5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (03/20/2013): Archer, Green Lantern, Young Justice, Apollo Gauntlet and Bob's Burgers

Lana puts a ring on it. And by "it," I mean her sausage finger.

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

Most love triangle storylines on sitcoms bore the shit out of me. But the triangle storylines on Archer never do because they're accompanied by always hilarious and sharp dialogue and the batshit crazy Greek chorus of Cheryl/Carol and Pam, who, respectively, expound on aphrodisiacs ("The ultimate's doing it on top of a tranqed-up tiger") and break into impressions of Lana that sound more like Fat Albert than Lana while they join Cyril in spying on Lana in "The Honeymooners." Cyril has gotten back together with Lana, whom he dated in the show's first season, and Pam's belief that Lana's latest undercover surveillance mission with Archer will rekindle whatever lust she used to have for Archer spurs Cyril to grab some binoculars and check if Pam is right about Lana and Archer.

(Photo source: Entertainment Fuse)

Lana, the agent-in-command on this mission, and Archer must pose as newlyweds at a luxury hotel (which happens to be owned by Cheryl/Carol's family) to identify the terrorist who's about to sell some enriched uranium to North Korean agents at the hotel. Archer is, of course, easily distracted by honeymoon suite amenities like pedicures and $300 scotch, and for a while, it seems like the espionage material in "The Honeymooners" is on the tepid side. But luckily, it doesn't take a turn towards the tepid when Archer and Lana wind up captured by the North Koreans they've been trying to keep tabs on, and Archer gets to remind viewers of his resourceful killing machine side--which can easily get lost underneath all the immaturity and dickishness that make him and MacGruber such entertaining comedic action heroes--as he fights his way out of his captors' handcuffs and leads Lana to escape.

However, Lana and Archer fail to ID the seller, who, in a great twist, turns out to be Krieger, whose possession of uranium explains recent experiments like his attempt to attain the proportional strength of an ant. In another twist that borders on disgusting--nah, wait, it is disgusting--Krieger apparently enjoys sex with his irradiated pig Pigley Three. I'm looking forward to the inevitable Krieger/Pigley/Holographic Anime Lover triangle. Judging by how well it handles usually tedious triangle storylines, Archer will hit that one out of the park as well.

Stray observations:
* Current Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles voice actor Hoon Lee played the leader of the North Korean spies. On Cinemax's original series Banshee, Lee has been fun to watch as transgendered hacker Job, Lucas Hood's partner-in-crime and the toughest Gaysian character to ever F-bomb--and building-bomb--his way through TV.

* "Relax, it's North Korea, the nation-state equivalent of the short bus."

* Cyril, mortified by Pam going to town on an order of ribs: "Oh God, were you raised in a barn?!" Pam: "No. I just slept out there a lot."

* Archer sometimes gets slammed for containing not-so-great animation. I'd like to submit as counter-evidence the really good animation for both the sequence where Archer rescues Lana after she loses her grip on the suction cups she's been scaling the side of the hotel with (the foley artists also did terrific work during that sequence) and Archer and Lana's reflections in the hotel window during the conversation afterward. The latter must have been really tricky to animate.

* While arguing about the sizes of their ISIS bonuses, Archer's lines to Lana about his brushes with death rival all those lists of comedic irritations Neil Simon characters would rattle off in the kind of monologue Simon once referred to as a "fingerprint" of his own writing: "Since I started working at ISIS, I've been shot, stabbed, set on fire, poisoned, shot, sexually assaulted, partially chewed, shot and declared legally dead. Twice on the same day!"

* Archer to Lana, in regards to North Korea: "It's not democratic, not a republic and definitely not glorious. Jesus, watch Frontline once in your life!"

* Pam and Cheryl/Carol, commenting on the smoke-covered fight between Lana, Cyril, Archer and the North Koreans: "Are they bangin'?" "They will be. Raves make everybody horny."

Waynestrumentals: And now, a different theme from every screen incarnation of Batman, including the crappy or racist versions

(Editor's note: Before we begin, here's what past Batverse comics writer Ed Brubaker tweeted about a certain senseless act in Colorado:

My thoughts exactly. Now on to the post.)

(Additional editor's note: The themes are in reverse chronological order as a nod to Dark Knight trilogy director Christopher Nolan's 2000 breakout film Memento, starting with a new score cue from The Dark Knight Rises as the track that represents the Nolan version of Batman on this post and concluding with music from a delightfully racist '40s Batman serial.)

Brittany Wakefield

(One more editor's note: Here on Blogger, I don't like to publish posts that don't contain a lot of text. That's what Tumblr is for. But I haven't had time to write so much text to accompany a Bat-load of Spotify and YouTube embeds, so Brittany Wakefield, a neighbor of mine who's a part-time beautician, volunteered to step in and provide the accompanying text to get more writing experience as preparation for the essay-writing portion of her GED test, even though she'd rather write about something called The Bad Girls Club, which she tells me is her favorite show. By the way, unlike a certain beautician who went on to become one of the modern-day Batverse comics' best writers, Brittany isn't familiar at all with Batman.)

In 1932, DC Comics began publishing the adventures of the world's first openly Jewish superhero, Ira Batman. By day, he was rich nightclub comedian Bruce Bruce, who played all the black rooms and some white rooms. By night, he suited up as Ira Batman (or The Batman, which is much less Jewish, or in later years, simply Batman). He chased after criminals to avenge the double murder of his Uncle Ben and Aunt Bernice. Ira's popularity in the funny books led to lots of screen versions of the Caped Crucifier, including the Christian Bale movies, which have come to an end with The Dark Knight Rises.

I'm sure I'll be texting during The Dark Knight Rises when I see it, but if there are at least two or three action scenes that aren't boring, then I'll totes take a break from my texts to look up at the screen and peep what's going on. In the Bale movies, Ira is referred to by other peeps as the Dark Knight because he could barely move around in his armor and had trouble removing it when he had to pee, just like a knight:

I don't know what Justice League: Doom is. Jim, do you know what that is?

(Editor's note: No, I've never watched it. I'm behind on the DC animated movies because I quit Netflix about a year ago. Netflix, wha happen?):


Batman: Year One flashed back to Ira's first year as a crimefighter. OMG, Ryan from The O.C. voiced Ira! I lurve him!:


Okay, I've seen Young Justice a few times, but only because Superboy's cute. Ira shows up sometimes in this cartoon, just to deliver buttloads of exposition to Robin and his peeps:


In Batman: Under the Red Hood, Ira fights someone named the Red Hood. If it's anything like that time Christina kicked Julie's booty on TBGC, then I'm on board:


In 2010, Ira appeared in Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. Again, I don't know what that is. Jim?

(Editor's note: No clue either, Brittany.):

Ira teamed up with Superman in the cartoon movie Superman/Batman: Public Enemies and its sequel Superman/Batman: Apocalypse. In the clips I FF'd through, Superman sounded a lot like Pete, that cute but really old doc on Private Practice:

A few months after The Dark Knight ruled the summer, Cartoon Network premiered Batman: The Bold and the Beautiful, in which Batman was the CEO of a high-powered fashion house:

A week before the release of The Dark Knight, Warner Bros. Animation dropped Batman: Gotham Knight as a straight-to-DVD cartoon tie-in. Instead of a dark knight, in this movie, he was a Gotham knight, which meant he could barely move around while wearing a buttload of mascara like Criss Angel:

The cartoon movie Justice League: The New Frontier imagined Ira in the '50s, just like how J-Biebs dressed like a '50s dude at the NRJ Awards. OMG, J-Biebs was so cute when he slicked back his hair that night!:

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (05/11/2012): Green Lantern, Young Justice, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Avengers and Motorcity

Over at my Tumblr, I said, "Though AFOS is a film and TV score music station, score music is not the only subject I post about on Tumblr and Blogger." If AFOS: The Tumblr or AFOS: The Blog were strictly about score music, I'd die of boredom, so beginning this week, I'm adding another non-score music-related subject to the many non-score music-related subjects I post about on Blogger.

For years, we've been living in a golden age of scripted TV that shows no signs of stopping despite the infuriating popularity of the Keeping Up with the Armenian NBA Hand-Me-Downs (a Joel McHale Soup joke, not mine) and Jersey Snores of the world. Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Community and Parks and Recreation are some current examples of this golden age.

We've also been experiencing a golden age of animation on cable. During high school, I loved the cinematic Batman: The Animated Series and The Simpsons. I always wanted to write for either of those shows. Quality-wise, they were such a huge step up from the wack cartoons of the '80s that frequently insulted viewers' intelligence and were nothing more than 30-minute excuses to hawk some toys. I'm a bit envious of pre-teen and teen viewers these days because their cartoons contain even better animation than B:TAS and the classic-era Simpsons did (the dizzying and mind-blowing action sequences on Disney XD's Motorcity make the beautifully animated Batman-vs.-Man-Bat airborne confrontation in B:TAS' first episode look like "Steamboat Willie"). These younger viewers have so many well-written animated shows to choose from (on cable, that is, instead of on the broadcast networks, which abandoned the kind of younger-skewing programming that's become the lifeblood of niche-y channels like Cartoon Network and the gazillion Nicks), compared to the paltry amount of three or four I watched regularly in the '90s.

Lately, I've been DVRing standout animated cable shows like Young Justice and Motorcity, and I've put season 2 of The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes on the DirecTV DVR equivalent of a Season Pass (DirecTV calls it the "Record Series" button) because the kids' networks that air these shows schedule them in bizarre time slots I have a hard time either remembering or waking up early for (maybe Earth's Mightiest Heroes would receive better ratings if viewers could actually find it). Today, I'm reviewing the five non-Adult Swim animated shows I've been regularly DVRing and catching--Green Lantern: The Animated Series, Young Justice: Invasion, Ultimate Spider-Man, Earth's Mightiest Heroes and the new Monday night show Motorcity--for a column called "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner." I hope to make this column about non-Adult Swim animation on cable a weekly thing on Tuesdays instead of Fridays--this trial and possibly inaugural edition today is an exception--but writing these things takes so goddamn long for me to do.

Ever since MCA's passing, I've been bumping so many Beastie Boys tracks, so I wanted to name a new blog feature after an obscure Beasties track. Hence "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner."

***

Disney XD and the half of Cartoon Network that has nothing to do with Adult Swim are channels my Mad Men/Justified/Louie-watching self usually avoids like the plague, so if it weren't for the Village Voice newspapers' Topless Robot blog or The A.V. Club, I wouldn't have been aware of Cartoon Network's "DC Nation" hour on Saturday mornings and its rival during an even more ungodly Sunday morning time slot, Disney XD's 76-minute "Marvel Universe" block. I caught the hour-long Green Lantern: The Animated Series sneak preview (which, fortunately, was much less of a slog than the live-action Green Lantern movie) last year on Cartoon Network but had totally forgotten that new GL:TAS episodes were dropping during the newly launched "DC Nation," so I didn't start tuning into GL:TAS until three or four weeks into the new season.

Though I'm not really a fan of the Green Lantern Corps space cop characters, I like how they're basically Jedi knights with personality. The live-action Star Wars prequels would have been much less lethargic had they featured as one of its heroes an acerbic character like the grumpy Green Lantern known as Kilowog, the dem-dese-dose alien cop who's wonderfully voiced on GL:TAS by not-so-dem-dese-dose black actor Kevin Michael Richardson (a.k.a. Martin Luther King from The Boondocks' classic "Return of the King" episode).

GL:TAS sells the "Jedi knights with personality" vibe more effectively than the much-maligned live-action version, which contained too little of Kilowog. Moviegoers who were so burned by the live-action Green Lantern that they gave up on anything else with the Green Lantern name on it should try out either Green Lantern: First Flight, a 2009 DC Animated Universe made-for-video feature that cleverly reimagined lead hero Hal Jordan's origin story as a Training Day-style space copera (and even snagged Law & Order: SVU's Chris Meloni for the role of Hal), or this energetic new CG series, which has partners Hal (Josh Keaton) and Kilowog investigating the deaths of their comrades and patrolling the stars on the Interceptor, an experimental ship that Hal and Kilowog stole and is maintained by Aya (Grey DeLisle), a resourceful female AI with powers like Hal and Kilowog's.

So the series, which is DC Animation's first completely CG show, is basically Green Lantern-as-a-starship-show-with-a-ragtag-crew-of-bickering-leads a la Farscape, Firefly, Andromeda, Galactica and I'm probably forgetting one more. Though recent episodes have felt like retreads of old Star Trek episodes like "The Devil in the Dark" and the animated "Lorelei Signal," I'm glad GL:TAS is more of a space-faring sci-fi show than a superhero piece, which was what the formulaic and way-too-Earthbound Ryan Reynolds movie was. B:TAS and Justice League Unlimited veteran Bruce Timm's character designs for the show are beautifully rendered in CG. Animation, whether it's CG or cel, is a more suitable medium for these characters and their cartoony-looking powers than live-action, which was where Green Lantern looked really flat and unconvincing (Charlie Jane Anders said it best over on io9: "Reynolds' disembodied face spends large chunks of Green Lantern floating around in an ocean of computer-animated cheese... Hal's costume is CG along with the backgrounds, so his head just floats there in the middle of a CG world."). Because animation isn't as constrained a medium as live-action, the action sequences on GL:TAS, particularly the airborne battles in last week's episode "Regime Change," are much more dynamic and epic than the ones in the Reynolds movie.

As a lead, Keaton's Hal isn't as difficult to empathize with as Reynolds' tepidly written version of Hal was, but if GL:TAS characters were cops from the original Law & Order, Kilowog would be Max Greevey and Hal would be boring-ass Rey Curtis. Aya has much less emotions than Hal but is a more interesting character. Luckily, the show has surrounded Hal with prickly characters to offset his frequent blandness, like Kilowog and Razer (Jason Spisak), a prisoner in Hal and Kilowog's custody who wants to atone for his past actions as an evil Red Lantern but hasn't completely rid himself of his dark side.

The show also seems to be hinting at romantic tension between Razer and the emotionless Aya, who patterned her permanent appearance after Razer's murdered wife while scanning his records. Unless they're part of Mad Men, nothing makes my eyes glaze over more than romance storylines, and the android who longs to be human has been done to death, but the Interceptor computer's interaction with Razer, which seems to be combining those two types of storylines and is reminiscent of Idris/the TARDIS' affection for The Doctor in Neil Gaiman's Doctor Who episode "The Doctor's Wife," might actually be an intriguing development in the coming weeks. A ship falling for one of its passengers? That's the kind of storyline William Shatner, who memorably eyefucked the Enterprise from a travel pod window for 78 minutes in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, must have always wanted to act out.

***

In another example of how bizarrely scheduled these animated cable shows are (so where's that fifth Venture Bros. season, Astrobase Go! and Adult Swim?), Cartoon Network's Young Justice, the other half-hour show in the "DC Nation" block, began its second season only one week after concluding its first.

And in an astonishing and I'm-still-not-quite-sure-if-it-was-necessary WTF moment for an animated show that's mainly for teens, the newly renamed Young Justice: Invasion jumped ahead five years into the future. The teens of Young Justice are now investigating a potential alien invasion that may have ties to the mystery of what six Justice League members who were brainwashed by supervillain Vandal Savage (Miguel Ferrer) were doing for 16 unaccounted hours at the end of the first season (Alex, I'm gonna go with "What is an evening of hookers and blow?"). Artemis (Stephanie Lemelin), who's basically Katniss with a raunchy sense of humor (separated from her bow and quiver by a team of villains in one episode, she memorably cracked, "Ugh, I feel naked. And not in a fun way."), and two other Young Justice members, Aqualad (Khary Payton) and Kid Flash (Jason Spisak), quit the team for reasons that have yet to be explained and were replaced by other heroes, like an unknown lady named Batgirl (Alyson Stoner).

Also, Rocket (Kittie), who joined Young Justice very late in the first season and is best remembered in print for being the first superheroine to experience a teen pregnancy in the late Dwayne McDuffie's Milestone comic Icon, graduated to the League. Robin (Jesse McCartney) is now Nightwing, and Tim Drake (Cameron Bowen) has assumed Robin's mantle and still-brightly-colored-for-no-reason-other-than-to-wind-up-with-bullets-in-the-ass crimefighting suit. Emo Superboy (Nolan North) and Miss Martian (Danica McKellar) are no longer a couple, and the latter (isn't her name a little like calling some Asian female member of Young Justice "Miss Asian"?) is now sporting a post-breakup haircut and Lagoon Boy (Yuri Lowenthal) on her arm. And the animation is still outstanding for a weekly TV series--this is the best a DC Animated Universe project has ever looked on-screen, outside of the DCAU feature films--and showrunner Greg Weisman, whom DC Animation wisely snapped up for this show after he lost The Spectacular Spider-Man to what appears to have been production company politics, is still killing it, though some of his creative decisions so far this season don't quite make sense, like that time jump a la Galactica and One Tree Hill.

Hopefully, this time jump has a purpose other than being an excuse to add more characters to an already hefty cast. That's a beef I have with most superhero works, whether it's The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes or the execrable live-action mess Heroes: this need to enlarge an overstuffed cast and, especially in the case of Earth's Mightiest Heroes, fill the show with fan service, which backfires when it takes away screen time from the regular characters we care more about. Once in a while, it's dope to see an obscure Marvel fan favorite appear on-screen for the first time ever (many of these lesser-known characters, like Rocket Raccoon, are ones I've never heard of before, while hardcore Marvel fans are apparently crazy about them), but does this have to happen in every episode of Earth's Mightiest Heroes now?

Justice League Unlimited expanded the scope and cast of Justice League and was loaded with cameos by obscure DC characters, but it never lost its focus on the seven original heroes we grew to like as a team in the first two seasons. As long as Young Justice: Invasion doesn't veer off into "Hiro in ancient Japan"-style tangents--last week's "Earthlings," which introduced to the DCAU the DC scientist hero named Adam Strange (Michael Trucco), who's basically John Carter with clothes and none of the stench of box-office failure, was almost an aimless tangent--this show could be another Justice League Unlimited instead of another Heroes.

***

Ultimate Spider-Man places Marvel's most popular character in a Young Justice-like premise in which the web-slinger (Drake Bell, who starred in Superhero Movie as a hero who was a Spidey parody) and other superpowered teens--Spidey-hating Nova (Logan Miller), token female White Tiger (Caitlyn Taylor Love), a de-aged Luke Cage (Ogie Banks) and an equally de-aged and annoyingly mandal-ed Danny Rand (Greg Cipes), a.k.a. Iron Fist--are given a Sky High-style education from S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Nick Fury (Chi McBride) and Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) on how to become better heroes. Out of all of Spidey's animated incarnations so far (from Ralph Bakshi's psychedelic Spidey to the solid and much-missed Spectacular Spider-Man), Ultimate boasts the most high-quality animation. The fluid and agile movements of this new animated Spidey and his superpowered cohorts are a huge leap forward from the cookie-cutter animation and constantly recycled footage of Bakshi's '60s Spidey and the jerky early '80s animation of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends.

Ultimate also boasts the most impressive guiding force script-wise, Emmy-winner Paul Dini, and it has the former B:TAS writer and the Ben 10 creative team known as Man of Action adapting (pretty loosely) Brian Michael Bendis' esteemed Ultimate Spider-Man comic, the linchpin of Marvel's Ultimate imprint. (Here's a quick breakdown of the Ultimate line: Ultimate comics are set in a continuity that's separate from the extremely convoluted and confusing one where flagship titles like The Amazing Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men take place. The alternate Peter Parker in this Ultimate universe boasted a few differences from Original Flavor Peter. Before Bendis killed off alt-Peter and pissed off right-wing racist nutjobs by replacing him with half-African American, half-Latino Miles Morales, a long-overdue non-white Spidey and actually Marvel's second non-white Spidey after the Spider-Man 2099 comic's half-Latino Miguel O'Hara, alt-Peter was still a teen and worked as the Daily Bugle's webmaster instead of as a Bugle photographer.)

Dini isn't the only B:TAS alum who's involved with Ultimate. His colleague from that influential show, animator Eric Radomski, is a co-executive producer on Ultimate. One of B:TAS' best visual touches was the expressiveness that Radomski and Bruce Timm brought to the eye portion of Batman's mask, and that same expressiveness has been added to this new animated Spidey's eyes. I wouldn't be surprised if that was a Radomski touch.

Dwayne McDuffie (1962-2011)

Dead at 49, Dwayne McDuffie was an incredibly prolific comics and TV animation writer who, as a story editor and frequent scriptwriter for Justice League Unlimited, helped make that cartoon the most satisfyingly written DC Animated Universe show since Batman: The Animated Series. But McDuffie's greatest contribution remains Milestone Media, the indie comics company he co-founded in the '90s to make the way-too-white superhero genre more diverse and to give comics writers and artists of color more opportunities behind the scenes.

"It showed that there could be actual black people in comics," wrote comics reviewer David Brothers in a Black History Month tribute to McDuffie and Milestone that he posted a couple of weeks before McDuffie's death yesterday. "The company was full of people who looked, acted, and talked like people I knew. This is a big deal, believe it or not."

It was also a big deal for Asian American readers like myself who grew up in a multiracial world that wasn't being reflected enough in superhero comics (sadly, it still isn't) and were looking for comics that featured Asian characters who were raised in America like we were and weren't foreigners in corny dragon-themed or martial arts-themed costumes that were the Asian equivalent of the "headband and yellow disco shirt" that The Boondocks once joked about in regards to Luke Cage's costume. Milestone responded to the lack of Asian American characters in superhero comics by creating the immortal hero Xombi and Third Rail, a Korean member of the Blood Syndicate, a superhero team comprised of gangbangers who were mutated by radioactive tear gas during a police crackdown on gangs. Latino and gay characters also inhabited the Milestone universe.

The most popular and enduring Milestone creation is McDuffie's Static character, a.k.a. Virgil Hawkins, a constantly bullied inner-city high-schooler who gains the ability to manipulate electricity after being exposed to the aforementioned radioactive tear gas. When the original Static comic debuted in 1993, I was glad to finally come across a comic about teens where the high school setting was hardly as clean-cut as Riverdale High or whatever campus subjected Peter Parker's Spider-Can to frequent wedgies. In other words, Ernest Hemingway High resembled the school I went to. Virgil's campus was beset by gang violence and racial conflict, elements that were watered down but still addressed in Static Shock, a more kid-friendly animated version that McDuffie was also involved in.