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.