VIOLENCE JACK (1986, 1988, 1990)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

If people say you can’t do something, then you want to do it even more. Things that are considered forbidden, means other people aren’t doing them yet! -- Go Nagai

From what spotty English-language reviews I found online, I don't get a sense that all, if any, of these three OVAs were totally faithful to Go Nagai's manga VIOLENCE JACK. But I have no doubt that they had total fidelity to Nagai's aesthetic of transgressive sex and violence. 

Before watching these productions, I read a few months' worth of the manga online, just to get a sense of its parameters, and I got the sense that it's a fairly loose concept. Such looseness was probably ideal for an OAV series, in that it wouldn't be expected to adapt an accepted continuity, and to date the original JACK material has proved too hardcore for even the Japanese to adapt fully into an anime series. In addition to being far more violent than even a lot of Nagai's other works, JACK is alleged to be the first manga/anime to delve into the post-apoc disaster genre-- which had been around a long time but was not usually melded with the genre of high-octane adventure. (Roger Zelazny's DAMNATION ALLEY was one predecessor.)  But this mainly allowed the protagonist-- a ten-foot-tall giant capable of brutal retaliation to protect the innocent-- to wander from situation to situation as he pleased. So I don't believe the original manga followed a strict continuity, and neither do the OVAs.

       

HAREM BOMBER was the first-released OVA in Japan, but it doesn't make any concessions regarding introducing Jack, and it only provides a sketchy backstory for its world. It all takes place in the Kanto region of Japan, which was so devastated by a meteor strike that it became a pocket world of ravaged human cliques. What happened to the rest of Japan, or the rest of the world? You'll never learn from the anime. As in many later genre-pieces, roving gangs of plunderers comprise the only authority, and the most powerful gang-leader is a warlord, Slum King, who comes into conflict with Jack. The two fight a bit, get separated, and the rest of the film concerns Jack protecting a young couple from the motorbike-riding looters. Slum King steals women to sell to sex slave-rings, and he's an equal opportunity employer, given that he has a whip-wielding lesbian henchwoman who sorts out the new acquisitions. Since Nagai probably intended to have some more climactic clash between the hero and Slum King down the line, the story's big fight concentrates on Jack vanquishing one of the warlord's henchmen, the titular Harem Bomber. In a twist of expectations, the girl lives and the boy dies, and there's a fuzzy reference to some Nagai concept about Jack has some sort of link to an ethereal bird-creature.

EVIL TOWN, the second OVA, feels more like an intro to Jack. A huge section of a Kanto city is swallowed by an earthquake, with the result that several humans are confined to the sunken area, unable to get back to the surface. The survivors break into three groups-- A, B and C-- and A's citizens are the ones who unearth Jack from a pile of rubble, where he's apparently been comatose. Jack at first tells the A-guys that he has no name but then dubs himself "Violence Jack" because he happens to have a huge jackknife with him. Though at first the taciturn hero defends the A-group from the freakish and malevolent denizens of the B-group, eventually Jack turns on both when he learns that the C-group is totally made up of women who have been abused and preyed upon by both groups. Though some of the women can fight-- particularly one muscular babe-- Jack defends them and makes it possible for them to return to the surface. TOWN seems to state a key tenet of Nagai's creative philosophy: that the "freaks" are not intrinsically less moral than the "straights," given that the latter group is willing to descend into rapine at the drop of a hat. TOWN is unquestionably the most extreme of the three OVAs, barraging the viewer with scenes of nudity, rape, bloody slaughter, cannibalism and even a little necrophilia.

HELL'S WIND, as well as being the name of a predacious gang of bikers, is the weakest of the OVAs. The gang menaces a small town seeking to get back to normal civilization, but the bikers, who report to the warlord Slum King, continually prey on the innocents. Long before Jack makes the scene, Hell's Wind assaults a young couple, killing the man and raping the woman, one Jun. She trains herself to become an Action Girl so that she can take revenge, but Jack more or less saves her the trouble, so that Jun doesn't have a satisfactory arc. Jack, though never demonstrative, seems to have a special liking for a young boy, and based on what little I read of the manga, I think that the two characters were intertwined in some way, though this never becomes explicit.

EVIL TOWN has the strongest sociological motif, implying that when men and women are confined together in a figurative prison with no outside contact, the men will become inveterate rapists. But though this is an intriguing idea, it's just a side-dish to the main course, which is loads and loads of sex and violence.

                       

PHANTOM 2040, SEASON TWO (1995-6)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Since the wrapup of Season 2 seems a bit rushed, it's possible that the producers were hoping to get one more season for their unique concept. Still, at least some subplots, such as the disposition of the missing father of Kit, are fully realized.

RITE OF PASSAGE/THE WORLD IS MY JUNGLE-- Both of these episodes are just recap shows with some new voiceovers, so they have no impact on the ongoing stories or their mythicity.

SANCTUARY-- Guran plans to take Kit back to Bangalla in Africa in order to complete his training as the Phantom. However, Nia wants to kidnap the hero and take him back so that she can use him to restore her rulership. To that end, she teams up with a master hunter, Gunnar, to take Guran prisoner as a way of luring the Phantom into their clutches. Gunnar has a secret agenda though, for he plans to execute a "most dangerous game" with the Man Who Cannot Die, hunting the Phantom down in the Sector Zero jungle. But Guran happens to harbor a deep secret with respect to a mysterious creature known as "the Shadow Panther," and that secret, alluded to in Season One, gets fully exposed here. "Sanctuary" directly follows the events of the last new episode of Season One, "A Boy and His Cat," which ended with Max Jr having retreated from the real world into a cyberspace haven. Rebecca makes a long-shot attempt to revive her son.

THE TIES THAT BIND-- Rebecca ramps up her plans to launch Cyberville, which will include her project of decimating most of Earth's ecology, although Phantom and his allies don't yet know her specific plans. She does launch an assault on Sean One's orbiting cities, though. Graft, for his own reasons, joins Max Jr in cyberspace and manages to talk the eccentric genius-youth into returning to the real world. A small army of biots attacks Phantom and his allies at their clandestine meeting-place, and even after the androids are vanquished, this development raises the possibility of betrayal from within. Graft then confides to Vaingloria that he plans to take over Rebecca's Cyberville project, and he tries to use Doctor Jak to that end. At one point both Sagan and Kit's aunt are injured, enraging Phantom into destroying the Cyberville project, at least temporarily. The episode ends with Kit's self-doubts about his status as a hero.

THE WOMAN IN THE MOON-- Sean One survives Rebecca's attack, and he seeks to persuade all of the orbital colonies to declare independence from Earth. Max Jr and Graft, however, try to swing the vote to their benefit. Vaingloria and Doctor Jak get taken on board the satellite as part of the big scheme, so I guess Vaingloria is the titular "woman in the moon." (This was probably a reference to a famous film about space travel, directed by Fritz Lang, who also helmed the film METROPOLIS, to which PHANTOM 2040 owes more than a little). I confess I didn't follow why Graft and Max Jr were farting around with the voting process, though, since they end up attempting to blow up the satellite, which seems to have been Rebecca's preference as well.     

MATTER OVER MIND-- Thanks to Graft's uneasy partnership with Max Jr, the junior Madison decodes the formula for the super-poison Max Sr almost unleashed during the Sector Zero catastrophe. By chance hacker Sparks gains access to the formula as well, altering the Phantom to its existence. The cyber-entity Mister Cairo learns of the formula as well and his encounter with the intel triggers in him a vague idea to "go home," though he has no idea how he was created. Sparks' investigation reveals that Cairo is a computer-probe that was split off from Doctor Jak's mind, and thus Cairo earnestly desires to be reunited with his creator. The Phantom team seeks to prevent that unison to protect Kit's secrets, but Heisenberg and Pavlova intervene to liberate Cairo. When Phantom again seeks to keep Doctor Jak from downloading Cairo's information, the shock-jock reveals the humanity beneath his obstreperous facade. Jak was originally a crusading journalist married to a tabloid reporter named Pavlova (on whom he patterned his android helper). Human Pavlova sneaks on board the train carrying Max Sr's shipment of poison, but she's killed by exposure to the poison. To learn the reason behind her fate, Jak splits off a part of his own mind to become the cyber-entity Cairo, but this eradicates some of his own memories and apparently shifts him into emulating the persona of his dead wife, being preoccupied with meaningless entertainment. The Phantom team is also made privy to Rebecca's plan to test a new iteration of the super-poison, making it possible to destroy the Madisons' chemical factory. Cairo then gives Phantom a gift of information that will solve the mystery of the Sector Zero catastrophe. An earlier episode worked in a reference to Miles Archer in THE MALTESE FALCON by naming Kit's teacher after that character. Here, it's clarified that the cyber-entity Cairo is named after the gunsel of that novel, for the technician who creates Cairo is made to look like Sydney Greenstreet, the actor playing Cairo's boss in the 1941 FALCON movie. Also, the two Pavlovas bear a slight resemblance to the two Marias of METROPOLIS.

SINS OF THE FATHERS PARTS 1-2-- Rebecca assures Max Jr that she's always known about Graft's attempts to undermine her authority but claims that they cannot stop the Maximum Era. Phantom gets access to information that suggests that his father did indeed cause the catastrophe that slew Max Sr and many others, and this fills Kit with mammoth self-doubt. Meanwhile, Graft and Vaingloria team up with Cordwainer Bird and descend into cyberspace to hack into Rebecca's plans. Kit, despite his misgivings, agrees to travel to Bangalla as Guran wishes, to learn more about the Phantom Heritage. However. he's interrupted by Sagan and DVL, for Sagan has figured out Kit's double identity. Phantom sabotages Rebecca's next project, but it's a fake-out on her part, for she plans to unleash Cyberville and the poisoning scheme. 

In Bangalla Phantom meets the grandfather of Guran, who still maintains the original Skull Cave. Rebecca's life is now complicated in that Max Sr's memory engrams have once more been implanted in a robot body, and the demented automaton tries to take control of Maximum Inc. To the frustration of Max Sr 2.0, he learns that the shipment he originally put on the train-- a toxin designed to eliminate "ghostwood"-- was replaced by Scythe, a more extreme poison with which Rebecca hoped to eradicate the world, aside from the survivors in Cyberville-- meaning that, when the Phantom interfered with the train, Max Sr died because of his wife's meddling. Phantom learns the same information, which exculpates his father of responsibility for the Sector Zero deaths. Phantom returns to Metropia and tries to destroy Rebecca's new plans, only to be attacked by Graft, who's been promised a new organic body by Rebecca. During the struggle Graft almost falls from a great height and Phantom offers to rescue him if he surrenders. Graft feels a moment of remorse and allows himself to fall, but Max Sr 2.0 saves him. Max Jr blunders and seals all of Maximum Inc behind a force field. At the conclusion Kit finds evidence that his father didn't die in the train-crash, and there's a cliffhanger showing that the previous Phantom does still live.

THE SACRIFICE PARTS 1-2-- Thanks to the information provided by Cairo, Phantom locates his father, but the previous hero was indeed affected by the poison, and only recently emerged from a cryonic slumber after sixteen years. The team seeks to find the antidote to the poison to save his life. Meanwhile, Max Jr suspects that his robot-dad has some encrypted data that will make it possible for the Madisons to escape the force-field prison. Max Sr discloses a way that the field can be disrupted, but only by outside forces, so Rebecca reaches out to her sometime associate, the smuggler Gorda. The obese criminal invades the jungle and informs Phantom that said jungle, brought into existence by the mutation of ghostwood, extends to many other areas far from Metropia. Phantom tries to prevent Gorda from freeing the Madisons but fails, barely escaping with his life.

Phantom and Sagan seek to find the formula for the super-poison by covertly accessing the Madison data banks, and Mister Cairo shows up to provide assistance. However, the Madisons retaliate by shutting down the computer system, threatening Cairo's cyber-existence. Cairo succeeds in transmitting the antidote info to the Phantom team, and also meets an old cyber-memory of Max Sr, and the two exchange pleasantries before both are annihilated by the power shutdown. Rebecca then launches a plan to have her biots to the Enforcers, with the aim of usurping the control of the police over the city. With this takeover, Rebecca decides she doesn't need Cyberville as she'll control Metropia as her private kingdom. While Guran seeks to heal Kit's father, Phantom and Sagan disable the compromised biots. Kit's father is somewhat strengthened, though the antidote isn't enough to provide full recovery, and so he must be returned to cryonic status.

THE SECOND TIME AROUND-- Phantom and Guran encounter a relatively ordinary crime, that of hijacking. However, one of the crooks displays a gold coin bearing the traditional "Good Mark," signifying that at some past point in time, he received the protection of a previous Phantom. Guran advises Phantom to release the hijackers, and Phantom reluctantly agrees. The Madisons seek to find out the coin's significance, while the hero accesses VR to figure out how the Good Mark coin came to be in a criminal's possession. It's one of the few weak episodes but is worthwhile for at least showing how one of the earlier Phantoms operated.

ROGUE-- Though Doctor Jak doesn't remember his nobler self, due to his separation from Cairo, Pavlova, who does remember all the disclosures, returns to work as his assistant. Jak records what seems to be a revolt of the self-aware biots, led by Heisenberg, and shows the Phantom coming to the biots' aid against Enforcer robots. The Enforcers thus put out a warrant for Phantom, meaning that he can't be seen accepting aid from Sagan anymore. The greater threat, though, is that Max Jr, who invented Heisenberg, devises a new method to regain control of the android, briefly forcing Heisenberg to fight the hero. Though things get sorted out to the status quo by episode's end, the script makes a good case for the concept of biots becoming self-aware, though without overstating the political interpretation of this championing of diversity, as did so many bad movies of the 21st century.      

THE FURIES-- Phantom tries to figure out a cryptic re mark made by his father before he had to re-enter cryogenic stasis. While looking into the unique properties of ghostwood in the Ghost Jungle, Phantom and Guran spot Gorda setting up some infernal machine and they attack, only to be routed thanks to the secret presence of Max Sr 2.0. Graft and Max Jr attempt to hijack an outer-space shipment of iridium, but they have to tell Rebecca that Gorda got there first. Both "business partners" began considering ways to sever their relationship. Finally both women figure out that Max Sr is playing them, but all the disputants are arrested by Enforcers. Unfortunately, all are also released for lack of evidence 

MOMENTS OF TRUTH-- Phantom and Sparks seek to expose a smuggling operation by Rebecca, which strangely involves a shipment of "special roses." During the investigation, Phantom discovers that Sparks doesn't have much knowledge of many practical matters, so over the teen's protests he gets enrolled in school. An unknown party, later revealed to be Gorda, steals the rose shipment, but she can't initially figure out what's special about the flowers. Graft, in throwing down with Phantom, records the presence of Sparks, so the Madisons seek to learn his identity. The truth is eventually revealed, that the roses were capable of neutralizing the good effects of ghostwood. 

THE WHOLE TRUTH-- The final episode begins with Kit meditating on the presence of mysteries in his life, which may be the reason the scripters kept making references to THE MALTESE FALCON. Rebecca and Gorda, having made their peace, launch a biot attack on the Enforcers for the purpose of conquering the city at last, but Phantom suspects there's more to it than a simple assault. He breaks into Maximum Inc and encounters Max Sr 2.0, who persuades the hero to leave the compound so they can talk. Because the robot still possesses all of the living man's memories, he's able to let Phantom download those memories (using a passcode, "flowers of evil," derived from the title of a poetry-collection by the original Baudelaire). In keeping with many spotty references to a friendship between Kit's father and the original Max Sr, the robot discloses that the two of them were seeking to implement ghostwood to clean up the toxins in Metropia, but without allowing the special plant to crowd out all other plants. As mentioned in an earlier episode, Rebecca substituted tanks of poison in the ghostwood shipment and caused the train to crash in a failed attempt to poison the city. Thus she killed her husband and almost slew Kit's father. (We also see in these memories an image of Max Jr as a pure young child, who has a normal-looking cat named Shakespeare.) All of the villains track Phantom and the robot to the Ghost Jungle, but Phantom evades them, hoping he can use the automaton's data to completely cure the comatose father. However, the cure fails and Kit must resign himself to his father's passing, as well as terminating Max Sr 2.0 (at the latter's request, of course). In a hurry-up-and-finish resolution, the four villains, who have dodged the law over and over are somehow convicted this time, and Kit can finally think about living another life, until the Phantom is needed again.    

                      

  

PHANTOM 2040, SEASON ONE (1994-5)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Hardly any of the TV serials I've comprehensively examined for high mythicity have received a total score of "good," meaning that there's a strong symbolic discourse running through most or all episodes. Peter Chung's AEON FLUX managed it, but that show consisted of only ten full episodes and some shorts. Chung provided character designs for PHANTOM 2040, but the writers were probably responsible for keeping up the quality of 2040's 35 episodes over the course of two seasons.

GENERATION UNTO GENERATION, Parts 1-2-- In 2040, the venerable costumed jungle-hero of the Lee Falk comic strip gets a futuristic update, possibly with some guidance from the future-city patterns created by the example of METROPOLIS. Eighteen-year-old Kit Walker (Scott Valentine), who has no idea of his heritage, was raised by his aunt in the city of "Metropia," a city divorced from the world of nature. Kit wants to become an ecological engineer in the few parts of the world where natural ecosystems are preserved since the world-devastating "resource wars." But because Kit reaches his majority, his father's old teacher, Guran of Bangalla, comes to Metropia to teach Kit to become the new Phantom. The main source of evil in the "big-city jungle" is Rebecca Madison (Margot Kidder), whose primary plot is to create a closed community, Cyberville, where the wealthy will be served while the rest of the world goes to hell. Kit doesn't want to be a crusader against evil, but he gets a big push toward savior-dom when he discovers that a mutated plant, "ghostwood," may be capable ofto renovating Earth's wrecked ecosystem. Kit consents to become a high-tech "Ghost Who Walks," complete with an invisibility screen. The first two-parter also introduces Rebecca's decadent son Max Jr, who at a young age was traumatized by the death of his father Max Sr, supposedly killed by the father of Kit. Max Jr affects to talk to others through the medium of his grungy cat, named for the French decadent poet Baudelaire. Also present are (1) Rebecca's cyborg enforcer Graft, (2) righteous Metropian police officer Sagan and her cyborg-partner, a mutt named DVL (a knowing spoof of Original Phantom's wolf-pet "Devil"), and (3) Metropian shock-jock Doctor Jak (Mark Hamill) and his "biot" (android) aide Pavlova. In the first two-parter, Phantom destroys Rebecca's plan to brainwash citizens with a video game.

THE SUM OF THE PARTS-- Max Jr concocts a new type of biot to frame the New Phantom as a criminal. This is one of the weaker plots, but the android itself takes on a new and unpredictable identity befitting the name Mad Max bestows on the android: Heisenberg. Another Phantom-foe appears: Sean One, who rules over a series of orbital colonies and who, like Rebecca, has plans to encourage humans to desert Earth to become citizens under his control. 

FIRE AND I.C.E.-- Phantom and his team seek to break into Rebecca's security system in order to find out her plans for Cyberville. In the process the hero makes another ally: teenaged hacker Sparks. He also encounters a mysterious figure, Mister Cairo, who seems to be an intelligent hologram.

REFLECTIONS OF GLORY-- Rebecca has another brainwashing plan, and this one is directed solely at the city-council members whose approval she needs to build Cyberville. This time the Madisons plan to use a beautiful singer, Vaingloria (Debbie Harry), who's been outfitted with implants to hypnotize others. (Some slight inspiration from the Evil Maria in METROPOLIS is possible.) In the same episode, Sagan meets Kit a second time when she apprehends Sparks for a minor criminal act, and more or less strongarms Kit into accompanying her on a date. However, when Kit changes into the Phantom to investigate, the vigilante has his first direct run-in with the by-the-book lady cop.

SHADOWS FROM THE PAST-- An African warrior-woman, Nia, bears a grudge against the previous Phantom, and so ends up having a big battle with the new hero. Rebecca makes an alliance with Nia to kill the Phantom, and in so doing shows the woman how she Rebecca has preserved the persona of her dead husband online. Nia poisons Guran, who goes berserk until Phantom is able to find a cure.         

THE BIOT IN RED-- Phantom continues trying to figure out what happened in the events that led to the death of Max Madison Sr and the disappearance of Kit's father. Heisenberg, who has escaped the control of Max Jr, befriends a jazz-playing musician. Max Jr stashes an information cylinder in the musician's case and Doctor Jak sends Pavlova to engage a detective to find the case. Pavlova engages Professor Archer, Kit's college teacher, who's playing at being a detective in imitation of his ancestor (implicitly Miles Archer of THE MALTESE FALCON). Heisenberg conceives a thing for Pavlova and the two of them play out the farewell scene from "Casablanca."         

THE GOOD MARK-- Intrigue out the wazoo. Not only is the Phantom trying to learn more about his father's disappearance, Graft and Max Jr conspire to get hold of Rebecca's secret files. Sagan gets framed by her commander, so Phantom helps her bring him down. The script works in a little-used bit of Phantom lore: "the Good Mark," a symbol of righteousness.

DARK ORBIT PTS 1-2-- Sean One desires to have his orbital colonies declared independent of Earth's government, so he gathers supplies for a space laser from an obese Earth-smuggler, the Aussie-accented Gorda. Phantom is forced to league himself with Graft and Max Jr to foil Sean One's plans. Though Graft remains allied to Rebecca by the end of the episode, he and the Phantom part as respectful adversaries, and even Guran hopes that someday the old soldier will recover the better angels of his nature.

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE-- Max Jr has a dream of his childhood, being shown love by his father. But Max's adult psyche intrudes, reciting a (somewhat altered) poem from Baudelaire about angels knowing grief. Simultaneously, Guran reveals that at a very young age Kit received some instruction from his missing father, thus creating a parallel between the adversaries. Rebecca then launches a new scheme: downloading the mental engrams of her husband into a new biot body. However, the biot awakes believing that it's the original Max Sr and goes on a rampage, taking Sparks prisoner. Later he releases Sparks but abducts Max Jr, forcing Phantom to try to stop the android. When the biot drags Max Jr to Sector Zero, the site of Max Sr's death-- an area which should be replete with poison due to the catastrophe there-- all are surprised to see that the mutated ghostwood plant has neutralized the poison elements. The android realizes that it's no more than a machine and destroys itself, though not without claiming that the previous Phantom killed Max Sr. 

LASERS IN THE JUNGLE-- The episode opens with Vaingloria musing on the impermanence of human life. That day at one of the singer's concerts, a mad bomber tries to assault Vaingloria, but the Phantom saves her. The hero also plans to lure Graft into the Section Zero jungle to annihilate Rebecca's biot army, on which her Cyberville scheme depends. Max Jr sends Vaingloria along with Graft and the biot army as his "observer," but it's more likely that Max Jr just likes messing with people. There's the hint of a possible romance between the singer and the soldier, though both are too damaged to make a connection. Phantom manages to use Vaingloria's specialty, illusions, to wipe out the biot army. There's an amusing side-plot in which Rebecca loses her hair due to chemical exposure, but by episode's end has regained it all thanks to clone-transplants. In the scene dealing with her recovery, her full head of hair is juxtaposed with the image of the snaky-locked head topping a statue of Medusa.

THREE INTO ONE-- Sagan is forced to work with the Phantom when a trio of citizens-- one of whom is a policewoman known to Sagan-- become a unitary being with enormous telekinetic powers. Cairo appears again, appearing to make a deal with Graft. Both Graft and the Phantom learn of "the Triad Project," which was supposedly abandoned during the era of Kit's predecessor. At the end, though Sagan doesn't learn Kit's secret, she's a bit more sanguine about the vigilante's activities.

THE GAUNTLET-- Sparks, who essentially raised himself on the streets after being apparently abandoned by his parents, gets the chance to find out what really happened. Mister Cairo takes an interest in the teen's welfare, not even charging anyone for eliciting vital memories from Sparks' subconscious. The boy learns that biots from Maximum Inc kidnapped both mother and father, and Phantom resolves to ferret out the truth, though he orders Sparks to stay out of the matter. Naturally the youth deals himself in anyway, but he, Phantom and Guran can only learn the truth by subduing a security system named Gauntlet, whose minds were used to provide a template for the system.

LIFE LESSONS-- Phantom shoots a biot and is grief stricken to find that he wounded (but fortunately did not kill) a human being masquerading as one of Maximum's androids. Phantom learns from the soulful biot Heisenberg that some biots have asserted their status as free, cognitive beings, which Kit finds hard to countenance. The main threat, however, is a defective reactor under the control of Maximum Inc, one that Rebecca's totally willing to let detonate since it will only harm the lower classes.

THE MAGICIAN-- Phantom encounters a professional magician named Steele, a friend of his vanished father. However, because of that contact, Graft and Rebecca may get a pipeline to a horde of secrets Steele maintained from the earlier association-- including a lot of the tech the modern Phantom uses. However, Steele uses his tricks to flummox Graft long enough to destroy the secrets and protect Kit. Though Steele doesn't look anything like the classic Mandrake, whom comics-artist Lee Falk created slightly before he invented The Phantom, it's obvious that this is a Mandrake homage, even if one doesn't know that the Steele character is being voiced by the same actor who did Mandrake in the 1986-7 DEFENDERS OF THE EARTH cartoon.      

SWIFTER, HIGHER, FASTER-- Kit's Phantom crusade has led him to neglect the fellow collegians he used to hang with, but when he seeks to re-connect, he learns that one sportswoman, Jenna, has been enhanced thanks to Maximum Inc's promotion of risky nanobot tech. Jenna goes berserk. One of the other females who witnessed the debut of the New Phantom strongly suspects his identity, but nothing more comes of this plot-thread.

DOWN THE LINE-- Phantom and his allies receive a transmission from what appears to be the Phantom of a future era. The supposed descendant claims that for the safety of humankind, Kit must break the Phantom's rule against killing and exterminate Rebecca Madison.

CONTROL GROUP-- Thanks to Rebecca experimenting with memory transfers, Phantom and Sparks get to witness downloads of the memories of Rebecca's enforcer Graft. Both heroes are surprised to learn that the ruthless henchman was once a hero in his own right, defending the helpless people Rebecca wiped out during the conflicts of the resource wars. But because Graft lost almost his entire organic body in the wars-- he speaks the famous Ronald Reagan line from a similarly maimed character in the forties movie KINGS ROW-- he allows himself to succumb to being a madwoman's tool. Yet by the end, it's evident that the heroic Graft is far from being as dead as he thinks he is.

A BOY AND HIS CAT-- Despite Max Jr's facility for plotting evil plots, he enters a VR program and refuses to emerge, so that his body becomes comatose. Rebecca rages at the loss of her son to his own psychosis and brings in a programmer to extricate Max. Said programmer's name is "Cordwainer Bird," a well-known alias of writer Harlan Ellison, and the script not only has Bird comment on his "dangerous visions," the episode title references a famous Ellison story, "A Boy and His Dog." In VR Max encounters a female computer construct who takes the name Athena because she claims that she sprang from Max's head, a la the story of Athena's birth from the skull of Zeus. However, just like Rebecca, Athena is a jealous mistress who doesn't want Max to ever leave, and at one point she morphs into a Medusa-form, referencing the conflation of Rebecca and the snake-haired gorgon in the episode LASERS IN THE JUNGLE. Phantom tries to pull Max out of his delusive state but in the end must leave the confused Maximum Inc heir to his own devices.

In closing my remarks on Season One, I'll reiterate a point I made in my analysis of the book METROPOLIS. The word "Metropolis" means "mother-city," and the arc of the book connotes the madonna-figure of Maria reasserting her primacy over a city controlled by a  father alienated from his son. In 2040, Rebecca wields almost total control of the similarly named Metropia, as well as her husband-- reduced to a "ghost in the machine"-- and all of her children, real and symbolic-- and as such, she's closer to the lascivious goddesses of pagan myth, the antitypes to the madonna archetype. Season Two will prove to be no less rich in mythopoeic correlations.         

       

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE, SEASON FOUR (2017-8)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*

This season is subtitled "Secret Wars," which can refer to two multi-feature crossovers from Marvel Comics in the 1980s and 1990s. In the first, a bunch of Marvel heroes and villains were abducted from Battleworld by an entity called The Beyonder, and forced to fight one another in largely pointless adventures. In the second, the Beyonder shows up on Marvel-Earth and has a lot of pointless encounters with Marvel regulars. 

 My summing-up of these dubious comic-book events should make clear that I don't think any adaptation of these stories had much to offer in the first place, and thus it's not impossible that any changes could well be improvements. However, when the season begins with a bunch of big-name Avengers getting dispersed into other dimensions, it's not the Beyonder who's responsible, but a new Cabal of regular Marvel villains: The Leader, Kang, Arnim Zola, The Enchantress and The Executioner. Once the former regulars-- Thor, Hulk, Iron Man, Hawkeye, Black Widow, and Captain America-- have been scattered hither and yon, Thor's girlfriend Jane Foster summons a new cavalcade of heroes, informally called The New Avengers, to look for the lost crusaders and to take up the heroic slack. This team consists of Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, Vision, Wasp and the Ant-Man. What's historically intriguing about this development is that it begins roughly a year before the two live-action movies that climaxed the MCU's Phase Three, 2018's AVENGERS INFINITY WAR and 2019's AVENGERS ENDGAME. I can only conclude that the animation producers were given advance information as to how the Phase 3 conclusion would shape up, particularly with respect to neutralizing the prominent (and expensive) live-action versions of Iron Man and Captain America.

In the live-action universe, Marvel Productions then went through all manner of torturous efforts to make the public fall in love with a new concatenation of less expensive icons-- efforts that largely failed. Yet in fairness, ASSEMBLE's efforts to promote a group of "scrubs" to take the place of the previous heavy-hitters wasn't that bad. The Vision, Wasp and the Ant-Man were nothing special, and Captain Marvel, while lacking in charm, wasn't as tedious as in her two live-action incarnations. Ms. Marvel, who had been promoted in the comics to be an exemplar of a virtuous Muslim heroine, was in her animated form a fairly lively, quirky character, and for once, she was actually pretty good in a fight. I praised the producers' conception of Black Panther in my review of Season Three, and Season Four is truer to the comic-book icon, rather than following the dubious lead of the live-action PANTHER movies. To be sure, Season Four also injects some of the politically correct characters who later dragged down the live-action continuity, such as the Panther's obnoxious sister Shuri and the Jane Foster version of Thor. But at least they're only in the season briefly.

Further, since ASSEMBLE wasn't sidelining its big-name heroes for the same reasons as did the MCU, there was no problem with bringing them all back in the course of the season's 26 episodes. One could wish that when the MCU finally did debut a purported "New Avengers" in the 2025 THUNDERBOLTS, they'd chosen a mix of icons at least as good as the one in ASSEMBLE Season 4. In addition, Season 4 gives the big names some nice character moments. In the episode "Weirdworld," Bruce Banner becomes separated from the Hulk, and his allies Black Widow and Cap Marvel watch as Banner becomes obsessed with killing his alter ego. Late in the season, the Avengers' old foe Loki makes common cause with them against the Beyonder, and there are some good moments in which Thor is genuinely disappointed that his wayward brother has once more lied to suit his agenda.

The Beyonder is probably the weakest link in Season 4, but then as stated, his original model wasn't much to speak of.                       

THE BEST OF THE TOM AND JERRY MOVIES (2017?)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I didn't see a date on this DVD collection of eight STV "Tom and Jerry" movies, but since the latest of them came out in 2017, I'll use that as a default date. All eight of the films appeared long after the properties of Hanna-Barbera had been absorbed by other companies. Nevertheless, though the scripts only range from decent to poor, the quality of the animation is quite good, especially compared to a lot of the DTV movies with H-B franchises (like some of the Scooby-Doo movies). The basic premise of all eight involves sticking the duo into some generic situation, sometimes horning in on some other iconic story, and adding the usual violent pratfalls to the mix. In order of appearance, rated either P for Poor or F for Fair.

TOM AND JERRY: SHIVER ME WHISKERS (2006) (P)-- Cat and mouse show up in the era of piracy and get caught between a devil (a ghostly apparition warning them of a treasure and its curse) and the deep blue sea (represented by two warring pirate brothers). This one has no crossovers, though Tom's perpetual enemy Spike the Bulldog appears in a support role. Mark Hamill voices the ghost.

TOM AND JERRY MEET SHERLOCK HOLMES (2010) (F)-- This seems to be the first of the STV films in which the cat and mouse overtly team up with a major fictional icon. This story adds the wrinkle that for regular human beings are okay interacting with walking, sometimes talking anthropomorphic animals, including not just Tom and Jerry but also a trio of thug-cats who serve the main villain. Said villain is of course Professor Moriarty (Malcolm McDowell) -- who else would a routine team-up flick pit against the Great Detective (Michael York)? The plot seems somewhat derivative of the 2009 live-action Holmes film starring Robert Downey Jr. In addition to support-characters Spike and Tyke, the script also works in Droopy and his frequent antagonist Butch. A battle between Holmes and Moriarty makes this a combative comedy.

TOM AND JERRY AND THE WIZARD OF OZ (2011) (P)-- This is easily the worst of the eight, being little more than a straight retelling of the 1939 film with the cat and mouse shoehorned in. Butch, Droopy and Jerry's cousin Tuffy are present as well.       

TOM AND JERRY: ROBIN HOOD AND HIS MERRIE MOUSE (2012) (P)-- Again, it's just the standard Robin Hood story, with the addition of Tom, Jerry, Spike and Droopy. The only asset is that the flick revives the character of Red Hot Riding Hood, infamous from the memorable MGM cartoon directed by Tex Avery. This time Red doubles as Maid Marian, but she still sounds like the Red of MGM as voiced by animation stalwart Grey Griffin. Red has a fine moment escaping a trio of guardian wolf-dudes by making them jealous of one another. Also a combative comedy, with Robin, Richard the Lion-Hearted joined by cat and mouse in battling Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham.

TOM AND JERRY'S GIANT ADVENTURE (F)-- Thanks to the script of the peerless Paul Dini, this retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk allows more space for original gags than the previous flicks. Cat and mouse work at StoryLand, a nearly bankrupt amusement park based on a fairy-tale theme. It's run by young Jack and his widowed mother, but the usual evil banker threatens to foreclose on the park, The mother asks Jack to sell their cow for money, but an odd fellow named Farmer O'Dell (read "Farmer in the Dell") convinces the young boy to accept magic beans in trade. Of course the beans grow the usual stalk, but this time Jack and his animal-buddies ascend and find a whole kingdom of fairy-tale icons. Most of them have only minor gags-- Mother Hubbard and her two dogs (Spike and Tyke), Humpty Dumpty, Simple Simon and the Pieman (played by Meathead and Screwy Squirrel), Old King Cole (Droopy), Barney Bear (playing no one in particular), and best of all, Red Hot Riding Hood's return, this time as a generic fairy. The fairy-kingdom is menaced by a giant named Ginormica who continually robs the residents, but Farmer O'Dell brought Jack to Fairy Land to fulfill his destiny to defeat the giant. The story's standard but is made more tolerable by the gags, particularly another sexy/funny song from Red. No combative mode.

TOM AND JERRY: THE LOST DRAGON (2014) (P)-- Tom and Jerry are raised in some medieval town by a good elf-girl, Athena. The three of them find a baby dragon and thus get on the bad side of dragon-hating townsfolk. In addition, Athena's evil aunt Drizelda has insidious plans for the baby dragon and for pretty much everyone else. No crossovers and no combative mode. It's not actively bad but just ordinary.

TOM AND JERRY: SPY QUEST (F) (2015) -- Frankly, this movie is the only one that urged me to check out this collection, as I'd never heard that anyone had attempted a teamup between the cat-and-mouse and the cast of JONNY QUEST. The animators and scripter Jim Kreig render yeoman service in trying to find a happy medium between the funny antics of the dueling duo and the "straight" adventure of the Quest team. For the most part they succeed, though I certainly could have done without villainous Doctor Zin having the three cat-thugs-- Tin, Pan and Alley-- as his henchmen. (Maybe Moriarty wanted to sabotage Zin by giving the trio a good rating?) Overall SPY QUEST feels sort of like a dual homage to William Hanna and Joe Barbera for both their wacky animal comedies and their brief but brilliant plunge into high-adrenaline adventure. Oh, and original Jonny-voice Tim Matheson has a small role here, while Tia Carrere contributes her version of the sultry Jezebel Jade. And yeah, Droopy's there again and is wearing out his welcome. Combative comedy all the way.

TOM AND JERRY: WILLIE WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (P) (2017) -- This isn't as ill-advised as the OZ crossover, but it's still very unnecessary, as it's just another reprise of the classic movie adaptation of the Roald Dahl tale with the cat and mouse worked in. Oh, and at least Droopy's time is brief, though unfortunately that of Cousin Tuffy is not.      

    

         

         

LEGO MARVEL SUPER HEROES: AVENGERS REASSEMBLED (2015)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

Almost a dozen of these short LEGO adaptations of Marvel properties have been floating around for about ten years, and I've tended to put off looking at any of them. Maybe the shortness of the features prejudiced me against them, because I have watched most of the available LEGO transformations of DC Comics and have even given some of them fairly positive reviews, for all that I'm no LEGO fan. But then, the very fact that a fair number of the DC ventures are an hour and a half indicates that someone in their production expended some effort. I suppose I thought Marvel wasn't that invested in working with LEGO to produce anything that captured the appeal of Marvel properties.

I don't think REASSEMBLED fails to do so utterly, but it's not very memorable either, even judged as simple kids' entertainment. We meet the Avengers-- mostly the standard roll call from the four live-action movies, though The Vision get a bit more exposure here than he did in the features. The heroes are making silly preparations for a party when the evil robot intelligence Ultron takes control of the Iron Man armor, with Tony Stark still inside. This at least satisfies the almost requisite "heroes forced to fight each other," and when Ultron commands Iron Man to fly off, the others must find a way to free their friend. They eventually learn that Ultron's taking control of the Iron Man armor is just a prelude to mobilizing Stark's flying squadron of armored robots, the Iron Legion, for purposes of world conquest. Frankly, since the idea of the Iron Legion debuted in IRON MAN 2, I always thought it sounded more like the conception of a supervillain than of a superhero.

This would seem to be a sufficient plot for a short of about 22 minutes. But for reasons that might have to do with marketing, the script squeezed in two extra villains, Baron Strucker and Yellowjacket (apparently an enemy of Ant Man in this world), and guest-shots for both Spider-Man and the Iron Spider. There are a lot of jokey lines, and a couple were a little diverting, but I'm not surprised that the LEGO aesthetic doesn't fit Marvel characters very well. After all, Marvel gained fame for being hip, and that's why LEGO is a better match with DC-- for DC's the company famous for showing "it's hip to be square."    

GRENADIER (2004-05)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*   

"The ultimate fighting strategy is to erase the enemy's will to fight."

I read a few of the seven volumes of the 2002 manga GRENADIER, but since I didn't finish the series, I can't say if this 12-episode TV anime captures every nuance of the source material. But since the twelve episodes possess a well-defined conclusion, there's a good chance that the anime represents the main plot-threads of the manga, especially since it only lasted about three years.

GRENADIER-- and no, the title doesn't have anything to do with the modern military term-- takes place in what is presumably a far-future world, but one that has no ties to any aspect of human history. There's no attempt to establish a distinct backstory for the world, either. The first episode implies some clash of cultures between the older, honor-bound samurai-like ethos centered around the sword, and the newer practice of a limited technology, mostly focused on hand-held guns, cannons, and a few specialized technologies, all of which create a "steampunk" vibe. In that first episode, samurai-type Yajiro seeks to use his blade-- with which he can perform a few marvels-- to liberate one of his group's leaders from a heavily armed fortress. But then he finds out he's a support-character in the story of Rushuna Taro, who's more or less the "grenadier" of the title.

Rushuna, a big-breasted female with a cowboy hat, is a practitioner of a discipline one might well call "gun-fu" a la John Woo, but with a much greater range of fantasy involved. As Yajiro mostly watches, Rushuna invades the fortress using nothing but her inimitable skill with a single pistol. I frankly lost track of whether or not the heroine used sci-fi ammunition. However, the emphasis of the overall story is that Rushuna can perform miracles with simple ballistics-skill. For instance, she can penetrate the "steampunk-mecha" armor of one opponent by firing a brace of bullets that hit the armor in the same place and thus rupture it. Yajiro is captivated by the busty blonde, at least partly because she has her own unique ethos. Rhusuna follows the teachings of a female perceptor named Tenshi, located in a distant city, and Tenshi's credo is that of erasing the will to fight amongst the various cities and countries. Apparently, Rushuna means to lead by example, for thought she shoots a lot of enemies, she's so infallible about hitting them non-fatally that the Lone Ranger would be jealous. Rushuna also projects the unfailingly sweet demeanor, and though she often cradles men to her ample breasts, she seems to have no erotic tendencies whatever and never gets mad even if she thinks Yajiro peeps at her in the bath. I don't know a Japanese word that might mean "anti-yandere" but such a word might fit Rushuna. (The duo does however acquire a third member, a young, boyishly-dressed girl named Mikan, and she supplies some of the saltiness absent in the main character.)

It would be nigh-impossible to depict a mission as long-range as Rushuna's unfolding in real time. Thus after Rushuna and her two aides quell a few minor bullies in small towns, the heroine is informed that there's a bounty on her head, and that it was put there by her beloved teacher Tenshi. Being a total innocent, Rushuna bends her path to Tenshi's city in order to plead her case. As the trio travel overland on foot-- I'm not sure we even see anyone using horses or similar mounts at all-- they're attacked by various members of Tenshi's honor guard. All of these warriors have highly specialized pseudo-scientific attainments and Rushuna has to use her brain to figure out how to counter each of their powers, with some incidental aid from Yajiro and from Mikan (who has the rather original talent of fashioning useful tricks out of balloons). Naturally, once the three good guys show up in Tenshi's court, they find (not surprisingly) that Tenshi is a prisoner of a conspiracy that has abrogated all of her ideals.                 

There's a lot of strong fighting-action in GRENADIER, though Rushuna uses only very minimal hand-to-hand maneuvers. Her amusing gun-trick is that the heroine can use her bounteous funbags as a makeshift bandolier, storing ammunition in her boobs and popping out bullets every time she needs to reload. This is about as racy as the show gets most of the time, though one of Rushuna's passing allies is the madame of a brothel (who also has special martial powers, BTW). Yajiro and Mikan get their own B-plots and these are nicely executed, though they remain secondary to Rushuna's quest to root out the threat to her idealistic philosophy. I see a few possible parallels-- not influences as such-- between GRENADIER and the samurai-drama RUROUNI KENSHIN. But KENSHIN possessed a deeper cultural resonance despite its metaphenomenal content, while GRENADIER is just a pleasant but ad hoc fantasy-world with some memorable gimmicks.        

NATSUKI CRISIS BATTLE (1994)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*  

YouTube's programming guided me to this two-part anime, of which I'd never heard. A manga and a game were produced around the same time, and while there's probably no authoritative reference as to which of the three was out of the gate first, I suspect that the game was paramount. For once, the OVA and the manga are equally brief, consisting (from what I can tell) of just two episodes.

And while most anime productions remain close to their manga source material (or vice versa), here it's as if someone said to the respective creators, "Do what you like, as long as you're telling the story of a high-school karate expert named Kisumi Natsuki." The manga shows young Kisumi getting into fights with male opponents, some of whom are just fellow judo/karate students, while others are more aggressive challengers, such as the school's sumo club. The anime pits Kisumi against a rival school, some of whom wear masks during an attack on Kisumi and a friend, But NATSUKI the anime is probably only thirty percent about the heroine battling male opponents, and seventy percent about Kisumi contending with female opponents. The first part of CRISIS largely deals with Kisumi bonding with a female student adept in wrestling, name of Rina, even though the two girls are feisty enough to fight one another. In the second part, Kisumi and Rina are both challenged by another girl wrestler, Kandori, who's somewhat exceptional for the time in being a FBB (though preceded by another lady bodybuilder in 1989's ANGEL COP).  

Kandori is allied to the bad high schoolers and has some vague relationship with Kisumi's current judo sensei, but there's no love-stuff in the anime, while there's only a tiny bit of potential romance in the manga. Of the two, the anime is much more enjoyable for the kinetic battle scenes, though story-wise it's absolutely average. 

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE, SEASON THREE (2016)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*

I was a moderate fan of AVENGERS: EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES, and nothing I saw in the first two seasons of that show's replacement, AVENGERS ASSEMBLE, made me think the follow-up was an adequate substitute. However, though there were still various weak episodes in Season 3, for the first time other stories were at least on the same level of good melodrama as the best tales in MIGHTIEST.

One of the weaker arcs is an attempt to boil down the very involved introduction of the 1990s superhero-team The Thunderbolts into a handful of episodes. As in the comic, the members of the team are all supervillains pretending to be heroes, in line with a master plan by their leader Baron Zemo. In the comic book. the whole idea is to gradually show some of the villains turning good, but that's not possible in ASSEMBLE, so the best thing about the Thunderbolts is just that it puts a few new costumes into the mix. The character Songbird makes a few other appearances, and has a slight rapport with Hawkeye, who's a former criminal in the comics (not sure about in the cartoon).

 Ultron and Kang make return appearances, and they're both as forgettable as they were in previous seasons. But I greatly appreciated the show's take on The Black Panther's first encounter with these Avengers. I don't know to what extent this Disney XD show was privy to the MCU's articulation of its Panther-iteration, though elements of that variation began to appear as early as 2015's AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON (with the introduction of the Panther's regular enemy Klaw) and then with the Panther himself appearing in CAPTAIN AMERICA CIVIL WAR the next year. In contrast to 2018's BLACK PANTHER, the Panther-episodes in ASSEMBLE do not over-emphasize a "woke" political viewpoint, and in that sense the cartoon-Panther is better than the live-action one. However, I think that one or more of the ASSEMBLE writers may have known about the politics brewing in Ryan Coogler's teapot. In the episode "Panther's Rage"-- significantly named for a famous (if unrelated) arc in the comics-- Panther gets into a battle with Klaw, who of course now looks like the live-action character. During the battle, Klaw has a line which I'll paraphrase as, "I'm gonna steal all your vibranium for the cause of colonial supremacy! Just kidding; I'm doing it for the money!"

Various other Marvel characters make peripatetic appearances. The Carol Danvers of Captain Marvel (who had appeared as the original "Ms. Marvel" in MIGHTIEST) shows up, and though she's as lousy a character here as in the comics, at least no one avoids using the Captain Marvel tag for her. Close on Danvers' heels is the Kamala Khan Ms. Marvel, who's also a nothing character, though the animators make her a better fighter than a lot of other iterations. This Ms. Marvel is made to be in line with her late 2010s iteration, who was retconned into a spawn of The Inhumans due to Disney/Marvel's attempt to build up those characters into a franchise to rival that of X-MEN. That attempt failed both in the comics and in the dismal live-action INHUMANS show. But though the Royal Family of Inhumans aren't particularly memorable in their ASSEMBLE appearances, the show gets decent mileage out of the situation where the Inhumans' mutation-chemical gets loose and transforms various humans into super-types. among them the aforementioned Ms. Marvel II. The social panic of these transformations causes the government to clamp down on the Avengers' activities, particularly upon the Hulk, and this development at least makes a little more sense than the MCU's idiotic Sokovian crisis. Though Season Four will deal with some sort of "Civil War," I liked the fact that in this arc, all of the Avengers defend their green-skinned fellow member, and thus earns better characterization-marks than many similar events both in comics and live-action movies.            

HARLEY QUINN-- SEASON 3 (2022)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological* 

In my review of Season One, I left things open as to whether the writer-producers of HARLEY QUINN really believed all of their rants about White Patriarchy, and by extension, all other such cant, such as the un-ironic use of the term "cisgender" in Season Two. It was at least possible that these raconteurs were simply trying to make a buck by playing to an audience that wanted an ultraliberal version of SOUTH PARK, with loads of naughty language and hardcore violence. But if Season 3 of this show demonstrated anything, it's that only true believers could pen a line like this one:

Harley Quinn (speaking to another female): "Congrats on freeing yourself from the chains of hetero hell!"

The showrunners make other dubious decisions-- the Riddler is gay, and Catwoman had a lesbian encounter with Poison Ivy but can barely tolerate the "hetero hell" of an ongoing relationship with boring billionaire Bruce Wayne). All these things demonstrate that the producers have goneg full tilt boogie into a trope I'll call, "Gay Always Good, Straight Always Bad." Before this, the scripts focused almost entirely on celebrating one particular lesbian hookup: the written-in-the-stars romance of BFFs Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn. Season 2 particularly burns up a lot of episode-time leading up to the inevitable union. But the apparent success of the HBO series evidently made the showrunners convinced that they could get away with anything-- just like SOUTH PARK, but with absolutely no wit or style.

From a very limited POV, Season 3 doesn't suffer from exactly the same crippling inevitability as Season 2. Once all the sexy pyrotechnics have been executed, Harley and Ivy have to deal with the pressures of an ongoing relationship. I don't mean to imply that the scripts show any logical progression of even very limited melodramatic characters; I'm only saying that the change of pace COULD have been allowed for better stories than those of Season 2. One big change comes from Ivy, who for two seasons of this show, put aside her forceful personality from other iterations and became a "shrinking violet," the better to play "femme" to Harley's "butch." Now, in order to play up the very different personalities of the lovers, Ivy starts to return to her eco-terrorist mode. Harley initially approves-- anything to make her leafy lover happy-- but at some point, even the empty-headed maniac realizes that Ivy's obsession is too extreme, even for her.

Season Two broadly implied that the main reason Harley launched a murderous campaign to take down most of Gotham's other villains was because she had no good lovin' in her life, and had never had even when she cohabited with the Joker, because well, "hetero equals hell." But once she's bumping nasties with Ivy, Harley conveniently forgets about her queenpin-ambitions and even starts making noises like a hero, which includes keeping Ivy from massacring large quantities of Gothamites. Of course, in the world of the fanatic, it doesn't matter than Harley herself has quite a few murders on her rap sheet, and not just villains-- unless we're supposed to believe that her attack on Earth with the forces of Darkseid conveniently cost no innocent lives. Being gay makes everything okay.

But in one sense Harley's dream of becoming a queenpin comes true, for in order for her to rise, the Big Bat must fall. Yes, the previous two seasons repetitively dragged Commissioner Gordon through the mud for a laugh, and other heroes were mocked, but the fanatics mostly left Batman alone. However, to him he's a straight white male hero, so he must be removed to make way for a gay (but also white) female villain with heroic aspirations. To be fair, in the comics Harley does undergo a psychological change that puts her mostly on the side of the angels. But the showrunners here have no interest in psychology except in the form of tedious bromides. "Batman has a savior complex. Bruce Wayne turns off Catwoman because his parental issues make him clingy." But in addition to all the factors that make the Big Bat a weak-ass white guy, he also belongs to the "one percent," and for that crime he must be punished, so that Killer Harley can take his place and check more boxes.

I confess I laughed at one joke that involved the Riddler running a danger room. However, the scripters lost that one point and more by making the Prince of Puzzlers gay for no reason but to create more pink representation. For TV animation, HQ is competent, particularly with respect to the violent fight-scenes. I'm aware there are two other seasons and another on the way, so I guess someone likes it. I won't be in any great hurry to review more of these turd-productions.                          

ULTIMATE AVENGERS 2 (2006)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

Whereas ULTIMATE AVENGERS was just a pedestrian failure, ULTIMATE AVENGERS 2-- released a few months later during the same year and written by the same writing-team-- is more the "interesting failure." The first film, allegedly based on Marvel's ULTIMATE AVENGERS comics-franchise, was concerned only with setting up its version of "how the Avengers came together," here consisting of Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, Hulk, Giant-Man and Wasp. But this time the writers made an attempt, however clumsy, to emulate the emotional melodrama of Marvel Comics-- which is more than a lot of the live-action iterations have tried to do.

 Some of the melodramatic setups seem more like excuses to get some of the cast-members out of the way. Since the first movie showed Bruce Banner getting in dutch with SHIELD for transforming himself into his emerald alter-ego, in Part 2 Banner's been locked down in a containment cube while a SHIELD doctor questions him. This effectively keeps Hulk out of the action till near the end. Thor isn't much different. The thunder-god spends a lot of time quarreling with his all-father about hanging out with humans too much, only to pitch in at the climax. Iron Man's about the same narcissist as always, and Black Widow tries to play den-mother to the group, but suddenly Captain America becomes obsessed with crusading to distract himself from time-displacement. This idea could have been done well, but once the main conflict-- another invasion by those dull ET-evildoers the Chitauri-- Cap's inner crisis gets kicked to the curb. For no particular reason Giant-Man becomes a snark-meister, alienating his wasp-winged girlfriend-- perhaps because this series lacked a Hawkeye for that function?

On top of all that, an eighth potential Avenger comes into the mix: the Black Panther. The hero's new origin is at least less encumbered than the one from the MCU's 2018 movie, bringing in a potentially good conflict between the reactionary attitudes of the Panther's subjects and the Panther's relative commitment to interaction with the First World countries. This time T'Challa attains the kingship thanks to a shapechanging Chitauri who spends most of the film looking like a leftover Nazi officer. The explanation for this peculiar affectation is that during the Chitauri's covert involvement during WWII, the shapechanger took the identity of a Nazi officer named Kleisser, in which form he killed Captain America's partner Bucky. There's no explanation as to why "Kleisser" continues to look like a Gestapo chief sixty-something years later, when he kills T'Challa's father. The extrinsic reason for the nasty-Nazi guise is to keep reminding viewers that he's the same entity on whom both Cap and the Panther desire vengeance-- though when they finally do, it's very underwhelming, even when the Panther's. inexplicably acquired the ability to morph into a panther-man shape.

At least I know what the writers were going for with giving two heroes the same enemy. But I have no clue as to what they were going for by making Giant-Man an overly critical douchebag. He rails on The Wasp, possibly because she's funding his research with her superior wealth and he resents that he needs her help. But again, this melodramatic point is just dropped later so that the character can undergo a sacrificial death. On top of all that, the action scenes are mediocre. The only standout moment occurs when Wasp, using some hyped-up strength, actually slams her way through a squamous Chitauri body and kills the ET dead.     

     

HULK AND THE AGENTS OF SMASH, SEASON ONE (2013-14)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*   

Both this TV cartoon and AVENGERS ASSEMBLE were launched in 2013, the year after the MCU culminated its "Phase One" sequence of films with THE AVENGERS. Both animated serials followed the template of the MCU AVENGERS in terms of mixing heavy-action sequences with lots of comedy relief-- as indeed the Classic Marvel comics had. ASSEMBLE enjoyed six seasons while SMASH only got two. But with the former show, credited showrunner "Man of Action" ended up producing a show with merely superficial humor and characterization-- unintentionally presaging the rot that would overtake the live-action MCU by Phase Three. With the latter program, showrunners Paul Dini and Henry Gilroy accomplished more in two seasons than Man of Action could have done with twice as many episodes. In short, Dini and Gilroy captured the fun of early Marvel comics.

Though both shows were free to pick and choose from the vast array of heroes and villains in Marvel's complex continuity, SMASH has much more fun with their choices, while with ASSEMBLE, every reference feels a lot like homework (a common complaint about the later MCU, by the way). What most surprised me about SMASH was how interesting they made all the HULK continuity from the 21st century iterations, few of which I've visited. Naturally a cartoon made for commercial TV had to change some things. SMASH's Red Hulk, though he has the same basic origin as the comics-version, is much less of a physical threat, while the barbaric powerhouse Skaar is not literally the Hulk's progeny, though there's a loose figurative filial relationship between the two. In the comics Hulk's perennial sidekick Rick Jones was only briefly changed into the monstrous "A-Bomb," but the cartoon's A-Bomb is more of a juvenile joker as well as a hypester, turning his exploits with the SMASH team into the stuff of podcasts. She-Hulk stays pretty much the same, strong and sassy, while the Big Green Guy manages to be a "smart Hulk" who doesn't come off as a cloying castration of the original hero's monstrous appeal.

I won't review all 26 episodes of SMASH's first season, for though I enjoyed them all, they could be fairly criticized for a certain sameness. Their best feature is, as I said above, the writers' ability to peg particular parts of the Marvel mythology and give them added appeal. I can't exactly quantify what SMASH does right and ASSEMBLE does wrong, except to say that the choices of SMASH don't seem nearly as predictable. For instance, thanks to a time-travel jaunt, the Hulk, a sixties co-creation of Jack Kirby, brings back to his time a big crimson dino called Devil Dinosaur to serve s pet-- the original "Devil" having been one of Kirby's 1970s creations. I enjoyed the episode "Deathlok" less for the presence of the titular cyborg hero than for the fact that the evildoers were the shapechanging Skrulls, whom the MCU tried to recast as some sort of put-upon marginalized alien race. And then there's "The Hunted," in which the Not So Jolly Green Giant gets stranded on Marvel's version of Monster Island, which plays host to over a dozen weird creatures culled from Marvel's "monster books" of the 1950s and 1960s. Of course, a lot of ideas don't work at all, like a bizarre plotline in which the ADD-afflicted A-Bomb tries to study the mystic arts under Doctor Strange. But usually even the episodes with hokey plotlines have some funny bits in them. Voicework is uniformly fine, with the standouts being Fred Tatasciore as Green Hulk, Clancy Brown as Red Hulk, and Eliza Dushku as "Too Sexy for Your Party" She-Hulk.