TEEN TITANS GO! TO THE MOVIES (2018), TEEN TITANS GO VS. TEEN TITANS (2019)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*


I commented in one of my ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE essays, SUBCOMBATIVE SUPERHEROES PART 3, that I didn't consider the still-current series TEEN TITANS GO! to be a combative series, even though occasional episodes did hinge on fight-scenes rather than on fart and poop jokes. In the multi-part episode "Island Adventure," even the character Raven commented, after she and the other Titans beat a bunch of villains, something like, "I don't know why we don't do this more often. After all, we are superheroes."

The two feature-movies based upon the GO series, however, emphasize the tropes of adventure more than does the average episode. Possibly, because both films run about eighty minutes each, the producers may have favored a more action-oriented superhero-plot to hold the audience's attention, even though both films are dominantly comedies. Of the two, only MOVIES was released to theaters, but though it enjoyed a profitable box office, the second went straight to DVD release. Perhaps Warner Brothers simply couldn't find a hole in their release schedule for a cartoon-movie sequel, despite the fact that MOVIES made substantial money.

As in various episodes, the comedic Teen Titans are screw-ups and bozos. When they botch a confrontation with the Balloon Man (based on an ultra-obscure one-shot METAL MEN villain), three other heroes-- Superman, Wonder Woman, and "John Stewart Green Lantern"-- comment that they don't consider the Titans real superheroes. The teens suffer further societal scorn. They're excluded when they try to attend an advance screening of a new Batman movie. Dozens of heroes far more obscure than the Titans are getting movies-- including Swamp Thing and the Challengers of the Unknown. Robin, the group's irritable alpha male, is particularly torqued at the group's marginalization. The other four aren't that affected, but they're willing to accompany Robin to Hollywood in quest of getting both respect and movie-fame.

Naturally, in the course of courting the cinema, the Titans fall afoul of the evildoer Slade. In the 2003 TEEN TITANS series, Slade was one of the group's principal villains, but most of the GO! episodes made only vague allusions to him, though he seemed to exist in their universe in some form. Here he's treated as if the heroes have never encountered the villain before, resulting in one of the film's better jokes, when the Titans mistake him for Marvel's Deadpool. Slade's evil plot also happens to involve the current craze for superhero movies, and even the late Stan Lee is called upon to make an animated cameo to usher the Titans into the Superhero Big Time.

Overall MOVIES has some moderately witty moments, though I imagine the references to obscure aspects of DC Comics' history were lost on younger viewers.

If anything, the DTV entry-- which I'll call TEEN/TEEN for short-- is even more referential. Here, most of the inside jokes deal with the popular 2003 TEEN TITANS series, which was dominantly serious in tone and which was responsible for establishing the comic-book characters as popular subjects for animation. Indeed, the producers of GO! included a "teaser" at the end of MOVIES, suggesting that the "Serious Titans" would appear in this sequel.

If the main subject of the first movie was American society's enthusiasm for all manner of superheroes, TEEN/TEEN spoofs what I'll call the "multiple earths adventure" In comic books, this trope depended on the encounter of at least two groups of heroes from parallel versions of Earth, wherein the two groups had to resolve some cosmic threat to the respective domains of each group. In Silver Age DC Comics, these were usually variant versions of popular heroes like the Flash and Green Lantern, and thus for the most part the trope was confined to the comic-book medium. The TEEN/TEEN take on this concept is certainly one of the first, if not the first, non-comics adaptations of the trope, debuting even before the CW network produced its very loose adaptation of a crossover-series from the eighties DC-series CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. In TEEN/TEEN, not only must the "funny Titans" deal with the serious versions of themselves, and with an assortment of other variant heroes as well, the teams' antagonists are a funny and a serious version of the demon-lord Trigon.

Though the 2003 Titans are played straight, their gravitas is largely flouted by the levity of the 2013 group. The level of humor is about the same level as MOVIES, decent but not spectacular, and the "serious TItans" don't really have a chance to shine in this format-- which will probably aggravate the many fans who preferred their adventures to those of their goofball variations.