JUSTICE LEAGUE ACTION (2016-17)

 

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PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

Though I didn't care for my initial exposure to JUSTICE LEAGUE ACTION in its Cartoon Network broadcast, I have to admit that a binge-watch of the 52 episodes proved a more felicitous experience.

The tongue-in-cheek attitude of ACTION bears some resemblance to that of the 2008-2011 series BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD. Both serials were the work of fan-writers intent on mining all the peculiar content of DC's Silver and Bronze Age comics, albeit given an antic sense of humor foreign to the original, often stodgy stories. I observed in this review that the Batman in BRAVE AND BOLD promulgated a form of "hip humor," but filtered through the main hero's deadpan demeanor. Batman is also worked into every episode of ACTION, as if he were a black-and-grey security blanket for DC adaptations. However, this Batman is played with the near-humorless characterization seen in BATMAN: THE ANIMATED ADVENTURES, probably because ACTION uses three of the key players from that series and its many sequels, writer Paul Dini and voice-actors Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill. 

All the rest of the DC characters are also given a light-hearted touch, though in the course of 52 episodes this strategy gets more than a little repetitious. The most tiresome bolt in ACTION's quiver is building an episode around one of DC's lesser luminaries, portrayed as some sort of goof-up, and showing how these characters triumph in spite of their shortcomings. This is fine when dealing with somewhat oddball types like Booster Gold and Plastic Man. It's not so great when the only episode centered on Green Lantern depicts this major hero losing his power ring down a bathroom drain. Yuk, yuk, yuk-- yawn. 

I also could've done without so many appearances of the 1950s sci-fi curiosity known as "Space Cabbie," a character whom no one has been yearning to see revived. Strangely, while almost none of the ACTION episodes are literally tied to any other series, the last of the "Cabbie" episodes contains a covert reference to the character of Aya from the second and last arc of 2012's GREEN LANTERN: THE ANIMATED SERIES.

The humor does work at times; at least I found myself caught off guard enough to laugh mildly. The downside of the humor-emphasis is that it's very rare that any person or world seems at all seriously under threat, and this is partly because all of the fight-scenes are very quickly executed, so that there's rarely any sense of genuine menace. The strongest episode is a homage to the movie FANTASTIC VOYAGE, in which three of the Leaguers have to be shrunk to germ-size to enter the afflicted body of Superman. Another good one draws from a comics-arc in which the Riddler reforms and becomes a private eye; the episode pits the Prince of Puzzlers and a couple of heroes against the Crown Prince of Crime himself-- and, rather refreshingly, Batman spends the whole episode as a captive. Superman and Wonder Woman do get one designated episode each, and they do have some strong kickass moments, though I for one never got used to the "pop-star" haircut of the Amazon Princess. Harley Quinn gets a fun story in which she's caught between two heroes (the redoubtable Superman and "legacy-hero" Stargirl) and two Silver Age icons (the villainous gorilla Grodd and the monstrous Titano, otherwise known as "King Kong if he had kryptonite vision".)

My biggest complaint is that although the visuals for the opening theme-song promise a big confrontation between the League and some new version of the Legion of Doom, fans never really get a major dust-up between two such opposed groups; the closest is the episode "System Error," where most of the villains turn out to be robots. ACTION is a decent little series to watch once, but if I want a cartoon rich in Silver Age goodness, I'll probably default to episodes of BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD.