The Brash And The Brazen
Posted on | December 18, 2008 at 11:13 pm | 2 Comments
Cartoon Network has a new weekly Batman animated series called The Brave and The Bold. It’s named after the old (and recently revived comic book series) that for most of its run featured Batman teaming up with other heroes. The cartoon follows that theme. So far, it’s seen Batman team up with the likes of Blue Beetle, Plastic Man, Aquaman, and Red Tornado. Each episode also has a action sequence teaser at the beginning that is largely unrelated to the rest of the episode and features the end of some other (non-fleshed out) adventure of Batman and a different hero.
The bizarre thing about this new series is that the tone of it is diametrically opposed to the tone of the current series of Batman live action movies. No “dark and gritty” here. B&B is the closest thing to the old campy 60s Batman series since the George Clooney Batman and Robin movie. The drawing style is sparse with clean lines. The animation sometimes has still action frames, like you see a lot in anime and in old cartoons from the 60s and 70s. Batman has short ears like in the 60s series. (As a general rule of thumb, you can tell what the tone of a Batman series is going to be by the length of his ears.) And Batman makes jokes. Lots of jokes. I guess that’s not surprising, since he’s voiced by Diedrich Bader. Sometimes he even smiles. This is a very light-hearted take on the Batman legend. All it’s missing is Robin, though I’m sure he’ll appear eventually.
The plots are pretty outlandish with villains concocting extremely elaborate plots that have very little basis in scientific reality, requiring an immense amount of suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer. Of course, that’s da rigeur for the superhero world, although it does violate the recent trend from the last few decades to inject a slight bit of realism here and there. B&B throws convention to the wind. When a couple of mind-controlled pteradactyls can lift a cruise ship into the air, you know that any pretense of logic is not going to make an appearance. The show also seems to exist in its own separate little dimension of the DC universe, as the characters are not real consistent with their appearances in the comic books or other shows. For example, in the show, Plastic Man’s origin is tied into Batman. (Batman knocked Eel O’Brien into a vat of chemicals while Eel was in the middle of a robbery, turning him into Plas. Shades of the sometimes-origin of The Joker!) Aquaman is a genial, pompous idiot who reminded me more of The Tick than of any Aquaman from the comics. I half expected him to be voiced by Patrick Warburton. His half-brother Orm (Ocean Master) is now suddenly Atlantean, instead of being the human son of Aquaman’s landlubber father. I understand they need to cut corners so that the viewer can quickly come up to speed on what’s going on, but some of those alterations don’t really seem necessary.
It’s not surprising that B&B The Show is so out of continuity with everything else DC, since in the heyday of B&B The Comic, it also existed in its own little world. Those Batman team-ups of the 70s were mostly written by Bob Haney, an old-time writer at DC who was obviously given free reign to play in his own sandbox and create his own universe that didn’t have to tie in with anything happening in the rest of the company. He would do things like have Batman team up with heroes from alternate Earths as if those heroes existed on his Earth. (This was before DC collapsed their multiverse, and “Earth-2″ heroes had to actually travel to “Earth-1″ to team up with the heroes there.) For just one example of Bob Haney craziness, see here. Here’s more. Haney was also responsible for the Super-Sons in World’s Finest Comics, who so annoyed me that I quite collecting comics for a few years in the 70s because of them.
So, anyway, the show is Bad. Horribly Bad. Yet I can’t stop watching it. The pinnacle of animated Batman was the series from the 90s, and I doubt it will ever be surpassed. The series from this decade that recently ended it’s run on the WB was pretty bad, although it did get better near the end. It’s not that I’m so starved for Batman fare that I’ll watch anything that comes along, but I just have this need to see what comes next and how bad it will get. And as loathe as I am to admit it, there’s something actually fun about B&B. And we can all use a little fun, can’t we?
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: Christmas cards with glitter. Why do I keep buying them? Actually, I didn’t buy any this year, but I had some left over from last year. That stuff gets on everything.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “phobias and damage to life”.
Videogame(s) Played Recently: Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (DS)
Comments
2 Responses to “The Brash And The Brazen”
December 18th, 2008 @ 11:48 pm
> the show is Bad. Horribly Bad. Yet I can’t stop watching it.
Is the problem with the show, or the viewer? It’s unclear from context.
December 20th, 2008 @ 7:56 pm
I was a bid fan of B&B as well as Kamandi, so how I missed the team-up is a mystery to me.