After rewatching the third season, I looked and noticed I had mentioned the show in passing a couple of times but I have never done one of my futile posts where I talk about it in-depth and people either ignore it or blow it off with "I haven't seen it" and/or "I don't have [whatever streamer]" or just make some generic comment like, "That sounds interesting." Now it's time to correct that oversight!
The series has sort of a complicated beginning. Originally there was a contest on Adult Swim where like Amazon was doing around that time they'd air some pilot episodes and people would vote online and the winner--or maybe a couple of winners--would get taken to series. Robot Chicken creator Matthew Senreich and writer Zeb Wells created what was originally called Ubermansion about a house of superheroes. I don't think I ever saw the actual pilot that aired for that.
That pilot won the contest...and yet it never went to series on Adult Swim. I suppose I could check Wikipedia or something for why. But a year or two later, the renamed "Supermansion" began airing on Sony's Crackle streaming service.
Like with many animated pilots, the first episode is a little off. The anamorphic cat Cooch especially looks different from later episodes. But the first episode does largely set up the premise and characters.
It focuses on the super-team the "League of Freedom" that's led by Titanium Rex (voiced by Bryan Cranston), who's sort of the Superman of the group--if Superman aged like a normal human. While Rex is still strong and flies and deflects bullets, he also has old man problems like a prostate that makes it hard for him to piss.
The rest of the team is:
- American Ranger (Keegan-Michael Key): a Captain America-type who was recently woke from a "time tunnel" after 70 years and is as casually racist, misogynist, and homophobic as most of his generation.
- Black Saturn (Tucker Gilmore): a wanna-be Batman who is in reality a dumb narcissist who throws "Saturn rings" instead of Batarangs. Unlike Bruce Wayne, his parents are still alive and he mooches off their fortune to fund his superhero lifestyle.
- Robobot/Jewbot (Zeb Wells): a former military robot with a defective empathy chip that made him too sensitive to be a killbot. For the first season and about half the second he goes by "Jewbot" as he thinks his creator is Jewish. Learning she wasn't, he goes back to his original name.
- Cooch (Heidi Gardner): she was an ordinary cat hit with an evolution ray that caused her to become human-like, though she still looks like a cat and has a lot of cat traits like a short attention span and sniffing butts.
- Brad (Tom Root): a junkie who takes a special serum to make him a pinkish Hulk-like thing.
The first five episodes are pretty general about adopting and then fighting "Omega Pets" (evil Superpets), Rex being humiliated while trying to fight the evil Blazaar, Cooch trying to pass a test to remain with the team, and most of the team turning grocery shopping into a disaster while Rex entertains the Secretary of Defense, Ranger's former kid sidekick. When Rex defeats Blazaar, his body is regenerated slightly (internally anyway) which helps to explain in future episodes why he doesn't have quite as bad of old man problems.
It's after that where the overall story arc for the season starts to kick in when a young woman calling herself Lex Lightning shows up and claims to be Rex's daughter. Rex really doesn't want anything to do with her but as she becomes popular with the public, he lets her stay and comes to love her. She starts going out with Saturn and even defeats the evil Dr. Deviso--
Except at the end of the penultimate episode, when she finally gets full League membership, we find out she's really a villain! She's working with Deviso to get access to the League's systems--and the nuclear launch codes. Since she's the daughter of the evil Frau Mantis, she has insect DNA that lets her change shape into a gross-looking dude. Rex uses a laser blast from his Titanium fist to blind her/him/it and she/he/it flies away.
To stop Deviso and save the planet, Brad drives the drilling machine Rex used to first come to Earth's surface from deep underground deep enough to destroy the mansion's computers with magma. He's killed in the process and unlike comic books he actually stays dead.
It wasn't really until the end of that penultimate episode that you realize there really is a plan for the show. You'd think it being from people behind Robot Chicken that it's just going to be a lot of random wackiness, but there actually is a method to the madness. Frau Mantis was referenced in the second episode and Lex's heel turn was hinted at a couple of times, like when she supposedly joking says, "You think I'm just here to infiltrate the League and get all its secrets?" Later while tripping on drugs, Brad sees Lex in her male form. At the time these things don't seem like anything, but looking back you can see they were hints at a larger overall story.
Season 2 starts off a little quicker. The villains that escaped from the mansion in the previous season are all living in an old pizza restaurant that dared to try to compete with the Arby's across the street--the blatant product placement becomes a running gag through the season. They're led by Deviso and a recovered Lex who vows revenge on her father. Rex has to go into cyberspace to try to recover some stolen data, which becomes important later on.
When Deviso can't get the data himself, who does he send in? Actor JK Simmons, playing a fictionalized version of himself. While trying to impress the actor, Rex reveals his one weakness: the crystal that powers the drill that brought him to the surface. Eventually Rex's brother down in "Subtopia" finds out where he went and an army of Subtopians swarms to the surface to take it over. To stop them, the heroes and villains have to work together. Lex saves her father and in the process decides to actually be a good guy.
There are a couple of side plots as well. After losing Brad, the team recruits former member Zenith, who's a black goddess bonded to Portia Jones (voiced by Community's Yvette Nicole Brown), who has become an Oprah-like figure. There's also an episode where Black Saturn swaps places with his older, fatter self and finds the future ruled by a woman called Gamora, the daughter of Zenith and Ranger, who killed Rex and took over the Earth thanks to Saturn's blundering. This plot is revisited in the next season.
Like how the prequels made the first six Star Wars movies really about Anakin's fall and redemption, season 3 makes it clear that overall, Supermansion is about Lex. In season 1 she rises, then falls. In season 2 she rises again. And in season 3 she struggles not to fall again.
The first few episodes of season 3 start harmlessly enough as the League has to incorporate the villains into their roster now that they've saved the world. There's another one of those seemingly innocuous things that turns out later to be a clue when the former villain Bugula (an overgrown ant) is attracted to Lex while every "normal" human is repulsed by her. Later, after saving Zenith in "the god's realm," the team winds up in that dark future from the previous season, only instead of Gamora, now it's ruled by an evil Ranger. Except it's not really Ranger: it's Lex disguised as Ranger! Once she unlocked the insectoid DNA from her mother, she became an unstoppable evil mastermind.
In the last batch of episodes, Lex's efforts to keep her insectoid DNA from emerging fail and she steals a nuke to drop into the super-volcano under Yellowstone in order to recreate the Earth. Only thanks to a sacrifice by Deviso and a weapon designed by him and Robobot is Lex able to purge the insect DNA and become fully human--and no longer a villain.
Really what's good about the show is while there is a lot of slapstick and foul-mouthed, potty humor there is at the core a real story. They do actually develop some of the characters like Lex, Rex, Deviso, Robobot, and even Black Saturn, who has to reconcile his feelings for his archenemy, an evil prop comic (is there any other kind of prop comic?) called The Groaner.
I of course would have liked a season 4 but I doubt that's in the works. Maybe if viewership on Amazon is high it would convince them to make another season, though it takes a while to make these stop-motion shows and the people behind it are already busy with Robot Chicken, MODOK, and other stuff.
Fun Facts: Obviously since it was created by Robot Chicken staff there are a number of actors who frequently appear on that show in this one like Seth Green, Breckin Meyer, and Michelle Trachtenberg. Star Trek reboot actors Chris Pine and Anton Yelchin both voiced characters in the show. Pine played Deviso while Yelchin played Saturn's psychotic little brother Dudley; the character was retired after Yelchin's death. Michael Dorn of TNG and DS9 voices a Galactus-like character while Ron Perlman (who was in Nemesis but more famously Hellboy) voiced his "herald" Blazaar.
It took a really long time before I equated Supermansion with Superman. You have to think about it sort of phonetically: Super-Man-Shun and then it makes sense and you wonder why you never thought about that in almost 4 years.
After Lex is added to the credits in season 1, instead of showing footage from the pilot episode, it shows silhouettes of villains through the season. Every episode then another of the silhouettes would be filled in, allowing the audience to try to guess who the next silhouette might be.
After Zenith nearly mates with Ranger in the middle of season 2, she isn't seen again until about a third of the way through season 3. Portia remains with the team through the end of season 2. It seemed weird to add her to the roster (and the credits) and then not use her for almost half of the season. Then in the third season trip to the God's realm she fuses with Portia to create Meta-Zenith, who doesn't show up until nearly the end. Kind of wonder in a situation like that if there were real world issues getting in the way.
1 comment:
Looks like a fun show. And if it's on Prime I can watch it right now !
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