Spring Potpourri

 Before we start the A to Z Challenge tomorrow, some random thoughts I don't feel like making into full blog entries.

Last month I talked about an online pyramid scheme where the great strategy to get free traffic was to write a blog--like I've been doing for 11 years.  Reinforcing how pointless it is to start a blog right now, I was looking at the "Blogs of Interest" linked to on Tony Laplume's blog and noticed of the 16 blogs listed, 10 of them (5/8 for those who can do fractions) were either inactive for over a year or completely out of service.  Besides proving that Laplume needs to edit the blogs he links to, it shows that blogging is not very hot anymore.  Starting a blog in 2021 thinking you're going to get a lot of traffic is about as smart of a business decision as opening a video store.

Something I mentioned on Facebook already is there's this one online casino advertising on Pluto TV (and probably other places) that keeps using the slogan "Online Casino is in Good Hands."  Every time I hear or see this it's like nails on the chalkboard.  It's like when I get some product off Amazon and the lame Chinese company, instead of hiring a native English speaker to write their manual, just wrote it in Mandarin and Google translated it so there are all these grammatical errors like, "When alarm is set, it will sounds for one full minute..."  But at least those crappy user manuals have an excuse.  What excuse does a casino site in America have for having a clearly faulty slogan? 

The most annoying thing is how sloppy it is.  Didn't anyone bother to spellcheck the slogan in a browser?  Don't they even know basic English grammar?  Not the people who wrote it?  Who produced it?  Not the company's marketing department?  No one noticed this?  It's so pathetic.  If that's how shoddy you are in your advertising, why should I waste money on your site versus the dozen others being advertised?  It bugs me as bad as "authors" who post books on Amazon with obvious typos in the title.  Geez, I spend more time editing these blog entries than apparently that casino site does with their advertising.

There are a couple of other ads I've seen that piss me off.  Like this one for Progressive where this guy is trying to get people to not be like their parents.  First the whole concept of that seems pretty idiotic.  If you don't want to be like your parents then does that mean your parents are terrible people?  Maybe the whole reason that people become like their parents as they get older is that they mature enough to realize there are a lot more important things than being cool and that their parents weren't so bad after all.  

But the part that really annoys me is a guy is reading a book and the teacher says he can't read it because it's a book about submarines and his dad reads books about submarines.  WTF?!  I can't like things because my dad likes them?  If that were true I'd never like Star Trek or most other sci-fi because my dad liked them.  The whole idea that you can't like something because your parents do is so flawed and small-minded.  If your dad is an English professor who reads Shakespeare does that mean you can't read Shakespeare?  

Sure there are some behaviors about your parents or grandparents you might not want to emulate (like casual racism or sexism) but the idea you can't like the same books as them is completely moronic.  That's really throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Another commercial that irritates me is this one Amazon one where people are wowed by the deals they find.  The parts that bug me are when they show two people walking with masks on and they can't understand each other.  One is like, "What a great price!" And the other is like, "What?"  Because everyone knows you can't understand someone right next to you when you're wearing masks.  That strip of cotton over your mouth makes you completely unintelligible to anyone near you!  Gee, Amazon, thanks for promoting unrealistic stereotypes and denigrating public safety precautions.  Idiots.  

Those two are really examples of bad jokes someone at whatever ad agency thought was funny but they really aren't.  I don't want to be a buzzkill but that shit just isn't funny.  Really that whole Progressive campaign is just dumb as shit.  I guess it makes sense if you're marketing your insurance to teenagers who are so scared about not being cool.  The Amazon one was probably written by some red state Trump-supporting asshole.  I wrote a blog entry once about how sometimes comedy ends up being a weapon against our best interests and these seem like more good examples of that.

Anyway, tomorrow the A to Z Challenge begins!  Not that Phantom Readers will care.

Is It Time to End Anachronistic Comic Book Origins?

 Recently when I watched Green Lantern the Animated Series and also the 2011 movie and the animated 2009 movie Green Lantern: First Flight, the origin of Hal Jordan really bugs me.  It's this idea of him being a daredevil test pilot who finds Abin Sur's ring and becomes a Green Lantern.  In the 1950s when the character debuted, test pilots like Chuck Yeager were a big deal.  They were rock stars before there were rock stars.

The problem is in the 21st Century no one cares about test pilots anymore.  Go ahead and name one.  Who cares if some guy can fly a new plane?  We've put people on the moon now.  We've sent scientists, teachers, and even pop stars into space. 

In the 2011 and 2009 movies they still try to make it work with that old Hal Jordan origin, but it just doesn't.  If they eventually get around to another movie or TV series, maybe it's time to retire that Hal Jordan origin.  Either come up with a new one or go with one of the other human Lanterns:  Guy Gardner, John Stewart, Kyle Rayner, Simon Baz, or Jessica Cruz.  They all probably have more contemporary stories that would be easier to work.  Really, they should make him an astronaut and he could find Abin Sur in space sort of like the Earth One story where he was like a space miner but a contemporary astronaut would also work.

The only other way to do it would be to set Hal Jordan's origin in the 1950s the way they set Captain America in WWII instead of updating it for modern day.  Since he's out in space all the time and has a Lantern ring they could just say he's been away for a long, long time.  He could be the man out of time and come back to Earth to find that not only is not cool to go chasing women around the office, there are actually women in fighter cockpits now.

I doubt they'd do that, but I'm just saying his original origin story is an anachronism.  You know who else has an anachronistic origin story?  Batman.  Like Hal Jordan they keep trying to make Bruce Wayne's original origin story work.  But it really doesn't.  I mean the Waynes are one of the richest families in Gotham.  They have millions or billions of dollars.  They have tons of cars and a chauffeur.  So...why would they be walking in an alley after a movie?  What kind of rich people are walking around alleys in New York City?  In Batman Begins they change it to an opera, but why the hell are they riding a train?  In Joker they're watching a movie when a riot breaks out.  How stupid were they to be out with all this stuff going on?

I get that Batman's parents in the alley with him standing or kneeling over them is good imagery but it's really an anachronism in the 21st Century.  Even if you change it to the early 80s like Joker or Batman v Superman, it still doesn't make a lot of sense.  Rich people walking around dark alleys was probably not even that plausible in 1939-1940.

I don't know what they'll do in The Batman, but it will probably still be something along those lines.  What would probably make more sense is that there's an attempted kidnapping of Bruce when he's with his parents and they're killed when things go wrong.  Maybe Alfred was driving and he gets wounded and feels bad for letting Bruce's parents down.

But while we're at it, the idea of the butler adopting the richest orphan kid in town also seems kind of ridiculous.  It can still probably happen if that's what the Waynes put in their will, but doesn't it seem like there would be relatives coming out of the woodwork to get a piece of that fortune?  In real life whenever a rich person dies there's always a bunch of moochers trying to get in on it.  A millionaire or billionaire with no parents whose only guardian is a butler?  If I can prove I'm a second cousin once removed why wouldn't I go to court and try to get guardianship?

Watching Titans recently brought up Dick Grayson's origin, which is rapidly becoming an anachronism now that circuses have closed down.  Right now it can still work but in another 10-15 years it really won't be plausible anymore that he could come from a family of traveling acrobats unless he's part of Cirque de Soleil.  The other Robins's origins are both fine, especially Tim Drake as sort of a computer geek who figured out Batman's secret identity.

I suppose you could say, we can't change their origin stories!  But it has been done before.  Spider-Man was originally bitten by a radioactive spider because in 1962 radiation was still a big thing and an easy way to explain stuff like that.  The same for the Hulk where Banner ran onto a bomb testing range to save Rick Jones.  The radiation thing was changed in the 2002 Spider-Man movie to a genetically altered spider and I think something along those lines was used in 2012 too.  The less said about the 2003 Hulk movie the better but since testing nuclear bombs was outlawed they had to change it in 2003 and 2008 to some other experiment with gamma radiation.

I'm not sure the Fantastic Four origin works all that great anymore either.  A group of people--2 of whom are related--being changed by "cosmic radiation" is kind of old-fashioned.  That's probably why they decided to go with the Ultimate Fantastic Four origin for the failed Josh Trank movie.

As for Superman's origin, it still works.  It didn't really work in the 2013 movie but the core concept still makes sense:  a planet is dying and so Kal-El's parents put him in an escape craft that shows up at Earth.  They just need to make the specifics a little less stupid than 2013 and it would work better.  I'm just saying.

Just some stuff for Phantom Readers not to think about.

Beyond Batman Beyond

 Since I watched Batman the Animated Series on HBO Max, I figured I might as well watch the sequel series Batman Beyond.  This follow-up series takes place about 30-40 years after BTAS.  It starts out with an aging Bruce Wayne in a new suit that augments his strength and has wings and jet engines and neat stuff like that.  He goes to rescue a woman taken hostage but suffers chest pains and to escape he grabs a fallen gun to threaten a criminal.  In doing so, he realizes he can no longer be Batman and retires.

Twenty years later, 17-year-old Terry McGinnis's father uncovers some dirt on his boss, Derek Powers, whose company merged with Bruce Wayne's a long time ago.  After being chased by a gang of "Jokerz," ie a gang that dresses up like clowns ala the Joker, to Wayne Manor, Terry finds the Batcave.  After his father is murdered, Terry steals the Batsuit Bruce wore for his final outing and goes out to get justice.  Reluctantly, the elderly Bruce agrees to work with Terry as sort of his Alfred--only without the butlering.  

At the end of the first two-part episode, Derek Powers is exposed to some radiation or toxic waste or whatever and becomes basically a radioactive skeleton that he covers with fake skin to hide what happened to him.  Terry stopped Powers's scheme but couldn't actually bust him, so Powers or Blight as he becomes known is the main villain for the first season.

Since this takes place in the future, they don't really use any of the traditional Batman villains except Mr. Freeze, who was revived after almost 50 years in cryostasis.  He's given a new body, but when it breaks down, he starts going on a rampage.  In another episode some athletes are using Venom so Terry tracks down Bane, who has become a scrawny, comatose husk.

The show introduces new villains like Inque, a woman made of an inky black substance allowing her to change shape; Shriek, who manipulates sound; Spellbinder, who manipulates images; Curare, a deadly assassin; and a new generation of the Royal Flush Gang, including "Ten" a girl named Melanie who is like Terry's Catwoman.  Then there are one-off episodes like where a guy who was buried with toxic waste becomes sort of a Clayface/Swamp Thing hybrid and tries to get revenge on the guy who killed him.

Besides Bruce Wayne, Barbara Gordon appears on the show as the police commissioner who resents the new Batman.  There seemed to be an implication in one episode that after she broke up with Nightwing, she and Batman might have partnered up for more than just fighting crime.  Ick.  But in the present of the show she's married to the DA, a black guy.  Terry's girlfriend is Asian so this show was kind of ahead of the curve in having interracial relationships.  Though probably since it was on in the kids block they didn't really have any gay characters.

For the most part the animation and storytelling are like BTAS, where while it aired in a time slot for kids, it was aimed more at adults.  The thing that occurred to me pretty early on is that since Terry is seventeen and still in high school and lives with his mom and tends to crack wise, what they did with this show was to combine Batman and Spider-Man.  I mean, Terry is pretty much like Peter Parker, only less of a science geek.  So if instead of being bitten by a spider, Peter had found the Batcave and put on a Batsuit that augmented his strength and allowed him to fly around, that's basically what this is.  I'm not saying that's a bad thing.  People love Batman but he can be kind of aloof and for younger viewers he's kind of old, so this makes Batman more fun and relatable to younger viewers.

While the first season had Blight as the central villain, the second season--the longest of the 3 at 26 episodes--used a lot more episodic structure.  There was no central villain throughout the season.  It was pretty much a different one every week.  I kept waiting for Blight to come back, but he didn't, which seems odd considering most of the other villains from that season did at some point in the future.

The second season ends with the secret origin of Bruce Wayne's dog Ace.  (There was a real "Bat-Hound" named Ace in the Batman comics, probably starting in the 50s when they did all sorts of things to stay relevant.)  Ace was adopted by an evil breeder to be trained to fight and experimented on, which was prescient of the Michael Vick dog fighting ring.  Only in the episode Ace escaped his captors and wound up in Crime Alley when Bruce went there to visit where his parents died and together they took down a petty criminal and became besties.  The sad thing is the dog is the only one Bruce allows himself to love at that point.

The third season was only 13 episodes like the first season.  There was a kind of creepy episode where Talia al Guhl visits Bruce on his birthday and offers to take him to the Lazarus Pit to become young again.  Bruce agrees and gets younger but then hears the voice of Ra's al Guhl and finds out that he is in Talia's body!  Ra's as his own daughter tries to put his mind into Bruce's body until Terry stops him.  After that is a two-part episode introducing the Justice League of that time, led by the original Superman who is older but not old.  Someone has been injuring members of the League so Superman recruits Batman, but then it turns out that Superman has been the one behind it all as he's controlled by a Starro, which is like an alien starfish.  Starro has shown up in the comics including I think the most recent run of Justice League and Justice League 3000.  It was also in the second Robot Chicken DC Comics special.

There was another two-part episode that was kind of neat for GI Joe fans.  In a previous episode there was a ruthless terrorist organization called Kobra introduced.  In this two-part episode Kobra has a plan to rule the world by creating dino-people and raising the world's temperature.  Terry inadvertently meets their leader, who was artificially created and taught by a mad scientist.  It was very similar to the origin of Serpentor in the GI Joe TV show and comic book, especially when he wears a costume with a cape and snake headpiece.  I checked and while BTAS and BB co-creator Paul Dini wrote an episode or two for GI Joe, he didn't write those episodes.  Still, maybe that was in the back of his mind.

Like BTAS, the last episode is mostly a flashback as Terry tells his friend Max a story about a kid he showed his face to.  That kid became a target of the aforementioned Kobra, who tried to access the kid's memories to see what Batman looks like.  But of course they fail.  The moral of the story is why it's so important not to let anyone know his secret--anyone who hasn't already figured it out.

I think probably between seasons 2 and 3 was a straight-to-video movie The Return of the Joker.  I think I had read about the plot before but never actually seen the movie.  It's kind of a dark movie as it's revealed about halfway in that a long time ago the final Robin (Tim Drake with Jason Todd's backstory as noted in the BTAS article) was captured by the Joker and Harley Quinn and Jokerized into a mini-Joker.  He revealed all of Batman's secrets to the Joker, who then lures Batman and Batgirl into a final showdown at the now-closed Arkham Asylum.  When the Joker gives Tim Drake a gun to shoot Batman, Tim shoots the Joker instead.  Afterwards Bruce forbade Tim from being Robin ever again.  

Only later in the movie do we find out that somehow the Joker implanted his consciousness in Tim's brain so that years later he could return without Tim knowing it.  And since the Joker through Tim knows Batman's secrets, he's able to ambush Bruce in the Batcave and nearly kill him with Joker toxin.  And so Terry is pretty much on his own to fight the resurgent Joker.  The one strange thing in the movie is that Tim's friend Maxine (who by then I think knew Terry's secret identity) never makes an appearance.  Her computer skills could really have come in handy after Bruce was incapacitated in the Batcave so it seems weird she wasn't there--or even mentioned.  Otherwise while not as good as Mask of the Phantasm, it was a better movie than Subzero in terms of straight-to-video animated BTAS universe movies. 

After watching the whole series there was one thing that occurred to me:  they never really got back to Bruce's quitting as Batman.  Early on there were a couple of times Terry asked him about it and Bruce blew him off.  You would have thought at some point they would have gotten back to that, where Bruce tells him the story of how he picked up a gun and was so ashamed that he quit.  Like maybe an episode where Terry would pick up a gun and Bruce would  have told him that story.  Maybe they were saving that for a season 4 or something.  It feels like a loose end.  I'm just saying.

Of course for a show that's supposed to be in the future, they didn't really nail the future thing very well.  We still don't have flying cars, but in other ways our technology is better than what they use.  I mean our cell phones have screens and we don't need huge computer terminals in schools.  They still mostly use discs for music, video, and computer files.  The "credits" they use aren't that different from debit cards, albeit I think they have some that are far more disposable.  The ridiculously biased newscasts that seem to make light of everything aren't really that different from Fox "News" or other right wing sycophant networks.

While I compared the main character to Peter Parker, the grungy industrial rock soundtrack is a lot more reminiscent of The Crow.  It would have been a lot more at home in 1994 than 1998.  They probably should have gone with something poppier.

Fun Facts:  Like BTAS they got a lot of actors you might have heard of from other things to do voices on the show like Stacy Keach, Stockard Channing, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, William H Macy, Stephen Baldwin, Terri Garr, George Takei, Patton Oswalt, Tim Curry, John Ritter, and Henry Rollins as "Mad Stan," a ranting anti-government guy who would have fit in perfectly at the Capitol on January 6.  Terry is voiced by Will Friedle of Boy Meets World and the underrated 1997 comedy Trojan War, where his quest for a condom leads to all sorts of mayhem.  Checking out his IMDB page, pretty much since this show most of what he does is voice work for DC, Marvel, Transformers, Thundercats, and other stuff.  Nice work if you can get it--probably.  It's funny to me that Seth Green voices the jock/bully Nelson since in real life he's the complete opposite of that physically.  Michael Rosenbaum did a couple of voices in the series and then a year or so after it ended went on to be the live action Lex Luthor in Smallville--and then went back to doing animated voices I think.

Another Fun Fact is in the second season episode "Rats!" there's a rat-looking guy who lives in the sewer with huge mutated rats sort of like the Sewer Rat in the Scarlet Knight series.  Except in the episode he basically goes Phantom of the Opera on Terry's girlfriend while if you read the Scarlet Knight books you would know the Sewer Rat turns out to be a good guy and even the father of Emma's daughter.  So we kind of both took the same starting point and went in different directions--mine is better.

The show ended in 2001 after three seasons and one straight-to-video movie but it has been kept alive in comics.  The Future's End story in about 2014 had Terry go back to "five years from now" to try to stop the destruction of the world only to be killed and replaced as Batman Beyond by former Robin/Red Robin Tim Drake until they rebooted it in the Rebirth reboot.  When it was announced Michael Keaton would be reprising his Batman role, a lot of fans began agitating for a live action Batman Beyond with him as the elderly Bruce Wayne.  I'm not sure if that will happen or not.  If it does, they'll probably fuck it up and let Zack Snyder make it.

Celebrating A Year In Lockdown

 I think the first Covid shutdown in Michigan started the 23rd of March last year.  Or maybe that was when it was announced and it started the 24th?  Whatever.  The point being it's been a year since we first locked down for Covid.

And thanks to all the idiots who continually violated lockdown rules, many of us are still locking it down a year later.  If all those Trump-loving jerk-offs had masked and social distanced from the beginning we might have had far fewer people hospitalized or dead and maybe we could have opened things up responsibly.  

Anyway, it's only been 11 months from when I'm writing this but so often it still seems like yesterday.  I mean sometimes I remember that the last time I went to a buffet place or an Ollie's was back in February 2020.  Or that the last time I went to a movie theater was for Rise of Skywalker on Christmas Eve in 2019!  Or that I haven't set foot in a coffee place to write anything since the first week of March in 2020.  It was about a year ago and yet it seems like just yesterday.

The question I ask myself then is:  how much do you miss it?  And the answer is:  not a lot.  I mean looking for bargains at Ollie's or eating crab cheese sushi at a buffet place was nice, but it wasn't a big part of my identity or anything.  Even going to coffee places to write was not a big part of my identity.  All apologies to comedy writers, but I never went there so other people could see me write; it was mostly to get away from the TV and other distractions at home.

Really a lot of the things people complained about the most were things I didn't care about much. 

• I shave my head so I don't need to go to a barber
• I don't have in-person friends so I didn't need to go see them
• I didn't eat in restaurants a lot
• I'm not religious so I don't go to church
• I obviously didn't need to get my nails done and I couldn't care less about getting a tan
• I don't drink often and when I did I did it at home
• I don't play golf or team sports
• I really don't like hunting, fishing, or camping
• I wrote a whole blog entry about how I don't really like movie theaters anymore
• I don't really like crowded places like sporting events, concerts, or amusement parks

In other words, all the crap people whined that they "needed" to feel normal was not really anything I needed to feel normal.  The things I needed I could still do:

• I could talk to my family online or on the phone
• I could write at home or in my car as I wrote about almost a month ago
• I could keep up with my games on my phone pretty much anywhere
• I could go out for a drive and get food from the drive-thru or curbside
• I could watch movies on streaming at home

It actually disappointed me how so many people seemed so unwilling or unable to adapt to Covid.  I mean all these people who "need" to go to church.  And every holiday from Easter 2020 to Easter 2021 where people "need" to get together.  Or of course how we "need" sports.  And so on.  As a country instead of like acting like the responsible leader of the free world, we acted like a bunch of spoiled, entitled brats screaming and crying because they couldn't get the toy they want.  I wanna go golfing!  I wanna go fishing!  I wanna watch football!  I wanna go to church!  Waaaah waaaah waaaah!  And so we have over half a million people dead and many more than that who may suffer debilitating side effects for perhaps years to come.  All because people were too dumb and selfish to alter their lifestyles in the slightest.

One of the really annoying things to me was people like me were literally being paid more to stay home and not work than to go to work at a crummy job.  People were being paid to stay home and watch TV and all they did was complain!  When people had to go to work, all they did was complain about that, but when given the chance to sit around home and watch TV--and be paid for it--they complained about that.  Other than the constant threat of death, most days it was pretty awesome to be able to sleep in, not deal with obnoxious people, watch TV, and write stories--and get paid almost twice what I was making at work!  If we could have kept that going the whole year I would have been all in favor of it.  But nooooo, these whiny assholes bitching and complaining like a bunch of little kids ruined it for all of us.  I just loooooved getting up early, going back to work, and risking death so I could make less money.  Idiots.  So many of these morons were probably like me, getting more money than working their crummy regular jobs, but they were too brainwashed by Fox "News" and the like to realize how great socialism could be.

The "Greatest Generation" in World War II gave up so much to fight the Nazis and Japanese Empire from sugar and metal to their lives.  But when it came our turn to sacrifice, we threw tantrums like little children.  The worst part is that so many of those tantrums came from the White House, Capitol, and state capitals.  Instead of leadership we got whining and conspiracy theories spouting nonsense "cures" and bullshit like "herd immunity" and bogus promises that it would go away like magic.  Which it never did.  If cases are still going down it's because of vaccinations.  It's because of science and medicine, not magic--and sure as hell not "herd immunity."

One of the few positives is I don't think without something like Covid an old stiff like Joe Biden could have hoped to beat Trump.  Without Covid raging, killing hundreds of thousands and--probably worse to our materialistic society--ruining the economy, the racist demagogue would probably have cruised to an easy win because so many people wouldn't have cared--like in 2016.  Like in Our Brand is Crisis, you need a crisis to get people off their asses to vote.  Sometimes--like 2016--the crises are invented but this time it was very, very real.

And now we have more and more people getting vaccinated, so that maybe someday we could get back to "normal," whatever that means anymore.  Of course the Tony Laplumes of the world would try to give Trump full or partial credit for that when really we would be so much farther ahead on this if that fucking dipshit had ordered more doses and actually had a plan for a national rollout instead of the lazy fuck just letting states do whatever they want because he was too busy whining and spreading conspiracy theories and trying to overthrow the government he wasn't running anyway.

Anyway, if I sound like it's over, of course it's not.  Maybe the worst is over, or maybe it's just that Round 1 is over and there's still another round to go with all the variants of Covid.  Who can really say?

If everything went back to "normal" would I go back to my old patterns?  Maybe, in time.  It would be nice to see the family in-person again.  Or to eat out.  Or watch a movie.  In the meantime I'm still doing the best I can and as the alcoholics say, "take it one day at a time."

Here's hoping Year 2 doesn't have to actually be a whole year.

The Snyder Cut Shows the Problem With Director's Cuts

 Last Friday I finally got around to watching Zack Snyder's Justice League, or as it's more popularly known, "The Snyder Cut."  At 4 hours long it is much, much too long for casual fans to watch.  And really it showcases the problem of most Director's Cuts in general:  most of the stuff added in is not really of value to the audience.

A lot of the stuff added to the Snyder Cut was not really stuff the audience needed to see.  The "Knightmare" sequences could easily have been left out.  Really the 4 different scenes that should have been cookie scenes in the credits could have been left out entirely.  The Flash's creepy rescue of Iris could definitely have stayed on the cutting room floor.

As I mentioned on Facebook and Twitter the biggest winners of The Snyder Cut were Cyborg and Steppenwolf.  Cyborg gets an expanded origin and much more screen time.  Steppenwolf gets a CGI tweaking and also some added background.  The other big winners were Darkseid and Martian Manhunter who had a combined 0 seconds of screen time in the theatrical version.  While I didn't like the Flash's creepy rescue scene, he does get a much cooler role in the big finale.  The biggest losers were Aquaman, who got most of his jokes cut, and Superman, who really after he returns doesn't do much besides punch Steppenwolf (a lot) and help pull the boxes apart.

As with other DC/Snyder offerings BvS and Watchmen, for the few minutes of added stuff that actually adds some value (ie building up Cyborg and Steppenwolf) there's a lot of bloat that really does nothing at all.  The aforementioned endless should-be cookie scenes in large part.  In BvS there was almost an hour of extra stuff but really the only stuff that mattered (explaining the bullet Lois finds when she's taken captive and explaining the wheelchair that blows up the Capitol was lead-lined) took up probably less than 5 minutes.  In Watchmen the Director's Cut adds a scene where the original Nite Owl is killed and another of Nite Owl II's retaliation and some other stuff, but none of it really adds anything important to the main story, which is finding who killed the Comedian and stopping the end of the world.  The Ultimate Cut adds another layer by including all the Director's Cut stuff plus the animated version of the pirate comic book.

For Watchmen that added stuff was cool for fans of the graphic novel but for casual fans it doesn't add anything.  It just makes it a lot longer and probably more confusing too.  If you ever listen to the director's commentary during deleted scenes of a movie the most common reason something gets cut is pacing.  In a lot of cases though if you watch the deleted scenes there's like 4 minutes of extra footage and so it doesn't seem to matter.  But in movies like Watchmen or Justice League there is a lot of extra stuff that really could have stayed cut for pacing.  In the case of Justice League though DC/WB/HBO Max wanted to get the most out of all the extra money they were sinking in, so why not let Snyder make it as long as he wanted?  Why bother editing it at all, right?  Just throw out the kitchen sink.  That's what people were paying (or not) to see.

In my experience there are very few alternate cuts of a movie that are actually better than the original.  The top of my list is Halloween VI:  The Producer's Cut because it makes a lot more sense than the theatrical version.  Other ones like Blade Runner, Superman II, or the "Special Edition" original trilogy Star Wars movies were at best a lateral move.  In those cases the issue like Justice League is really about adding extra value along with extra run time.  When a director or producer or whoever is recutting a movie there's always that temptation to add in all the stuff that didn't make the first cut instead of trying to just add enough to make it a better movie.  In part that might be because if a studio is going to release a new version they want it to be worth the audience's while; if only a couple of minutes are added, the audience is probably going to complain they got ripped off.  If Justice League only had the extra 10-20 minutes that were actually helpful, people would probably have just shrugged after waiting about 3 1/2 years.  Whereas if you say there was almost 2 hours of new footage, it seems like a much bigger deal, even if most of that 2 hours is just unimportant crap that isn't memorable and doesn't add anything to the overall plot.

So, Phantom Readers, any Director's Cuts (or whatever alternate editions) you like better than the original theatrical release?  Do tell.  I dare you.  And if you want to give your opinion of The Snyder Cut, go right ahead.

Beware the Both Siders

 A month ago on Facebook I said I'd have respected Ted Cruz more if he had just stayed in Cancun after winter storms crippled Texas than letting social media shame him into coming back to pretend he cared while throwing his wife and kids under the bus.  Someone then jumped into attack mode like, "How can you admire him?!"  And I wasn't using "respect" in that way.  I meant it like "I respect your right to exist."  It doesn't mean I like you or admire you but that I tolerate you.

By the same token I respect a villain like Donald Trump who is consistent.  I don't admire him but I respect that he's not wishy-washy.  I don't like his politics or him as a supposed human being, but at least you know where he stands.

The ones I really don't respect are these jerk-offs who try to moderate everything terrible people like Trump or Ted Cruz does by saying, "Well both sides are bad."  Or "Well what about..."  Usually it's, What about Hillary?  Or What about Obama?  What about Hunter Biden?  Blah blah blah.

There are jerk-offs like Tony Laplume who after a Trump mob tries to overthrow the government say, "Well what about Black Lives Matter protests?"  What about them?  They weren't trying to overthrow the government.  But there was violence there!  Mostly because dipshit Trump and his sycophants wanted to "dominate the protesters."  And the few violent protests naturally got way more media attention than the many, many that were peaceful.

And after the Ted Cruz thing they try to say, "It snowed, so what?"  Um, no it didn't just snow.  Much of the state was without power, heat, or water in freezing temperatures.  People were literally dying and he decides to jet off to sunny Cancun, Mexico (the country Trump supporters hate so much) for a vacation.  Does that sound like what a compassionate leader or decent human being would do?

Then there's this oldie but goody:  Liberals preach tolerance but they're intolerant of us!  Um, yeah, we're intolerant of asshole fascists with their Nazi and Confederate flags.  That makes us so terrible, right?  The implied paradox is one that doesn't really exist; some things you are supposed to be intolerant of:  murderers, child pornographers, religious extremists, white supremacists, and the like.  That doesn't make us "intolerant;" it makes us decent human beings.  If you're trying to bend yourself into a pretzel mentally to excuse those behaviors, what kind of human being are you?

What the Both Siders are really trying to do is to pull everything into the middle.  Trump supporters raid a nuclear missile silo and nuke Mexico?  Well, remember when Obama saluted a Marine with a coffee cup in hand?  Just as bad!  Or remember when Obama wore a tan suit?  Just as bad!  Both sides are equally bad!

And really the worst part about it is people like Tony Laplume can't just say they support Trump.  Instead they try to cloak it in all this "both sides are bad" or "what about..." bullshit.  I'd respect you more if you just said which side you're on instead of trying to act like you're in the middle when it's pretty fucking obvious which side you're on.  You're not fooling anyone--except yourself.

If you notice, that kind of both siders never seem to say anything to defend people on the left.  Nope, it's always to defend the right.  So when you say I don't get it or I'm misinterpreting it, well, what else am I supposed to think?  Write some lame poems or Twitter posts defending Bernie and AOC and I might really believe your "both sides" crap.

(And predictably when Laplume couldn't win arguments on his stupid poetry blog he just started deleting my comments.  It's funny how these right wingers are only tough guys until someone hits them back.  Then they run crying to Mommy.)

Green Lantern The Animated Series Was Another Show Killed Off Too Soon

 Since it's St. Me Day and the color of the day is green, why not talk about Green Lanterns?  Particularly Green Lantern The Animated Series that I watched on HBO Max last month.  This was the forerunner to Beware the Batman in its CGI animation style, its more adult-oriented storytelling, and its 26-episode run.  Since I watched Beware the Batman, why not watch the other?  And Michael Offutt had a blog entry about it a long time ago.

(Not to go on a rant, but you people probably don't remember shit I say but I remember a blog post of yours from 8 years ago.  I'm just saying.)

Anyway, this was aired on Cartoon Network not long after the failed (but not terrible) Ryan Reynolds movie.  It thankfully doesn't start with an origin story.  They make you think that at first when they show Hal Jordan flying a plane, but then he takes out his ring to save a train so this starts after he's been a Green Lantern.  Like Beware the Batman it's more of a Year Two than a Year One.

Hal is called back to Oa after the murder of a Green Lantern whose ring came back.  Defying the Guardians who made the Green Lantern rings, Hal and the pig-looking Kilowog steal "the Interceptor," a prototype spaceship that has its own miniature version of the central battery the Lanterns use to charge their rings.  They head out across the galaxy to "the frontier."

There they discover that there are "Red Lanterns" who have rings that run on rage instead of willpower.  This mostly borrows from Geoff Johns's long run on the Green Lantern comics where they introduced a whole rainbow of rings:

Green:  Willpower

Yellow:  Fear

Red:  Rage

Purple:  Love

Blue:  Hope

Orange:  Greed

Black:  Death

White:  All the colors

I think largely then to save money by restricting the number of cast members (something they did for the Beast Wars Transformers show back in the mid-90s) the Interceptor is damaged so they can't go back to Oa right away.  Instead they're trapped in that sector of space for a while and have to recruit allies and find a way to stop the Red Lanterns.

One of the Red Lanterns named Razer is captured and ends up defecting to their side.  Meanwhile the AI that runs the Interceptor creates its own body and goes by the name Aya.  With the willpower battery on the ship it more or less has the same power as Hal and Kilowog.  Aya's body is based on Razer's dead wife and they start to develop feelings for each other, but Razer has a hard time with her being an artificial being.

The first 13-episode season ends with Hal and his allies defeating the Red Lanterns by stopping them from killing the Guardians on Oa and blocking passage for a fleet of Red Lantern ships to enter Oan space.  Razer and Aya are reunited after the Red Lanterns hijacked her and the Interceptor.

The second 13-episode season starts with Hal returning to Earth only to find a new Green Lantern there.  Not John Stewart.  Not Kyle Rayner.  Not Simon Baz.  Not Jessica Cruz.  No, the other one--Guy Gardner.  He and Hal butt heads at first but then learn to work together.  But then Hal has to go back into space because Manhunters are coming to life and attacking planets.  Manhunters are robots originally built by the Guardians before the Green Lanterns, but they started to think that anything with emotion needed to be killed and so were deactivated.

To stop the Manhunters, Hal reassembles his team from the first season, which means having to break Aya out of a lab where she's being studied.  Once in space, they find that the Manhunters have been revived by "the Anti-Monitor," a being who comes from the "antimatter universe" and is trying to destroy all life.  You might remember him from Crisis on Infinite Earths on the CW.  

Hal's first encounter with the Anti-Monitor ends with him being sent into the antimatter universe, where he ends up on an Earth-like planet that's been turned into a 19th Century steampunk planet.  There's a reference to the original Green Lantern who had a red costume and wore a cape, but after he died, someone else took his place.

After getting back to normal space, Hal and company's next fight against the Anti-Monitor doesn't go much better.  Razer is cut off and Aya goes to save him.  He confesses his love and she is thought to be killed to save him.  But she comes back later, having cobbled together a body from Manhunter pieces.  Now that she's alive, Razer retracts his love for her.  This makes her so angry that she drains the ship's battery of power and then beheads the Anti-Monitor.  Instead of coming back to the ship, she takes over the Manhunters and decrees that she's going to destroy all emotion.

So for the second half of the season, Aya is the main villain.  This creates a problem for Hal and especially for Razer as he's still uncertain how he feels about her.  After the Interceptor crashes on a distant planet, Hal and company get back to Oa and then look for the orange Lantern battery.  The Orange Lanterns, driven by greed, basically killed each other until only one remained, a Gollum-like alien called Larfleeze.  He's a fun character and it's too bad they don't have a season 3 or a spinoff to work him in more.

The final confrontation takes place on a planet where the head of the Anti-Monitor has erected defenses to try to keep Aya from stealing its time travel portal generator.  But of course she gets it and goes back to the start of the universe to try to erase all "emotional" organic life.  Meanwhile Guy Gardner returns and mentions that John Stewart has taken up being the Lantern of Earth, so again too bad there wasn't another season or maybe he could have shown up, gotten promoted, and then Kyle Rayner could have become the Lantern of Earth.

There is a great, emotional ending where Razer is going to kill Aya, but he can't bring himself to do it.  She blasts him, but then realizes her love for him, which means even she is not a perfect unemotional machine.  She saves Razer and then uses a computer virus to destroy the Manhunters.  But like Terminator 2 she also destroys herself to make sure all traces of her and the Anti-Monitor are gone.

The series ends with Razer going out into space to search for any signs that Aya might still be out there.  A blue ring follows him, drawn no doubt by his hope.  Which means that probably in time he would have lost the red ring of rage and started wearing the blue ring of hope.

It's kind of odd that while Hal Jordan is supposed to be the main character, he's kind of the third most important character in the series behind Razer and Aya.  They really could have used any of the human Lanterns and it would have been the same--if not better.

It's interesting that while this was airing on Cartoon Network before the Adult Swim block for adults, it was not really aimed at kids.  That's evident when the series begins with Red Lanterns murdering a Green Lantern.  Even if it's not overly graphic, it's still more PG-13 than PG.  A lot of the story material isn't all that kid-friendly either like when they go to a prison where the inmates are tortured with their worst memories.  Along with the love story of Razer and Aya it really was more like a grown up sci-fi show like the various Star Trek series than a series for kids.

Fun Facts:  In the comics Sinestro has been a longtime antagonist, even going so far as to form the Yellow Lantern or Sinestro Corps.  But in a second season episode Sinestro is still a Green Lantern. Sinestro was voiced by Ron Perlman who was not only the original Hellboy but as mentioned in a previous entry voiced a character on Batman the Animated Series.  

Sergeant Kilowog is voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson, who also voiced Bulkhead on the similarly CGI-animated Transformers Prime that aired around the same time.  You might also recognize his deep, rumbling voice from American Dad, Family Guy, and The Simpsons.

Are Most Newer Shows Un-Re-Watchable?

 On Twitter almost a month ago Wisconsin comic Alan Talaga said:

Streaming service exec: "We paid so much money to buy an old show. Worth it though, people watch these episodes over and over again because they can pop in at any point in the series."

Employee: "What about our original content?"

Exec: "Every show is a serialized 10 hour movie."

I watched the recent season of Star Trek Discovery and enjoyed it (despite some still weak writing) a lot. But I don't think I'll ever watch that season again. This afternoon, I'll ride my exercise bike and rewatch a TNG or DS9 episode I've seen a dozen times.

And I have to admit he has a point.  As good as a lot of these shows are, they're not necessarily all that rewatchable.  Since Game of Thrones ended in 2019 I've never once felt the need to rewatch it.  Nor have I felt like rewatching The Expanse, The Walking Dead, or other modern series.

There are a few reasons for this:

Nostalgia:  This is a big component.  Someone might want to watch TNG or DS9 more because of the nostalgia from watching those shows in the 90s.  Discovery or Picard is so new that obviously there's no nostalgia except for the references to the old shows.

Episodic Nature:  Though a lot of DS9 and Babylon 5 had interconnected stories, TNG, Voyager, and plenty of DS9 episodes were standalone episodes.  That's a lot less prevalent on modern shows, which makes it hard to just jump into some random episode.

Grim & Gritty:  A lot of modern shows like Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and The Expanse aren't all that fun.  And that I think harms the rewatching value.  Of course plenty of old TNG and DS9 episodes aren't that fun either, but most aren't as grim and gritty as a lot of these newer shows.  So if you are going to watch something on your exercise bike or whatever, it's more fun to watch one of those older shows.

Though really I don't rewatch random episodes of dramas all that much.  I occasionally watch a TNG episode on Pluto TV but mostly I binge them on Prime Video or wherever.  When they used to show it, I watched some random episodes of Earth Final Conflict on Pluto TV too.  But I'm more likely to rewatch random episodes of comedies than dramas.  I suppose for one thing they're shorter and they're far more episodic so I don't have to invest much time or thought into them.

About the only time I rewatched shows like House of Cards, Breaking Bad, or Game of Thrones was before a new season dropped so I could catch up.  But pretty much when they're done, I'm done.  

What about you, Phantom Readers?

Don't Beware the Batman

 After I watched Batman: The Animated Series on HBO Max, I decided to watch another animated Batman series, Beware the Batman.  I had actually watched the last seven episodes back in 2014 when Cartoon Network unceremoniously dumped them out in the Toonami block from like 11pm-6am.  It was a strange, disappointing end for a series that really wasn't that bad.

Unlike most other animated Batman series this was computer animated in the same style as the Green Lantern series of that time.  Like The Clone Wars series also on Cartoon Network (and later Netflix and even later Disney+) while it was animated on a kid's network it was not necessarily aimed at kids.

The premise of the series was similar to Batman Begins in that it takes place when Batman is just starting out, though it's a little after his origin.  So instead of Year One, it's more like Year Two where he's got the costume and Batmobile and a lot of the kinks worked out.  And also like Batman Begins, James Gordon is initially a lieutenant, not the commissioner.  Unlike the movies he has a teenage daughter, Barbara, and apparently no one else.

The major difference from other Batman shows to that point is that besides being a butler, Alfred is an ex-super spy and Bruce's main teacher.  Something similar to this happens in Geoff Johns's Batman Earth One comic, which I didn't particularly enjoy.

Since this is only Year Two, we don't see a lot of the main Batman villains.  There's no Joker, Riddler, Two-Face, Poison Ivy, Scarecrow, Catwoman or Bane.  (Penguin is shown in a police sketch and Harvey Dent wonders if he's a man dressed like a penguin or a penguin dressed like a man.)  There are more recent villains like Anarky, Professor Pyg, and Phosphorous Rex (the latter two created during Grant Morrison's run in the 2000s) and a couple of more well-known ones like Ra's al Guhl, Killer Croc, and Deathstroke.  A couple of episodes also feature Metamorpho, who I thought was a Superman villain more than a Batman villain.  Instead of some kid dressed in red-and-gold like in the 90s, the Anarky they use is an adult who goes around in all white like Marvel's Moon Knight, which I guess was a little better.

The first villains are Professor Pyg and Mr. Toad, who terrorize rich Gothamites who have in some way harmed animals.  Their final target is Bruce Wayne, which is a little awkward for Batman.  After being injured while helping Bruce, Alfred decides Bruce needs some help and recruits Tatsu, aka Katana, his goddaughter and the daughter of his ex-partner in MI6.  Katana doesn't actually know Bruce is Batman for a few episodes, during which he tests her abilities in a variety of ways.

(I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but Alfred in his bowler hat and Katana in her black catsuit make me think of The Avengers--the British TV show, not the Marvel franchise.  That Katana, an Asian woman, is driving Bruce around and working as his bodyguard is also like Kato in The Green Hornet.  Again, I'm not sure if that was intentional.)

During the first fifteen episodes, the main story focuses on the "Ion Cortex," an energy source that looks like the Autobot Matrix of Leadership/Creation from Transformers cartoons/comics.  The League of Assassins led at first by Lady Shiva and then Ra's al Guhl wants the Cortex for their nefarious plans.

The second story arc covering the remaining 11 episodes takes place a couple of months later.  Gordon has been promoted to commissioner and there's a new DA named Harvey Dent who has a real boner for capturing Batman and isn't afraid to work with Anarky and Deathstroke if it will help him catch Batman and get elected mayor.  During a raid, there's an explosion and Harvey's face gets wrapped in bandages and ruins his political career.  Meanwhile Batman saves the father of an old girlfriend and she and Bruce start to get reacquainted, which was good since there wasn't much going on the romantic front until then.  The end of the series focuses on Batman vs Deathstroke.  After Batman seemingly kills him, Deathstroke returns and manages to penetrate the Batcave.  So in the grand finale, Batman, Alfred, Katana, Man-Bat, Metamorpho, and Barbara Gordon battle Deathstroke in the Batcave.  He's planted a bunch of explosives in the place and they have to find them all to stop him.  

A season two probably would have seen more of Batman working with "The Outsiders" or all his allies mentioned above.  It's likely Dent would have fully become Two-Face and they probably would have started working in more traditional villains like the Penguin or Joker to go with Anarky.  Obviously that will never happen now.

For the most part I enjoyed the series.  The tone was grimmer than the previous Batman Brave and Bold series, but it was not all that different from The Animated Series in the 90s.  Stylistically it was a lot more in line with the Nolan movies than the Burton ones with Gotham looking more like a real city and the cars and fashions and stuff more like contemporary ones instead of vaguely 30s-ish.

The guns always looked weird, usually sort of squarish and often brightly colored.  Checking out the Wikipedia page for the series, I guess it was after the Colorado theater shootings in 2012 (during a Batman movie) the producers didn't want guns on the show to look too real.  I doubt it really made a difference, but whatever.

It's hard for me to say why this series failed so badly that most of it wound up getting dumped on Toonami to be shown late, late at night.  It might have been that the tone was so different from the previous series.  Or maybe that Alfred was different.  Or that there wasn't the Joker and other well-known villains.  Maybe people just didn't like the look of Batman with the head mostly like the original 1939 costume and the rest more like the Batman Begins suit.

One thing I considered was maybe Katana didn't work as a sidekick.  Maybe they should have gone with Robin or Batgirl, someone younger and spunkier.  I mean you think of the original Robin.  Or Ahsoka Tano on Clone Wars.  Or even Grogu on The Mandalorian.  They're smaller and cuter, not fully-grown ninjas.  Maybe that's what people want.  Maybe if they'd gone with Barbara Gordon as Oracle/Batgirl it would have worked out better as she was more the target audience's age.  If you're airing on Cartoon Network before the Adult Swim block begins, it might make more sense to have a younger sidekick to relate better, which was really where the idea of the kid sidekicks came from back in the 40s.  Or maybe not.

Or since the Green Lantern show that was on a couple of years earlier got cancelled too after the same number of episodes, maybe it was just a financial decision that these CGI shows were too expensive and it was better to go with traditional animation instead.  It's hard to say.

What I can say is this show deserved a better fate than what it got.  Certainly if you like BTAS or The Clone Wars or the Nolan movies then you'd probably like this.

With BTAS there were a lot of voice actors you might have heard of, particularly a lot who had been involved in Star Trek in some way.  Not really the same for this show.  Other than Kurtwood Smith as James Gordon there weren't a lot of familiar names.  So not much for Fun Facts.

A to Z Challenge Topic Revealed!

 Out of boredom more than anything I think I'll amuse myself a little by doing an A to Z Challenge.  I spent a lot of time in 2019 writing the MST3K/Rifftrax entries (and then adding to them until 2020) but as I'm writing this it's mid-January I don't really have months and months.

Inspired by the "Action Figures I Like" or "Don't Like" entries, I thought of something pretty easy:  Star Wars figures!  

Original 1977 Figure Promotion

For Star Wars figures there are 3 periods for the most part.  The first figures were made by Kenner starting in 1978.  Since no one expected the movie to be a success, Hasbro, Mattel, and other big companies had passed on it and Kenner hadn't really planned much until the movie was a huge hit.

Because there wasn't time to get figures out by XMas in 1977, they arranged a promotion where you could buy an empty playset and then the figures would be shipped to you later.  The line was really popular through the first three movies but after 1983 they started to run out of stuff to make, so the line pretty much folded in 1985.

Late 90s Figure

In the mid-90s Kenner, by then owned by Hasbro, started a new line called Power of the Force.  The first ones they made looked really weird because the male characters had really huge muscles more like He-Man figures.  After that first batch they started to make them look more normal.  They ran through the popular characters and even some characters from comic books and novels like Grand Admiral Thrawn and Mara Jade.  That line had pretty much ended by 1999 as the prequels came out.

2010s Black Series Figure

After Disney bought the rights to Star Wars in 2012, Hasbro created The Black Series, which is a premium mostly six-inch line of figures like their Marvel Legends line.  The Black Series has covered all nine main movies, plus the spinoffs, and also the TV series and video games.

For purposes of my A to Z Challenge I'm focusing on the newer Black Series 6-inch figures.  There were a couple of letters that were tough, though maybe not the ones you'd think.

Weirdly N was a hard letter for me to find.  You'd think they would have made Lando's co-pilot in the larger Black Series by now, but nope.  Maybe that will be in a future series.

Anyway, that's what I'm doing.  Deal with it.

Revisiting Batman: The Animated Series

Among the animated DC offerings on HBO Max is Batman: The Animated Series, the seminal series from the 90s.  The most interesting thing about it is that while it was animated, it wasn't really geared towards kids.  When it started in 1992, Fox aired it in primetime, albeit I think at like 7:30pm on Sundays or something like that.  The way the series was drawn was to keep the noir-ish air of the Burton movies.  The first and third seasons even used the Danny Elfman theme from the movies as the theme song.

Maybe since they had comic book writers like Gerry Conway, Marv Wolfman, and even long-time Batman writer/editor Dennis O'Neill write episodes they weren't hugely different from what you'd have found in Batman comics, more the grittier "Bronze Age" of the 70s & 80s than the 40s-60s.  It wasn't too grim-and-gritty but not as campy as the old Adam West show or Superfriends either.

The first two-part episode involves Batman teaming with Catwoman to find and defeat a female terrorist known as Red Claw.  The show doesn't start with Batman's origin; in fact it seems to be after Batman has been established for about 10 years.  The third episode is the first I remember seeing.  It's about a scientist using an experimental drug to become Man-Bat, who inadvertently frames Batman for his activities until Batman can track him down.

Most of the next episodes bring in a lot of the well-known Batman rogue's gallery:  Joker, Mr. Freeze, Clayface, Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, and Mad Hatter.  At the start Harvey Dent is a normal guy, but then there's a two-part episode to turn him into Two-Face.  The Penguin shows up a bit later in while the Riddler doesn't show up until about 40 episodes in.  Ra's al Guhl is introduced in a two-part episode a while into it.  Bane turns up in a second season episode that's sort of a truncated version of the Bane origin and Knightfall story from the comics, albeit with a different ending where Bruce Wayne defeats Bane by turning up his Venom until he ODs on it.  

A really odd thing is how Dick Grayson as Robin just shows up in the 19th episode.  Scarecrow is poisoning athletes to bet against them--including Dick's college roommate, who's a quarterback--and Dick just basically shows up in the Robin costume.  It's not until a little later that they go into Robin's origin and he appears sporadically throughout the 65 episodes of the first season.  Though most of it is just Bruce and Alfred.

But then about 8 episodes in season 2 the title changes to The Adventures of Batman and Robin and the theme song changes for the rest of that season.  So obviously Robin is in it a lot more than the first season.  There's also a two-part episode to introduce Barbara Gordon as Batgirl, in a gray costume with a blue cape not so different from Batman's.  

Between season 2 and season 3 was the movie Subzero, which probably after Mask of the Phantasm failed at the box office was released straight to video.  Unlike Mask of the Phantasm, Subzero is basically just a longer episode of the series with a little better animation on the vehicles.  The story involves Mr. Freeze kidnapping Barbara Gordon to transplant her organs to save his wife Nora.  The strange thing about this movie is that it's a Batman movie and yet Batman is hardly involved.  It mostly focuses on Freeze, Barbara Gordon, and Dick Grayson.  I think the former colleague Freeze kidnaps to do the transplant surgery gets more screen time than Batman.  It was definitely not as good as Phantasm but better than Batman and Robin that came out around the same time.

Then things change again with season 3.  Not only does it go back to the original opening and theme song, but the drawing style is cruder, Batgirl has a black costume with a yellow cape, and there's a new Robin with an all-red costume and yellow cape.  It's kind of confusing as the first episode is a holiday episode where the new Robin is just there.  It's not until the next episode that we get his origin.  While his name is Tim Drake (the third Robin in the comics) his backstory and general attitude are far more like Jason Todd, the second Robin who was famously killed off until being revived as the Red Hood.  I'm not sure why they chose to do that.  Then a few episodes later Dick Grayson shows up with longer hair and in his black with blue symbol Nightwing costume.

But while season 3 looks more kid-friendly and was airing in the kids animation block, the stories remained more adult friendly.  In one particularly dark episode, Batgirl is hit with Scarecrow gas and dreams her own death, upon which Commissioner Gordon finds out Batgirl is his daughter and then learns Batman's secret identity.  Gordon goes to war against Batman, going so far as releasing Bane to try to capture the Dark Knight.  What's neat though is that in the end Barbara goes to her father to tell him her secret identity only to find out that he already knows.  Most of the time we think Commissioner Gordon is a dupe, so it's neat to see he isn't such a dumbass not to know what his own daughter is up to.

Another fun episode that season has three kids speculating on what Batman is like.  One kid tells a story that's done in animation more like Superfriends.  Another kid tells a story that's like Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, focusing on Batman's fight with the mutant leader.  Besides copying the drawing style of that book, they had Michael Ironside do Batman's voice to go along with it.  The episode ends with the kids stumbling on the Firefly going to burn down a building until the real Batman shows up to stop him and save the kids.

An earlier episode that also paid homage to Batman history had Adam West voice an actor who played a character called the Gray Ghost, an old favorite of Bruce Wayne.  When a crazed fan starts reenacting episodes of the show, Batman and the Gray Ghost have to team up to stop him.

One unfortunate thing about this otherwise really good series is it's the origin of Harley Quinn.  She starts off as just a henchwoman of the Joker.  It took a few appearances before they started in with her "tragic" (and nonsensical) origin story.  The full version of that was the final episode of the series.  The only episode I didn't watch was "Harley's Holiday" because I really can't stand her.

The series is also the origin of another villain:  Condiment King!  In one episode the Joker is drugging contestants of some comedy special so he can be #1.  One of the comics dresses up in a costume with ketchup and mustard guns to hold people up.  The character showed up in an issue of Tom King's recent run of the Batman comic and in the Harley Quinn TV series and in a Lego game.

Besides Robin, Batgirl, and Nightwing the only other superhero team-up was one episode late in the third season when Supergirl comes to Gotham on the trail of Livewire and teams up with Batgirl.  I assume this was after the Superman cartoon had started to air.  There were also guest appearances by Zatanna, Jonah Hex, Etrigan the Demon, and Clarion the Boy Witch.  The former two didn't really have any superpowers; Zatanna was just a normal illusionist and Jonah Hex an elderly bounty hunter. 

There are a few references in the series to Tiny Toon Adventures, like a couple of times when someone in the background is reading a Tiny Toon comic book.  Both series were WB projects on Fox around the same time co-created and written by Paul Dini.  And conversely there were a few times when Batman would show up on Tiny Toons.  Looking up Dini's Wikipedia page, he got his start by writing episodes for most of the cartoons my family watched in the 80s like He-Man, Transformers, GI JOE, Smurfs, Rainbow Brite, and Jem.

One other minor criticism is that a lot of episodes seem to rely on some variation of knock-out gas, which does not really exist.  Like the old Adam West show, a lot of the episodes also rely on Batman walking into a trap and escaping.  When you binge watch, you really start thinking Batman is kind of a dumbass.

A Fun Fact I noticed starting with the first two episodes is there are a number of actors from Star Trek series and movies who do voices for characters in this show including Kate Mulgrew, Rene Auberjonois, Diana Muldaur, LeVar Burton, Brock Peters, Jeffrey Combs, David Warner, and Ron Perlman.  Mark Hamill was the voice of the Joker and has reprised that role on several occasions since then.  Roddy McDowall of the Planet of the Apes movies was the voice of the Mad Hatter, so there was representation of three big sci-fi franchises.  Melissa Gilbert was the original voice of Barbara Gordon/Batgirl, though when Batgirl became a regular in season 3 they changed to someone else.  There were some other recognizable names in various episodes like Jean Smart, Ernie Hudson, Richard Moll, Seth Green, Sela Ward, Adrienne Barbeau, Helen Slater (the original live action Supergirl), and Michael McKean.

Anyway, this was a fun series and really set the standard for superhero cartoons.  I don't know if it was the first superhero cartoon aimed more at adults than kids, but it is the most well-known.  There have been several Batman animated series since then but only one is THE animated Batman series. 

Misadventures in Branding

 In watching old episodes of The Price is Right they frequently give away cars.  Most of them in 1982 are crappy little hatchbacks or economy cars.  But occasionally they give away (or try to) a Cadillac Cimarron.  Any Phantom Readers, what do you think a 1983 Cadillac Cimarron looks like without going to Google? 

You probably think it's some big fancy car.  But the Cimarron was actually an upgraded Chevy Cavalier economy-size sedan.  It was not really very popular, not just because American cars in general weren't hugely popular in the early 80s but because when people thought "Cadillac" they didn't think a Cavalier with leather seats and a sunroof.

After propping up the Cimarron for about six years, they finally dumped it in 1988.  The people at GM learned their lesson...for about 10 years.  Then they did the exact same thing!  They tried to again have a economy Cadillac, called the Catera, which was pretty much a Pontiac Grand Am with leather seats and stuff.  And guess what?  It failed.  Because still when people think "Cadillac" they thought a big fancy car--or SUV.

GM is not the only company to have failed this way.  Other companies have done similarly dumb things.  Like when Lincoln made a pick-up truck.  Or Mercedes made a station wagon.  Or Porsche made a crossover.  Or recently I saw Toyota minivan commercials where they were trying to market it as a vehicle for young people instead of a vehicle for families.

For products--including books--it can be hard to fight public perception.  As much as Cadillac might have wanted to get a foot in the economy market, it didn't really make sense.  Who would pay about twice the economy car price for an economy-sized car?  There isn't much value to the consumer.  I guess the thinking was it was so someone could get a Cadillac without spending Cadillac money.  But if you said, "Check out my Cadillac" and then show them a Cimarron or Catera, people would probably think you'd bought a Cavalier or Grand Am and glued a Cadillac badge on.  You'd be better off getting a used Cadillac than buying some crappy little one.

About 20-25 years ago the stodgy old Bill Knapps restaurant decided they would shake things up by rebranding with hip new restaurants and the slogan, "That was Then, This is Wow!"  And what happened?  They alienated the old farts who frequented the place and the hip young crowd still didn't want to go to Bill Knapps.  Within a year or two the whole chain went out of business.

Authors can of course have the same struggle.  That was why JK Rowling tried to release her thriller series under a pseudonym.  She--and probably the publisher--was worried people wouldn't want a thriller from the author of the Harry Potter series.  But then it turned out people would buy it--though not as much.  Or when Stephen King did some not really horror books he used the name Richard Bachmann, though like JK Rowling's books they eventually leaked the real author's name so people would buy it--though maybe not as much.  

If Eric Filler put out a YA book do you think people would buy it?  Not in the same numbers.  In music there have been big flaps when a musician and/or band changes his/her/their sound like when Dylan went electric or U2 going to a poppier sound with Zooropa.  It's not like that sunk Dylan or U2, but it might have hurt sales a little.

So most of the time it's just better to stick with what you're good at.  No sense getting greedy.  No one can have it all.

The Beautiful Mess of DC's Doom Patrol

 I had watched the first three episodes of DC Universe HBO Max's Doom Patrol series on YouTube months ago--legally, I might add.  After watching some other stuff on HBO Max I finally got around to watching the rest of the show.  And I was kind of disappointed.  There are a lot of loose threads and in the end I don't think a lot of them came together.

The Doom Patrol was a minor superhero team back in the 60s but this TV series takes its cues from the Grant Morrison reboot of the 1980s.  Morrison made the team a bunch of freaks and the stories were often extremely weird, like one where a painting ate Paris.

In this TV version the Chief of the team is Niles Caulder, who has been around apparently since the 19th Century and is obsessed with living forever.  Like Professor X he's in a wheelchair but he has no superpowers; he's just kind of a mad scientist.

Rita Farr was an actress in the 40s and 50s but then she fell into a river in Africa and turned into a blob.  With the Chief's help she learned to pull herself together to look human, though her control of that can be shaky.

Larry Trainor was a test pilot in the early 60s who was married with two boys but also a closeted homosexual with a secret lover.  After a radioactive alien spirit collides with his plane, he's badly disfigured and wears bandages to cover himself up.  The bandages are special in that they keep his radiation at bay; without them the radiation would kill everyone and everything around him in time.  The "Negative Spirit" inside of him can launch out to fight or project things telepathically but in doing so Larry is weakened and will die after a short time of being separated from the spirit.

Cliff Steele was a washed-up redneck race car driver until a car accident not on the track killed him and his wife.  The Chief salvaged his brain to put it into a crude robot body.

Jane used to be a girl named Kay who was sexually abused.  She was a relatively harmless schizophrenic in a mental institution until the Chief gave her something that jacked her up so now her different personalities can sometimes manifest superpowers like teleportation or psychic control.

Cyborg is not supposed to be part of the Doom Patrol.  He started in the Teen Titans and then was moved to the Justice League.  The origin story here is mostly the same as in the Justice League movie:  football star Victor Stone is injured and his father Dr. Silas Stone of STAR Labs uses advanced cybernetics to make him into Cyborg.  Unlike Justice League and the comics there's nothing about an alien "mother box" being used to create him--at least not yet.

The gist of the first season is that a villain calling himself Mr. Nobody kidnaps the Chief and so the Doom Patrol tries to rescue him.  There are a lot of misadventures along the way, like when Mr. Nobody puts a whole town up a donkey's ass.  They have to join with a British guy (who's like a really low-rent Constantine) to stop the "De-Creator" (a giant eyeball) from destroying the world.  And they have to go into the white space of a comic book to find Mr. Nobody.

In the first season there are a lot of diversions to focus on the characters and their tragic pasts and stuff.  Which is all well and good--if it were in the service of something important.  But the last episode of the first season really failed to make the journey worthwhile.  

After failing to defeat Mr. Nobody in the white space, the team goes its separate ways when the Chief confesses how he basically created everyone in the team, causing or taking advantage of their accidents to try to learn the secrets of immortality.  But then he calls everyone back because his daughter has been kidnapped by Mr. Nobody, a Doomsday prophesizing cockroach, and a rat that got revenge on Cliff by actually climbing inside of him and messing with his brain.  The whole daughter thing is just thrown out there with almost no set up and everyone just accepts on faith that there really is a daughter and just by focusing they're able to jump into a painting to save her.

The problem from there is almost everyone is just a distraction.  The cockroach and rat are destroying everything in the painting after going rogue from Mr. Nobody.  Cliff gets eaten by the rat almost right away.  Jane and the Chief go to find his daughter.  Rita convinces Mr. Nobody to help them by narrating.  Cyborg and Larry really don't do much right away.  While Jane sings to the Chief's daughter to try to get her out, she only comes out when the Chief actually shows up, so what was the point of Jane being there?  

Then everyone is eaten by the cockroach except for Larry and thanks to Mr. Nobody's narration the rat and cockroach kiss so Cliff can get in the cockroach.  Then Larry and the Negative Spirit get them out of the painting.  The cockroach's shell keeps them safe from radiation apparently, but the problem when they come out is they're the size relative to the cockroach in the real world.

Anyway, after all the shit that happened, the final thing could really have been done with Larry, Chief, and Rita.  No one else really contributed anything.  They could have not gone and the result would have been the same.  It struck me as really sloppy storytelling.  After sixteen episodes of all this stuff, you really need there to be a payoff that actually utilizes everyone as a team.  Otherwise, what's the point if you only really needed half the team and the rest were extraneous?

And really, if Mr. Nobody's whole original plan was just to turn everybody against the Chief so he wouldn't have any friends left, couldn't he have just send email videos or something of the incriminating evidence to everyone?  This whole long, drawn-out thing could have been done in a couple of minutes on a laptop.  I guess it was more fun for him drawing it out this way, but 14 episodes?  Way too much hang time on that punt.

Another thing that bugged me in the end of that first season was they had two episodes where they found Flex Mentallo, the "hero of the beach" who literally flexes his muscles to make stuff happen and then the team helped him get his memory back after the government had brainwashed him.  (One of my early blog entries here was talking about the solo miniseries Grant Morrison wrote in the 80s or early 90s.)  And then all he does is flex to get them into the white space.  Later a newspaper in the painting says that he helped to get all the other people out.  Why didn't they find him to help fight the stuff in the painting?  Or get them in and out of it?  He would have been way more useful than pretty much everyone else who actually did go.

Or in the second season when everyone except Larry is shrunk to tiny size, why don't they get Flex to help them?  He probably could have if the writers had wanted him to.  Instead after months of failed science experiments the Chief has to give the British magic guy some stuff to magic them out of there.

Honestly the second season isn't really any better in regards to the storytelling.  There's really no "big bad" for the season. Ostensibly the main story is the Chief's Planet of the Apes-looking daughter Dorothy could destroy the world and he has to stop her from growing up.  And everyone else really has nothing to do with this.

In the nine episodes everyone else has their own stuff going on.  Larry finds out his son killed himself and tries to make amends.  Rita finds out her mom fucked some guy to get her a role that launched her career; she becomes obsessed with acting in some community theater play and becoming a proper superhero, though she sucks at both.  Cliff finally tells his daughter the truth and finds out she's pregnant and marrying another woman.  Vic meets a young woman in Detroit who was a black ops agent and had some implants sort of like his.  And of course there's a lot of whiny, annoying Jane bullshit too.  She gets replaced by "Miranda" who is awesome.  Sure she's secretly evil, but she's not always whining and screaming and throwing tantrums like a bitch either so I was rooting for her.

And then there's stuff that really has nothing much to do with anything else.  After Dorothy drops the brick that used to be Danny the Street (who is literally a sentient, teleporting street), Flex Mentallo and the "Dannyzens" (people who lived on Danny Street) come to the mansion to throw a big party to revive him.  During the party some kind of sexual Ghostbusters show up to stop some entity from turning Earth into a hedonistic paradise.  A spaceship the Chief sent out in 1955 finally returns with an astronaut who has a Negative Spirit like Larry, only she's learned to control hers so she doesn't need to wear bandages.  Jack the Ripper abducts the Chief, Larry, and Rita and after failing to get the Chief to become his apprentice goes all torture porn on him and Larry.  And there are some kind of spores that make people have terrible ideas that are then harvested to make some chemical the queen of the spores uses like royal jelly.

None of this stuff in the last two paragraphs really has to do with the main problem, which is Dorothy destroying the world.  And yet that's like 75% of the second season.  That's what annoys me:  there's so much that doesn't really matter.  If they were just doing a wacky episodic series that would be fine but when you're doing serial TV it helps if at some point you actually bring all this stuff together somehow.  I mean the last episode is 50% about Miranda's "tragic" history where she fell in love with some folk singer guy in 1969 but then after they moved in together he decided to invite a bunch of people over for an orgy and she essentially killed herself, which gave rise to whiny, annoying Jane.  Did this have anything to do with what else was going on?  No.  Will it?  Probably not.  Meanwhile with a little help from the Chief, Dorothy is basically saving herself while the rest of our "heroes" got frozen in wax in like no time at all.

The show itself is weird and fun, especially Alan Tudyk as the fourth-wall-breaking, scene-chewing Mr. Nobody in season one.  The problem for me is the stories just don't come together in a meaningful way.  All the whiny obnoxious Jane crap and she doesn't do anything important.  All the flashbacks of fat Brendan Fraser and he doesn't do anything important.  All Vic's whining about his implants and his dad and he doesn't do anything important.  It's really annoying to me.  I mean they probably could have done everything that mattered in the first season in 4 episodes and everything that mattered in the second season in 3 episodes.

About a month ago I talked about season 5 of The Expanse on Amazon.  In that the main characters were scattered around the Solar System through most of the season.  But in the end everyone's stories brought them back together.  All of the separate threads were brought together fairly neatly.  It wasn't just a bunch of crazy shit that happened.  And that unfortunately is most of Doom Patrol:  a bunch of crazy shit that happens and doesn't matter.

Fun Fact:  Recently I watched the first season of Titans on HBO Max and the 4th episode is somewhat of a pilot for Doom Patrol.  Beast Boy takes Raven to the Chief's house to hide her from bad guys.  He has a room in the house with a bunch of video games and stuff.  Then we meet the other housemates.  Jane and Cyborg aren't there yet.  Cliff and April look more or less like they do in the series, but Larry doesn't look the same.  His bandages are different--there's actually a mouth hole visible--his sunglasses don't go all the way around, his jacket is slightly different, and the actor playing him looks bulkier.  That's nothing compared to the Chief, who is a completely different actor with a completely different accent.  They also say the house is on Danny Street when in the series Danny Street is somewhere else.  It's kind of funny then that Beast Boy was on Doom Patrol and went to the Titans while Cyborg was supposed to be on the Titans and went to the Doom Patrol--though in the comics both were on the Titans for a while.

Fake News Can Happen When You Least Expect It

 First off on Wednesday I mentioned it was my niece's birthday.  Then on Saturday was my brother's birthday.  And now today is my mom's birthday to complete the trifecta of birthdays.  In the pre-pandemic times we would usually get together on the weekend to celebrate all three at once.

Anyway, we all know about fake news.  Typically we think fake news is just for spreading wild and wacky far-right conspiracy theories.  But sadly liberals are also sometimes guilty of fake news, even if it is a little more subtle.

On Facebook, Dan Rather's "News and Guts" is the only news site left that I follow because they have a good track record about not posting fake news, but they let this Slate article slip through the cracks.  I saw the provocative headline, "Trump People Were the Worst Restaurant Guests, Too" and opened it to read all the horrible things Trump staffers did to restaurant workers.  Did they scream at them?  Not tip?  Make crazy demands?  

But as I plowed through the turgid, overblown prose (this waiter must be an English major) I kept looking for something to justify the headline.  And looking...and looking--

There's really nothing here.  It's all sizzle and no steak to use a restaurant metaphor.  OK, sure Stephen Miller bugged the waiter about where the caviar came from.  But he left a tip of more than 20%.  Wilbur Ross ordered the cheapest wine by the glass, but he left a tip of almost 15%, which is not great but it's not "the worst" either.

Paul Manafort came in under a fake name...but left a 25% tip.

Where are the atrocities the headline made me expect?  Spoiler alert, there really aren't any.  I don't like to whine about entitlement, but this sounds pretty entitled to me:

His fellow near-billionaire Gary Cohn, Trump’s first chief economic adviser, was a bigger spender who still couldn’t bring himself to tip more than 18 percent, though it’s possible this was retaliation for my failure to remove every pin bone from his turbot, which was one of the first I’d deboned. (They say the big perk of a blue-collar job is the ability to leave work at the workplace, but here I am years later still wondering why some obnoxious banker stiffed me $15 after I’d meticulously removed at least 96 percent of the bones in his fish.)

He ONLY left an 18% tip when I got almost all the bones out of his fish.  So...even though you didn't quite do a great job you should have been rewarded with a huge tip, right?  Uh-huh.

It turns out Trump staffers were not really that bad.  They probably weren't as good as Obama's staffers but far from "the worst" either.  I hate defending Trump people but this is a clear example of fake news, where someone let his political views bias him.  Maybe he sold the article before writing it and struggled to find anything to justify it.  Or someone at Slate came up with the headline to get people to read it.

Any way you slice it, this is an example of why you need to read articles instead of just the headlines because on both sides of the political divide, fake news is all over the place.