天下制覇

Teen Titans Dick is so the only good one.

It’s been pretty quiet in the western world of animation for awhile. I’m still looking forward to both Tartakovsky’s Sym-Bionic Titan and the spectacular (har de har har) Weisman’s Young Justice. Rex is still on break, and while the comedies (Futurama and Adventure Time) are going well, there’s definitely a comic action void. Oh well, I’m looking forward to these shows finally manifesting.

Impressions:

This is an adaptation of the two arcs covering the oft-ignored Jason Todd’s (the second Robin) death and revival as what essentially boils down to The Punisher. Like all of these DC features, it looks quite good for the most part. They do share Japan’s fascination with CG vehicles a little overly much. The ending fight between JT and Batman was also especially brutal. The way they handled Bruce’s memories of meeting and training JT was also pretty well handled. The ghost visions of himself were corny, but they were short, to the point, and added to the drama of the scene whenever they were dredged up.

Unfortunately, there are a few really big issues too. Nightwing (Dick Grayson/Robin 1.0) was absolutely insufferable. His dialogue was simply godawful and then he just disappeared from the entire show. Since the central theme was about raising and failing JT, you would have thought they’d at least have done something other than have Dick run around, make some awful pithy comments, then disappear, but no. The Black Mask was also a complete joke as an antagonist. The first shot of him is having his office literally covered in hockey puck-sized bugs and it only goes downhill from there. I wasn’t thrilled with this ritalined-up version of the Joker either. 

In the last 15 minutes the writing also crumbles into a number of truly bizarre deus ex machinas to hurry the plot to its end. Black Mask suddenly decides that only the Joker can fight Red Hood, which it turns out was JT’s plan all along (who says it was because only Black Mask had the resources to break him out, despite it taking nothing more than a few goons and a couple bribes). It’s par for the course for comic book villains, but that doesn’t make it any less of an ass-pull. The cops all standing around the Joker and then… sitting there while the Joker danced around and threatened to kill people… was also weird. Does Gotham PD not have snipers? Or guns? "He’s about to kill these people… EVERYBODY HOLD YOUR FIRE! But wait! There’s some other guy over there! Everybody ignore the Joker! Some guy’s standing on the bridge!"

Overall, it’s still one of the better DC Animated features to date though, about on par with their last one (Crisis on Two Earths) which I can’t remember if I covered here or not. There’ll be the obvious comparisons to the other "Joker Beats the Crap Out of a Robin" one with Beyond’s Return of the Joker, and honestly, the latter is much stronger all around. This wasn’t bad in the slightest though and is well worth your time if you’re even just a casual Batman fan.