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.