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 (08/07/2012): Scooby-Doo!, Ben 10: Omniverse, Ultimate Spider-Man, Adventure Time and Regular Show

Like that old homosexual millionaire in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, he wants Daphne to powder him up and spank him.

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.

Scooby-Doo mysteries aren't all that difficult to figure out, so I correctly guessed that Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated villain Crybaby Clown (Mark Hamill, as demented-sounding as always) was really movie star Baylor Hotner (Matt Lanter), who disguised himself in Norbit-style prosthetics as research for a role he coveted. But these mysteries usually aren't ambitiously serialized or stretched out for a few episodes, which sets Mystery Incorporated apart from previous incarnations of Scooby.

What also sets the show apart from past incarnations are the moody small-town setting (Crystal Cove instead of the more benign Coolsville); a grown-up sense of humor (instead of The Three Stooges or The Harlem Globetrotters as guest stars, Mystery Incorporated opts for the likes of Lewis Black as a secretly villainous ex-detective and Harlan Ellison as himself); and the fact that it takes its protagonists seriously for once, even though they carry on lengthy conversations with talking dogs and parrots as if they're regular people.

As Chris Sims notes at ComicsAlliance, Mystery Incorporated has taken a previously bland character like Fred--who's still voiced by Frank Welker--and used his blandness to reimagine him as an unexpectedly tragic figure (but not so tragic that he has an addiction to smack or picks up hitchhikers in the Mystery Machine and takes them to motels to torture them in order to feel alive).

"Fred is given a love of traps that comes off as about as one-note as Shaggy being hungry all the time. It's built for gags, giving him a funny obsession that [sic] so that he can be cheerily oblivious to Daphne's professions of love," writes Sims. "But as the show goes on, and it's revealed piece by piece that Fred's father has told him that his mother abandoned their family, his obsession with keeping things from getting away from him takes on a whole new light. It shifts from something that's pure comedy to a joke with an undercurrent of genuine sadness that grows ever larger as the truth about his life starts to come out."

All these novel (for a Scooby show) touches could be why Cartoon Network has been burning off most of Mystery Incorporated's second season without much fanfare each weekday afternoon since last week. Often when Cartoon Network execs wind up with an interesting and ambitious show with a cult following like Mystery Incorporated (a blogger over at Wired considers it "the true inheritor of the Buffy crown") or Genndy Tartakovsky's Sym-Bionic Titan, they really don't know what to do with it. The bizarre treatment of Mystery Incorporated as an afterthought is either because they have no clue how to market it or because they were probably soured by contract disputes with the show's producers, which delayed the second season. I'm not an industry insider, so I don't really know why Mystery Incorporated lapsed into Burnoff Theater.

Hot Dog Water and Velma

But what I do know is that the first seven episodes of the new season have been as satisfying as the episodes from the first season's back half, which I first caught between seasons. So much has happened in one week. Mystery Incorporated temporarily replaced Daphne with Marcy "Hot Dog Water" Fleach (Linda Cardellini, reunited with her live-action Scooby co-star Matthew Lillard), a former rival of Velma's who's clearly attracted to Velma (now is that why Cartoon Network, which lost its shit over Adventure Time's implication that Princess Bubblegum and Marceline were briefly more than friends, sidelined Mystery Incorporated?). Daphne learned of Baylor's scheme as Crybaby Clown and dumped him. She rejoined Mystery Incorporated, which resulted in the ousting of Hot Dog Water, who pretended to be upset by the ouster and actually anticipated it so that she could use it as ammo to plot against the team with the backing of Black's Mr. E character. I wouldn't be surprised if Hot Dog Water's plot is a continuation of Mr. E's attempt to block the team from collecting every piece of the Planispheric Disk, the key to finding Crystal Cove's hidden conquistador treasure.

Also, Fred is getting to know his long-lost birth parents, "trap-making mystery solvers" Brad Chiles (Tim Matheson) and Judy Reeves (Tia Carrere), whose names are straight out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and whose non-verbal female puppy Nova is Scooby's first non-food-related object of affection. Brad and Judy are also former Mystery Incorporated members like Mr. E and local DJ Cassidy Williams (Vivica A. Fox). The fact that the couple is secretly in cahoots with Mr. E and the evil parrot Professor Pericles (Udo Kier), Scooby's predecessor as the team mascot--and their lack of remorse for sketchy past activities Cassidy still feels guilty about having been complicit in--are both bound to crush Fred's morale and leave him in a worse state than he was at the end of last season.

This rising conspiracy against the teens illuminates what Sims notes is a major theme of this show: "Adults are either outright liars or complicit in some kind of deception." And when these adults aren't just the costumed perps who are unmasked and busted by the team at the end of every episode and are figures whom Fred and his friends have placed their trust in--like Mr. E, Cassidy and now, Fred's real parents--it brings some genuine drama to the franchise's premise of teens who defy their fears to find the truth.

It's a cynical view of the world that Mystery Incorporated is amazingly unafraid to embrace, but to keep the show from being a total downer, the writers offset the ominousness of the rising conspiracy with humorous standalone storylines like a hilarious spoof of Andy Warhol--here, he's called Randy Warsaw (Billy West)--and his history as a control freak. In the funniest second-season episode so far, "Art of Darkness!," a perp with a grudge against Warsaw seizes control of his metal sculptures and uses them to attack and engulf models and singers Warsaw has molded into art-scene superstars, so Warsaw ends up replacing his missing emo art-rock star Eeko (Grey DeLisle) with Scooby. Warsaw sticks an Edgar Winter wig on the Great Dane and renames him Freako.

"That voice," purrs Warsaw when he first hears Scooby speak. "It's anti-art. Anti-music. It's--it's anti-words."

The sight of Scooby singing a droning, Velvet Underground & Nico-style tune is one of many reasons why--rut-roh--I'll miss Mystery Incorporated when Cartoon Network inevitably cancels it after this season is over.

(Photo source: David Willis)

***

Cartoon Network's Ben 10 superhero franchise for preteen viewers isn't my cup of tea, but I wanted to catch the first part of "The More Things Change," Ben 10: Omniverse's two-part series premiere (the conclusion will air together with part 1 when the series officially premieres on September 22), because it's one of the last things credited to the late Dwayne McDuffie, whom I got to briefly meet a couple of years before his death. McDuffie, a Ben 10 veteran whose '90s Milestone comics I enjoyed as a teen, received a "story by" credit with his wife and writing partner Charlotte Fullerton for "The More Things Change."

I'm not familiar with the Ben 10 cartoons. My only exposure to the franchise has been the last half-hour of Ben 10: Alien Swarm, one of Cartoon Network's live-action Ben 10 TV-movies. Alien Swarm featured Barry Corbin in a terrible hairpiece as Ben Tennyson's grandfather Max, a retired member of the intergalactic peacekeeping force known as the Plumbers (fortunately, this group of Plumbers isn't afflliated with a right-wing dickweed who calls himself Joe). On Omniverse, Grandpa Max (Paul Eiding) has summoned a young alien Plumber named Rook Blanko (Bumper Robinson) to help out his grandson (Yuri Lowenthal), who's been bragging about not needing a partner to help him fight alien threats ever since his previous Plumber sidekicks, cousin Gwen (Ashley Johnson) and her boyfriend Kevin Levin (Greg Cipes), left for college.

Of course, Ben won't admit it, but he needs all the help he can get because even though he's become a capable hero like his grandpa due to the Omnitrix, the gadget on his wrist that allows him to temporarily assume the forms of powerful alien warriors, he doesn't have much control over the device. It doesn't give Ben the ability to choose which alien he wants to be, so he has to constantly improvise with whatever form the Omnitrix converts him into. It's like having Clive Anderson on your wrist, except instead of him telling you to act out a visit to the dry cleaner as a cowboy who speaks in questions only, he's turned you into a shape-shifting alien with a body made out of Lego blocks, and he doesn't speak and proceed to badger you with insults about your silly American ways or your short stature.

Dwayne McDuffie (1962-2011)

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

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

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

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