"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Awesomes, "Destination Deading"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

The superhero sitcom The Awesomes, about a cash-poor team of misfits and their equally inept adversaries, is easily the best of Hulu's batch of original animated shows--a batch of mostly horrendous, often Canadian-made shows. I can't say The Awesomes is a great show quite yet, but it might be getting there. The first season of The Awesomes was marred by animation by Bento Box that was as rough-looking as the Burbank and Atlanta animation studio's work on Bob's Burgers was during that now-great Fox show's first season, as well as the stilted, Jerry Seinfeld-during-Seinfeld-ish voice acting of Awesomes co-creator Seth Meyers, whose previous experience with the superhero genre was co-writing a Spider-Man comic with Awesomes co-star Bill Hader. In the second season, Meyers has clearly been growing a little more comfortable with the voice work, plus Bento Box is starting to play around more with shadows and shading, so The Awesomes has been looking less and less like a visually flat Flash webtoon from 2004.

Meyers and co-creator Mike Shoemaker just need to ditch the annoying device of having Meyers' neurotic and meek team leader character Prock always use his superpower of freezing time, not to perform heroic tasks but to monologue, and not to the audience like how Zack Morris monologued on Saved by the Bell but to himself for some weird reason (perhaps Meyers is trying to avoid making Prock resemble Zack by having him talk to himself, but it just continues to remind me of Zack). The big running joke in these time-freezing scenes is that there's always some sort of dangling opportunity for Prock--who has to follow his doctor's orders about not using his superpower for too long because it gives him nosebleeds--to make that superpower useful, but he keeps ignoring it. It's a good running joke that's reminiscent of self-important Maxwell Smart's ineptitude on Get Smart, but it can't disguise the fact that these scenes are such a clunky exposition device (Jody Schaeffer and George Krstic were better at the self-monologuing thing when Coop always did it in the middle of robot battles on Megas XLR). The device shows up in every Awesomes episode, and it briefly mars "Destination Deading," a solid Awesomes episode that riffs on both Andy Serkis' unexpectedly popular Planet of the Apes prequels and the absurdities of expensive and tedious destination weddings, from $800-a-night hotel rooms to $18 glasses of lemon water.

Recently on Late Night with Seth Meyers, the host told the audience that much of "Destination Deading" was lifted from an Awesomes staff writer's terrible experience as a guest at a destination wedding. "One of the writers said, 'Oh, [the Awesomes] should have to go to a destination wedding, and that will be worse than any supervillain they've ever fought because nothing's worse than when you get invited to a destination wedding.' And what made that hard for me to hear was he had been a guest of mine at my destination wedding," said Meyers.

The Awesomes co-creator's willingness to make fun of himself and own up to the mistakes he and his bride put their wedding guests through ("It was a nightmare. We were awful people," added Meyers) is one of a few reasons why I can't get mad at The Awesomes, even whenever Prock is awkwardly rattling off exposition to himself or when Prock, who's saddled with daddy issues, and his season 2 nemesis Malocchio Jr. (Will Forte)--the Black Canary-inspired accountant son of Malocchio (Hader, terrific as always), season 1's big bad (and now maybe a season 2 ally)--both come off as Venture Bros. lite. Another thing that helps The Awesomes through its rough spots is the simple fact that the members of the Awesomes are likable without being bland, as well as flawed without being as detestable as the characters of Hulu's other animated shows Fugget About It and Mother Up!, which both follow the increasingly hackneyed "let's make everybody an asshole for the sake of shock value" model of animated comedy.

Impresario (Kenan Thompson), a magician-themed hero saddled with a smothering mom (also voiced by Thompson), Concierge (Emily Spivey), Gadget Gal (Paula Pell) and Sumo (Bobby Lee) are my favorites of the team (which, fortunately, is as diverse as Meyers' unexpectedly diverse Late Night writing staff). Impresario's Green Lantern-style constructs always take the shape of his mom, and they're an amusing and effective running gag (Impresario's construct in "Destination Deading" turns into a mash-up of Mom and Godzilla, complete with Japanese lettering beside her). The Awesomes' efficient secretary Concierge--who was promoted to official Awesomes team member in the last episode despite not having any superpowers and was also given a snazzy new jumpsuit to replace her standard secretary outfit--borders on Mary Sue territory. But Spivey--a veteran SNL writer who created and then fled the sinking ship known as Up All Night and was recently involved with the equally troubled How I Met Your Dad pilot that didn't sell--imbues Concierge with a nicely irascible Southern voice that keeps the character from being Blandy McPerfectshoes.

Enjoyable voice work by another veteran SNL writer--Pell, who wrote two of my favorite SNL commercial parodies, Litter Critters and Homocil--also distinguishes Gadget Gal, an elderly heroine in a rejuvenated body that's modeled after the look of the '40s Silk Spectre from Watchmen. And Daily Beast contributor and Jeopardy! champ Arthur Chu has been wishing for an Asian Hulk (after Marvel gender-swapped Thor and made Captain America black) because Hulk's identity crisis reminds him so much of the cultural baggage of being an Asian American male who's constantly stereotyped and emasculated, but Chu clearly hasn't been aware that The Awesomes already features an Asian Hulk. He's in the form of 11-year-old Tim, a.k.a. Sumo, a mash-up of Hulk (brute strength) and Shazam (a little boy in a big guy's body).

Scripted by Dan Levy, "Destination Deading" continues the running joke of everyone on the team (except for Ike Barinholtz's supportive best friend character Muscleman and Taran Killam's deferential-to-Prock speedster Frantic) finding Prock to be a dorky stick in the mud, exemplified in this episode by the schmoopy talk between Prock and his new lawyer girlfriend Jaclyn Stone (Meyers' old Weekend Update partner Amy Poehler). But the team's dislike of Prock's mushy phone conversations with Jaclyn is immediately outweighed by their dislike of the overpriced drinks and suites during the wedding of Muscleman's sister Abby (Meyers' old Chicago improv partner Jill Benjamin), who had an unrequited crush on Prock and isn't quite over him, and David Apelstein, a mild-mannered chiropractor from the ape nation of Apesylvania. An Awesomes episode wouldn't be complete without a battle between superheroes and supervillains, so "Destination Deading" pits the team against the groom's grumpy uncle Elliot Levy-Apelstein (Colin Quinn), who uses his nephew's wedding to plot an ape uprising against humans.

Absent from this episode is Hotwire (Rashida Jones), an Awesomes member who turned out last season to be a reluctant mole for her dad Malocchio and is currently thought to be dead by her teammates, including Prock, who fell in love with her. Rescued off-screen by drunken Teleportation Larry (Bobby Moynihan), Hotwire has kept herself hidden and is pretending to be a male armored hero named Metal Fella. Jones excels at playing awkward--one of my favorite Jones scenes on Parks and Recreation had Ann Perkins trying and failing to bond with Ron Swanson's little stepdaughters--so Hotwire's awkward attempts at dudebro talk with Prock while she was suited up as Metal Fella last week marked the first time that this show has used Jones really well as a voice actor. Also absent from "Destination Deading" is Bob's Burgers voice actor Dan Mintz, who joined the Awesomes writing staff this season and voiced several different side characters in the episode he wrote, "Hotwire's Funeral," so it was kind of bizarre to hear Tina Belcher's voice--which is basically Mintz's normal speaking voice--popping up on another show and emanating from people who don't look like Tina. But "Destination Deading" is worthwhile for nailing the tediousness of weddings, especially destination weddings. "It's like a vacation, but at an inconvenient time, twice as expensive, not where you actually want to go," grumbles Concierge, "and instead of having a vacation, you go to a wedding." I've never been invited to a destination wedding, but if I had to pay $18 for a glass of water, I'd rather stay parched.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (12/26/2012): The best episodes of 2012 (part 1)

The helmeted villain with no name attempts to trim Mike's bangs.

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. There will be no new columns this week and next week due to the holidays and the lack of first-run programming (only Tron: Uprising and Motorcity are first-run because Disney XD chose to burn off the rest of their episodes over the holidays). In a special year-end edition of "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," here are previous reviews of five of my favorite non-Adult Swim cable cartoon episodes from May to December 2012.

Motorcity, "Power Trip" (from May 11, 2012)

Motorcity, the only one out of the five cartoons this week that's not based on a superhero comic for a change, is only two episodes in, and this unlikely collabo between Disney and the not-so-family-friendly Titmouse animation studio (of Metalocalypse and Freaknik: The Musical fame) is already the most inventive and thrilling of the five. It's not a superhero show, yet it's dealing with questions about heroism (and even activism) more interestingly than most cartoons that are actual superhero shows.

In Motorcity's future setting, the socio-economical punching bag that is Detroit has been divided by greedy developer Abraham Kane (Batman: The Animated Series and Metalocalypse vocal MVP Mark Hamill) into two sections, the sparkling-clean, EPCOT-like Detroit Deluxe for the city's most affluent inhabitants and Motorcity, a subterranean ghetto that Kane is plotting to completely bulldoze. Teenage gearhead Mike Chilton (Reid Scott, currently appearing on HBO's Veep as the conceited douche on VP Selina Meyer's staff) has banded together with cowardly hacker and best friend Chuck (Nate Torrence), industrial spy Julie (Kate Micucci) and mechanics Dutch (Kel Mitchell), Texas (Jess Harnell) and Goat Jacob (Brian Doyle-Murray) to prevent Kane and his Shockbots from wiping out Motorcity. These tech-savvy rebels call themselves the Burners. If an older Phineas and Ferb joined Dominic Toretto's crew from the Fast and the Furious movies and then were all forced to live in a dystopic ghetto of the future, it would look something like the Burners.

To borrow a line from the infamous Super Bowl XLVI Chrysler ad where Clint Eastwood big-upped the Detroit auto industry, now Motorcity is fighting again. But will Kane succeed in turning the Burners and the people of Motorcity against Mike, who, like Jacob, used to work for KaneCo? Will the fog, division, discord and blame make it hard for the Burners to see what lies ahead?

Even though Motorcity must have been created by Titmouse honcho Chris Prynoski long before the Occupy movement began (and judging from how much work Titmouse put into making the show's visuals look amazing, it had have to been created that long ago) and Prynoski is more concerned with high-octane action than political allegory, it's hard to ignore how similar the Burners' opposition to Kane is to the struggles of us 99 Percenters. It's about time Occupy protesters got an animated show they can root for and embrace--and of course, watch while being camped out between protests, most likely through Burners-style illegal means that would make Disney's blood boil.

Speaking of Disney, how the hell did a show with a clear disdain for EPCOT-like things manage to get Disney's approval and make it on to a Disney-owned channel?

"When I asked Prynoski about this [satirical] aspect of Motorcity," wrote Jim Hill in his article about Motorcity, "all Chris could do in response was laugh and then say 'I don't think I'm allowed to comment on that. But I will say that you're a very perceptive fellow.'"

For a long time, I found it difficult to get over Cartoon Network's cancellation of the Titmouse-produced Megas XLR, which, like Motorcity, had a bunch of teenage gearheads as the heroes (instead of souped-up hot rods, their ride was a giant robot from the future). I think I'm finally over it. Motorcity is a great substitute, and in some ways, it's an even better show. Sure, there aren't as many amusing pop culture reference gags on Motorcity as there were on Megas XLR, which, for instance, regularly ridiculed MTV for cancelling the Titmouse cult favorite Downtown by destroying a "PopTV" sign in every episode (Roth, a robot named after car customizer Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, and a shout-out to Admiral Ackbar's "It's a trap!" line from Hamill's Star Wars past are as reference-y as Motorcity gets). But the Burners are more interesting characters (I especially enjoyed the matter-of-fact way the "Battle for Motorcity" premiere episode revealed that Julie is Kane's daughter) and more fallible heroes than Megas XLR's Coop, who always triumphed over the Glorft at the end of each episode despite leveling most of New Jersey in the process. On Megas XLR, the destruction of Jersey was a running gag, but on Motorcity, the impact the Burners' battles against Kane have on the fragile ghetto they call home is treated a little more seriously.

This week's "Power Trip" episode, scripted by Megas XLR co-creator George Krstic, features a great scene where the Burners brainstorm how to break into the KaneCo Tower and realize why each of their ideas would suck donkey balls. In that comedic scene and in later moments where characters debate over weaponizing an unstable KaneCo energy source, "Power Trip" deals with how heroism sometimes requires compromise, but without getting preachy about it. Mike gets a KaneCo R&D scientist (Jim Cummings) to steal from Kane an energy core, which would result in Kane's evil empire being shut down once and for all. But even though the energy core is too unstable and dangerous for the Burners to keep around in Motorcity, Mike insists on using it as a weapon, and his stance is met with opposition by Chuck and the scientist. The series isn't afraid to show that while Mike is a great leader, he's also an adrenaline junkie, and his recklessness can be a liability for the people he wants to protect.

In "Battle for Motorcity," the constantly whiny Chuck, who's so squeamish he makes Shaggy from Scooby-Doo look macho, quickly became the show's most grating character. He's still a whiny crybaby in "Power Trip," but luckily, this second episode gives Chuck more to do than just whine, squeal and activate his ejector seat, and in the scenes where the characters express their hesitancy over handling the energy core, we see why Mike values Chuck as the conscience of the group and why Mike needs him to keep him in check (over on Tumblr, several Motorcity fans are already shipping Mike and Chuck as a gay couple, and I wouldn't be surprised if some female viewer somewhere is currently hard at work on her Mike/Chuck slashfic).

(Photo source: People of MotorCity)

I'm making Motorcity sound like a serious show, but it's far from it. It's as wild a ride as that rollercoaster Phineas and Ferb built in their backyard. Disney and Titmouse may turn out to be the most worthwhile partnership between The Mouse and another animation studio since Disney and some little computer graphics company from the Bay Area.

***

Motorcity, "Vendetta" (from June 19, 2012)

Motorcity introduces yet another adversary for the Burners during another solid episode of this finely crafted cartoon, "Vendetta." This time, it's a nameless, red muscle car-driving warrior (Eric Ladin, just recently killed off on The Killing) in a spiked helmet who looks like a rejected Tron: Uprising baddie and is referred to in the end credits only as "Red"--although this mystery man's beef is mainly with Burners leader Mike Chilton. On the one-year anniversary of the day Mike severed ties with Abraham Kane, Red emerges from out of nowhere to take revenge on Mike and eliminate him.

In juicy flashbacks that finally explain what Mike did when he was a KaneCo employee, we learn that he was a cadet in Kane's army of soldiers known as the Ultra Elites. The fact that a businessman assembled an army to guard him and do his dirty work shows how psychotic this particular businessman is.

At the height of Donald Trump's still-continuing racist nonsense about President Obama, Lewis Black did a hilarious Daily Show "Back in Black" segment where he joked that he wants Trump to be the next president because America needs to be run by someone as insane as Muammar Gaddafi and Kim Jong Il. Kane is like a mash-up of Trump's Third World dictator-style craziness and Steve Jobs' technological genius, his dickish treatment of his Apple colleagues and his love of the color white--in the wardrobe and burly body of a douchey gym manager.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (12/19/2012): Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Kaijudo, Dan Vs., Tron: Uprising and Motorcity

And then Elise tore off her clothes and reenacted Sandra Bernhard's crazy monologue from The King of Comedy.

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired. There will be no new column next week due to Christmas. Instead, five previous reviews of the best non-Adult Swim cable cartoon episodes I saw between May and December 2012 will be reposted on December 26.

Back in September, I caught most of the series premiere of Nickelodeon's CG-animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This reboot of the '80s indie comic-turned-cartoon is noteworthy for bringing back to the franchise '80s and '90s TMNT voice actor Rob Paulsen, who, when TMNT exploded as a merchandising phenomenon, was four years away from getting the chance to work with better and funnier animated material as the voices of Yakko, Pinky and Dr. Scratchansniff on Animaniacs (but on this new TMNT, Paulsen voices Donatello instead of his old role of Raphael). I might have liked this TMNT reboot if I were 12, but because I'm not 12, eh, it's not so appealing to me. The only other TMNT episode I've caught is "It Came from the Depths," the latest installment.

(Photo source: TMNTPedia)

Sure, the animation is much more fluid during this CG version and the theme song is 2000s-style lite-rap instead of very '80s lite-rock (little-known fact: the '80s theme, which the new theme lifts its chorus from, was co-written by a then-unknown, pre-Dharma & Greg/Two and a Half Men Chuck Lorre), but otherwise, the Ninja Turtles aren't much different from the Ninja Turtles I first saw (and tolerated) as a kid. They still fight like Japanese swordsmen and talk like white dudes. They're still obsessed with pizza, a joke that wasn't funny in 1988 and still isn't funny in 2012.

However, there's one genuinely funny gag during "It Came from the Depths," and it has nothing to do with the episode's boring plot, which reintroduces mutant alligator Leatherhead, a Killer Croc-ish character from the old show. Ninja Turtles leader Leonardo (Jason Biggs) is a fan of Space Heroes, a popular sci-fi cartoon that's a mash-up of Filmation's barely animated version of Star Trek from the '70s--a show I first caught on Nickelodeon!--and Hanna-Barbera's Sealab 2020. The cel-animated clip of Space Heroes is a great animation industry in-joke from episode director Juan Meza-Leon about how stiff and crappy the animation looked on the Trek cartoon. The Space Heroes clip even resembles an actual episode of the Trek cartoon, "More Tribbles, More Troubles" (but here, the Tribbles make honking noises instead of purring sounds and are called "Trumpets"). They even nailed the Trek cartoon's strange, Ingmar Bergman-esque two-shots of Kirk and Spock! That was one of Filmation's famously lazy-ass ways of restricting the animation to just mouth and eyebrow movements.

(Photo source: TMNTPedia)

Aside from that terrific little spoof of the Trek cartoon, Nick's TMNT isn't a show I'll be revisiting. The controversy surrounding Biggs' involvement in the show is more interesting than the show itself. The American Pie star has an off-color and not-exactly-Nick-audience-friendly Twitter account where he tweets racist jokes about Indian American spelling bee contestants and raunchy ones about Ann Romney and Paul Ryan's wife (what else would you expect from a guy who became famous for sticking his dick in a pie?). During the week of the Republican National Convention, Fox News anchor and pepper spray expert Megyn Kelly reacted to Biggs' tweets about the Romney and Ryan wives by yelling, "Off with his head!" Nick ended up apologizing for Biggs' RNC tweets and "our mistake to link from our Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles twitter feed to Jason's personal twitter account" and yadda yadda. So Nick apologizes when the GOP whines about Biggs' anti-Republican jokes, but the channel's silent about the racist jokes he cracked a couple of months before about Indian kids? Ninja please.

***

As someone who got involved in writing a few pieces of Asian American fiction (one published, the others either unpublished, unfinished or read by barely anybody) to help take away the power of the Jason Biggses of the world, I think it's kind of sad that the only current action show with an Asian American lead as the main hero is a kids' cartoon where he's voiced by Scott Wolf and the heroes cheesily shout aloud reverbed I-have-the-power incantations like "Tatsurion the Unchained!" and "Scaradorable of Gloom Hollow!," a kids' show-ism that usually makes me fumble for my remote. I initially didn't think I'd be able to withstand the TV-Y7-rated Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters, but in spite of its kids' show-isms and occasionally clunky dialogue, the Hasbro Studios cartoon has grown on me. The fact that it's rather nicely animated by the Korean studio MOI instead of poorly animated like the '80s versions of G.I. Joe and Transformers sort of helps, along with little touches like the attention to Ray's biracial background, the lead duo's names of Bob and Ray (c'mon, man, that's gotta be a shout-out to Chris Elliott's dad and his late comedy partner!) and Bob's words to Ray when he wishes him luck in part 2 of "The Rising," the first-season finale.

"Don't forget: bob and weave," says Bob, a.k.a. Tatsurion, to Ray in a rousing callback to the battle instruction from Ray that was misunderstood so badly by Tatsurion in the series premiere that it wound up becoming his nickname.

Ray doesn't kill his cruel nemesis the Choten like I wanted him to, but with the help of the other Duel Masters, their kaiju sidekicks, a resurrected Sasha (Kari Wahlgren) and even his newly-outed-as-a-Duelist mom, Ray's able to foil the Choten's season-long plan to open the Veil that the Order of the Duel Masters keeps sealed in order to protect Earth from the creature realm. Alakshmi (Grey DeLisle), the Shane Vendrell of Kaijudo, continues to get screwed over, even after finally wising up about her evil boss and deciding to help Gabe thwart him. She's rewarded for her moment of clarity by winding up a prisoner in the Fire Civilization, where the Fire God excites a coliseum full of bloodthirsty Fire Civilization creatures by declaring war on Earth.

In another set-up for season 2, the Choten, now trapped in the creature realm with his henchmen and his new ally Nigel Brightmore, hatches another plan: to conquer the realm from the other side of the Veil. Meanwhile, the Order chooses the no-longer-inept Gabe as the new Light Civilization Master to replace the traitorous Nigel, and Ray must deal with losing his dad Ken again, but he's unaware that Ken is alive and was rescued by Water Civilization creatures. Also, Masters Chavez (Freddy Rodriguez) and Nadia (also DeLisle) stop playing timid and finally express their feelings for each other (as do Ray and Allie, but less overtly) to cap off a season-long romantic subplot that consisted of nothing but very minimal dialogue and strange electricity between Chavez and Nadia whenever the Choten's attacks forced them to be huddled together in tight corners.

Of course, nobody watches Kaijudo to see these humans make out. We tune in mainly to see kaiju wreak havoc on each other, and "The Rising, Part 2" delivers plenty of kaiju rampaging on each other (and emerging from the opened Veil to attack Earth during some of my favorite epic shots of the series), although Guillermo del Toro's robots-vs.-kaiju epic Pacific Rim, which hasn't been released yet but has just dropped an amazing-looking trailer, is already making Kaijudo look like a bunch of rough notebook doodles.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (07/24/2012): Motorcity, Gravity Falls, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Avengers and Regular Show

A typically serene moment in J. Jonah Jameson's office

Each Tuesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

According to an angry asian man post last week, at the recent 2012 San Diego Comic-Con, the Hasbro-owned Hub family channel, the home of the surprise hit My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, passed out fortune cookies with racist "Ching chong a-ling long" messages inside (a Hub network exec later publicly apologized for the racist cookies). Isn't the hero of The Hub's Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters, a cartoon I've sometimes covered in this column, a half-Asian kid who has to put up with racist bullying?

Way to be as tolerant as one of your own original shows, Hub. If the channel formerly known as Discovery Kids disappeared tomorrow from my DirecTV channel roster like all the Viacom channels temporarily did during the carriage dispute between Viacom and DirecTV last week, I wouldn't bat an eye, even though legendary voice actor and current Motorcity big bad Mark Hamill is now one of the station announcers. The Hub is now that inessential to me.

Open your fortune cookie, Hub. The message inside says, "In two years, you'll end up being a 24-hour infomercial channel and then totally falter." In bed.

***

Jen's sleeves. That's what first caught my eye during Downtown when the animated sitcom aired too briefly on MTV in 1999.

Jen from Downtown

The baggy sweater-wearing Asian American tomboy's overlong sleeves also happened to be the first bit of character business that made me take notice of the distinctive animation style of the studio I later learned was called Titmouse, when studio co-founder Shannon Prynoski wrote on my guestbook (aw, guestbooks--remember those?) in 2004 to tell me she's a fan of my radio station A Fistful of Soundtracks. I e-mailed her back to say I enjoyed Downtown, as well as the hallucination sequence her studio animated for Beavis and Butt-head Do America, and she said she tuned into AFOS late at night while working on a then-upcoming Cartoon Network show called Megas XLR.

After first learning about Megas from her, I became a fan of Titmouse's work and have followed most of the studio's output since Megas, from the occasional Metalocalypse rerun to Freaknik: The Musical and now, the animated version of Black Dynamite and Motorcity. I haven't watched an entire Downtown episode in 13 years (I know that the show can be YouTubed, and its creator, Shannon's husband Chris, found a clever way to make the entire series available to its fans, but I keep putting off re-watching it), and I've forgotten all the dialogue from Downtown since then, but I've never forgotten Jen's sleeves because that's the inventiveness of Titmouse in a nutshell.

Subtle character animation has always been Titmouse's forte, and Motorcity's "Off the Rack" episode is filled with plenty of it, which is why I'm kind of frustrated that Disney XD delayed the episode until last Thursday night. If "Off the Rack" feels like an episode from earlier in Motorcity's run, that's because it's the sixth one produced by Titmouse (we're 11 episodes into Motorcity's 20-episode season), and Disney XD has been airing Motorcity episodes out of order.

Shuffling the episode order is a network business decision I don't always understand. The practice, which I first noticed back when Fox unveiled Batman: The Animated Series' first few episodes in 1992 (the first episode that ever aired, a Catwoman story, was actually the 13th one produced), makes less and less sense in an age when time-shifted viewing is making both the Nielsen ratings system and ratings-driven business decisions increasingly irrelevant. NBC did it with Homicide: Life on the Street in its first season because they didn't think the bottle episode "Night of the Dead Living," one of the earliest episodes that was filmed, would hook viewers like the season's slightly more higher-stakes episodes (like the "Gone for Goode" pilot or "Three Men and Adena") would, so they banished it to later in the season.

Delaying "Night of the Dead Living" was an odd move because I ended up finding that bottle episode (an abandoned baby at the precinct brings out sides of the cop characters we'd never seen before) to be more fascinating and rewatchable than most of the first season's other higher-stakes episodes. This wasn't the last time NBC would eff around with Homicide's episode order. Two seasons later, a similar airdate shuffle resulted in the death of a major character (Jon Polito's conspiracy-theory-obsessed Steve Crosetti) being inadvertently spoiled a few weeks before NBC aired the episode that revealed his demise.

In a less older example, Fox shuffled Firefly's intended order because they wanted to make the Joss Whedon show more appealing to the kinds of viewers they wanted to attract. The network wasn't satisfied with the Firefly pilot as a premiere episode (Fox felt the pilot had too much woe-is-me and not enough derring-do, according to the A.V. Club), so they asked Whedon to come up with a more action-packed premiere. The episode switch didn't pay off. Fox cancelled Firefly a few weeks later due to low ratings, and the show ended up becoming more popular on DVD.

Motorcity isn't serialized like Homicide was, so when Disney XD shuffles episodes around, it's not as disastrous as the Crosetti mishap, but it's still noticeable, like in "Blond Thunder" and "Off the Rack," which throws an intriguing monkey wrench into Julie Kane's efforts to hide her parentage from the Burners while also hiding her allegiance to her freedom fighter friends from her evil businessman father Abraham Kane. Julie's jeopardized double life is the kind of dramatic predicament that usually pops up early on in an action show's run to basically say to the viewers, "And these are the stakes! Stake it up! Stake it up! Stake it up!" (her parentage was revealed in the first episode, and as I said before, "Off the Rack" was sixth in Titmouse's production order). So it's bizarre and off-putting to see Disney XD delay that kind of story (which was written by George Krstic, who, as we saw in "Power Trip" and "Going Dutch," is great at raising the show's stakes) to a point in the season that's later than when Titmouse intended.

The monkey wrench into Julie's balancing act is the new Safe-T-Suit that Kane has implemented on each of his KaneCo employees, including Julie, who works as an intern for her father and is using her access to spy on his plans. The Safe-T-Suit is the latest advancement in protective wear ("Stability magnets, collar side airbags, safety form parachute pants!"). With just a push of a button on a special ring that's similar to that ring the Flash carries around his red costume in, the suit self-inflates from out of the ring and completely covers the wearer, and then it can easily fold itself back into the ring when the wearer wants to deactivate it.

(Photo source: Hair Nets and Dog Food)

But because this is Abraham Kane we're talking about here, he's secretly designed the suit so that he can hack into any suit and manipulate via Minority Report-style interfaces the movements of whichever employee is wearing a suit ring, mainly to prevent disgruntled employees from defecting Detroit Deluxe. Kane's external control is like bloodbending on The Legend of Korra, but without the creepy bone-grinding sound FX and the anguished faces in which the victims look like they're on the toilet, taking the world's most painful deuce. When his scanners alert him that a suit has been deployed outside of Detroit Deluxe and inside Motorcity, Kane deduces from the suit's hidden camera footage that a Burner has stolen it, and he activates the external control.

The tyrannical tycoon forcibly summons the Burner back to KaneCo Tower for punishment without realizing that the Burner inside the suit is his own daughter (the camera is--rather conveniently--unable to adjust its own lens so that Kane can see her face). Julie feels guilty over missing out on a recent Burners battle against her evil dad's Sector Enforcer Drones because of the duties that her cover at KaneCo entails. She bristles when Texas questions her loyalty to the Burners and calls her "Miss Deluxe" again like he did in "Ride the Lightning." So she attempts to make up for her absence by heading off to attack the Enforcer Drone factory on her own with the help of her suit's abilities, right when her dad unknowingly bloodbends her.

(Photo source: Hair Nets and Dog Food)

The technobabble-heavy resolution to the suit crisis is a bit convoluted. After Chuck helps Texas rescue from external control mode Julie's best friend Claire (the animators somehow work into the mayhem a hilarious, how-did-this-make-it-onto-Disney-XD? shot of Chuck accidentally sitting on Texas' face), Chuck eagerly hugs the girl he's had a crush on, and the hug's disabling of the suit makes him realize the suit can be shut down if its "protection threshold" is overloaded. Wouldn't it be easier to just slip the rings off the workers' fingers and shut down the suits that way? However, the visuals before and after the resolution are some of the most amazing shots this series has ever done. Mike Chilton may despise the sterile city he used to work in, but Detroit Deluxe looks mighty spiffy during the moment when Kane hijacks hundreds of his employees' suits all at once and activates "dive mode" to unleash a swarm of these frightened-looking human missiles on Mike's car Mutt. And then just when I thought the "dive mode" shot of the red flood of KaneCo workers swarming on Mutt was the episode's visual highlight, "Off the Rack" immediately tops it with shots of a Katamari Damacy-style "human ball" that Kane forms out of the workers' bodies to squash the Burners' rides.

(Photo source: Hair Nets and Dog Food)

Another visual highlight in "Off the Rack" is the aforementioned subtle character animation, especially for Julie (and Claire too, when she expresses her enthusiasm over receiving the suit). Because this is her spotlight episode, Julie does a lot of running around and spying here (she gets to reenact the "Tom Cruise dangles from a wire" heist scene from the first Mission: Impossible movie). I don't know if it's because it's cable and not Saturday morning network TV--so cartoon studios aren't forced to work under production schedules that were stricter back when ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC were in charge of cartoons, and the animation work back then was really cookie-cutter as a result--but this series, particularly during "Off the Rack," is loaded with stunning feature film-quality animation, which was such a rarity to see on the small screen back when I was a Batman: The Animated Series-watching teen.

(Photo source: Hair Nets and Dog Food)

The Ovation channel has lately been repeating Frank and Ollie, director Theodore Thomas' 1995 documentary about the legendary Disney studio partnership between his father Frank Thomas and his fellow animator Ollie Johnston, and though I'm not a Disney fan, the doc has made me better appreciate the subtle character animation that the duo was known for. Thomas and Johnston's animation style lives on in amusing tics that the Titmouse animators have given to the Motorcity characters, like the self-confident and headstrong Julie's frequent tic of resting her hand on her hip, even when she's in multiple-hologram form when she uses her trusty holographic gadget to confuse adversaries.

"I really dug animating Julie doing spy stuff... and it's made all the sweeter when the action ramps up later ([animator] Ben Li is amazing)," posted Titmouse animator Parker Simmons on Tumblr about "Off the Rack." He added, "Julie is definitely one of my favorite characters to animate when she's in confident sweetheart mode, not schoolmarm mode."

And that's another thing I enjoyed about "Off the Rack." In several episodes, Julie, whose secret double life I've been waiting to get more of a glimpse of ever since the premiere, has done nothing more than act as a schoolmarm to Mike or Texas when she's not engaged in battle or tossing her boomerang at Kanebots, so it's great to see her intensely driven character fleshed out a bit more. We've never seen Julie look frightened before. Kanebots don't scare her. What scares her more is losing control over her double life.

She's also not the screamy type--that would be Chuck--so it's surprising to see her scream for the first time in the series, when her dad hijacks her suit to make her steal Mutt from Mike and drive away to KaneCo Tower at a speed so insanely high it would make David Letterman piss his pants. But Julie quickly learns to keep her cool, and she regains her smile when Mike busts into his own car to help her out and her dad makes her repeatedly punch Mike in the shoulder. Both Julie's nicely drawn expressions while she's trapped inside the suit and the suit design itself made me think of Jen's overlong sleeves.

(Photo source: Hair Nets and Dog Food)

It all amazingly ties back to Jen's sleeves.

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.

TV math

That line about all Asians enjoying math is bullshit because not all of us enjoy it. I hate math because I've always sucked at it. I barely remember how to do algebra anymore--that's how much I adore math. I took my own difficulties with math and made that trait a part of the backstory of the heroine I created for Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology. If us Filipinos were great at math, we wouldn't be making so many damn boneheaded decisions when it comes to money, business or real estate.

I may suck at math, but I'm good at TV math, as you can see from these December 3, 2010 tweets I'm reposting. I got bored on Twitter one morning and started talking in nothing but TV math equations.

Evangeline Lilly

+ @MeganSCDP =

that hot chick in the T-Mobile myTouch 4G commercials
11:07 AM Dec 3rd

Robotech

+ the '90s MTV animated series Downtown

+ (the Clerks franchise minus the bestiality) =

the much-missed Megas XLR
11:15 AM Dec 3rd

Voltron

+ Bring It On

+ (The Powers of Matthew Star minus the sight of Louis Gossett Jr. slumming it) =

Sym-Bionic Titan
11:18 AM Dec 3rd

(28 Days Later minus fast zombies) + slow zombies + all the bickering scenes from Lost = AMC's adaptation of The Walking Dead
11:08 AM Dec 3rd

Early '90s-era Usher + the baritone of a teenage Wayne Newton + awful songwriting + Linda Evangelista's hair = Justin Bieber
11:09 AM Dec 3rd

Kelly Brook boobage + MTV Spring Break coverage reimagined by a Gorezone reader + (Jerry O'Connell minus his dick) = Piranha 3D #FilmMath
11:11 AM Dec 3rd

(The live-action Scooby-Doo minus the Scooby cast) + the Yogi cast + Hanna or Barbera spinning in his grave = that Yogi Bear movie #FilmMath
11:13 AM Dec 3rd

(Northern Exposure minus almost all the Indians) + the intellect of a bag of hammers + a train wreck = Sarah Palin's Alaska on TLC
11:20 AM Dec 3rd

Hollywood, leave the '80s cartoons alone

Because of the success of Transformers, movie studios have moved on from filming mediocre features based on sitcoms (Bewitched, The Honeymooners) to making equally mediocre projects based on cartoons from the '80s, a rather lousy era for animation (except for Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, I can't think of an '80s cartoon that ever approached the caliber of later shows like The Simpsons or Batman: The Animated Series). New Regency wants to launch its own Transformers-like franchise with Voltron, while Italian Job remake co-stars Mark Wahlberg and Jason Statham are rumored to be reuniting for a G.I. Joe film. Tobey Maguire's production company just bought the film rights to Robotech, the Roots of mecha cartoons (trying to squeeze Robotech into a two-and-a-half-hour live-action feature would be like trying to make a two-and-a-half-hour film out of, well, Roots). News items about long-delayed Thundercats and He-Man adaptations continue to haunt viewers like me who grew up watching those cartoons but don't think they've aged well--or would make for great live-action films either.

The He-Man franchise already blew it once with Cannon Films' 1987 Dolph Lundgren vehicle Masters of the Universe. The Mattel higher-ups expressed their shame about releasing toys that contain dangerous amounts of lead. If only they were equally apologetic about the Masters of the Universe movie, which isn't as poisonous but can induce seizures in viewers who are unable to sit through a Cannon Film, especially one that features so many flashy and annoying laser ray effects.

Hollywood needs to stop turning to the RetroJunk site for movie ideas. If there's one animated series that I'd like to see adapted to film--hell, I'd just be glad to see it return in any form other than comics--it'd be the lesser-known Megas XLR (2004-05), a too-short-lived Cartoon Network giant robot spoof that was sharper and more entertaining than the '80s cartoons it parodied. (Titmouse, the studio that created Megas, is currently busy producing Adult Swim's delightfully gory Metalocalypse.)

Megas is the story of Coop Cooplowski, a Jersey schlub who stumbles upon the future's most coveted superweapon--a giant robot that its time-traveling female pilot, Kiva, hid in Earth's past from extraterrestrial baddies. A live-action Megas movie would be the perfect vehicle for Tyler Labine, a scene-stealing veteran of good but short-lived shows like Dead Last, Kevin Hill and Invasion (hopefully, Labine's much-buzzed-about Reaper won't join that list). Labine was born to play Coop, and he even sounds like David DeLuise (Dom's son), who voiced the lazy but bright gearhead on the cartoon. Megas' Kevin Smith-meets-Robotech premise has tons of potential as a live-action feature (unless any one of the filmmaking geniuses listed in the A.V. Club's "10 Directors You Didn't Know You Hated" article gets his mitts on Megas--then the movie's really in trouble), and unlike the overlong, overstuffed Transformers, it wouldn't take over an hour for the lead robot to finally appear.