Origins

OK. One detour before the next episode since we're starting up again. One of the features on the Blu-Ray set is the inclusion of the original promo reel that Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski created as the official pitch to the studio for The Animated Series. This is the general concept of the storytelling and visual styles that they planned to use and you can see why the studio, already eager to begin a Batman project by recruiting Timm, were convinced that they had found the right person to do it.

This video has been around in bootleg form for quite some time, but ordinarily the sound file isn't connected to it and that's the case on the Blu-Rays, as well. But this user on YouTube found the soundtrack and synced it properly so we're not just listening to the theme music, but the actual delivery of the moment as Timm and Radomski first presented it. You can see all of their main visual themes in this two-minute clip: the darkness of the overall picture, the red skies of Gotham, the menacing portrayal of The Batman, including the painted still at 0:59. There's a bit of variation, in that the moments immediately following that still showing our hero dodging gunfire uses a more "toony" approach than the rest of the series did, with The Batman showing Bugs Bunny-like agility in his motion. But the moment where the camera pulls back to show the literally larger-than-life combat between The Batman and the gangster at 1:25, as their shadows on the wall display the Caped Crusader's effort for the entire city to see, is every bit the kind of story that Timm and Radomski meant to tell. Speaking of Bugs, the full orchestra behind the music of the series is also something that the producers wanted in order to get closer to that cinematic effect, just like those Warner Bros. classics.

It was Radomski who came up with the idea of painting all of the backgrounds on black paper in order to maintain that darkness. In fact, some of the early episodes were so dark that they apparently hit the technical limit for broadcast, since it affects the overall picture. And you can see that in the case of the first episode they worked on and released, which is the second episode I reviewed: On Leather Wings. That one has it all: the red skies, the darkness, the elaborate animation style that is evident in the promo reel above. There's also a highlight where the Man-Bat, with The Batman in town, flies along the length of one of those police airships. Timm said the shot was so complex that they were afraid the director, Kevin Altieri, wouldn't be interested, since it would be easy for a lot of viewers to lose the flow of the action. But Altieri signed right onto it, which confirmed to Timm and Radomski that they had a guy who would go on to become a key member of the team in a lot of different functions.

That also meant directors that were flexible, since most of the scripts for the episodes were shorter than typical TV animation scripts, which map out every action and camera change. These scripts were done in more "Marvel style", echoing the rival comic publisher's approach to comic scripting, in which the writer sends a detailed plot and leaves the pace and camera angle up to the artist, before returning to script (dialogue) the action. The studio hated it, because there was less detail for them to object to, so they didn't know what was coming. But that's what happens when you don't know where the Darknight Detective will appear next-! One other detail that Timm revealed about On Leather Wings is that it's the first and last time that The Batman appeared in the series with blood on his face (from a rough landing.) That's one thing the censors objected to and which wouldn't happen again.

OK. Next time for sure: See No Evil.

Batman: TAS episode #33: Christmas with The Joker

[Editor's note: I'm going to stick with the numbering system that I started with, which is based on HBO's arrangement. until I get to disc 4 of the Blu-rays, where I can begin following the arrangement that is presented on the discs and simply move on from there.]

Unlike the previous episode (Beware the Grey Ghost), Christmas with The Joker is presented as a very "standard" Batman adventure and, in truth, kind of like a "standard" Christmas period TV show, where the basic premise is subsumed in the holiday timing and theming that one assumes was foremost on the minds of the viewers, with Consumerist Extravaganza (aka the holiday season) looming large, so Batman and Co. were following suit. This was originally the second episode of the series broadcast on November 13th of 1992 so that does become one of the themes of the episode, in which Robin insists that it's time for them to kick back and take a break during the holidays, while Batman is determined to keep their normal routine, not least because the Clown Prince of Crime has just escaped from Arkham and our hero knows he'll be a problem. It's a pretty standard plot in that respect and follows it to the letter, so there's very little innovation here from a screenplay perspective. In some respects, that's fine, because anything involving The Joker is going to be just as entertaining, if not moreso, than any of the other regular villains that we'll encounter. That's reemphasized here by the reminder that Mark Hamill is perhaps the best choice ever made as the voice talent behind the deadly harlequin, as his mildly deranged cackle gives us the air of menace we needed behind the character's otherwise goofy exploits and schemes. With Commissioner Gordon, Summer Gleeson, and Harvey Bullock held captive as "the Lawful Family" whom The Joker threatens to kill if the heroes don't get there in time to save them, the producers not only generated a regular Batman adventure with Christmas trappings but also dropped in the people who would be part of the regular series cast for years.

The episode was also an acknowledgement of the greater cultural context that would be attached to the series, as it begins with the schoolyard rhyme that would never have been approved of by DC Comics but which most children of the era would've been familiar with:

Jingle bells, Batman smells
Robin laid an egg
Batmobile, lost a wheel
Joker got away-hey!

This was a Batman for the 90s, in which society has become refamiliarized with the character as an essential part of the culture and not just a costumed superhero known only to children. Again, the dual nature of good cartoons- funny pictures and adventures for the kids, more mature even subversive messages for the adults akin to the best of Warner Bros. productions, rather than the basics of something like Disney -is evident here. These are the lessons of Marvel ringing true in DC presentations and a tip of the hat to how Batman has greater appeal than almost any other character in the DC stable for many, many reasons. A further example of that appears in the discovery of a "Betty Blooper" doll; an acknowledgement of Betty Boop, a classic character of animation history who had just been reintroduced to moviegoers and animation fans everywhere with the recent production of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in 1988. Here was also a chance to insert the usual Jokerisms (a menacing Joker-in-the-box and the dolls produced by LaffCo as a clue for the heroes to find where the villain was hiding), as well as an opportunity to bring in Danse Macabre as a musical overture to the action. As the second episode of the new series, it doesn't stray too far from the old reliables, which is both understandable and acceptable, even if it seems rote, 30+ years later (and kinda did, then, too.) Speaking of which, Robin being used to spit out expository elements of the plot ("We gotta stop that train-!" after they discover that The Joker has detonated the nearby railway bridge) is also SOP right from the 60s TV show, alongside a typical pun line when our hero dispenses with some of Joker's threats in the most direct way possible ("They don't call ya Bat Man for nothing!") I will say that the writers missed a chance to make the cream pie that covered The Batman some kind of dire chemical, but we'd reached the end of our half hour episode running time by then. Ah, well.

Anyway, a solid return to our examination of the series with the greatest foe The Batman has ever had or ever will, even if it was about as bog-standard as you can get for a plot. Next up, we revert to a more mundane challenge for the Darknight Detective when he encounters a moral quandary that is a more pointed example of the series' direction toward younger viewers in See No Evil.

Picking up where we left off

Three-and-a-half years ago, I posted my last review of a Batman: The Animated Series episode. I had made it to what HBO (now (ugh) Max) had represented as episode #32: Beware The Grey Ghost. What I didn't realize in the passage of some 30 years since the series had been first aired is that most of what HBO had on their service was just the first season of B:TAS and not only were there many more episodes to watch, but there were also the films that had been associated with the series at various points. Thankfully, in perusing the retail overlord that is Amazon a few weeks ago, I discovered the complete series, including specials, films, and behind-the-scenes stuff for just a few dollars. The reason that was probably presented to me by the all-powerful algorithm is that I'd been watching the latest effort by producer, Bruce Timm, which is Batman: Caped Crusader; Amazon's own production that is a mild reworking of B:TAS, oriented away from the kid-friendly lessons that Fox and censors had demanded and more toward actual psychological exploration of the characters and adult storylines of relationships and society. It didn't do anything spectacular, but it did give the canon a healthy dose of modernization (for example, it has the best rendition of Harley Quinn ever presented, a character who was created in B:TAS.) But after watching that series of 10 episodes, I remembered that I had let my exploration of B:TAS run aground and gave some more thought to picking it up and seeing if I could complete my original attempt at watching and writing about the whole project. So, here I am.

As noted, I made it through 32 episodes of season 1, which leaves me another 33(!) to write about here, plus 20 more in season 2 and 24 in season 3, plus a few insider/background/bonus features and the two films Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and Batman & Mr. Freeze: Subzero. It's, uh, going to be a long road and by the time I finish this, perhaps the second season of Caped Crusader will be out... Regardless, we'll be slightly shifting tack just based on the medium at hand. Since there's only one episode of season 1 that I haven't covered left on disc 1 of the set that I have, I'm going to look at that one and then probably the pilot that's also on that disc (The Dark Knight's First Night) and the one remaining on disc 2 (See No Evil) before finally moving on to the originally planned Cat Scratch Fever, which is on disc 3 along with 5 other episodes of season 1. So, next up is Christmas with the Joker. It's probably best to get back into the whole thing with the Clown Prince of Crime, anyway.

Failure of vision

Francis Ford Coppola is a director of note mainly for the time period when he was part of the insurgent "New Hollywood" in the 70s, who were a collection of filmmakers that were lauded for breaking the studio system, such that the directors of films finally had more authority than the studio did. The studios just looked at the books and what might sell, while said directors had vision that audiences responded to. In Coppola's case, that means films like the Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now, and The Conversation. But he's also cited for one of the films that ended said era in One from the Heart, which led to a decade of him producing "commercial" (i.e. studio approved) films to pay back the debt he owed from that colossal failure (critically panned and earning ~$600k against a $26m budget.) Nothing he's done since the 1970s has been the type of success that you'd expect from someone who directed and co-wrote what many people regard as the greatest film ever made (The Godfather; for the record, I am not one of those people) and, in fact, he hadn't done anything for 13 years prior to the release of Megalopolis, which he wrote, directed, and produced. And when I say "produced", I mean "footed the bill for", since he'd been carrying this idea around for 40 years and could convince no one to fund it until he sold some of his businesses in order to do so, which should tell you quite a bit about why it couldn't have been done before now. That "why" is because it's a total travesty of a production and easily the worst thing I've seen since Power of the Dog.

Now, a note on that latter film. At the very least, it had a discernible plot. It wasn't a good story, but you could follow along (for two... and... a... half... hours... at... this... pace...) and at least get some great performances out of the people that were helping to tell that story. Megalopolis has none of this except the horrible pacing. The plot is supposedly based on the Catilinarian conspiracy from 1st century BC Rome. In point of fact, it has absolutely nothing to do with it. The conspiracy was about a demagogue, Lucius Sergius Catilina, who lost the election for consul and tried to instigate a populist insurrection to overthrow the then-current consuls, one of whom was Marcus Tullius Cicero. Sounds like modern times, right? We're dealing with that right now with the walking creamsicle and his collection of MAGAts. Except this film doesn't present that scenario in any way. Adam Driver, playing Cesar Catilina (Coppola was convinced to rename the character "Cesar" so that people would, y'know, get that it was a film about ancient Rome) isn't a political outsider. He's not leading a revolt. He's a visionary inventor who's created something called "megalon" which is supposedly the pathway to economic stability and prosperity for the downtrodden. Is this like the real Catilina promising to wipe out debt (albeit not just for the poor, but also the very wealthy) like the current orange idiot's obsession with tariffs? If this is the political warning that Coppola was trying to convey, then why is Cesar Catilina the hero of the film? Is it because Coppola is following the widely discarded idea that Cicero, in writing about the events, not only embellished but outright lied about what took place and that's why Lucius Catilina has gone down through history as a villain and general threat to democracy? I mean, OK, but then why do many of the opponents of Cesar Catilina, like Mayor Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), end up endorsing the hero who has apparently saved society as we know it?

It's that kind of discordancy that is emblematic of the entire production. Apparently, Coppola would spend hours locked in his trailer, only to emerge with new scenes that had nothing to do with either the script or the day's shooting schedule, leaving everyone else to catch up to his "vision." The entire film is like that. We veer from parties that seem to be emblematic of societal decay but also seem to be made up of all of the characters shown as heroes at the end to scenes of Catilina hard at work on the MacGuffin (Meg-uffin?) that he has supposedly already invented to Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) scheming about how having the world at her feet isn't good enough if she can't also have the one man who wants to do nothing but reject and also remake that world. What makes this even worse is the dialogue, which could have been plucked from the nearest 8th grader's first attempt at a novel. There's not a single line of dialogue in the film that I can recall, having seen it just last night, except the scene where Driver recites Hamlet's entire nunnery scene speech ("To be or not to be...") and the sequence where Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel) regurgitates bits of Marcus Aurelius in rapid succession. In other words, the only memorable dialogue in the entire 2.5 hour film is that written by other writers. The rest of it is boilerplate exposition and exclamation that you'd think would be used in a basic theater class as an exercise. The story from the set was that Coppola asked Driver to do the nunnery speech as a warm-up exercise and then left it in the film because it fit with... what? I have no idea.

Meanwhile, the central element of the plot- the megalon -is, as noted, a MacGuffin. It doesn't really do anything. It's just there for the rest of the non-story to revolve around. It finally makes a concerted appearance in the last 10 minutes, doing what it's claimed to be invented for (reshaping the way people live), but is mostly just visual effects that don't actually impact the story. At one point, Catilina is injured and megalon is used to seemingly save his life, but the miracle substance doesn't affect his body, his character arc, his attitude, or even his appearance in any way. It's just perfect plastic surgery and that major event in the story dissipates like everything else. That includes most of the performances. With a cast like this, you'd expect that you're going to get something interesting, at least. But with the parts they were given (or woefully miscast with; can you imagine Gustavo Freng as a confused buffoon? Because that's what Esposito is in this film.) or the lack thereof, it's not really a surprise that none of them were able to generate much. Dustin Hoffman is in this film for about 5 minutes of screen time and three lines. Like the megalon, he doesn't actually do anything except show up on the cast list, which may be the whole reason he was included, but even if his part were larger, I'm not sure what he could have done with it. Jon Voigt had a significantly greater part and still spent most of his time just being there while other people shouted monosyllabic platitudes around him. It takes real effort to make actors this good look this bad and that's even when they're doing something mildly interesting, like Shia LaBeouf as Claudio Pulcher going down on Platinum while she insists he call her "Auntie Wow." It has nothing to do with the plot and is completely incongruous with the scenes that came just before it, so it fits the definition of titillation perfectly, but at least someone was doing something.

I've really never seen anything like it and really don't care to ever again. I frequently suggest whether films are worth the time and effort of seeing them in this space and this is one in which I don't think I can mention a single, redeeming feature, unlike many others that I've not cared for. I sincerely wish I had the 2.5 hours of my life back. It's possible to see a film just so you can see something that was so bad, it's "good." But if you're going to do that, at least see something short, like The Room. This film is quite simply a mega waste of time (and money. Yours and Coppola's.)

When the most innovative thing about your story is the title

So, I'm the story guy. Any of you that have read this blog more than once knows this. If I'm going to enjoy anything on any screen, it's going to have to have at least a semblance of a decent story. That is, in the end, the purpose of most creative works, be they words, pictures, or moving pictures. The old "... worth a thousand words" is a cliché for a reason. Even more importantly, if you're going to present a creative work that's just the latest in a long, long, long train of similar works because the genre has some inherent appeal to modern culture, then you really have to try just a bit more to make your efforts worthwhile. Sadly, My Old Ass does not do this. It's presented as a "coming of age" story with the twist being that the person helping guide Elliott (Maisy Stella, in her well done film debut) through that transition is the older version of herself, complete with knowledge of how their conjoined life will proceed which, of course, can't be told to the younger version, who's too insouciant to care early on in the film, anyway.

The main problem with the story presented in this film is that it lacks pathos. Nothing in it makes you think that it resembles the real life of teenagers around the world in any way, shape, or form. There is no tragedy. There is no concern. There's not even a bit of frustration outside of constructed elements that only vaguely resemble the disenchantment that most teenagers have with family life. The reason for this lack of real emotion is that none of the characters in this film are real people. They're all perfect representations of people, but they lack any hint of the trouble or problems or fears or consternation that all real humans actually have. This is a Hallmark card come to life. One brother is an expert golfer who's going to take over the family cranberry farm, not because he has to in order to save it or because his parents have demanded that he do so, but because he wants to be a farmer in 2024. The other brother is a blissful pre-teen whose only identifying trait is a serious attachment to Saoirse Ronan. Elliott makes noises about being annoyed by both of them as most teenaged girls would be with their younger brothers, but neither of them displays any behavior whatsoever that would be annoying to her. They're cardboard cutouts. Perhaps as a perfect example of how detached this script is from reality, despite this being an American film, all of the characters in it are non-threatening Canadians, since presumably no one could have this artificial an existence in Trumplandia.

Elliott is no different. Not only is she about to depart the rural enclave which is a beautiful lake house and her parents' cranberry farm for life at the University of Toronto with no baggage whatsoever, but she also has equally perfect and contented friends, the girlfriend she's always wanted, and has nothing to do but drive her boat around the picturesque lake out back. Sex with said girlfriend is stated to be fantastic and, of course, since we somehow can't see an actual coming-of-age sequence, Elliott is already eighteen when the film opens, so she's even a legal adult when it comes to sex, just in case some parts of the American audience would have conniptions about the fact that teenagers might have sex with each other. (They do. All the time.) There's absolutely nothing that would drive this film toward telling any kind of story because there's really no story to tell. There is no conflict. There is no change. There's no pathos that is a regular feature of most kids climbing through their teenage years. A perfect contrast is one of the classics of the genre, Stand By Me. In that film, Gordie's parents ignore him in favor of his deceased brother; Chris' older brother is a thug and he's regarded as one by association; Teddy's father is abusive and he bears the emotional trauma of that; and Vern is an outsider to this group of outsiders, seemingly loved and appreciated by no one, but pitied instead (Pathos!) They go through an adventure that shows them confronting these realistic problems and coming out the end of it in a more positive, reflective place. There's a story there that conveys that. My Old Ass, OTOH, shows you a complete fantasy that has to deliver the "wisdom" inherent to coming-of-age films with a boilerplate recital by Elliott telling us all to be brave enough to actually live life, rather than try to avoid its pitfalls. If there were any actual pitfalls in this film, that message might not have sounded so utterly hollow.

As we coasted along through this like Elliott in her boat, the word that kept coming to me as the best descriptor of this film is "cute." If that's all you want your film to be, OK. It rings more of a music video director (and, uh, writer) but I'm probably aiming a lot higher than most audiences, too. The other encapsulation that came to mind is that My Old Ass is the cinematic equivalent of one of those "Live, Love, Laugh" pictures that show up in people's bathrooms. I'd be a lot more interested in "Live, Sob, Glare Accusingly at Husband Over Breakfast" because at least there'd be something that comprised an actual story there and which might resemble life as all of us real humans know it, rather than in that mystical land of Perfectly No Problem Canadia. Am I being too cynical about this? Maybe. But mostly I'm just reacting to the fact that, once again, I sat in a theater for 90 minutes and no one told me a story that was worth seeing. I mean, sure, if all you want is a feel-good "story", fine. But that's why we have Hallmark cards, most of which don't take an hour-and-a-half to read before you find out they weren't worth it.