Superman: The Animated Series - "The Demon Reborn"

“Old age, Superman – it truly is a shipwreck. One that I have survived more times than I can remember.”

An art exhibit in Metropolis attracts an army of ninja attackers, who steal a peculiar staff fabled to have mystical healing powers. Batman arrives to help Superman apprehend the ninja, who are working for his old flame Talia (Olivia Hussey). Talia wants the staff to help her ailing father Ra’s al Ghul (David Warner), but Ra’s needs Superman for the final stages of his plan, which will make Batman’s foe more dangerous than ever.

“The Demon Reborn” is a peculiar episode because of its bifurcated identity. Where “Knight Time” did a very good job bringing Superman into Gotham, the attempt to bring Batman into Metropolis is somewhat more overpowering. The character Superman feels very out of place in an episode that wants so desperately to be another Batman episode, revisiting one of his greatest foes in a plot that doesn’t have much use for Superman other than as a demi-MacGuffin for the al Ghul clan to chase. Lois Lane, too, gets the short end of the stick, though she has a charming scene with Batman that builds on their unconventional relationship from “World’s Finest.” It’s a fun moment in which both characters reckon with their strange past and muse on their impossible future – a conversation that’s only possible in this incarnation of the DC Universe, where Lois fell in love with Bruce Wayne but fled from the Batman. (“She likes Bruce Wayne and she likes Superman. It’s the other two guys she’s not crazy about.” / “Too bad we can't mix and match.”)

As a capper to more than two years of reviews, then, “The Demon Reborn” makes the case one last time for Batman as a genre-proof dynamo, able to airdrop into any type of story without any seams. Superman seems out of sorts in a mystical story like this one, and he’s ill-matched for the threat Ra’s poses because all Superman can do is politely accommodate Ra’s and his villainous monologue until it’s time to break free. Superman is vulnerable to magic, yes, but that always seemed to me to be a way to justify putting two divergent cosmologies together. Morality plays, colossal threats, iconic battles of good vs. evil, interrogations of the notion of America – these better suit Superman than an immortal man with a magic stick. (And conversely, Ra’s al Ghul deserves better, I think, than trying to steal Superman’s strength for no particular reason.) In the moments when Batman is doing his detective work, the episode is firing on all cylinders; oddly enough, it’s the Superman parts that drag – though perhaps I’d feel differently if I had just watched the 50 preceding episodes of Superman: The Animated Series.

It’s hard to imagine that Batman: The Animated Series marked the first time that Ra’s al Ghul had been adapted from the comics, but he had a character-defining portrayal there, with David Warner as the irreplaceable voice in my head. We can think of “The Demon Reborn” as the capper to the fine Ra’s episodes – “The Demon’s Quest,” “Avatar,” and “Showdown.” Indeed, in the latter we saw (through a Jonah Hex flashback darkly) Ra’s al Ghul beginning to reflect on his long life and his many regrets, and we see that painful legacy here, with the ecoterrorist’s body failing him as the Lazarus Pits have begun to lose their luster. We also see, for the first time, Ra’s demonstrating some degree of compassion for his daughter; all too often, Talia was treated like a devoted disciple and not a true member of his family. She’s been abandoned, beaten, manipulated, and literally thrown at Batman, but at least here she gets a modicum of respect from her father, who abandons his assault on Superman to save her. (The icky, bizarre conclusion to their strange relationship would come in an episode of Batman Beyond, penned by no less than Paul Dini himself.)

“The Demon Reborn” is in a weird liminal space where it’s not quite a Superman episode, but not quite a Batman one, either. It’s a terrible note on which to end a review series because of the way it resolutely resists finality; when Superman suggests that he and Batman work together more often, Kevin Conroy is given the unsettlingly glib line, “Yeah, right.” Of course, they would work together on a regular basis in the Justice League animated series beginning in 2001, but moreover it’s odd to hear a surfer bro’s response from the mouth of a grim avenger. Conroy sells it, of course, but I wonder if he’d have done better with a terse “We’ll see.” It’s not quite my Batman, not quite my Superman, and not even quite my Ra’s al Ghul – but even so, it’s not quite terrible. It’s silly and fun, and perhaps that’s all we need to ask from a show like this one.

Original Air Date: September 18, 1999

Writer: Rich Fogel

Director: Dan Riba

Villains: Ra’s al Ghul (David Warner) and Talia al Ghul (Olivia Hussey)

Next episode: Once more, we come to the end of a series. Next time we’re together, we’ll begin revisiting the best and worst of the Batman animated project.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇

Monday at the Movies - January 28, 2019

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, two films wildly different in tone and yet unmistakably British in their sensibilities.

The Death of Stalin (2018) – Few people can make me laugh as hard as Armando Iannucci, he whose British series The Thick of It can’t be enjoyed on a single viewing because you’ll miss half the jokes while splitting your sides at its creative profanity and monumentally madcap antics. After Iannucci ravaged the mundanely moronic ("All roads lead to Munich") in the lead-up to the Iraq War in Thick of It’s spinoff film In the Loop, he turns his satirical eye to the Soviet Union in the wake of Josef Stalin’s death and finds the Communist Party in chaos, beginning with the puddle of urine in which the party leader’s corpse is found. The cast is as unpredictable as the punchlines – we now live, folks, in a world where Steve Buscemi plays Nikita Khrushchev (and yes, Virginia, there is a “bury you” joke). Meanwhile we’ve got Jeffrey Tambor as the melancholy Georgy Malenkov, ill-suited to the leadership role he inherits; noted Shakespearean Simon Russell Beale as the oily Lavrentiy Beria of the secret police; and Jason Isaacs as Georgy Zhukov, all too eager to lead his army into open revolt. It’s a cast of all-stars (including Rupert Friend and Andrea Riseborough as Stalin’s children), but the biggest draw is the film’s pitch-black humor, depicting Stalin’s worst atrocities as something akin to a Karl Marx Brothers film. There are moments when one is not quite sure whether to laugh or recoil in horror, as when an executioner just gives up halfway down his line of victims, but Iannucci is quite successful at capturing the ambient paranoia that comes from not knowing who to trust in a totalitarian regime – and the absurdity when a brood of vipers is forced to try to trust one another.

Paddington 2 (2017) – With the benefit of hindsight, Paddington 2 might well be one of the best films of 2017. A film like this has no right to be as charming, intricately constructed, or genuinely emotional as Paddington 2 manages to be. Now that the well-mannered Paddington (Ben Whishaw) has taken up residence in London, he goes in search of a birthday present for his Aunt Lucy, only to find the perfect pop-up book out of his price range. After a series of odd jobs, Paddington is framed for the theft of the book, landing unceremoniously in a Victorian-era prison where he befriends the entire population – including prison cook Knuckles McGinty (Brendan Gleeson) – through the powers of civility and marmalade. Paddington 2 is even better than its predecessor, somehow more earnest now that it’s dispensed with the need to explain how and why an affable bear is living with ordinary people. Instead the filmscape is opened up to boundless adventures where Paddington’s relentless cheeriness persists, undaunted by his circumstances. Whether he’s shoved into the role of accidental barber or whether he finds himself teaching a prison how to make orange jam, Paddington is so endearing that it’s almost a personal offense when something unfortunate befalls him; “how dare they,” I said aloud at one point, “how dare the filmmakers do this to such a nice bear!” For all the antics and charm that the film possesses – really, I cannot overstate just how charming this movie is – it has an astonishing emotional depth rooted in Paddington’s love for his Aunt Lucy, and the film’s final moments are guaranteed to get you teary-eyed in a way that I thought only Pixar had been able to capture with computer-generated characters.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” Stay tuned for Wednesday’s final Batman animated review!

Superman: The Animated Series - "Knight Time"

“All this sneaking around isn’t exactly my style.”

Superman (Tim Daly) busts up a classic Roxy Rocket heist in Metropolis when he discovers that Batman has gone missing. With crime up in Gotham, Superman offers his help to a reluctant Robin, impersonating Batman in the interim until the Dark Knight can be found. Suspecting mind control, Robin and a disguised Superman scour the city for the Mad Hatter but find Bane, who’s elated to have another chance to break the Batman.

Just in case I never get around to full reviews of Superman: The Animated Series, I should say up front that this is probably my favorite of the show’s 54 episodes – discounting, of course, the three-parter “World’s Finest,” strung together as The Batman/Superman Movie. No slight to Superman, who had plenty of good episodes of his own (“Livewire,” “Mxyzpixilated,” and “Apokolips... Now!” come to mind), but it should come as no surprise that this Bat-fan was tickled pink to see Metropolis and Gotham meet once again. And while some Batman/Superman crossovers get bogged down in the philosophical differences between the two superheroes, occasionally erring on the side of the impossibility of cooperation, “Knight Time” is unapologetic in reveling in the exuberant fun of mixing the two worlds together.

Batman’s absence is the narrative catalyst, forcing Superman to investigate, but the episode is particularly inspired in the moments when Superman disguises himself as Batman, mastering Kevin Conroy’s voice through “precise muscle control” but completely missing the boat on posture, demeanor, and his own invincibility. It’s a comedy of errors, but the joke wisely never targets either hero, acknowledging instead the inherent absurdity of the situation and the irreplaceability of Batman. The episode even sneaks in a clever meta-gag about the darker tone of The New Batman Adventures when Robin notes that a video from Bruce Wayne has to be a forgery because “he’s smiling.” It’s an interesting sideways glance at Gotham, where one man’s disappearance sends an entire city into chaos; the police are stymied by a dangerous uptick in violent crime, while every villain known to man collaborates on a dystopian plot to conquer the city.

Despite its pitch-perfect portrayal of its titanic protagonist, the strength of the Batman animated shows was always its deep bench of villains, and “Knight Time” really packs them in. Even aside from the trio of villains plotting to dominate Gotham – Bane, Mad Hatter, and the criminally underused Riddler – we get appearances from Roxy Rocket and the Penguin, both of whom get compelling face-time with Superman. Roxy is, as ever, flirtatious, but it’s Penguin who gets what might be the best scene of the episode, facing down a Batman who’s suddenly able to kick a table across a room (even if Bat-Superman needs a little nudging from Robin to amp up the aggression). 

“Knight Time” remembers, of course, that it’s a Superman show, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome in Gotham simply because it’d be fun to do so. The reveal of the episode – that Bruce Wayne’s disappearance has been engineered by Brainiac, who needs his considerable resources to build a rocket – fits right in with how Superman: The Animated Series reimagined Brainiac. And it’s always a delight to hear Corey Burton, who was positively iconic in the role of a dispassionate computer willing to sacrifice an entire world to preserve its knowledge. Like its bat-eared predecessor, StAS had a tendency to knock it out of the park on voice casting (shout-out to casting director Andrea Romano); like Mark Hamill as The Joker, Clancy Brown is to this day getting work as Lex Luthor, while Gilbert Gottfried and Dana Delaney really captured something quintessential about Mr. Mxyzptlk and Lois Lane, respectively. But Corey Burton’s clipped precision as Brainiac is dollars-to-donuts in that legendary status, and he’s a rival befitting Tim Daly’s note-perfect boy scout Superman.

“Knight Time” is an interesting coda to these animated Batman reviews because it’s an episode that celebrates the best of Batman’s 109 episodes – its madcap characters, its funhouse mirror of a setting, and its flexible accommodation of nearly any conceivable plot. It’s both a return (of sorts) to Gotham and a fun frolic through a new setting for Superman. And it’s a fine example of the best kinds of episodes the DC Animated Universe could churn out, the kind of candy you eat every so often without getting bored of it. It feels mildly sacrilegious to say, but “Knight Time” is probably the episode of StAS I’ve watched the most; it’s in a league with the best of Batman.

Original Air Date: October 10, 1998

Writer: Robert Goodman

Director: Curt Geda

Villains: Brainiac (Corey Burton), Bane (Henry Silva), Roxy Rocket (Charity James), The Penguin (Paul Williams), The Mad Hatter (Roddy McDowall), and The Riddler (John Glover)

Next episode: “The Demon Reborn,” in which Superman meets one of Batman’s exes.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇

Glass (2019)

I was an early believer on Unbreakable – I can still vividly recall the ads in comic books of the time heralding the fact that Alex Ross had created artwork for the DVD release. In that sense, I have always already been the perfectly calibrated audience for Shyamalan’s fascination with superheroes; I’ve been in the trenches of fandom with him this whole time, and I’ve come back to Unbreakable from time to time as I get older and deeper into the genre. Even as Shyamalan’s career has met with less than stellar reception, most of us have wondered when he’d do a sequel to his one superhero movie, especially as the genre became billion-dollar business.

No one expected him to backdoor his way into the terrain through his split-personality abduction horror film Split – spoilers, it’s a sequel to Unbreakable – but if that’s the way we get to Glass, so be it. It’s been nineteen years (much ado is made within the film itself) as David Dunn (Bruce Willis) continues to do the superhero thing, with his vigilante eyes set on serial killer Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy). Meanwhile, Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) languishes in a mental institution under the care of Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), who believes that “Mister Glass” suffers from psychotic delusions.

As much as I felt weirdly cheated by the fact that Split was a covert sequel to Unbreakable, a misplaced and almost perfunctory twist, there’s an undeniable frisson of delight in seeing Willis, McAvoy, and Jackson on screen together, as if you can hear Shyamalan giggling from behind the camera, “Can you believe they let me get away with this?” And despite the crossover factor being markedly less ambitious than, say, Avengers: Infinity War, Glass manages to scratch that same itch, especially when all three are together. (Shyamalan’s cameo, in which he appears to claim that at least three of his cameos have all been the same man, is perhaps a bridge too far, but even there we find something mildly admirable in his overreach.)

To repeat what I said above, I had an acute sense during Glass that it was a movie designed to target my specific brand of fandom – my intense devotion to the genre and the way it helps us imagine and re-envision ourselves as the heroes we need. It stars three actors who I adore, turning in varying levels of exquisite performance. Willis continues, admittedly, to phone it in a bit, but as David Dunn I have the sense that Willis doesn’t actively resent being in the film (as was apparent in, for one, Cop Out). David has always been a more contemplative, quiet hero type, so it’s fine that Willis leaves the flashier performances to the film’s antagonists – itself a kind of genre-based decision. McAvoy was riveting in Split, but in Glass he revs up his performance by transitioning between personalities without the aid of costume changes. Far and away, though, as the title presages, the film belongs to the magisterial talents of Samuel L. Jackson, who gleefully carves the scenery and boxes up the rest to take home for later. Delivering impassioned monologues with eyes gleaming with fiery madness, Jackson is equally compelling in the moments when he’s not talking, as we try to divine what’s going on behind his silence. At home in both a hospital gown and his more ostentatious purple leather suit, Mister Glass is the kind of villain on which a franchise can properly be hung.

At the same time, and as much as I found myself digging the mythopoetic jazz Shyamalan is laying down with the genre, I understand entirely that the film isn’t for everyone, that Glass’s mixed-to-negative reviews are not quite unfair. As superhero films go, this is one of the talkier ones, and its genre deconstruction isn’t perhaps as revelatory as Shyamalan hopes (though it might have been nineteen years ago). Moreover, Shyamalan’s proclivity for “twists” in his storytelling stacks up in the film’s third act, with nearly as many false endings as the third Lord of the Rings movie, and though not all of these twists land with the mind-blowing effect of The Sixth Sense’s final developments, Shyamalan ultimately arrives at a place where I felt – if not accepting – at least understanding what he had tried to accomplish. Despite the broad ambitions of its morality play, the film’s scale is exceedingly intimate, but in those moments Shyamalan displays that he has lost none of his dexterity with miniature moments of terror, of the bumps-in-the-night scares on which he made his name with The Sixth Sense and Signs (which I recall, on the strengths of its sound mixing alone, being immensely terrifying in a dark room). 

If The Visit was Shyamalan’s low-budget back-to-basics return, with Split edging his way toward his earlier successes, it’s hard not to hope that Glass marks a sort of new beginning for a man whose career langured in critical limbo and popular dismissal. While this may not be the sort of superhero film for everyone, its methodical deliberateness is exactly my cup of tea and a useful counterprogramming if you’re feeling a bit worn by the blockbusters of the genre. Glass is so delightfully idiosyncratic that it’s all too easy to be swept along by the steady, purposeful drive of the story.

Glass is rated PG-13 for “violence including some bloody images, thematic elements, and language.” Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sarah Paulson, Spencer Treat Clark, and Samuel L. Jackson.

Batman: The Animated Series - "The Lost Episode"

“Yowza, yowza, ladies and germs! Let’s have a big Land O’ Laffs welcome for your pal and his – Batman! Hee hee! I’m delighted to see you made it this far, but then I knew those other losers couldn’t put you out of action... at least, not like I can. Ah hahahaha!”

After apprehending Poison Ivy during a bank robbery, Batman discovers that his foes have all banded together to run the Dark Knight through a gauntlet. The Riddler has captured Commissioner Gordon, while The Joker and Harley Quinn are holding Robin hostage at (where else?) an abandoned amusement park. As Batman races to free his friends, he learns that he’s heading for a confrontation with the architect of this insidious plot.

The Adventures of Batman & Robin debuted on Sega CD in July 1995. While the game existed in several different versions released across various platforms (a Super Nintendo version loosely adapted episodes like “What Is Reality?”), the Sega version has gone down in the annals of fandom as a “lost episode.” It resurfaced on the Internet a few years back but got a signal boost when Mark Hamill tweeted about its existence in December 2018. As a “lost episode,” this collection of video game cutscenes is remarkable for uniting the voice cast from Batman: The Animated Series in a story written by the show’s top scribes, Paul Dini and Bruce Timm. That’s an impressive assembly of talent for a forgotten video game on an obsolete gaming system.

“The Lost Episode” is not, however, a lost treasure or even a missing link. It’s by definition a little choppy, since the playable levels – all driving, by the way, with Batman never exiting the Batmobile for any gameplay – have all been extracted and frankensteined together in this seventeen-minute compilation. But despite making for unconventional viewing, there’s actually a good deal to like in here, leading some (Hamill included) to lament that it wasn’t included in some form on any of the DVD sets. The cutscenes play like a “greatest hits” compilation, with each villain getting a new variation on a classic gimmick. They’re familiar premises but new riffs, almost like hearing Eric Clapton’s acoustic version of “Layla” for the first time. Poison Ivy debuts a new plant monster, while Riddler devises a scheme to prove his own mental and technological superiority; Joker orchestrates a carnival gone mad, and Clayface morphs and smashes like no other. Best of all, it’s all our favorite voices, including Arleen Sorkin as a giddy Harley Quinn.

There are two surprises in “The Lost Episode,” both of which make it an interesting change of pace from the standard BTAS fare. The first of these is the violence, which is not particularly graphic but is certainly shocking in comparison to the tamer material that reminds us that BTAS was, first and foremost, a show aimed at kids. Verboten by the television censors were guns, drugs, breaking glass, alcohol, smoking, nudity, child endangerment, religion, and strangulation – all of which Bruce Timm infamously sketched into one Batman image. (Also off-limits were vampires and most depictions of blood.) Unfettered by the censors, though, “The Lost Episode” includes a shockingly protracted sequence in which Batman takes a fire axe to Poison Ivy’s plant-based beastie. Batman’s face is splashed with green goo before the scene warps into a riff on “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” all splinters and shadows as Batman dismembers the creature. After 100+ episodes of network standards, “The Lost Episode” feels a little edgier – not necessarily for the worse, but definitely enough to give even a seasoned viewer a moment’s pause.

The second big surprise is the master villain – the final boss, if you will. And it’s spoiler warning time, because I can’t talk about the twist without talking about the double twist. At first, it seems that the true mastermind of the plot is Rupert Thorne (John Vernon), and I observed aloud, “Well, that’s disappointing.” Though Vernon is delightfully smarmy as crime boss Thorne, he’s hardly the archrival Batman – or a videogame – deserves. But “The Lost Episode” does an unexpected about-face when it’s revealed that, actually, Clayface is masquerading as Thorne to unite Batman’s rogues against him. It’s a bit of an intellectual stretch for Clayface to become a criminal mastermind, but it’s a fun change of pace and would seem to lend itself to a nifty boss fight – if the game weren’t comprised exclusively of driving and flying levels. (Clayface meets a classic “haven’t seen the last of him” fiery end when his plane is shot down over the Gotham River.)

All told, “The Lost Episode” is a strange bird, an odd viewing experience that does not quite yield the concealed greatness its mysterious name implies, but it’s just shy of required for any fan of Batman: The Animated Series. If nothing else, it’s seventeen “new” minutes of Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, and the rest of the gang. After twenty-four hit-or-miss episodes of The New Batman Adventures, “The Lost Episode” is that rare treat which reteams Bruce Timm and Paul Dini for as authentic an experience as you can get. If nothing else, it’s a fine auguring of future, better Bat-games likeBatman: Vengeance and the Arkham series, both of which would continue to reteam Conroy and Hamill in the roles they defined (with the latter scripted by Dini).

Original Release Date: July 1995

Writers: Paul Dini and Bruce Timm

Director: Bruce Timm

Villains: Poison Ivy (Diane Pershing), The Riddler (John Glover), Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin), The Joker (Mark Hamill), and Clayface (Ron Perlman)

Next episode: There are no more episodes! Stay tuned, though, for two more bonus reviews before we revisit the Top and Bottom 10 episodes. Up next, “Knight Time,” in which Bruce Wayne treats himself to an impromptu vacation.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇

The New Batman Adventures - "Judgment Day"

“May heaven have mercy on your souls, Two-Face – both of them.”

Gotham’s new vigilante, The Judge (Malachi Throne), takes a harder line on crime when he violently attacks The Penguin. Egged on by corrupt city councilman J. Carroll Corcoran (Steven Weber), The Judge works his way down a list of Gotham’s most wanted. While Two-Face (Richard Moll) scrambles to avoid facing the vigilante’s death sentence, Batman discovers that something far worse than a murderer lurks beneath The Judge’s robes. (Note: I’ll have to spoil the reveal below to discuss this episode fully.)

It’s a strange position to review “Judgment Day” as a series finale. It was the last episode produced but not the last one to air – that honor belongs to the masterful “Mad Love.” I’ve never been clear on how quickly the creators had to change course, though in Vulture’s oral history Bruce Timm suggests a fairly quick turnaround between The New Batman Adventures and Batman Beyond. (In that same history, Paul Dini notes, “we could have gone another two or three years on just Batman stories alone, because we also liked where we were taking the relationships.” If only!) So it seems partially fair to treat “Judgment Day” like a series finale, but we also have to acknowledge that it was more of a full stop than a proper conclusion.

As a finale, “Judgment Day” ties a bow on one of the animated programs’ longest running arcs – the fragile sanity of Harvey Dent, who debuted in the show’s fifth episode before the series’s first two-part episode depicted his fall from grace in an accident that scarred him physically and shattered him mentally. It’s both perplexing and fitting, then, that this episode introduces a third personality – that of The Judge – to accompany Harvey Dent and Two-Face (the erstwhile “Big Bad Harv”). Giving Two-Face a third personality is perhaps a bridge too far for a villain so obsessed with doubles and duality, but it compounds the tragedy of Harvey Dent and doubles-down, so to speak, on this Batman’s first and perhaps only great failure. Batman’s concluding monologue, reminiscent of a similar closing speech from Psycho, is perhaps a little too pat in explaining the narrative twist, and another pass might have helped draw out the long connection Batman and Two-Face, Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent, have shared.

When Councilman Corcoran volunteers to help The Judge, he does so by observing, “I figure if Gordon can have his hero, why can’t I have mine?” This comparison is a fascinating one, and it’s something that, in another world, might have made for an excellent two-parter or even a season-long subplot. Positing The Judge – and, by extension, Two-Face – as Batman’s dark opposite number raises fascinating questions about which lines are important for Gotham’s vigilantes to draw, and the fact that only Corcoran notices is a bit disappointing. Along the same vein, The New Batman Adventures has prided itself on deepening the Bat-bench with Nightwing, a new Robin, and an expanded role for Batgirl, yet none of the Bat-family appears, save for a brief Alfred cameo. Batman himself doesn’t appear for nearly seven minutes while The Judge makes the rounds with Gotham’s villains. It’s a treat, to be sure, to see many of these foes again, even if Killer Croc isn’t voiced by Aron Kincaid, or if The Riddler is relegated to a news clip in his only non-hallucination appearance on TNBA. But one can’t help but feel this episode might have been fuller had someone other than Batman had a word about The Judge – especially Tim Drake, on whom Two-Face had a rather significant impact back in “Sins of the Father.”

On one point of order, “Judgment Day” is a striking series finale because of the way it invokes one of the animated project’s finest hours. Between his swooping robes, booming voice, and operatic score, it cannot be an accident that The Judge is extremely evocative of The Phantasm, the eponymous antagonist of Batman’s first and best animated film – to say nothing of the fact that Alan Burnett wrote both this episode and Phantasm’s story. Harley Quinn certainly looms largest among the pantheon of original animated creations, but there has always been something primal about The Phantasm, who never quite made the jump to the comics the way Harley did. (The Phantasm would resurface in an episode of Justice League Unlimited and a few Batman Beyond comics; when I met the writer of those comics, he speculated that the rights might have been handled differently at the time since Phantasm was released theatrically.) Nevertheless, The Phantasm has become a kind of hypostatic metaphor for the entire Batman animated project – an example of its fine visual flair, its ingenious creative writing, and its gut-level “cool” factor. 

Moreover, The Phantasm represents the key conceit that Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures always kept in mind: no matter how relentlessly cool his villains might be, Batman is the star of his own show, and every well-crafted story has to feed into exploring his specific psyche, his need for justice, and the personal connection he shares with his enemies –many of whom he may have had an accidental hand in creating. It’s also always been about the belief that one man can make a difference, that the city is a better place for this one figure standing between it and total lawlessness. We see it with The Phantasm, with Simon Trent and the redemption of his soul, even with Harley Quinn and her loony halfhearted reforms. And we see it with Harvey Dent, on whom Batman has never given up. This episode works very well as a thematic sequel to “Second Chance,” in which Harvey Dent found himself abducted by a Two-Face unwilling to accept that his better half might genuinely express contrition for his crimes. Back then, I wrote words that sum up my overall sense of the Batman animated project, words on which it may be wise to end:

We came for the earnest exploration of the Batman and his world, who he was and how his enemies came to be; we stayed for stories like this one, that remind us that these stories matter because they are about superhuman figures who remain, at the end of the day, failingly human.

Original Air Date: October 31, 1998

Writers: Rich Fogel and Alan Burnett

Director: Curt Geda

Villains: The Judge (Malachi Throne), Two-Face (Richard Moll), The Penguin (Paul Williams), Killer Croc (Brooks Gardner), and The Riddler (John Glover)

Next episode: “The Lost Episode,” in which everything old is new again.

🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

We like to say that “the geeks have won.” It’s a victory that’s been called more often than Barbara Stanwyck’s bedside telephone in Sorry, Wrong Number, but each time it feels like geekdom has achieved the unthinkable – be it the smash debut of The Avengers or introducing comics-accurate oddballs like King Shark and Professor Pyg on primetime. In 2018, the geeks won by having a banner year, with three animated superhero films alongside major showings by their live-action counterparts. However you slice it, we can have a productive argument about whether the cartoon with a Spider-Pig was actually the best one – a true win for the geeks.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (finally) introduces Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) to the big screen as Brooklyn’s new friendly neighborhood Spider-Man after a spider bite puts him in a league with his universe’s Peter Parker (Chris Pine). I say “his” universe, for Brooklyn becomes host to a coterie of spider-people after The Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) tears a hole in the fabric of space-time with a particle accelerator experiment. Joining Miles are a shlubbier Spidey (Jake Johnson), Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld), the black-and-white Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage), and Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham (John Mulaney) – all in search of a way home.

I’ve said in the past that Batman is the greatest fictional character because of his chameleonic ability to accommodate whatever his audience needs – he can be the paragon of camp, the apex gargoyle, a space-age dark knight, or a kid-friendly crusader. When I say that, however, I’m usually not thinking of Spider-Man, for whose comparable metamorphoses Spider-Verse makes a compelling argument. Spider-Verse posits a veritable spider-prism (kids next door, rocker chicks, tough-guy gangsters, wise-cracking pigs, and more), each of whom accesses the central truth of Spider-Man – that with great power, there must also come great responsibility. You can’t run away, you can’t turn your back; your family and your friendly neighborhood are counting on you. For all his myriad forms, it’s hard to imagine Batman in a film like this one, teamwork having never been his strong suit. (Singular dislocation suits Batman better than prismatic conjunction; cf. Batman Ninja, Batman Beyond, etc.)

It’s equally hard to imagine that Spider-Verse works as well as it does. Its irreverent approach to storytelling, layering origin stories in a gag that never loses its comedic punch, helps the viewer navigate fifty years of convoluted chronology with deft precision. (Its comics counterpart, 2014’s Spider-Verse crossover, is comparably impenetrable.) Make no mistake, though; for all its spider-people, Spider-Verse is well and truly Miles’s film, a full origin story for the newest Spider-Man (who debuted in 2011). Here Miles is quite a character, engaging and relatable because of his eminent humanity; he’s shy but gifted, funny and earnest. What’s more, there comes a moment in the film where you’d almost rather he not become Spider-Man because of how well we like Miles and the unique story being told with him; it almost seems a shame to put him in a costume and give him a fairly recognizable super-action narrative. But the exceedingly clever script finds a way to weave that hero’s journey into the story already in progress (including a few, ahem, touching callbacks).

Of course, so much of the film’s success owes to its lanky animation style, delicately exaggerated in the best Tex Avery tradition. The slightly jerky movements and modest design tweaks help divorce Spider-Verse from strict representation and move it into a realm where it feels like anything can happen, where any abstract incursion fits right in (cf. Spider-Ham). Animation naturally unfetters a filmmaker’s aspirations in the way that a comic book page renders all things possible beyond constraints of budget. That’s not to say that Spider-Verse is cheap (its budget has been reported at $90 million), but it’s hard to imagine a live-action film capturing all the peculiar quirks of this world, to say nothing of its technicolor climax or the characters that almost need to belong to an animated world (again, Spider-Ham, but also the monochromatic Spider-Man Noir). I knew I was in for a visual treat even from the trailers, but nothing can really prepare a moviegoer for the first appearance of the massive Kingpin – whose sheer mass cannot be understated. Even this, though, is essential character work; Kingpin’s colossal bulk distorts gravity around him, in the way that his particle accelerator tampers with the laws of physics in order to pull in the objects of his plot (no spoilers, but the script is smart to make Kingpin three-dimensional, giving him a full and possibly legitimate reason for risking the fate of the universe).

As dark as the film can be, wading into heavy subplots about betrayal, disappointment, and loss, Spider-Verse is exuberantly, boundlessly fun. I can’t, for example, point at someone or touch their shoulder without thinking of particular jokes in the film and guffawing my webs off. But the film also tickles my specific devotion to superheroes for its relentless optimism. Yes, the situation is dire, with cataclysmic consequences, but here’s a kid from Brooklyn who stands at the center of this massive web with the power to save everyone, and all he needs to do is figure himself out. What’s more, he has a loving family and a network of friends to help him through difficult times; no matter how isolated he feels, Miles Morales is never alone. Reducing him to “the black Spider-Man” doesn’t do justice to the depth of this character or the ways he advances and perpetuates the legend of Spider-Man without the guilt or baggage of Peter Parker.

I’m not ready to wade into the battlefields of “who did it better?” just yet. (As I get older, I’m losing patience with these pithy ‘hot takes’ that end more conversations than they start.) The geeks have well and truly won when we can have Black Panther and Spider-Verse, when we get a long-overdue Incredibles 2 alongside them and Avengers: Infinity War, to say nothing of Aquaman, Venom, Deadpool 2, and Ant-Man and the Wasp. (Phew!) It’s an embarrassment of riches, not unlike the spider-cornucopia presented in Spider-Verse, with something for everyone and everything adding up to a romping good time. Best of all, Spider-Verse got me to dust off my Marvel Unlimited subscription and queue up a slate of spider-comics to read. That’s how the geeks win.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is rated PG for “frenetic sequences of animated action violence, thematic elements, and mild language.” Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman. Written by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Brian Michael Bendis, Sara Pichelli, and Dan Slott. Starring Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, John Mulaney, Nicolas Cage, Kathryn Hahn, Liev Schreiber, and Chris Pine.

The New Batman Adventures - "Beware the Creeper"

“Jilted madman stalks crazy clown girl – film at 11!”

While reporting on Gotham’s villains, Jack Ryder (Jeff Bennett) finds himself on the wrong side of The Joker (Mark Hamill) and his famous temper. Joker douses Ryder with the chemicals that made him the clown prince of crime seven years ago, but Ryder emerges as The Creeper, a bright yellow ludic goblin whose fractured sanity leads him on a mad chaotic spree across Gotham – and into a deep infatuation with Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin). 

When Steve Ditko passed away in June 2018, he was rightly remembered as the co-creator of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and Squirrel Girl. His creations for DC Comics were somewhat less widely remembered, though chief among them was The Question – inarguably the spiritual father of Watchmen’s Rorschach. Forgotten by all but the diehard DC heads was The Creeper, the madcap alter ego of Gotham television reporter Jack Ryder. The Creeper isn’t exactly an obscure character, but he’s a pretty deep cut; I’d wager that most comics fans (this one included) can’t quote his origin story, even if they know the central Jekyll-and-Hyde conceit of the character.

Bruce Timm is on record saying that his crew made several attempts to work The Creeper into the animated series but never found a story that made good use of the character. In the show’s eleventh hour, it isn’t clear whether Timm and company finally found the right notes or if they just threw their hands up and deployed The Creeper before it was too late. I’d like to think it was the former, especially because the show gave Jack Ryder the Harvey Dent treatment and used him throughout The New Batman Adventures before finally giving him the Christmas colors of The Creeper. Writers Rich Fogel and Steve Gerber (the latter having made his mark on weird comics by creating Howard the Duck) are so enamored of the character that Batman is largely a guest star on his own show, which is oddly appropriate for a show that has risen and fallen on the strength of its villains and supporting cast. (And when the show’s star, Kevin Conroy, is as steady and consistent as ever, it can afford to lean on its villains.) This shift in focus also lends credence to my theory that The New Batman Adventures was headed toward a “brave and bold” team-up model. 

“Beware the Creeper” marks the final appearance of The Joker, so it’s fitting that the show turns on its head for its greatest ne’er-do-well, a theatrical scene-stealer of the first order. In this topsy-turvy episode, Joker becomes the hero, with The Creeper dogging his every move and trying to steal his girl; at the episode’s climax, Joker begs for Batman’s help, retreating in sheer terror at the lunacy of The Creeper. It’s a laugh riot, especially as the episode operates under a kind of Looney Tunes approach to physics, with an absurdist domino chain leading to Jack Ryder’s initial transformation. Acid, fireworks, cigars, and chemical explosions all conspire to reshape Ryder’s reality before he’s presumed dead in a send-up of the most readily accepted version of The Joker’s own origin. (The episode also includes a nod to Joker’s role in the flashbacks from Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, a nice little wink for the penultimate episode.) In short, this episode is a hoot, and it knows it. 

As the last Joker episode, it’s also the last episode for Harley Quinn, too. While “Mad Love” is an impossible act to follow, this episode takes the interesting approach of reminding us why we love a loon like Harley, even when she’s acting against her own best interests. Despite seeing firsthand how incidental she is for her beloved Mistah J – in a meringue-coated spoof of Marilyn Monroe, which provides a delightful excuse for Arleen Sorkin to sing for us one last time – we still feel some degree of safety with him as opposed to the daft courtship of The Creeper. Creeper’s amorous intentions are never without a whopper of comedic intent, but there is something a little scary about his irrational and relentless pursuit. Put another way, maybe we’d all get back together with our worst exes if the rebound looked like The Creeper. No matter what, though, we’re always rooting for Harley – and I think we always will.

I had said back when The New Batman Adventures began, with “Holiday Knights,” that the Joker redesign was more than a little reminiscent of contemporary cartoon Freakazoid!, and with “Beware the Creeper” we come full circle. Freakazoid, the Deadpool of his day, took great postmodern delight in deconstructing what a kid’s cartoon could look like, with a powerful metafictional bent and a visual style that was more Chuck Jones than Jack Kirby. While I never watched much Freakazoid as a kid, I’ve always been aware that this incarnation of The Creeper owes a little bit to that offbeat sensibility. Case in point, the inspired use of Billy West as Joker’s three goons Mo, Lar, and Cur – doubtless a gag built around West’s spot-on Larry Fine impression (at a time when Larry was the “forgotten Stooge,” seldom imitated). It’s a joke that works because it makes perfect sense that Joker would hire goons for their resemblance to bygone comedians, the same way Two-Face would hire sets of twins. But it’s also a joke that only works because the audience recognizes the telling, a joke told as much for the benefit of its tellers, who layer in the reference with reverence. It’s one last reminder that the creators of the show have always given their viewers credit for being smart enough to follow along, even in an episode as deliberately mindless – and ultimately, richly entertaining – as this one.

Original Air Date: November 7, 1998

Writers: Rich Fogel and Steve Gerber

Director: Dan Riba

Villains: The Joker (Mark Hamill) and Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin)

Next episode: “Judgment Day,” in which it all wraps up when The Judge delivers his final verdict.

🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇