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| A typically serene moment in J. Jonah Jameson's office |
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?
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.
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Jen's sleeves. That's what first caught my eye during Downtown when the animated sitcom aired too briefly on MTV in 1999.
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| Jen from Downtown |
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.
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| (Photo source: Hair Nets and Dog Food) |
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.
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| (Photo source: Hair Nets and Dog Food) |
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| (Photo source: Hair Nets and Dog Food) |
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| (Photo source: Hair Nets and Dog Food) |
"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.
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| (Photo source: Hair Nets and Dog Food) |
