5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (06/19/2012): Motorcity, ThunderCats, Dan Vs., Kaijudo and Ultimate Spider-Man

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

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.

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.

Mike was one of Kane's most obedient cadets, and on the day the sinister Detroit Deluxe developer promoted him to lieutenant, he gave Mike his first mission to supervise: the demolition of a Motorcity tenement building. But when Mike discovered that Kane lied to him about the building being abandoned--it was actually still full of tenants inside--he realized Kane's evilness and walked away from his job. Mike was able to save the tenants' lives, but he wasn't able to save their home from the wrecking ball.

One of the residents who ended up homeless also happened to be Red, who blames Mike for the loss of his home. As a reminder to Mike of what he failed to save, Red has his armor emblazoned with the dual-triangle insignia that KaneCo marked on the building for demolition. "Vendetta" never really divulges Red's identity (Kane calls him "son" when he presents him with a job offer in the final scene, so I initially thought Red is Kane's son--and therefore, the brother of Burners member Julie--while another theory I had was that he's Mike's blond-haired cadet friend from the flashbacks, but his voice isn't the same as Red's).

Mike asks his new (and rather standoffish) underworld ally, the Duke of Detroit (Dee Snider), if he knows the whereabouts of Racer X. The Duke has no idea who this mystery man is either, but he's a little more helpful when it comes to the Burners' other current predicament, Kane's robomites, tiny robots that feed on metal and quickly multiply. Julie's father made cars illegal in both Detroit Deluxe and Motorcity, and now he's invented robomites to infest Motorcity and deprive the Burners of their cherished rides, as well as destroy the plumbing and housing in the subterranean city.

The Duke, who's worried that the mites will munch on the cars in his mansion and junkyards, supplies the Burners with a surplus of iron in the form of an inexplicably gigantic cube, which the team uses to lure the wafer-sized bots away from the Ambassador Bridge, old Detroit's biggest hunk of iron, and other parts of Motorcity. The Burners spray the block of iron with a corrosive oxidizing agent to poison the mites, which frighten the hell out of the Burners' squeaking robot assistant Roth, even though Roth is made mostly of polymer (copped from KaneCo robot parts by Burners tinkerer Dutch) rather than metal. But the mites are nowhere as frightening as the snack baked by older Burners member Jacob to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Mike's conversion to heroism: okra-mayonnaise muffins.

Texas has become Motorcity's breakout character because of his dumb-jock dialogue (he even refers to himself in the third person like many sports celebrities do), but he isn't always this Keanu-esque Asian jock whose solution for everything is sweet Muay Thai kicks, and he can be quite perceptive when his ego isn't in the way. In this episode, Texas gets to act as a voice of reason when Mike expresses to him his guilt over not having been more aware of Kane's evilness when he worked for him. He tells Mike that his late realization about his tyranny is understandable because a master manipulator like Kane makes it difficult for people to see his true agenda, and then he says, "You've got to stop thinking about what you didn't do and start thinking about what you're doing to save people now."

(Photo source: Latia I. Am)

No one in cartoon voice acting does rage quite like Mark Hamill, and while he's terrific as Kane (he was downright menacing when Kane shook Julie around like a rag doll and barked at her in the "Battle for Motorcity" premiere episode), the character has tended to be a one-note villain who does nothing but sneer and rant and lash out at his underlings. (I bet Motorcity creator Chris Prynoski gave Kane's dumbass underling the name Tooley as a shout-out to both Harley Quinn from Hamill's Batman: The Animated Series days and the distinctive way Hamill would put the accent on "Har-LEEEY!!!" whenever The Joker would bark at her. I've noticed Hamill, who's been reunited with his Batman voice director Andrea Romano on this show, does that same accent thing when he yells "Too-LEEEY!!!")

But in the flashbacks in "Vendetta," Hamill gets to tone Kane down a bit and show a more subtle and fatherly side to him, which illustrates Texas' later point about Kane being such an effective enemy because of how he lured to his side good people like Mike, Jacob and the R&D scientist from "Power Trip." I also like how in the flashbacks, "Vendetta" writer John O'Bryan doesn't hold back in turning Kane into the cruelest Disney villain since Scar from The Lion King. Ordering the demolition of a tenement building with residents still inside and without even letting them know that they should evacuate? Wow, that's as vile as an okra-mayonnaise muffin.

***

Revenge is also on the mind of Pumyra (Pamela Adlon), who actually died during Mumm-Ra's destruction of Thundera and has been working for the ThunderCats' nemesis ever since he called on the Ancient Spirits to resurrect her, as the conclusion of ThunderCats' two-part "What Lies Above" finale reveals. She wants Lion-O to suffer for not saving her and has been spying on the ThunderCats for Mumm-Ra.

The Tech Stone, which the ThunderCats tried and failed to borrow from the bird people to defeat Mumm-Ra, winds up in the hands of their nemesis, thanks to the efforts of Pumyra, who's also Mumm-Ra's lover. Thanks a lot, ThunderCats, for putting in my head the disgusting (and most likely Frank Ocean-soundtracked) picture of what Pumyra does with her extremely elderly sugar daddy when they're not plotting to conquer Third Earth.