AFOS Blog Rewind: Young Justice, "Bloodlines"

The third season of the CW's The Flash begins tonight, so the following is a repost of my June 5, 2012 discussion of the Young Justice episode "Bloodlines," a story that united four generations of DC Comics speedsters, including Barry Allen and Wally West, two characters who are central to the CW show. "Bloodlines" can be streamed on Netflix.

I remember writer Peter David best for his work on DC's Star Trek comics (a Len Wein-scripted 1987 issue that reunited the Enterprise-A crew with con man Harry Mudd from the '60s show was the first comic I ever bought at an actual comic shop). But superhero comics readers admire David most for his writing on The Incredible Hulk, X-Factor (the X-Men spinoff, not the wack singing contest show), Supergirl and the original Young Justice comic. David gets to revisit the Young Justice characters in "Bloodlines," the third episode he's written for the animated version. The best part of David's run on DC's Star Trek was the humor, and David's sense of humor is a highlight of "Bloodlines," an entertaining fish-out-of-water story about the unexpected arrival of Impulse (Jason Marsden), a speedster from the future who talks as if he has ADHD and who also happens to be Bart Allen, the grandson of Barry Allen (George Eads), the current incarnation of The Flash.

"Tell us something we don't know yet. When do I become leader of the team? When do I join the Justice League? When do I get my own reality series?," inquires Beast Boy (Logan Grove) when he wants proof from Impulse that he's from the future. And I always get a kick out of how this TV-PG-rated cartoon sometimes toys with Cartoon Network's Standards & Practices department, like it does here when Impulse responds to Nightwing's old cop-show trick of getting his interviewee to verify his identity via a glass of water. "Oh, ah, you're trying to get a DNA sample. You need my spit," says Impulse. "Ha! That's such a Dick Grayson thing to do." The way Impulse puts emphasis on the name "Dick" makes his sentence sound as if it's going to be "That's such a dick move."

In "Bloodlines" (which also finds time to resolve the Roy Harper clone's search for the original Roy during its B-story), an adversary wreaks so much havoc on The Flash's home turf of Central City that it requires the attention of four generations of speedsters. Retired-from-superheroing Stanford student Wally West interrupts his regularly scheduled Asian fetish to suit up again as Kid Flash and keep an eye on Impulse as a favor to Nightwing. Another retired speedster, former Flash Jay Garrick (Geoff Pierson), runs the risk of his wife Joan's wrath because he snuck out of the quiet 70th wedding anniversary celebration Barry and his wife Iris (Young Justice writer Nicole Dubuc) threw for them and dusted off his old Mercury-style tin hat to assist the three younger Flashes on the decimated and scorched streets of Central City.

The destruction-causing stranger in a containment suit known as Neutron (James Arnold Taylor) turns out not to be a new supervillain but a brainwashed human pawn in an alien conspiracy who's having trouble controlling his powers. The aliens who unleashed Neutron on Central City are the same aliens who have been experimenting on teen runaways to access their metagenes, the genes that determine which humans are metahumans (the DC universe's equivalent of Marvel's mutants). Neutron's hidden overseers, who abandon their failed experiment with Neutron and flee their hideout before the team of speedsters can find them, speak in Krolotean but are taller than the Krolotean invaders who previously appeared on Young Justice this season and were blown up by The Light in "Alienated." Is this a superior breed of Kroloteans that's in league with both The Light and this season's shadowy new nemesis The Partner?

Impulse knows more than he's been letting on. His time machine's arrival at Mount Justice at about the same time as Neutron's energy-wave attack on Central City is hardly coincidental. In the grim post-apocalyptic scenes that open and close "Bloodlines," an older, prison-garbed Neutron sees Bart off as he readies his time machine for its destination: 40 years before Mount Justice--and the world--were reduced to rubble. Bart's mission is/was to save Neutron's younger self from prison and prevent the world's destruction. We see that Bart's "hyperactive tourist from the future" persona is just an act--a costume like the ones donned by "half the meat at Comic-Con" (they're so quirky because they're actually from the future too, according to one of the funniest lines David gives to Impulse). We also see that Impulse's accomplishments in the past aren't enough to fix the timestream because aside from older Neutron's slight change in appearance, the post-apocalyptic world remains unchanged.

I don't like that Young Justice is adding time travel as another spinning plate to the Ed Sullivan Show spinning plates act that this season has been basically shaping up to be because I'm so jaded from the aimless time-travel storytelling messes I was subjected to during Heroes. That live-action show soured the enjoyment I used to have for time-travel stories. But when time travel is placed into the hands of more capable writers like David and the Young Justice staffers, I doubt I'll find my not-so-TV-PG-rated self to be saying about the writing, "That's such a dick move."

http://carrajua.tumblr.com/post/144084411129/part2of3-young-justice-s01e06-bloodlines

http://khany82.tumblr.com/post/80001099271/peter-davids-first-draft-script-for-young-justice

KDFC is pronouncing "Varèse Sarabande" three different ways, and only one of them is right

A current storyline on CW's The Flash centers on Jay Garrick moping--and then doing some more moping--over the loss of his ability to run at superhuman speeds. Jay fought crime under the name of the Flash in a parallel universe where their version of Barry Allen, the show's main character, doesn't have any superpowers, so Barry's not the Flash over there. Unless he's actually been the Tony Todd-voiced supervillain known as Zoom this whole time, Jay is too much of a goody-goody to regain his speed with the help of cocaine, so the only way Jay can get his speed back temporarily is to inject himself with an experimental drug called Velocity-6.

I suffer from writer's block all the time, which was never a good thing when I worked in the newspaper biz, and it's the last thing you want to deal with when you're running a blog and you're trying to come up with one or two posts per week. But I don't need Velocity-6 or blow to type out a post at a superhuman speed. All I need is the Bay Area classical music station KDFC.

I recently discovered that having KDFC in my headphones has helped me to finish writing posts. DJ mixes sometimes do the trick, but they can occasionally be distracting, especially when the DJ throws on a beat like the one from Pete Rock and CL Smooth's "The Creator" or the one from Kendrick Lamar's "Alright," and then all I want to do is nod my head repeatedly or do the Robot instead of finish writing. Film and TV score music, the Internet radio format I dabbled in from 2002 to last month, is even more distracting. Like I wrote a few weeks ago, score music comes with too much baggage.

"That kind of music often wrecks my attempt to concentrate on filling a blank space with a paragraph and causes me to start thinking about the action sequence the cue was written for, followed by all the camerawork that went into it... And then my brain starts to shout, 'Yeaaaah, go, Iko Uwais!,' or 'Yeaaaah, throw that shovel hook, Michael B.!,' and my concentration is completely destroyed," I wrote on January 26.

Neither classical music nor instrumental hip-hop come with that kind of baggage, so when I need music to help me to concentrate, only those two genres can get me to start typing (classical music has also helped me to sleep well late at night). So right when I've started turning to KDFC as a reliable place for instrumentals that cure my writer's block instead of distracting or annoying me, the station, which tosses in a few movie themes on its playlists here and there, has been increasing the airplay of film score music.

KDFC chose last June's Varèse Sarabande album Back in Time... 1985 at the Movies, Galaxy Quest composer David Newman's re-recording of film score cues from 1985, as its "CD of the Week." All this week, the station has been spotlighting selections from 1985 at the Movies, which is a solid album from Newman, although I would have swapped out the love theme from St. Elmo's Fire for either a selection from the John Morris score to Clue or a Lee Holdridge instrumental from Moonlighting, and I would have packaged the six-disc edition of 1985 at the Movies exactly like a McDLT, so that "The hot stays hot and the cool stays cool!"

Then all next week, KDFC will join in the countdown to Oscar night and play one theme composed by John Williams per hour as a salute to Williams. He's one of this year's Best Original Score Oscar nominees for his work in Star Wars: The Force Awakens ("Rey's Theme" is especially terrific).

After trying to avoid film score music because it doesn't help as an accompaniment for writing, I should be irritated that KDFC is playing more film score music this month. But I'm not. I'm actually kind of delighted to see film score compositions like "Rey's Theme" receiving airplay on terrestrial radio outside of a college station, although KDFC tends to prefer concert arrangements of film score music over the actual score cues that were used in the films. So that means you won't hear "The Scavenger," the cue that nicely introduces Rey in The Force Awakens, but you will hear "Rey's Theme," the concert arrangement of the Daisy Ridley character's motif. But it doesn't matter; it's just sofa king good to hear such cues on a non-college terrestrial station.

Not everyone agrees.

Anonymous needs to go walk into traffic. That's just stupid talk. As someone who streamed film and TV score music for 13 years, I can't stand people like that.

And as a film score music DJ who would then encounter racist, neo-con film music nerds who think hip-hop, one of my favorite genres, is evil or unworthy to be considered music, I can't stand those people either. They need to go walk into traffic too.

KDFC's Dianne Nicolini and KDFC president Bill Lueth (Photo source: SFCV)

I don't have time to deal with narrow minds. I don't miss the part of being a film score music DJ where I'd be subjected to "Hip-hop causes violence!" or "C'mon, really? Who wants to listen to just the instrumentals? Am I right?" I also don't miss the part of it that involved trying to pronounce baffling-looking names of composers, filmmakers (I would love to hear someone say "Krzysztof Kieslowski" while they're on Novocaine) and record labels. But whenever I encountered such a name, I would always Google its pronunciation. I didn't mind doing that. I never wanted to sound like an imbecile or Alec Baldwin in that SNL "Soap Opera Digest" sketch where he's playing a doctor and he keeps mangling medical terms and university names, like when he says, "There's no class at Yeah-leh Medical School that can prepare you for this!"

But how did I find out about mysterious pronunciations before Google? I simply asked around. One particular name that used to make me scratch my head in the '90s was "Varèse Sarabande." That one was cleared up for me by Jeff Bond, the author of The Music of Star Trek and a film score music expert who has written score album liner notes for everyone from Varèse to La-La Land Records. I simply asked him how to pronounce the inkblot-logoed record label's name while recording with him a phoner for my college radio program.

So that's why it's amusing to hear KDFC DJs attempt to tackle "Varèse" during the week of Varèse's 1985 at the Movies in the spotlight, without even checking its pronunciation. Morning host Hoyt Smith pronounced it as "vuh-reez." Early afternoon host Dianne Nicolini said "vuh-rez" (rhymes with Pez). Afternoon drive-time host Ray White went with "vuh-ray-say."

Only Nicolini is correct. It's "vuh-rez."



I'm glad to see 1985 at the Movies--and film and TV score music in general--receiving this much exposure from the KDFC DJs, but they ought to follow Nicolini's lead. The key to pronouncing "Varèse" isn't hard to remember. It would simply be "It rhymes with Pez."

If movie theaters need bouncers, then classical stations need pronunciation consultants. Who wants to end up looking like Alec Baldwin in the SNL "Soap Opera Digest" sketch? No name is too intimidating for a pronunciation consultant. Such a consultant would always be ready and on call to tackle the predicament of trying to figure out how to say a puzzling-looking musician's name on an album cover. There's no class at Yeah-leh that can prepare you for "Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina."

***

Other film and TV score compositions played by KDFC (from snapshots I took of score music appearing on the KDFC site's playlists)

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Vixen, "Episode 1"

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

At only five minutes per weekly episode, the six-part CW Seed miniseries Vixen, an animated reintroduction of a black DC Comics heroine who previously appeared in animated, Gina Torres-voiced form on Bruce Timm's beloved Justice League Unlimited, is hilariously short. I expected Chris Rock to channel his old SNL character Nat X and joke about how a black superhero can only get a five-minute webtoon because the Man won't give her a two-hour movie. So I was surprised to discover that Rock has been raving about Vixen.

The best superhero I've seen all summer is #vixen http://t.co/MV9C7fmgAu @megalyn pic.twitter.com/8MMqJKJAKJ

— Chris Rock (@chrisrock) August 25, 2015

In a summer that's consisted of Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man on the big screen (we'll just forget the whole Fantastic Four fiasco, and, oh, by the way, the only Fantastic Four that matters is these guys), that's huge praise for a superhero webtoon. So is Vixen--which takes place in the Arrow/The Flash/Legends of Tomorrow shared universe and will feature the voices of Arrow stars Stephen Amell and Emily Bett Rickards and Flash stars Grant Gustin and Carlos Valdes in upcoming episodes--as terrific as Rock implies? Animation-wise: yes. Storytelling-wise: it's too early--and too short--to tell. So far, I'm not in love with the presence of the ubiquitous in medias res device--an old storytelling favorite of the Arrow writers, who also scripted Vixen--and the clunky-sounding exposition during a diner conversation between aspiring Detroit fashion designer Mari McCabe (Megalyn Echikunwoke), who's about to discover that a family heirloom she's been wearing can grant her the power to mimic the abilities of animals, and her white foster dad Chuck (Neil Flynn, a.k.a. the dad on The Middle) in this first episode.

My least favorite aspect of Greg Weisman and Brandon Vietti's now-defunct DC Animation show Young Justice comes back to haunt this new DC Animation project. Early on in one episode of Young Justice, Miss Martian was seen explaining to a skeptical and typically monosyllabic Superboy why she used her shape-shifting powers to disguise themselves as her uncle J'onn J'onnz and Superman at a press conference that just took place, more for the sake of bringing the audience up to speed than for her ex-boyfriend's sake. "Conner, you know we have to maintain the illusion that Superman, Manhunter and the other Leaguers who went into space are still on Earth. We can't let our enemies know how short-handed the Justice League is right now," she said to Superboy, who, in addition to being miserable about his life as a teenage clone of both Superman and Lex Luthor, has to go to work each day with a pro-torture ex-girlfriend who's fond of speaking in IMDb plot summary-ese.

Arrow veterans Wendy Mericle, Keto Shimizu and Brian Ford Sullivan (all paired up with Lauren Certo, who co-wrote another Arrow-related webseries, the live-action Blood Rush) are a little more skilled at handling exposition than Weisman and Vietti because of the experience they've had writing dialogue for a live-action prime-time show that can't really get away with that type of Saturday morning cartoon exposition too often. So Vixen is slightly more cognizant than Young Justice about how people who know each other well actually talk to each other and is a little less ridiculous and awkward about the exposition--we learn Mari is looking for her birth parents, the difficulties of finding the fashion design job she wants have left her with an understandable temper and she's closer to Patty, an absent and most likely ailing member of Mari's foster family who's presumably Chuck's wife (and will be voiced by Kari Wuhrer), than she is to Chuck--but much of it is still unnatural-sounding expository dialogue. The opening action sequence is much closer to what I want out of an animated sister show to Arrow, The Flash and the forthcoming Legends of Tomorrow, and that would be nicely staged action that's full of visuals an animated show can pull off with more panache than a live-action one, with minimal dialogue during the action. But that rooftop sequence in which Mari outwits the Arrow (Amell) and outraces the Flash (Gustin)--only to accidentally slip and fall--actually goes one better by containing no dialogue at all. It's a wise stylistic choice by both the Arrow writers and miniseries director James Tucker, who previously directed the 2013 DC Animation movie Superman Unbound and showran Batman: The Brave and the Bold, the surprisingly good DC Animation show that proved a light-hearted take on modern-day Batman doesn't have to suck like a Joel Schumacher Batman movie.

The effective animation for Mari's escape from Oliver Queen and Barry Allen, a sequence in which miniseries co-composer Blake Neely gets to restate his main themes from Arrow and The Flash, is mainly what earns the Vixen premiere episode the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week title. But there are a couple of extra touches that elevate Vixen and will make it worth following on CW Seed in the next few weeks.

The show's dialogue recording team is clearly made up of fans of Fantastic Mr. Fox, which was distinctive for having its vocal cast record their dialogue outside the recording booth and outdoors in order to make their stop-motion-animated movie sound naturalistic. I'm not sure if the Vixen sound team actually did venture outside the booth to record Mari's reverby scene in jail, her diner scene with Chuck and an upcoming S.T.A.R. Labs scene between Barry and Valdes' lab tech character Cisco that was included in the series premiere trailer, but the Fantastic Mr. Fox approach to getting Mari and the other characters to sound like they're actually in reverby and chilly rooms gives this DC Animation project an interestingly grounded feel and makes it a seamless part of the live-action Arrow/Flashverse.

Oh yeah, and there's the simple fact that Mari is the first female superpowered hero of color in the Arrow/Flashverse (Katana, a heroic swordswoman played on Arrow last season by Rila Fukushima, doesn't have any powers). The character is an appealing middle ground between the fantasy-based heroism of the supers on The Flash and the more flawed (and non-superpowered) heroism of the street-level crimefighters on Arrow (the time frame of the miniseries begins with Mari in jail for self-defense, and the episode implies that the man she attacked was such a disgusting perv that she didn't deserve to be put behind bars).

I'm curious to see how Echikunwoke--whom I remember from her eye-candy roles on The 4400 and House of Lies and is an ideal choice to play Mari if she becomes a live-action character--will tackle both voice acting, especially in a setting that's way more family-friendly than House of Lies (but still salty in the dialogue department, in a CW kind of way, of course), and a heroic character who, like Static from DC's Milestone imprint, clearly means a lot to African American DC readers. So far, the premiere episode has shown that Echikunwoke is a great screamer. I never read the Justice League Detroit comics. I don't think Vixen screams like Mel from Doctor Who in those comics.

I'm also curious to see how Vixen will handle what's essentially a story about a black adoptee raised by white parents (she appears to be embarrassed about it)--and in search of both her heritage and her purpose in life--that happens to be dressed up in superhero genre garb. Will it handle that kind of story with the same kind of aplomb Penny Dreadful has demonstrated as a story about identity that's dressed up as a Gothic horror drama? Or will it drop the ball like 2011's Green Lantern, which Arrow creators and Vixen co-executive producers Marc Guggenheim and Greg Berlanti both co-wrote, and turn into another unimaginative--and emotionally flat--daddy issues-driven origin story?

Chris Rock's praise of this webtoon's premiere episode, as well as Flash cast member Candice Patton's similar endorsement of it--even though she's not in Vixen and she didn't get to reprise her role as Iris West--and black viewers' interest in it on Twitter, all remind me of when I was involved in the creation of a similar female superhero of color for an indie graphic novel about Asian American superheroes. I noticed a glint of excitement in the eyes of both male and female Asian American readers who were fans of that novel back in 2009. It was a glint that said, "I've been hungry for this my whole life."

I'm unable to glimpse that same glint on people from Black Twitter for obvious reasons, but judging from Vixen viewers' #DatTotem hashtag and enthusiastic tweets from the likes of BlackGirlNerds and the hosts of The Fan Bros Show, that glint is definitely there in their writing. Everyone's getting tired of superhero movies starring white guys named Chris. There needs to be more Chrisiquas and Cristinas up in this piece.

Times are changing, and the increasingly inclusive Arrow/Flashverse appears to be responding to the frustrations younger viewers have expressed about the presence of underrepresented groups on the screen, but it's responding in mostly sensible--and now with the arrival of Vixen, fascinating--ways. For instance, on The Flash, the police captain isn't an old, pasty Irish guy like it always used to be on cop shows and superhero shows before the '90s (neither is the captain some African American authority figure with no inner life). He's a younger and openly gay Indian Canadian guy. And now the Arrow/Flashverse is boldly placing a black woman at the center of the action instead of behind the action like spymaster Amanda Waller or on the sidelines like Iris. The five-minute webtoon format may make Vixen seem like a small step towards progress, but this step's a big one.

WHAT IF… Soul Train's animated locomotive raced against the Neighborhood Trolley from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood?

Superman: The Animated Series once pitted super-fast Superman against the equally super-fast Flash in a charity footrace that got interrupted by a supervillain's plot to make the sky rain cats and dogs or some shit. When Supes and The Flash resumed their around-the-world race after saving the weather together, the episode left the race unresolved. Nerds everywhere must have hurled their Hot Pockets at the TV screen in frustration--this must have been their equivalent of the famously infuriating Sopranos series finale ending (pre-Battlestar Galactica/Lost, of course)--but I thought concluding the race on an ambiguous note was a brilliant, post-show-discussion-sparking move.

Soul Train's recent re-emergence as a trending topic due to Don Cornelius' death has got me thinking which lovable TV show mascot from my youth would win a Supes-vs.-The Flash-style railroad race: the animated Soul Train itself or Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Trolley?

For a locomotive, the Soul Train moves kind of slow, like the similar-looking Batmobile in the 1989 Batman with Michael Keaton (who happened to start out on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood as an assistant whose tasks included helping the crew with the Trolley). It's kind of difficult to build up speed when your chassis is swaying back and forth to O'Bryan or Shalamar.

Because it's much smaller and it doesn't dance (that inability to dance, even during its own piano theme music, means it must be really white), the Trolley is faster.





Even though the Trolley would win and everyone in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe would lose their minds, I'd still root for the Soul Train. I'd rather root for the not-so-white underdog who can't resist grooving to Shalamar.



Shit yeah, Cheryl Song! Represent!

And this concludes this edition of "Watch What Happens When I Sound Like a Discussion Someone Had with a Housemate While Sharing Some Indo at 2am."