house to clear Walker only for us to encounter yet another sting against the political establishment: the governor has chosen to attend the execution to gain votes for an upcoming election. This chilling touch that deftly comments on our society’s obsession with violence and the equivalencies we draw between supporting carefree killing and possessing the image of stern authoritarianism, immediately segues into a panorama of politicians staring indifferently at Walker as he awaits execution. If the action has already climaxed at the helicopter battle, then our dramatic investment climaxes here, at a pictorial assault on our willful negligence of the ruptures in a system that can very well put innocent men to death and the inhumanity with which we approach these cases that fall through the cracks. Perhaps Clark Kent’s minor transgressions against corrupt authority were never adequate to bring a man to justice, given that the final solution, after so much meticulous investigation, is for Superman to barge right into a government facility, a superheroic victory after all.

We then witness Bowman’s death at the hands of the law, a mirror image of Walker’s near-execution that draws a kind of parallel. One may see this doubling effect as Stan Berkowitz’s way of juxtaposing black and white abstracts of innocence and guilt so as to reward the audience with the gratifying killing a man who finally ‘deserves’ it, and yet the retainment of the same cold row of political figureheads and absence of any dramatically affirmative cue of finality endows this final death with the same air of eerie tranquility. Though none of the good guys end up dead, the philosophical underpinnings of The Late Mr. Kent dictate that someone has to die, and it is up to us to determine whether this is a necessary return to equilibrium or a somber reflection on the way the world works. The final gesture can hardly be said to be celebratory.

As Clark Kent’s monologue begins, he chooses to discuss luck and make the kind of hard-boiled overarching observations that come across as some kind of pretentious stipulation for prestige. And yet what he says about luck’s predominance is hardly irrelevant to the story, which is about chance in all its extremities and interpolations. We entrust the development of all stories to Superman’s deterministic action, and yet The Late Mr. Kent reminds us of how much luck factors into every little incident that allows him to come through in the end. And it’s not just Superman’s luck. While he is lucky that the fisherman had bad eyesight and that his childhood sweetheart was around to help with a cover story, Walker is equally fortunate that the reporter working on his case just happened to be Superman in disguise and that the pizza place actually had delivery records. In an episode where the events that transpire are troubling enough, we are nudged to wonder how things may have turned out were it not for the convenient reversals of fortune that ultimately win the day.

In the end, The Late Mr. Kent offers us the fullest realization of the clash between an interplanetary being and the struggles people face on a day-to-day basis, demonstrating that our imperfect social and political systems can stand as hindrances to even the most super powered being and that there is a wealth of real world problems that can’t be chalked up to the usual preventable, physical chaos. For every catastrophe that requires swashbuckling heroics, there is one that hinges even more on everyday happenstance and amid all the fluff that diverts the viewers’ eyes from the hard facts about the world we’re living in, there is a rare twenty-minute action cartoon that dares to say something.

S:TAS reviews: Prototype

A soap opera blueprint, Prototype is weak-minded science fiction that seems just as dependent on supercilious observance of one-time characters as Target, another Hilary Bader script. An excellent screenwriter responsible for the densest episode of Superman, A Little Piece of Home, she often eases into a satisfaction with rudimentary materials and tentative ideas that reduce characters to types and follow old formulas. If I gave the producers the benefit of the doubt, I would offer Prototype the one praise that its title bemusedly applies to the conditions of its making as well as to its leading character.

That character, Sergeant Corey Mills, is an all-American military hero with blond hair and blue eyes and who doesn’t get five seconds of screen time without his appendages being radically foreshortened to emphasize his dynamism. The story is about his neurological dependence on and addiction to his LexCorp manufactured robotic police suit. A broad assessment would be that Prototype is covertly about Luthor’s corporate monopoly on government and the dangers of capitalistic shortsightedness, but not only does that not account for its deficiency of commentary and overabundant fight scenes—this is one of the first time the viewer’s childish astonishment at action scenes is supposed to extend to military weaponry—but it also betrays Luthor’s typically cautious character by depicting him as wholly irresponsible. Prototype can also be said to be about police brutality, but only in that it shows an upright hero descending into self-absorbed power-hunger on the flimsiest of conceits that has nothing to say about how authority figures actually do come to abuse the law. Given that Mills steals the suit right under the noses of Turpin and Sawyer, one could say that it’s just as much about police laziness with equal validity.

Even as a run-of-the-mill story about an upstanding citizen who succumbs to power hunger and suffers accordingly, Bader feels content, like so many Disney producers do, to breeze right along and plunge Mills and his swooning wife into a trench of marital despair. Mills has but one introductory scene before he resorts to excessive violence, and we have to take on faith that he and his wife were in a dreamboat of a marriage before his reliance on the suit’s power begins tearing it apart. Character arcs are not suited for twenty-minute cartoons, because they stop looking like arcs and start looking more like elongated parabolas. Mills’ progression as a character hits its peak early on and the hyper-dramatic developments never subside afterwards. It doesn’t help that Xander Berkely, who voices Mills, gives an abysmal vocal performance, all but expected when assigned the role of a hollow man whose lust for a personified set of body armor ignites an agonizing fever pitch.

One of the few pleasures is an off-kilter, improvisational fight scene that drifts along with no clear purpose until Superman uses power plant wires to finally defeat Mills. A blast from Mills’ laser renders Superman temporarily blind, denoted by sharp, dissonant piano notes and out-of-place subjective slow motion. The storyboarding is surprisingly mobile for an episode so poorly animated, giving Superman leeway to backward somersault after an assault and makes the journey of the ever-relocating action feel fluid. Another of the small pleasures is the debut of John Henry Irons, an S:TAS mainstay.

S:TAS reviews: Bizarro's World

Bizarro appears to be the ambassador of mental disability in the DC Animated Universe, a drawling, well-meaning half-wit who inadvertently causes harm to a great many people. In Bizarro’s World, he almost obliterates Metropolis with the fuzzy aim of retelling the story of Krypton’s destruction on Earth; conceivably the same decimation made possible by a duplicitous supercomputer is now enacted through the bumbling confusion of a freak scientific accident with a brain disorder. The most ethically conflicting question raised in conjunction with Bizarro’s handicap is whether Superman is conveniently refusing to help him assimilate by placing him within a figurative playpen, patronizingly relocating him under the guise of granting him a reward.

Of course these musings are an over-ambitious exercise short-circuited by the obvious position taken by the episode and its screenwriter Robert Goodman, that Bizarro is a suitable target for our derision and that Superman is never ambiguous in his upstanding actions. Goodman is a master at fun, naïve celebrations of undiluted heroism, but his screenplay for Bizarro’s World has a slightly mean-spirited edge in the way Bizarro is treated as a fragile distraction that must be disquieted by white lies and patronization, but only after Superman himself attempts incapacitation by way of Kryptonite. If Identity Crisis was a celebration of stupidity as heroism incarnate, then Bizarro’s World treats it with an air of condescension.

The instance that comes closest to doubling as evidence for a rereading of Superman’s supposedly spotless ethics is when Bizarro finds the last survivors of the Preserver’s ship caged behind glass walls in the Fortress of Solitude. Superman’s taming and encaging potentially harmful organisms seems thematically tied to the way he comes to treat Bizarro and remove him from human civilization, and Bizarro’s instinct to free the creatures seems hardly disagreeable. Indeed, his gut morals may come across as more reasonable than Superman’s top-down compartmentalization and classification of the various species. Goodman never comes close to any explicit suggestion that Superman is in any way acting contrary to virtue, but I believe it is possible to find fault in his methods, a position supported by the morally gray prism of Justice League Unlimited. When viewed under that prism, Superman’s ideological faults extend back to S:TAS, whether Superman or the audience was aware or not.

An aspect I find more worth reading into than a deep-rooted ambivalence towards Superman’s moral actions is Lois’s maternal relationship with Bizarro, who in his infantilism seeks out a look-alike for Jor-El but not for Laura, settling on Lois instead. Bizarro’s fascination with Lois is preconfigured not by the information of the Brainiac orb, but by his previous conditioning as a clone of Superman. Even though Bizarro now knows himself to not be Superman, he still harbors an odd, Oedipal affection for her. Naturally his drive-in movie antics in the abandoned cultural center stem from Superman’s own attraction toward Lois, but with Bizarro’s mental defects, his idealization and compulsory protectiveness of her couple with her self-aware placation yield several possible psychological implications from which Lois could perceptibly draw intriguing inferences about the original model.

S:TAS reviews: The Hand of Fate

This piece of filler scripted by both Stan Berkowitz and Hilary Bader pits Superman against both a demonic lord bent on enslaving humanity and the self-defeating cosmic isolationism of his former friend and ally, Doctor Fate. Both writers seem at a loss for handling dialectics, fumbling by with platitudes about good and evil and the point of doing right in the world without producing any convincing rhetoric. On a moralistic level, The Hand of Fate functions admirably as a gut-level statement against defeatism and inaction that surely appeals to kids, but its didacticism is too cut from a mold to get anyone else to care.

And yet this dialecticism is borne of a relationship between heroes developed off-screen that broadens the reach of the DC Animated Universe. Fate represents a particular genre and philosophical attitude—magical fantasy and metaphysical attunement—and The Hand of Fate sufficiently lays down building blocks, even in its simplification. His position on life is unexplored and the dramatic conflict duly suffers, but the similarly unexplored trans-dimensional bewilderment of his ancient stone spire bids imaginative gap filling and the potential for future exploration. That we are invited to ponder a sub-realm of mysticism treated matter-of-factly in spite of the fact that we are only now introduced to it conjures a conception of this universe as a surface just waiting to be probed in greater depth.

Compared to the Flash of Speed Demons, the only previous team-up episode we have been treated to in S:TAS besides World’s Finest, Fate is a more obscure character featured not as road-movie foil, but more ambitiously as an ideological position. It is implied that Superman first met Fate long ago, and this in media res leap into a relationship history stimulates the imagination in the same way the slight inklings of visual information on Fate’s boundless fortress do. Though Superman and Fate’s dispute is axiomatic, the producers’ boldness in ridding themselves of the impulse to lather on back-story and follow every detail of the former’s growth as a hero is refreshing and, on hindsight, a masterstroke. Making the most of each new character spotlight to cover all the bases fails to anticipate any future chance of development; Fate is featured again later on, and so retrospectively the decision not to do as much with the character as possible in his debut is the right one.

Even more attractive than either the story or the implications about continuity is the disarmingly retro look. The sharp angles of Karkull’s minions, airbrushed backgrounds, and bright green swirls of magic energy seem cribbed from a miscellaneous fifties sci-fi magazine. The zigzag declivities of the cavernous walls of Karkull’s vertiginous lair are undoubtedly modeled on the slants and sharp edges of German Expressionism. The stylistic homage extends to the subject matter: long-buried supernatural horror unearthed due to some poor fool’s selfish opportunism. For all of The Hand of Fate’s narrative weaknesses as a morality play, it has a surprisingly firm grasp on both the aesthetics and thematic elements of its source material.

S:TAS reviews: Father's Day

For a work with its title, Father’s Day has very few things to say on the subject of paternity, aside from niftily segueing between two diametrically opposed father/son relationships. But as for the dynamics of fatherhood, most episodes of TNBA have more to say about what it entails—mentorship, mutual respect, emotional distance, etc.—than Father’s Day musters over the entire course of its blow-trading eternity.

One of the common misconceptions about fiction is that action always propels narrative. Of course that is true in most cases, but in Father’s Day, taking a card from Hollywood action movies, the action grinds the narrative to a halt and generates a stasis. As soon as Superman and Kalibak begin bare-knuckle brawling, the story seems to dissipate, the suspense dwindles, and it’s as if the rest of the world is interminably paused. Superman’s objective is to rescue his father from the rubble of a recently ravaged restaurant, Kalibak’s murderous intent preventing the task from getting done. The viewer’s expected reaction is to clench his armrest dreading that Superman might not reach his father in time, but as the fight persists, the effect is more like running on an activated treadmill in the hope of reaching the end and having to wait a good fifteen minutes before Superman finally decides to press the ‘off’ switch by hurling Kalibak into the sky.

Director Dan Riba can only keep the fight going by cutting corners via temporal and logical inconsistencies. Not only does Superman decide to walk to the site of Jonathan’s entrapment under the rubble after temporarily incapacitating his foe, but he also manages to take but two steps before Kalibak traverses a far greater distance to resume their trifling skirmish. Superman defeats Kalibak by flying the flightless fiend into the air, though it is never clear why he was unable to do this earlier. With the freelance writers drawing fruitless parallels between the two opponents at every juncture—their differing relationships with their fathers and opposing moral principles—the extended sequence reeks of a pretentious vanity, and the most grabbing of all the characters’ differences is their physical disparity—handsome upright Man of Steel and clunky, dwarfish ogre. Kalibak’s physical deformity, however, seems to be cruelly associated with his insecurities as an unloved son.

Father’s Day trumpets its importance as an integral piece of the Darkseid arc, though it depicts Darkseid at his least menacing by turning him into a parody of Darth Vader with forced mythical undertones. His strained, soliloquized “I have no son” and his arbitrary mandates posit him as a dictatorial profile as opposed to a character. In Apokalips…Now! he is the plausible embodiment of an abstract evil; in Father’s Day, he has too much in common with pop culture archetypes and too often shares the same physical space as his minions without any directorial effort to distinguish him. Darkseid’s ‘plan’ to kill Superman is silly in the key of a good Superfriends episode, and yet amazingly with greater plot holes circling around his own sincerity. If it is integral to kill Superman, why does he refuse to commit the deed himself at the end, using a nonsensical faux-profundity with phony gravitas, “Superman cannot be killed in one stroke,” to justify his reluctance?

TNBA reviews: Never Fear

Stan Berkowitz finally takes the Scarecrow in a direction that amplifies his menace and taps into his former position as a university psychologist. Batman: the Animated Series attempted three different routes with the character—revenge-crazed wacko, maniacal anarchist, and sharp crook out for a profit—and it became readily clear that the former two slipped far too easily into silliness. A man as intelligent as Jonathan Crane shines behind the veil of underworld business deals, and in his role as the manufacturer of a new product that eliminates fear, he simultaneously functions as an odd satirical target—the corrupt head of a pharmaceutical firm—and as a brilliant madman posing fascinating questions from both psychological and sociological standpoints.

The most harrowing of Never Fear’s many presuppositions is that morality and ideology, or at least certain moral and ideological tenets, are ultimately borne of fear, an emotion whose benefits we associate more with self-preservation than with developed human thought processes. For the first two characters exposed to the gas we are introduced to, fear serves as a failsafe device for physical safety and social security. When Batman, whom Berkowitz takes for granted is more guarded and mentally developed than these two men, becomes exposed, fear is viewed instead as a moral failsafe, and whether or not this is a valid theory is ultimately irrelevant when viewed in light of the thoughts and ideas it raises. Berkowitz and Conroy, who gives Batman a vicious edge, work closely to place the viewer in the position of a character so far the equivalent of a marketing device for kids. The transformation from mentor and guardian into a deadly, irresponsible authority figure invokes a paternal terror so far unmatched in the DC cartoons.

The character-specific effects of Berkowitz’s thought experiment intertwine with broader ideas about how people construct their morals and how what is taken for granted about behavior often corresponds to social conditioning. This is aptly demonstrated in the second test subject’s sudden assertiveness, having his whole life been stricken with the fear of offending the established social order. There are several morsels of ideas pertaining to the sociological importance of fear and the inhibitions it places on people, all of which accumulate in the logic behind Scarecrow’s grand scheme, to advertise fear as a hindrance only to demand big money for an antidote once his new toxin submits Gotham to utter chaos. “Fear is the glue that holds society together,” he addresses to the camera, and it is a statement that may very well have more than one implication.

Scarecrow himself now resembles a ghastly, grim reaper figure whose only concrete accoutrements are his hat and coat, walking stick, and noose dangling around his neck. The details of his actual person are deliberately enigmatic; not only is his face a sludgy swirl of malformed skin, broken up by shadows and craggy teeth, but one has no way of knowing whether this is actual physical deformity or an extension of his costume. His horrifying physical demeanor may as well be a promotional image for all of the foreboding imagery that Never Fear gets away with. The blood-red skies of Gotham finally work as a figurative device, a premonitory canvas against which all of the action takes place. The production team also exploits a censorship double standard to make us believe for an instant Bruce Wayne has met a grisly end in a whirlpool of blood. Never Fear takes the opportunities offered by Warner Bros. lax censorship to reflect its grueling story in equally horrific imagery, a formal synthesis that makes it a surefire contender in any canon of greats.

TNBA reviews: You Scratch My Back

With You Scratch My Back, Timm and company take the opportunity to undo the damage done to the Catwoman character by Sean Catherine Derek by making her a seductive thief and leaving her at that, no silly animal rights activism to be had. Her former persona was an uneasy coexistence of infantile play and grown-up responsibility that failed to mix. You Scratch My Back strives to be playful, relying on Catwoman as the agent that can make it happen, but doesn’t quite break free of the shackles of murky Bat-Family drama.

The second appearance of Dick Grayson in TNBA, following his cameo at the end of Sins of the Father, obfuscates more than it clarifies. The twist of You Scratch My Back is that Nightwing was in cahoots with Batman and Batgirl all along, a double-cross to match Catwoman’s own backstabbing. Rethinking the episode’s prior events, how much are we to take with a grain of salt? If the twist is any indication, much of Nightwing’s apparent begrudging towards Batman is only play-acting. The endings of both episodes place Dick on good terms with his former allies, leaving us confused as to the authenticity of his assertions of independence. An odd scene between Dick and Barbara, who in this series has so far come across as a vacuous sidekick, is particularly cloudy.

Though Nightwing is a more viable sucker for Catwoman’s seductions, their relationship is never as fun as that between her and Batman, whose square-jawed humorlessness and broad physical girth contrasted wonderfully with Catwoman’s petite sensuality. Our inability to read him as a character due to the prolongation of his back story, a move whose only benefit is that it makes that revelatory episode a treat once it finally rolls around, leaves Nightwing out in the cold as a slick action hero without an ounce of discernable character. A theoretically whimsical tale of shifting allegiances and compounding surprises doubles as a puzzling, pseudo-serious character introduction that is unfortunately unable to serve two masters.

But fortunately enough, the opening unfolds before we have the chance to think about such incongruities, during which we are treated to the apotheosis of all that Timm and Murakami hoped to achieve by their lean character redesigns. Nightwing launches an assault on a gang of South American smugglers and Dan Riba seems to channel the character’s flair for showmanship in his directorial gymnastics, detailing extreme gestures coupled with camera movements so erratic that the analytical cuts that highlight the impact of such gestures feel like fluid transitions as opposed to abrupt, disorienting reconfigurations of space.

These literal and figurative acrobatics reach an excitement lacking in the story, Riba making up for its destabilization by proving how adept he is at regulating his technique. In Batman’s fight against Enrique El Gancho, the closest thing the episode has to a set piece, Riba tones down long shot martial arts displays for close-in shots that absorb the two characters’ voluminous figures—low angles and medium shots abound. Riba pulls the camera with the weight of his characters, instilling in the viewer a comprehension of their physical exertion as they spar with one another. If that isn’t evidence enough of Riba’s achievements, he also employs a soft lighting effect to reflect the nighttime fog of the shipyard, a lovely glaze that does wonders to enhance the atmosphere.

TNBA reviews: Double Talk

Double Talk is the first formalist triumph of TNBA, not quite nearing the best of B:TAS’s many experiments, but surpassing the dryness of the new series’ previous efforts. It is the first episode to construct multiple psychological spaces and offer any semblance of psychological subjectivity, not essential qualities for an action cartoon but far preferable to the connect-the-dots linearity of the previous installments.

As the second spotlight for the Ventriloquist, it is difficult not to compare Double Talk to its precedent and superior, Read My Lips, an episode that excised the psychoanalytical dream sequences that Double Talk thrives on in favor of snazzy genre flourishes. Double Talk has more in common with the up-close character probing of Two-Face, and indeed, both episodes share many of the same formalist features that make each one such a compelling psychodrama—color tinted interiors that erupt from the mental anguish of their respective protagonists, opening dream sequences in which the suppressed identity terrorizes the nervous host in an abstract space, and bombastic set pieces that gradually recede into periphery as the protagonist’s psychological turmoil moves to the forefront.

In trying to emulate both Read My Lips and Two-Face, Double Talk fails to meet either one. Its stylization persists as long as the subjective set pieces do, making the more ‘objective’ or plot-oriented sequences just as stale as those in Cold Comfort or Sins of the Father. Keeping its stylistic strengths apparent for its entire duration, Read My Lips has a rhythmic edge, one that enables it to float back and forth between fairly personalized dramatizations of Wesker’s disorder and the surrounding rat-a-tat action that synchronizes to the palpitating jazz score with a dance-like finesse. As for its attempts to match the intimacy of Two-Face, it lacks the slow, methodical pace of that episode’s two-part format and the believable spatial evocations of its meticulously painted backdrops.

The most fascinating aspect of Double Talk is that it seems to split off from one of the core ideological foundations of B:TAS, that being that all villains are so possessed by their psychoses that there is no hope of reformation, a Calvinist, predeterminist underpinning that at its worst yielded moments of bitter, shoulder-shrugging defeatism. Wesker finally rids himself of Scar-Face, asserting his dominance as he riddles the dummy with machine-gun bullets. It is a moment that sadly lacks the visceral impact of Read My Lips’s similar climax, in which Boy Kirkland exercised canted perspectives and focal shifts while maintaining a hectic tempo to hammer home Wesker’s psychological devastation. In Double Talk, Geda doesn’t show any such feel for Kirkland’s psychologically acute framings, anticlimactically cutting from Wesker’s triumph to an optimistic affirmation of Wesker’s newly acquired happiness, a sudden and fleeting catharsis that clearly merited more time.

Double Talk is still a success, the first entry in the TNBA line-up that exhibits some regard for human troubles and doesn’t simply flatten its concerns into passionless artifice and that, besides Holiday Knights, achieves a visual style that has more dimension than cardboard.

TNBA reviews: Cold Comfort

Before one attempts to analyze Cold Comfort as a continuation of the Mr. Freeze saga, one could very well analyze it as a camp version of Heart of Ice. It redoubles certain scenes, as when Freeze leaves behind a henchwoman whose leg has been frozen, but drains from them all the nuance and replaces them with kitsch; what was once a suffering thug who posed a moral choice for Batman and who illuminated the fierce extent of Freeze’s inhumanity is now a retro female in Eskimo garb who makes bad puns. Heart of Ice daringly strove for Citizen Kane allusions and the self-destructive undertones of a Greek Tragedy; Cold Comfort almost sardonically juxtaposes a most human despair with unfeeling surroundings.

While many fans despise Cold Comfort for doing injustice to the ending of Sub-Zero, in which Mr. Freeze finds happy for the first time in his animated career, having overheard the news of his wife’s recovery before hobbling away through the snowy wilderness, I fail to see why they prefer to accept that fates are sealed in uplifting, melodramatic movie endings and abject from eventual changes and redirections. If fans wanted to, they could ignore Cold Comfort in the same way that one might ignore all of François Truffaut’s sequels to his masterpiece, The 400 Blows, preferring an instant of freeze-frame finality to the reality of continuation, but I feel this is counterproductive.

The premise is that Freeze returns to Gotham to arbitrarily shatter the hopes and dreams and happiness of all of its citizens in mass retaliation for his inability to achieve his one true happiness, Nora, who has run away with her doctor after Freeze failed to return to her. Though this bitter drive for ruination unfortunately converges on a singular act of doomsday destruction, the notion of a ruined man systematically sharing his suffering with a complacent world of successful and satisfied citizens is an appealing one. It is a story that divides sympathies as we endure the sadness of the people whose life work Freeze has remorselessly destroyed, yet with the knowledge that none of these people have suffered more than the agent of their destruction, who simultaneously deserves the most of our empathy and the most of our hatred.

But the weight of such a tale is deflated both by the sterile animation direction that plagued Sins of the Father and the aforementioned camp value that is surely endemic of Hilary Bader’s sense of humor. It is worth noting that Bader did not work on Batman: the Animated Series, and therefore her history with the Mr. Freeze character is not as entrenched as it was for Boyd Kirkland and Paul Dini. She seems here to thrive on the same penchant for corniness and derision that made Target so funny. However, Freeze is a character with a history, not a prototypic angst-ridden wacko; the ’66 Batman callbacks and fifties sci-fi artifacts are only so much fun until they jut up against the melancholic strains of Ansara’s vocals, at which point the whole enterprise seems to collapse.

Bader does manage to cleanse the sickly aftertaste of the ending to Sins of the Father with brief bonding moments between the four members of the now-established Bat-Family. Already Freeze has pinpointed Batman’s attempts to manufacture a surrogate family, reminding the viewer that these new communal relationships are just as much psychological crutches as anything else. Whether a family in a traditional sense can exist for crime-fighters is a pressing inquiry that comes to root out the more disturbing undercurrents of these new relationships, all of which end up amounting to some tragedy.