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."

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (02/06/2013): Archer, Green Lantern, Young Justice, Robot Chicken and Adventure Time

Best Super Bowl beer ad ever.

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.

The first minute of "Legs" is a thing of comedic-editing beauty and an atypical way for Archer to kick off a cold open. It centers not on Archer or a bunch of the major players in the same room but on secondary character Ray and his frustrating morning routine ever since Archer's crash-landing of the escape craft at the end of last season left the gay agent paralyzed (for real this time, after he pretended to be paralyzed for much of the third season).

The sight of Ray struggling with his medical bills and the difficulties that come with being actually paralyzed--like having to relieve himself in a plastic bag--is slightly reminiscent of a much more somber montage during Ed (the Tom Cavanagh lawyer show, not the Matt LeBlanc baseball monkey shitpile), in which handicapped cast member Daryl "Chill" Mitchell, whose character on Ed was wheelchair-bound Eli, wordlessly demonstrated how much longer it takes for a disabled person to get out of bed and change clothes. But because this isn't Ed, where the characters were far less irritable, cynical and TV-MA-mouthed, Ray is grumbling aloud to himself while getting ready for work and cursing Archer, "the other shitbag in my life." Ray is like the long-suffering Frank Grimes to Archer's oblivious Homer Simpson, and this episode's subtlest and cruelest joke (but not as cruel as the countless ways Meg's been humiliated on Family Guy) is that even in an episode where Ray gets to drive much of the story's events, he ends up sidelined for most of it, due to undergoing surgery to receive robotic legs from Krieger.

Despite being a bottle episode, "Legs" is a shining moment for the show's editors. Besides that cold open about Ray's crappy morning, they also demonstrate their editing skills through that "cutting away from one conversation to another so that it sounds like the character in the next scene is replying from faraway" device Archer deploys, but rarely to the extent that the show does in this episode. (The funniest of these gags cuts away from Cyril asking Lana if Terminator cyborgs are asexual to Krieger in mid-conversation with Pam while operating on Ray: "Not when I'm done with him.") It's fitting that "Legs" makes use of this choppy comedic device so often because Ray is being rebuilt in a similar (and much gorier) way.

Word of Ray's surgery causes Archer's fear of robots to resurface, which distracts him from heading to Rome with Lana and Cyril for an ISIS mission. Convinced that the robot apocalypse is near, Archer defies uptight ISIS armory supervisor Rodney and collects an array of weapons from the armory. He tries to thwart the surgical operation by himself, while Krieger races against time to finish Ray's new legs before Archer can burst in and ruin Ray's legs again.

Archer is that rare spy show where the hero occasionally becomes the villain, not because of mind control or brainwashing by some adversary but because he's simply an immature prick. When Archer fires a rocket launcher inside the armory and becomes a danger to the office building, Lana takes up the task of stopping Archer and gets to outwit him while he crawls through ducts like a typical, post-Die Hard '90s action hero. She has a repairman overheat the building's furnace, which causes Archer to doze off. Lana vs. Archer is always an amusing rivalry, whether she's verbally sparring with him in other episodes or pitted against him strategically like in "Legs" (most of her verbal sparring here is with Cyril rather than Archer). But both Archer and Lana wind up looking stupid at the end of "Legs" because Archer is also that rare spy show where the female spy who's supposedly more competent than the lead character sometimes screws up when she gets her chance to step up. Two days after she stops Archer from wreaking further havoc in the building, Lana realizes she forgot to turn off the furnace and let him out of the ducts.

Overheated furnace/ginormous heating bill screw-up aside, Lana and Krieger have helped Ray to receive something the ill-fated Frank Grimes never got: a happy ending. Ray regains the use of his legs--that is until the next time Archer causes him to end up paralyzed again. Because this is Archer, chaos reigns. On this show, happy endings don't last like chaos does--and are not as entertaining.

Stray observations:
* Ray: "I piss and shit in a plastic bag!" Krieger: "Me too!"

* According to Cheryl/Carol's dialogue with Archer about cyborgs, the show takes place in a universe where the Voight-Kampff machine from Blade Runner is now apparently a household item (extra points to Archer for not having Cheryl/Carol awkwardly point out it's from Blade Runner for the folks in the audience who never saw the film). The Voight-Kampff test ought to be used on reality TV stars like Kim Kardashian to confirm that they're all really machines because when most of these attention whore-bots cry on-camera, they don't look like normal people crying--they look like Cameron the Terminator when she creepily imitated human grief during Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

* Someone finally came up with the brilliant idea of giving Krieger and the equally crazy Pam a bunch of scenes together. Krieger's form of crazy is rarely in sync with Pam's form of crazy, except for when Pam, the world's worst nurse, asks Krieger if she was supposed to scrub up before surgery. His answer is "Eh, I didn't."

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (01/30/2013): Archer, Green Lantern, Bob's Burgers, Tron: Uprising and American Dad

Archer's latest episode recaptures the most exciting part of Skyfall: the scenes where they filled out paperwork.

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.

After Archer's entertaining crossover with Bob's Burgers, the FX cartoon sort of crosses over with another show I love, FX's Justified, by borrowing its star (Timothy Olyphant) and one of its staff writers (Chris Provenzano) for "The Wind Cries Mary." Olyphant, whose comedic chops on Justified are frequently overlooked (even at the A.V. Club, of all places), blends in quite well with the twisted Archer universe while voicing eternal frat-boy Lucas Troy, Archer's previously unmentioned best friend and an operative from ISIS' rival agency ODIN who may not be as trustworthy--or as straight--as Archer deems him to be.

I love it when a show suddenly introduces some important buddy from the main character's past who's never been brought up by the lead before, and then after one episode or, in the case of Steve Buscemi's Tony Blundetto on The Sopranos, an entire season, we never see his ass again. The original Star Trek did it all the time, Jim Rockford would be frequently visited by war buddies we'd never hear from again (and not even on that answering machine of his), that beloved teammate of Sam Malone's who came out of the closet in a tell-all book he promoted at Cheers never dropped by the bar again for another beer and so on. I wish "The Wind Cries Mary" would have poked a little more fun at this old trope of the previously unmentioned BFF, besides making this bestie turn out to be gay for Archer (and no one else). But as usual on Archer, there are so many killer lines from cold open to finish (and also, welcome back, workplace humor that's been absent for a couple of episodes) that whatever gripes I have about the episode end up--like "the life that lived" in the Jimi Hendrix tune this episode cops its title from--dead.

Stray observations:
* Ringtone gags in sitcoms always suck, but somehow, only Archer manages to make them work. Archer's choice of "Danger Zone" as his ringtone is as predictable as his frequently ridiculed choice of sidearm.

* I enjoyed this line Archer utters to himself because I once considered enrolling in the two-year Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont and then Googled small-town Vermont and thought, nah, that hood's not for me: "Vermont has liquor stores, right? Yeah, they have to. It sucks there."

* Pam: "So why are these damn peer reviews so hard?! Only like 10 people work in this whole goddamn chickenshit outfit!" That'd be dope if Pam punctuated one or two other lines this season with mic drops, using the same battered-looking mic she dropped at the end of that "chickenshit outfit" line.

* Archer: "There's, uh, there's kind of a lot of blood down there." A dying Lucas: "Said your mom."

* Lucas: "I only did it because I wanted us to be together. Forever." Lana, off-screen: "Called it!" Off-screen, two-to-three-word asides about someone's sex life have been a favorite comedic device of mine ever since NewsRadio once built a great running gag out of Catherine thinking Lisa was trying to seduce Dave for new office supplies, so she continually goaded Lisa on to shake her stuff for Dave.

* Whoever drew Lana's expression during the episode-closing awkward ride home after Luke's half-finished deathbed confession deserves some sort of nod for Outstanding Achievement in Animating Appalled Expressions.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (10/03/2012): Gravity Falls, Green Lantern, Young Justice, Adventure Time and Regular Show

The Kanye West/Big Sean/Pusha T/2 Chainz track "Mercy" isn't about Mercy Graves, but it ought to be. (Photo source: Young Justice Wiki)

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.

Lil' Gideon Gleeful (Thurop Van Orman), the psychic entertainer kid who didn't take rejection from his temporary girlfriend Mabel too well in Gravity Falls' "Hand That Rocks the Mabel" episode, returns to menace the Pines family in "Little Dipper." This time, the creepy, porcine-nosed Gideon gets his grubby hands on a magical height-altering crystal that Dipper's attached to a flashlight and shone at himself to make himself a millimeter taller than his twin sister Mabel (Dipper's been bummed out lately by Mabel's delight over the fact that she's the taller twin--by a millimeter).

This week's Gravity Falls cryptogram is "gsv rmerhryov draziw rh dzgxsrmt." The decoded result is "The invisible wizard is watching." (Photo source: Gravity Falls Wiki)

Gideon uses the crystal to shrink Dipper and Mabel and hold them hostage as part of his plan to take over the Mystery Shack, the tourist trap run by his business rival Stan, the twins' great-uncle (I like how Grunkle Stan is such a dick to Gideon throughout this episode). The pompadoured little jerk, who comes complete with a fawning stage dad (Stephen Root) who runs a shady car dealership to support Gideon's popular act, is shaping up to be a great--and original--Disney villain and is an especially relevant meanie in this age of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and similar reality shows where talentless and annoying fame-whore kids are let loose by scummy stage parents who live vicariously through them. I don't think I've ever seen a Disney villain before who scares his or her mother in the same way that Gideon petrifies Mrs. Gleeful (Grey DeLisle), who's always seen cleaning the house and avoiding making eye contact with her domineering and hot-tempered son. "Just keep vacuuming," mutters Mrs. Gleeful to herself repeatedly at one point.

(Photo source: Gravity Falls Wiki)

In addition to being a fun villainy-heavy episode of Gravity Falls (I hate the term "shipping," so I'm not going to use it, but I think Gideon and another villain on the show, mean girl Pacifica Northwest, are made for each other), "Little Dipper" is also a good Dipper/Mabel story. Dipper's climactic realization that he's been a jerk to his sister (she's been hurt by his tendency to gloat over how he's better than her at everything, and height is the one thing where she's discovered she has an advantage over him) exemplifies why his dialogue with Mabel has resonated so much with Gravity Falls' biggest fans. Gravity Falls creator/showrunner Alex Hirsch took the traits of his own twin sister Ariel and used them to form Mabel's sunny personality, her love of both quirky sweaters and pea-brained animals (speaking of which, I enjoy how this show animates the dumbness of Gideon's inattentive hamster Cheekums and Mabel's pig Waddles, who's absent in this episode) and her interaction with Dipper.

"I've read countless comments on Tumblr, on Twitter, on message boards where people are saying, 'Thank you, thank you for showing a sibling relationship where they're not just sniping and hating on each other all the time,'" said Hirsch in a recent A.V. Club interview where he discussed viewers' enthusiastic responses to Dipper's scenes with Mabel. "When I started the show, I didn't originally begin with a conscious effort to do that. My conscious effort was, 'Oh, I want to make it like me and my sister, and I'll make it funny.'"

And "Little Dipper" demonstrates once again why Gravity Falls never falls short at delivering the funny.

***

Diedrich Bader's most memorable--as well as his most personal favorite--voiceover stint was the three seasons he spent as Batman on the lighthearted and surprisingly good Batman: The Brave and the Bold (2008-2011). He played the titular superhero not as a source of deadpan humor like Adam West's take on Batman, but as a straight man to the campiness surrounding him. Now Bader gets to take on a more comedic superhero role that's closer to his sillier work on The Drew Carey Show and Napoleon Dynamite: egotistical ex-jock Guy Gardner, Hal Jordan's replacement as the Green Lantern Corps member assigned to patrol Earth, in "The New Guy," Green Lantern: The Animated Series' amusing season premiere.

Bader excels at this kind of role, a 180-degree turn from his subdued and benevolent version of Batman. It echoes the over-the-top machismo of the first role I knew Bader from, his title role in "The Searcher," a spoof of the Lorenzo Lamas action show Renegade that was a segment on the short-lived '90s Fox comedy anthology Danger Theatre. The new Green Lantern, who, in one of my favorite moments of Guy Gardner dickishness, autographs a photo of himself for a hot female cable news reporter while she's interviewing him live on TV, could easily be a main character in any one of Will Ferrell's movies where Ferrell deconstructs--via characters like Ron Burgundy in Anchorman and its upcoming sequel--what he referred to in a New York magazine interview as "the macho American male or the overly confident person."

After fighting the Red Lanterns and preventing them from killing the Guardians on Oa, Hal returns to Earth to find his girlfriend and Ferris Air boss Carol has fired him from his job as a test pilot because, well, an employee who's been gone from the planet for several months is sort of a liability for a military aircraft company (this show's look at how intergalactic heroism can wreck someone's day job reminds me of Doctor Who a couple of weeks ago, when Rory got questioned by a hospital co-worker about why he's so often away from his job as a nurse). Hal also discovers that the Guardians replaced him with the publicity-craving Guy as the Corps patrolman on Earth and did so without informing him. Annoyed by Guy's cockiness and dismissal of Hal as a "helpless civilian" and "temp" who's butting in on his turf, Hal must put aside his differences with his oblivious rival when a group of Manhunters--the same Guardian-created robots that turned against the Guardians and slaughtered millions in the Forgotten Zone--arrives on Earth to purge the planet of its human population because of their human imperfections.

Speaking of purging things, I'm glad to see that "The New Guy" got rid of Guy's bowl cut from the '80s and '90s Green Lantern and Justice League comics. Guy's ability to charm the opportunistic cable news reporter wouldn't have been so believable with that ugly-ass bowl cut on his head.

Better than the live-action version, Green Lantern: The Animated Series shines in the music department, and now its score cues are part of "AFOS Prime"

I've recapped Green Lantern: The Animated Series, Batman: The Animated Series producer Bruce Timm's latest series, a few times for "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner" during the series' first season, and though I'm not really a fan of the Green Lantern Corps space cop characters and I had a nice nap when I went to see the live-action version, I've found this Cartoon Network CG series to be surprisingly good. Aya, a heroic, Spock-like female AI who was created by Timm for the series (and is terrifically voiced by Grey DeLisle), is the breakout character on GL:TAS, as well as one of the reasons why the series is more enjoyable than the much-maligned Ryan Reynolds version (that movie was remarkable for somehow being both overstuffed and undernourished at the same time).

I don't own an iPhone because I currently can't afford one and because I don't care for smartphones. Like Greg Proops, I think smartphones are causing society to become douchier (at 39:57 of "Lobsters," Proops astutely likened iPhone addicts to the subjugated citizens in Brave New World as part of his reply to a Smartest Man in the World listener's question about aspects of 20th century dystopian novels that are pertinent to today). But if I did own an iPhone, I'd kick Siri's ass out and have her replaced with the super-reliable Aya. And at least Aya won't try to tell me jokes that are hilarious only to John Malkovich.

Even though I'm neither a machine like Aya nor a reformed alien thug like Razer, I have an easier time relating to Aya's arc of wanting to be taken seriously as a Green Lantern and Razer's shame over his past as a Red Lantern than I did trying to relate to Hal Jordan's hackneyed daddy issues during that inane movie. That's all due to Timm and his crew's knack for intriguing characters (which raises the question "Why doesn't Warner Bros. ever place the scripts of its non-Batman live-action DC films into the more capable hands of either Timm, Alan Burnett, Paul Dini or any of the other talents who have shepherded DC Animation's hit shows and made-for-video movies?"). Another reason why GL:TAS is superior to the Reynolds movie (which, by the way, was directed by Martin Campbell, who recently wiped out the stench of the live-action GL with the excellent pilot he directed for ABC's new action drama Last Resort) is the simple fact that it's animated. Animation, especially CG, is a more suitable medium for the Lanterns and their cartoony-looking powers than live-action, which was where the Lanterns looked unconvincing and inert.

GL:TAS airs on Saturday mornings, which is an unusual time period for an animated cable show's first-run episodes (because most of them tend to air first-run in the evenings), but it's the same time period where earlier Timm projects like The Adventures of Batman & Robin (a retitled, more Robin-centric version of B:TAS) and Superman: The Animated Series first aired back when network TV ran cartoons on Saturdays. Most of the cartoons I used to watch on Saturdays had terrible, colorless and frequently recycled score music, but GL:TAS doesn't. The crappy-sounding electric guitar work and T.J. Hooker drum machines that used to define Saturday morning score music in the '80s and early '90s are nowhere to be found on GL:TAS.

The show's score music, which comes from newcomer Frederik Wiedmann, is original from start to finish in every episode--"recycling" is a dirty word in the Warner Bros. Animation music department--and suitably majestic. There's lots of brass and choir, plus a motif for each major character (for instance, Razer is represented by an electric violin theme), just like how each hero and villain on B:TAS had a motif or instrument that defined him or her musically (I don't think Robin had his own theme on B:TAS though, and I don't remember if he did because I don't really care for that character). Because of Wiedmann's scores, I always feel like I'm watching an epic sci-fi movie whenever I play back an episode of GL:TAS.

Frederik Wiedmann at the Úbeda PlayFest with future composer Kyan Wiedmann (Photo source: BMI)

As work continues on GL:TAS' second season, La-La Land Records has released 36 of Wiedmann's first-season score cues on the GL:TAS soundtrack album, and I've added my favorite pieces from the album to the "AFOS Prime" and "New Cue Revue" blocks on A Fistful of Soundtracks. Wiedmann's GL:TAS music sounds even better live, as attested by the following footage of a 65-piece orchestra and a 40-piece choir performing a suite of Wiedmann's GL:TAS themes at the PlayFest animation/video game music festival in Úbeda, Spain back in July. At the end of the footage, the man who's pretending to get choked up over the emotional portion of the GL:TAS suite is GL:TAS co-executive producer Giancarlo Volpe:

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (06/05/2012): ThunderCats, Young Justice, Kaijudo, Adventure Time and Regular Show

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.

In previous weeks, I've covered Cartoon Network's Green Lantern: The Animated Series, which just quietly ended its first season. The same week as the season finale, Green Lantern became the talk of the non-comics media and trended on Twitter because DC announced that it's reintroducing one of the Green Lanterns, the previously straight Alan Scott, as openly gay.

While I'm happy for GLBT comics readers because the not-diverse-enough world of superhero comics just got a skosh more diverse, DC and Marvel still have a lot more work to do in terms of diversity. And as Grantland's Alex Pappademas said, maybe DC is making too big of a deal over this. It's second-tier Green Lantern Alan Scott, who hasn't been a major DC character since the '50s, and he's not the first-ever gay superhero.

Topless Robot editor Rob Bricken called shenanigans on DC's announcement about its "major new iconic gay character," which he found to be exploitative. "Alan Scott is not that iconic. In fact, I don't think any non-comics fans even know who the fuck he is," grumbled the always squeaky-clean-sounding Bricken on his blog. "He's not even going to be part of the main DC universe. At least Marvel has Northstar's wedding taking place in the normal Marvel U."

DC's outing of Alan led to lots of quips on Twitter like "Can the Green Lantern please come and organize my closet and tell me which jeans I look fat in?" (Molly Ringwald) and "Hope the first issue of the gay Green Lantern comic has him dishing lots of catty remarks about the Green Lantern movie" (awesomely anti-conservative ex-MST3K joke writer Frank Conniff). I was going to tweet an ultra-nerdy quip like "DC's rebooted Green Lantern Alan is now gay. So when he goes on & on about Will, he means some fabulous dude he met at the gym."

But I wasn't in the mood to have my tweet appear in Twitter searches for "Green Lantern" alongside lame and hateful tweets from conservatives like "Thanks to our depraved society, the Green Lantern will now be known as the Pink Nightlight" from a "Pastor Greg Locke." If that's your idea of humor, stick to announcing bingo numbers, pastor.

(Photo source: Robot 6)

While all this is going on, the "DC Nation" block is re-airing the entire first season of GL:TAS, starting with the "Beware My Power" premiere episode. I hadn't watched that installment since last year, so I forgot that during "Beware My Power," Hal Jordan, whom I referred to as a Rey Curtis-y space cop (a.k.a. bland and sanctimonious), was a little less Rey Curtis-y than I thought and willing to defy authority, particularly his fuddy-duddy Guardian superiors when they get too fuddy-duddy. The series opens with Hal fresh out of boot camp (his drill sergeant-turned-partner Kilowog frequently kids him about how he's such a naive poozer) and still adjusting to Green Lantern Corps procedure, a more interesting way to write Hal than having him easily get the hang of being a Lantern like in the live-action Ryan Reynolds flop.

I always liked how GL:TAS skipped the origin story--the least interesting kind of story in the superhero genre--and cut to the chase in "Beware My Power." It's something a lot more live-action superhero movies ought to do, and I'm glad Joss Whedon's The Avengers does what GL:TAS did and basically says, "Hey, origin story structure, fuck off into the night."

***

Jeffrey Combs, whose voice work I praised while briefly discussing his regular role on the currently-on-hiatus Transformers Prime, is unsurprisingly terrific during his guest shot as the tragic title character of "The Soul Sever," the last episode of Cartoon Network's ThunderCats reboot before its two-part season (or series) finale. I appreciate how the new ThunderCats is better animated and more sophisticated than the cheesy '80s Rankin-Bass version. But I'm neither a sword-and-sorcery guy nor a furry, so other than the two-part "Omens" premiere and an episode about rapidly aging woodland creatures that looked like a Studio Ghibli remake of the Doctor Who story "The Girl in the Fireplace," I haven't been watching ThunderCats, which is apparently on the bubble.

One change that makes this new version superior to the original is the reworking of lead hero Lion-O (former Batman Beyond star Will Friedle) into an insecure and hotheaded teen adjusting to his role as leader, a far cry from the totally confident preteen-in-a-man's-body who brings to mind Shazam, the DC Property Formerly Known as Captain Marvel. On the original show, Lion-O was a grown-up with a 12-year-old boy's mind because he spent all of his teens in suspended animation on a spaceship that fled from the planet Thundera to Third Earth.

The reimagining dispenses with Lion-O's strange origin and makes the character more relatable. He's also angstier. The series opened with Mumm-Ra (Robin Atkin Downes) murdering Lion-O's father and king Claudus (who, in a nice way of passing the baton, was played by Larry Kenney, the voice of Lion-O on the '80s show, as well as the father of State and Reno 911! alum Kerri Kenney-Silver). Mumm-Ra and his minions used advanced technology to destroy Thundera (now just a kingdom on Third Earth instead of another planet) and forced the Thunderian survivors into exile or, in the case of those who weren't as lucky as the escaped ThunderCats, slavery.

So Lion-O hates technology because of its role in obliterating his homeland. In "The Soul Sever," the Luddite becomes less resentful of technology and realizes it's "neither the disease nor the cure" as he attempts to recover the magical Book of Omens, which guides the ThunderCats on their mission to defeat Mumm-Ra and was stolen from them by Combs' mad scientist character, the show's shout-out to the actor's signature role in Re-Animator.

The Soul Sever is a robot scientist who once was flesh. An alien whose wife and children died from a plague, he made a Faustian bargain to resurrect them by allowing a Cybermen-like race known as the Necromechers to rebuild him as one of their own, with the hopes that the technology they utilized to make him immortal would do the same for this family. But when the Necromechers refused to grant the Soul Sever access to their tech because they thought his plans would have Frankenstein-ian consequences, the Soul Sever wiped out the Necromechers. After stealing their tech, the Soul Sever was able to recover his loved ones' floating souls but has been unsuccessful in putting their souls into robot bodies.

When he learns the Book of Omens carries the soul of Obi-Wan Jaga (Corey Burton), the Soul Sever believes the artifact can bring his family back to corporeal form. Lion-O, Panthro (Kevin Michael Richardson) and Tygra (Matthew Mercer), Lion-O's adopted older brother, end up as the scientist's unwilling guinea pigs for his flesh-to-metal experiment. With the help of a chittering mechanical bug sidekick named Flicker, Lion-O and Panthro are able to break out of their restraints. But they're too late to pull out Tygra, whose soul is transferred by the Soul Sever's Book of Omens-powered experiment into an out-of-control mecha monstrosity that, in a wild sequence reminiscent of Tetsuo's grisly climactic transformation in Akira, keeps growing and growing due to spare parts it affixes to its body.

The mad scientist, who realizes the folly of his actions, must sacrifice his loved ones' souls to save himself, Lion-O and Panthro from Mecha Tygra and transfer Tygra's soul back to his normal body. It's rare to see kids' animation on TV tackle a downbeat ending like the one for the Soul Sever, his family and Flicker, which gives its life to activate the power surge that destroys Mecha Tygra (the pet euthanasia subject matter that Star Trek: The Animated Series' "Yesteryear" episode got away with on NBC back in 1973 comes to mind). But ThunderCats undercuts the ending with a final shot of Flicker coming back to life in the Soul Sever's hand, which indicates that if Flicker can Iron Giant its shattered little self back to power, then maybe the Soul Sever will be able to restore his family after all.

"The Soul Sever" may chicken out at the end, but Combs' gravitas, guided by beloved voice director Andrea Romano, redeems the episode. As a voice actor, Combs helped make the previously uninteresting and un-creepy Scarecrow a more formidable and creepy villain on Batman: The Animated Series and later stole scenes as the bubblegum pop music-loving weirdo The Question on Justice League Unlimited. The guy just can't do no wrong.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (05/29/2012): Green Lantern, Young Justice, Transformers Prime, Adventure Time and Regular Show

Each Tuesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I review five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone and are on kids' networks that make you look like a child molester if you watch them for too long. Even though I'm older than the target audience for these shows, I watch a few of them because of my fondness for the past works of these shows' writers and animators (for instance, Ultimate Spider-Man is co-produced by Paul Dini, who wrote several of my favorite Batman: The Animated Series episodes, and Motorcity is made by writers and animators from the late '90s MTV cartoon Downtown and Megas XLR ).

Topless Robot recently posted a very funny one-hour-and-20-minute table read of the first Star Wars film's screenplay by cartoon voice actors at Seattle's Emerald City Comicon from a couple of months ago. Several of the actors at this read have worked on one or two of the shows I'm covering for "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner." Jess Harnell, the voice actor/musician at the read who looks like Rob Zombie, is the voice of Texas the reckless mechanic on Motorcity, while Futurama's John DiMaggio has voiced Thor's hammer forger Eitri on The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes and is currently roaming the Land of Ooo as Jake the shape-shifting yellow dog on Adventure Time. Tara Strong can be heard on Young Justice, Green Lantern: The Animated Series and Ultimate Spider-Man (she's voicing Mary Jane). She's also reprising both her B:TAS role as Batgirl and her Teen Titans role as Raven in the "DC Nation Superhero Shorts" that air between Green Lantern and Young Justice.

Because these performers are cartoon voice actors, this read is no straightforward performance of the Star Wars script. Except for former B:TAS star Kevin Conroy, whose baritone is recruited for only narrative and non-comedic purposes, the voiceover artists shift back and forth between their most signature characters (I'm not familiar with several of these characters--I actually had to Google "Twilight Sparkle") or celebrity impressions.

Yeah, this read is basically an hour and 20 minutes of that old '80s stand-up trope "If Jack Nicholson were a flight attendant, it would go something like this," but it's much funnier because the voice actors frequently go off-script, and some of them pull dead-on impressions out of their asses that I never knew they were capable of. I didn't know Strong does the best Rosie Perez impression ever. DiMaggio's Tracy Morgan gives Jay Mohr's Tracy Morgan a run for its money. I wish the Emerald City Comicon moderator had DiMaggio do his funniest celebrity impression, blue-eyed soul artist Michael McDonald, which he busted out while sitting in the audience at Bar Lubitsch during the "McDonalds" episode of Greg Proops' Smartest Man in the World podcast (it led to DiMaggio and Proops hilariously doing dueling McDonalds).

Here are my favorite moments during the read:

34:45 to 39:31: Harnell doing double duty as Drawn Together's Captain Hero as Luke and Albert Brooks as Marlin from Finding Nemo as R2D2, Maurice LaMarche as Dudley Moore as Arthur as C3PO and DiMaggio as Tracy Morgan as Obi-Wan.

40:24 to 44:57: Harnell as Cartman as Obi-Wan, Billy West as the Professor from Futurama as Luke, DiMaggio as Obi-Wan's lightsaber and Strong as Rosie Perez as Princess Leia (42:44 to 43:29).

52:53 to 54:00: West as Porky Pig as Obi-Wan and DiMaggio as Bender as a Stormtrooper during Obi-Wan's Jedi mind-trick scene.

55:58 to 56:42: DiMaggio as Paul Lynde as Doctor Death (the alien in the cantina who says to Luke, "He doesn't like you") and Harnell as Rodney Dangerfield as Luke.

59:54 to 1:02:00: West as Tony Soprano as Greedo, Strong as My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic's Twilight Sparkle as Han--I love her expressions while Twilight Sparkle Han is unfazed by Tony Sogreedo's foul-mouthed threats--and DiMaggio as Paulie Walnuts during the Han/Greedo scene.

1:15:44 to 1:20:05: LaMarche as William Shatner as Luke, Rob Paulsen as Christopher Walken as Han, DiMaggio as Tracy Morgan as Obi-Wan and Harnell as Chewbacca during the "That's no moon, that's a space station!" scene.

For a table read that features quite a few characters of color, it's very lacking in actual actors of color. I would have loved this read even more if DiMaggio and West's Futurama co-star Phil LaMarr or one of animation's other busiest black voice actors--for example, Kevin Michael Richardson or Cree Summer--had been involved. It's also missing a certain legendary voice actor who got his big break from the first Star Wars. Where's Conroy's old B:TAS co-star Mark Hamill? I'm sure the former Luke Skywalker would have wanted to voice a character who's not Luke, and I'm sure it would have rocked the house.

***

Speaking of intergalactic warfare, "Homecoming," the Green Lantern: The Animated Series season finale, packs an hour's worth of it into a mere 20-something minutes. Red Lantern leader Atrocitus has been slaughtering Green Lantern Corps members throughout the season and is now summoning battleships to Guardian space--all in retaliation for earlier attacks by the Guardians' malfunctioned Manhunter robot army on his sector of space, which the Guardians labeled the Forgotten Zone to help bury a shameful early part of Guardian history before they founded the Green Lantern Corps. Hacked into by Atrocitus' technical genius accomplice Drusa (Juliet Landau) and forced to carry out Atrocitus' commands, Aya navigates her hijacked Interceptor ship to the Guardians' homeworld of Oa and sheds a tear while tricking Green Lantern Corps protocol officer Salaak (Tom Kenny) and the Guardians to their doom (the AI is developing emotions!).

Armed with a power ring that's fully recharged by the power battery he was lucky to take along with him before Atrocitus stole the Interceptor from him and Hal, Kilowog is fighting the fleet of battleships from the Forgotten Zone all by himself at the Maelstrom asteroid belt that Atrocitus blew apart with planet-killing Liberator bombs to bring the Red Armada into Guardian space. Meanwhile, in the middle of all this, Hal is back on Earth, enjoying a romantic lunch with his aircraft company exec girlfriend Carol Ferris (Jennifer Hale) at an outdoor bistro on a strangely underpopulated Coast City street--and with no memory of his duty as a Green Lantern and the events that led him back to Coast City.

I admire the work of Bruce Timm, but what is it with Timm projects and their occasional scenes on city streets with no people? The deserted street reminds me of the nighttime New York fight scene in Timm and Lauren Montgomery's 2009 Wonder Woman animated feature. The most unbelievable thing about that Wonder Woman scene? The city that never sleeps was empty while Diana Prince and her adversary Deimos were fighting each other.

You know right away that this is a fantasy movie because New York is devoid of people at this time of night. (Photo source: Lauren Montgomery)

The mystery surrounding Hal's sudden reunion with Carol briefly revisits Hal's conflict between his life with Carol and his duty as a space cop, a theme in both the series' "Beware My Power" premiere episode and "...In Love and War," the episode that introduced the Star Sapphire Corps. That mystery is the niftiest part of "Homecoming," but it's also way too rushed. It would have been more effective in an hour-long (or two-part) format.

The lack of people in Coast City (other than a moving car or two in the background) isn't because Hal is unconscious and trapped in some Matrix-like simulation of his hometown by an alien enemy, which is what I originally thought. It turns out that Hal and Razer asked the Star Sapphires to use their powers of teleportation to send the power battery-less Hal back to Earth so that he can get access to his battery and fully recharge his power ring for Atrocitus' attack on Oa. The Star Sapphires warned Hal that travel through their portal can result in side effects, so Hal is afflicted with amnesia after teleporting from the Star Sapphires' homeworld of Zamaron to Earth. With Carol's help, Hal regains his memory and powers and flies back to Oa just in time to save the Guardians from Atrocitus, as well as propose reparations to the Red Lanterns for the genocide that was committed on the planets of the Forgotten Zone by the malfunctioned creations of the now-remorseful Guardians.

Speaking of exquisite timing, new Blue Lantern Saint Walker and Mogo, the Green Lantern Corps member who's an actual planet, arrive in time to aid Kilowog in fending off the Red Armada. Though Saint Walker's last-minute emergence isn't much of a surprise, it's still exhilarating, thanks in part to the majestic score music of series composer Frederik Wiedmann. The epic showdown that ensues between the trio and the armada is a stunning achievement in small-screen CG animation. Between this battle and the equally gargantuan wildfire explosion that tore apart Davos Seaworth's ship on Game of Thrones the following day, Saturday and Sunday made for one really dull Memorial Day Weekend of TV-watching.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (05/22/2012): Green Lantern, Young Justice, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Avengers and Motorcity

Each Tuesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I review five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone and are aired on kids' networks where I have to sit through many of the most obnoxious commercials known to man because my DVR remote control is broken and will never be fixed. I think some of those kids' TV commercials have been used to extract information from Gitmo inmates.

I recently saw someone compare the sleek and nicely lit CG visuals on Bruce Timm's Green Lantern: The Animated Series to The Incredibles, so since then, I've thought, "Hal does look a little Mr. Incredible-ish when he runs," which isn't a bad thing. If you're going to crib a thing or two from an animated feature film, crib from one of the best. And like Brad Bird's movie, GL:TAS isn't afraid to make its main character lose badly once in a while.

In "Invasion," the last GL:TAS episode before the season finale, Hal (Josh Keaton), Kilowog (Kevin Michael Richardson), Razer (Jason Spisak) and Aya (Grey DeLisle), the Interceptor's AI, attempt to complete their mission to destroy the ancient Lighthouse, an automated space station that allows ships to travel through the asteroid belt separating the Forgotten Zone from the sector of space where Oa, the homeworld of the Guardians, the Green Lantern Corps' superiors, is located. If evil Red Lantern leader Atrocitus (Jonathan Adams) gets his hands on the Lighthouse before the Green Lanterns do, he'll use the station to teleport more of his Red Lantern fleet from the Forgotten Zone into Oan space to attack the Guardians.

Meanwhile, "Invasion" catches up with Saint Walker (Phil Morris, a.k.a. Jackie Chiles from Seinfeld), an idealistic hermit on the sentient planet Mogo (also Richardson) whom viewers first met in GL:TAS' "Lost Planet" episode when he declined the green power ring that Mogo accepted to become the only Green Lantern Corps member that's an actual planet. Before "Lost Planet," the Red Lanterns destroyed Walker's homeworld, and Walker found refuge on Mogo. "Invasion" gets very Ten Commandments-ish as Walker, who's turned to Mogo as if he were God and asked him for help in figuring out his destiny during the Red Lantern invasion, scales a mountain that Mogo repeatedly tells him to climb to get his answer.

After a few complications, the Interceptor crew succeeds in destroying the Lighthouse, but their triumph becomes a short-lived one when Hal, Kilowog and Razer board Atrocitus' suddenly immobile ship to arrest him and his cohorts, and the trio walks into a trap. The Red Lanterns have evacuated their ship and rigged it to self-destruct with the Green Lanterns inside. Atrocitus seizes the Interceptor, has Aya reprogrammed to do his bidding and tears open a wormhole in space that's big enough to allow more of his forces to pass through to invade Oa.

Razer, who gets the episode's best line earlier when he uses one of those fake curse words so many of these sci-fi shows are fond of ("I hate to be the glurg in the punch bowl, but it seems we weren't the only ones to make it through"), uses his red power ring to shield Hal, Kilowog and himself from the blast. Hal is up glurg's creek without a paddle and in a rare moment, is unsure what his next move should be. He doesn't know that hope lies elsewhere on a mountaintop on Mogo, where a blue lantern materializes in front of Walker and presents the alien with a blue power ring.

"Invasion" is fun if you like seeing the heroes experience one setback after another but is otherwise kind of dull, mostly due to the scenes between Walker and Mogo, which feel like they're straight out of a Christian sci-fi flick. However, that willingness to make the Green Lanterns sometimes fail at the end of an episode illuminates a major difference between this current era of DC Animation and the godawful limited-animation days of Superfriends, when the heroes triumphed over evil every single time, which is fine for kids and the conservative audience that makes all those interchangeable CBS procedurals such ratings hits and is afraid of change, but it's yawnsville for those of us viewers who prefer a tad more variety in the storytelling.

***

In spite of how much DC Animation productions have raised the bar for kids' animation, these shows are still kind of skittish in the way they handle some of their edgier storylines. Several weeks ago--or rather, late last season--the TV-PG-rated Young Justice did what was basically a drug addiction arc when Superboy got addicted to "shields," steroid-like patches that suppress his human DNA and amplify his Kryptonian powers and were supplied to him by one of his two daddies, Lex Luthor. So when the recently rebranded Young Justice: Invasion does another addiction storyline with the mental and physical decline of the clone known as Red Arrow (Crispin Freeman), whose comics counterpart was once addicted to smack, and the storyline contains all the elements of an addiction arc, from the intervention staged by the Roy Harper clone's friends to his unkempt and emaciated state (or rather, what passes for emaciated in the non-Timm DC Animated Universe), why does the show chicken out and explain that his decline isn't due to heroin addiction and is merely exhaustion from his intense search for the original Roy?

And then when it's later revealed in this week's Greg Weisman-scripted "Salvage" episode that Roy and Cheshire (Kelly Hu), the assassin sister of Artemis (Stephanie Lemelin), became a couple during the five-year interim between seasons and Cheshire had Roy's baby, why does the show chicken out again and sneak in the rather unconvincing detail that Roy and Cheshire were married before she got pregnant? Are Cartoon Network censors really that uptight about characters on their shows having kids out of wedlock?

These censors also have terrible eyesight because a couple of minutes before the revelation about Roy and Cheshire, "Salvage" shows the retired Artemis--who's still dating another fellow retired superhero, Wally "Kid Flash" West (Jason Spisak)--prancing around in just a Stanford University T-shirt, which hints that Artemis banged Wally before he went off to Roy's intervention. I like seeing how amazed and shocked some Young Justice viewers are about the sight of pantsless and post-coital Artemis on a Saturday morning cartoon. This actually isn't the first time a DC Animation project has featured a scene with pantsless female characters to hint that they just got laid.

Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn--sans clown makeup and pants--in Batman: The Animated Series' classic "Harley and Ivy" episode (Photo source: World's Finest Online)

Post-coital Bruce Wayne and Andrea Beaumont in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

I love DC Animation.

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.