SHE BEAST (1966)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

"Hey, we can only afford Barbara Steele for a few days' shooting on this picture!"

"Not to worry: we'll shoot her few scenes so that they bookend the main story, and audiences will be satisfied as long as they see her at the beginning and the end."

That's of course a made-up idea of what might have prompted Michael Reeves to invest his own money into this mediocrity in order to launch his directing career. Other considerations could have been simply finding out that the bankable actress was only available to Reeves for a limited amount of time, or any number of other contingencies. Nevertheless, SHE BEAST is not a Barbara Steele film just because Steele is in the movie for maybe 20 minutes, and I as a viewer resent that what Reeves and company gave viewers was the menace of an ugly old witch in place of Steel's imperial beauty. "Subverting expectations" was as much of a cop-out then as it is now.         

A prologue shows us a town of aggrieved Transylvanians lynching an ugly witch, one Vardella, back in the 1700s, by drowning her in a local lake.  a honeymooning couple named Veronica and Philip (Steele, Ian Ogilvy) trek through Transylvania and get lost. They check into the only hotel available, run by slovenly owner Ladislav (Mel Welles). The couple meets a local eccentric, Count Von Helsing, who claims to be descended from the same (non-aristocratic) doctor from the DRACULA story, which he intimates was real life. At night Ladislav peeps through a window at Veronica, and Philip responds by beating the tar out of the innkeeper.

Morning comes and the couple get in their car and drive away. They don't get far, for when they near the lake where Vardella died, an occult force seizes the car, causing it to plunge into the lake. A truck driver pulls two bodies out of the waters, a still-living Philip and what looks like the corpse of a raddled old woman. What happened to Veronica? Philip doesn't have a clue, but Von Helsing knows that if he and Philip don't complete an exorcism ritual, Vardella will come back to life in Veronica's usurped body. And then most of the movie is devoted to Philip and Von Helsing trying to overcome Vardella's curse, and the ambivalent results of their endeavors.

This is largely a paint-by-the-numbers horror flick, which was probably sufficient for a lot of viewers back in the day, though it's pretty scant of strong horror moments. Only two elements stand out from the routine. One is Mel Welles, who played his lascivious, Commie-maxim-spouting innkeeper for all he's worth, and almost certainly contributed his own lines to the script. The other-- as if to make up for the absence of the regal Steele beauty-- is a scene in which Ladislav's niece (Lucretia Love) tries to take shelter with her uncle to avoid the weirdness, and the slob tries to rape her. He doesn't succeed but the incident does serve to inject into the film some nubile flesh, thus slightly offsetting the repellent image of Vardella, who's equally ghastly both dead and alive.

                   

DEADLY SWEET (1967)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

First off, I've long heard the name of erotic filmmaker Tinto Brass, but have only seen a G-rated 1964 film he directed, THE FLYING SAUCER, which is probably not representative of his work. DEADLY SWEET, which also used the title I AM WHAT I AM, may not be any more so.  

Second, SWEET is a hard film to classify. The poster above calls SWEET "a sexy giallo thriller," but aside from the director/co-writer's use of garish color, there's not much here to tie the movie in with the giallos as they later developed. SWEET might be deemed to prefigure the way some later giallos combined psycho-horror with crime thrillers, and indeed this film frequently seems like a sendup of a crime thriller. The only metaphenomenal element is that of a perilous psycho, but Brass approaches the genre-element of "find the killer" with a studied indifference, underscored by two separate references either to director Michelangelo Antonioni or to that director's BLOW-UP from the previous year. Since that movie also concerned a crime that almost gets lost in the protagonist's experiences in the world of Swinging Sixties London, there can't be much doubt that Brass wanted attentive viewers to pick up on his emulations-- for all that BLOW-UP became an international sensation while SWEET was essentially forgotten.

POV character Bernard (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is an out-of-work actor in London, and he's not painted as the brightest bulb, given that he's given to dropping random quotes of persons as different as Lao Tsu and Mao Tse-tung. While in a disco-- where he's been cut off for failure to pay his bar tab-- he spies four well-known upper-class celebrities: blonde heiress Jane Burroughs (Ewa Aulin), her brother Jerome, her stepmother Martha, and an older man, Leris, rumored to be keeping company with Martha since her husband passed away. This sounds a lot like the sort of nuclear family constellation that makes for dramatic explosions, but unlike most giallos, family conflicts get lost in the shuffle.

Bernard drops in on the club's owner and finds the man dead, while in the same room is Jane, who immediately claims, "I didn't do it." Does Bernard do the sane thing and call the cops? No, he decides he's going to play detective (he even wears a trenchcoat during most of the film) and try to exonerate the waifish Jane. When she introduces herself, he responds to the name "Jane Burroughs" with "Me Tarzan," making clear that Bernard nurtures delusions of being a rescuing hero. And Jane seems content to let him squire her around the sights of Swinging London-- at least, until she's seized by kidnappers (one played by a very young David Prowse). Then Bernard has to start playing detective for real, eventually linking up with Brother Jerome to save Jane.

Though in many giallos the kidnappers would be related to the murder, here they seem to be nothing but mundane extortionists. Along the way Leris, the supposed lover of Martha, is also murdered, and toward the movie's conclusion-- amid lots of psychedelia, jump cuts, pop art imagery, and brief shifts from color to black-and-white-- Bernard finally gets around to interviewing Stepmother Martha. She promptly reveals that she wasn't the one Leris was dating on the sly, and Bernard learns that a hero should never trust a blonde waif, even after she lets said hero jump her bones.

Euro-comics master Guido Crepax is credited with having story-boarded SWEET, and most of the time the movie looks like an attempt to apply the sixties' pop art aesthetic to a whole motion picture. Pop art appears in many location backgrounds, including one Batman painting not known to me and one of Lichtenstein's famous "blow-ups" of a single romance-comics panel. In two different scenes violence is punctuated with quick "sound-effects" like "SLAM," a clear shout-out to '66 BATMAN, and Bernard also has a close encounter with Alfred E. Neumann. Even Jane's enigmatic line-- "I am what I am"-- might be derived from a certain salty sailor. I don't think Brass had any particular point to make with these citations, though, any more than his conjurations with the sixties music scene. Swinging London does at times seem to dissolve into a Dionysian chaos far from anything that Humphrey Bogart, or even Jean-Paul Belmondo, ever had to cope with. Thus I classify SWEET as an irony, in that the film depicts a world where even the story's Big Reveal doesn't make things any less chaotic.

                        

 

X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, SEASON ONE (1992-93)

 

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

Oddly, the collection I'm reviewing isn't really confined to the 13 episodes of Season One; it adds on the first three episodes of Season 2 for good measure. This does have the minor advantage of giving me more of the "Morph arc"-- that is, the disposition of the original-to-the-series shape-changer of that name. He was introduced in the first two-part of Season One with the intention of his being an "instant casualty," but though he's not a compelling character, it was interesting to see how the writers brought him back and then exiled him again, at least for the near future. This doesn't mean, however, that the faux Season One ends without other dangling plotlines.

X-MEN '92 was a fan-favorite in its day, simply because it was the first major attempt to adapt the popular franchise to any other narrative medium. For me personally, though, the success of the adaptation is compromised at best. "My" X-MEN was the classic run from the 1970s through the early 1980s, and I lost interest for the most part in the 1990s and thereafter. But X-MEN '92 was devoted to spotlighting a number of characters and creations that were getting heavy play in the late 1980s and early 1990s and melding them with stories from the classic run.

For instance, in the comics the arc DAYS OF FUTURE PAST was an intense time-travel tale in which the future-era character of Shadowcat journeyed back to the 1980s to inhabit the body of her teenaged self, with the end of forestalling a major crisis in the past. The cartoon keeps some of the same beats as the comics-tale, but the time-traveler becomes 1990s character Bishop, whose appeal as a character I find baffling. The arc still sets up the usual anti-mutant paranoia, as in the comic, but there's no emotional kick to the plot-events. 

The "classic run" characters-- Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, and Wolverine-- usually receive less interesting character-moments, while another classic character, Colossus, is confined to a guest shot. The scripts instead emphasize later characters Gambit, Jubilee, and Rogue, and of those three, only Rogue is executed with a degree of charm. (Her involved history with Ms. Marvel is naturally not referenced here, but it did occur to me, as a result of viewing the first season, that there was a good reason Rogue became more popular than the Carol Danvers character.) 

The animation is very limited in the first season, and that takes away from any pleasure I might get from seeing the merry mutants kick ass against evil. I was amused by the episode "Slave Island" simply because it worked in a half-dozen mutant-cameos, many of whom had no lines, though later I had to wonder why said mutants-- all of whom were kidnapped to be slaves on the island of Genosha-- were all performing their slave-duties in their gaudy costumes. Still, given that Genosha is made into the source of the mutant-hunting Sentinel robots, this did give rise to a good line in which someone observes that the mutants are being forced to labor for the same people making the automatons who hunt their kind.

Since it's not that much fun to watch the first season, I'd rather just read the comics rather than see the classic run crossbred with the stuff I never cared much about.                   

RESIDENT EVIL: DEGENERATION (2008)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

DEGENERATION was the first motion-capture animated film based directly on the popular video game, and the first time an adaptation linked up the game's protagonists, soldier Leon S. Kennedy and scientist Claire Redfield. That means that viewers like me-- who only knew the series that starred original movie-character Alice (Milla Jovavich)-- had to go Alice-less.

While the character design of Claire Redfield has a stronger vibe than I've seen in a lot of motion-capture animation, the story is a fairly dull setup of all the basics of the franchise. The viewer learns how an evil corporation designed the insidious T-virus, which has the unfortunate side effect of turning its victims into killer zombies. If one doesn't want to hear that much about the mechanics of who did what to whom, DEGENERATION fails to provide much in the way of dynamic characters or situations.

Its most positive aspect is that this film got all the exposition out of the way, so that the next in the series, DAMNATION, offered a lot more of the kickass action integral to the live-action movie franchise.      

THE BATMAN, SEASON TWO (2005)

 

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

The first season was too busy putting new wine in old bottles to trouble with crossovers, but Season Two makes up for lost time in that department.

THE CAT, THE BAT AND THE VERY UGLY (F)-- Catwoman and Penguin go after the same priceless gems and then decide to team up to take out Batman. However, while Catwoman wants the gems for reasons of mere avarice, Penguin plays a grander game, hoping to use the gems to mount an attack on Gotham. It's a very straightforward "villain teamup" story, though it's amusing that Catwoman is offended when Penguin betrays her before she can betray him. 

RIDDLED (G)-- One reason it's hard to do better-than-average Riddler stories, even in comics, is that he started out as being just as antic a villain as The Joker. BTAS tried to make Riddler over into a more intellectual type of Bat-foe, but that iteration had only mixed success. The producers of BATMAN '04 decided to cut out all the wackiness of earlier Riddlers, re-designing the malcontent to look utterly serious, his face painted so as to give him a gloomy appearance. This Riddler announces his war on Gotham with a bomb-threat, and he wants just one cop, Ellen Yin, to try to solve his riddles. In truth, this Riddler fully expects Batman to work covertly with Yin, and this grimdark Prince of Puzzlers seems more imposing due to his less humorous attitude. For a bonus, Yin gets to stomp a bunch of Riddler-goons with martial arts.

FIRE AND ICE (P)-- The script never bothers to articulate how two such unlikely partners in crime, Mister Freeze and Firefly, come to team up. Some OK action-scenes but nothing more.

THE LAUGHING BAT (G)-- This episode presents one of Joker's loonier schemes, as he dresses up in a Bat-suit and starts doling out extreme punishments to people who commit minor infractions. For good measure, he infects the Bat with a venom that causes the hero, in both his identities, to be assailed by bouts of consuming laughter, laughter that will eventually kill him. For good measure Joker-Bat crosses paths with Penguin, who's "creeped out" by the role reversals of the two enemies, and Gotham's mayor is voiced by none other than Adam West. But the episode's greatest strength is the conflation of grotesqueries in both the hero and his nemesis.

SWAMPED (G)-- In BTAS as in many comics, the reptilian rogue Killer Croc is usually just a big strong guy, able to give Batman a really tough hand-to-hand fight. But the writer of "Swamped" apparently remembered that the original Croc was a ruthless gang-boss, and in addition this Croc-iteration also imperils Gotham through his hijacking of Gotham's canal system. Croc gives Batman a good tussle, and voice-artist Ron Perlman gives Croc's dialogue an excellent Bayou flavor.     

PETS (F)-- Penguin invents a sonic device with which to control birds and make them commit crimes, but the same device allows the villain to control the monstrous Man-Bat. Again, a few decent fights, but nothing special.

MELTDOWN (F)-- When Joker launches another crime-spree, Clayface attacks the clown for having created the putty-mutagen that made Detective Bennett into a shapechanger. Batman intervenes and captures Clayface, though not Joker. Over the ensuing weeks, Bennett goes on trial and receives positive testimony from none other than Arkham Asylum's chief psychiatrist, Hugo Strange (a villain in the comics, though in Season Two he seems benign). Bruce Wayne gets Bennett released on probation, as long as Bennett refrains from becoming Clayface. However, Bennett's resentments over his hard luck, as well as his desire to kill Joker, prove his undoing. The sense of tragedy from the first-season reinvention of Clayface is entirely lost.

JTV (P)-- Joker starts his own broadcast channel. It sounds like it ought to yield a lot of lunatic fun, but it's fairly dull. Yin gets a new partner, a comically egotistical cop.

RAGDOLLS TO RICHES (F)-- I give the writers credit for revamping a DC villain not associated with Batman: Ragdoll, an unpredictable athlete with an incredibly limber, seemingly boneless body. He and Catwoman contend for a museum prize, and Batman seeks to capture them both. There's a nice sequence with Selina Kyle having a meet-cute with Bruce Wayne, followed by bat and cat teaming up to play with the doll. 

THE BUTLER DID IT (F)-- The little-used Bat-villain Spellbinder might not be a foe anyone wanted to see again, but he still turns out better than Season One's ersatz Cluemaster. And this villain has a novel plan: brainwashing the butlers of wealthy men-- including Alfred-- to commit crimes. 

GRUNDY'S NIGHT (F)-- Solomon Grundy, undead foe of Green Lantern, has only occasionally taken the role of a Bat-enemy. But "Night" does present Grundy as a Halloween legend, and in keeping with the All-Hallows tradition, the being that appears to be Solomon Grundy is not what he appears to be.

STRANGE MINDS (G)-- Joker kidnaps Detective Yin and tells everyone that he alone knows where she is, and he alone can prevent her being blown up by a time bomb. With the help of Hugo Strange, Batman is able to interface with Joker's warped mentality, seeking to make the villain reveal Yin's location. But this time the game of bat and jester takes place on the crime clown's turf.

NIGHT AND THE CITY (F)-- I have no idea why someone bestowed the name of a well-regarded film noir upon a routine villain-teamup, in which Riddler, Joker and Penguin vie for the death of Batman and the control of Gotham City. The best part is when Joker, meeting Riddler for the first time, demands to know if the newer villain is "stealing my schtick," and the Riddler haughtily replies, "I don't do jokes. I tell riddles." Yin, accused of collaborating with the Bat-vigilante, is vindicated partly because Batman captures all three super-crooks, and partly because there's a new commissioner in town, name of Gordon, who concludes the season with the first display of the Bat-signal.               

THE BATMAN, SEASON ONE (2004-05)

 

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

Like many fans of the 1990s BATMAN cartoon series, I probably was so impressed with that show's accomplishments that I didn't give this 2004-2008 program a fair shake. I didn't initially find the art style of the latter series, with its strong manga influence, attractive. However, I now think it's a creditable approach. It's true that some characters, like Bruce Wayne, seemed a little too "rounded," though this series does take place when Bruce Wayne is young and has only been Batman for a year or so. In compensation, some of the villains are drawn as less realistic, almost "bigfoot" grotesques, but the sense of their being more "cartoony" had its own attractive aspects.

THE BAT IN THE BELFRY (F)- Not surprisingly, the show led off with the debut of both the New Batman and a more demonic looking version of The Joker. In contrast to BATS, here the two adversaries have never met before, so this is Young Batman's first encounter with both the Clown Prince and his dominant weapon, Joker Venom. It's a fairly straightforward story, though Joker has an interesting observation as to how he and the crusader might be viewed as iterations of the "comedy" and "tragedy" theatrical masks.

CALL OF THE COBBLEPOT (G)-- Though both the 1992 and 2004 cartoons took considerable inspiration from the Tim Burton Penguin, both in terms of his freakish looks and a Dickensian style of attire, I now like the 2004 concept better. In the 1992 cartoon as in the comics, Penguin is generally just a weird-looking fellow with pretenses of social refinement. But the 2004 writers came up a new and valid take: this Oswald Cobblepot actually comes from old British money, so some of his affectations are rooted in family heritage. However, when Bruce Wayne first encounters the pudgy purveyor of perfidy, he finds that his social standing is just a mask for his rudeness and petty larceny-- not long before Batman learns that Penguin believes himself entitled to become a full-time criminal. Alfred provides some strong comedy relief in that his grandfather butled for Penguin's ancestor, and Alfred conveys the opinion that the Cobblepots were all rotters. Since Penguin's tics are so familiar, it's tough to do anything inventive with him, but THE BATMAN's version of the Birdman Bandit may turn out to outrate that of BTAS. An additional improvement is that this Penguin's henchpersons are a couple of identical "kabuki ninja girls."

TRACTION (P)-- The only thing I can say for the debut of Bane-- a hugely overrated Bat-foe in my view-- is that here he's no worse than the one in either the comics or in BTAS. The fight between Bane and the hero is okay, but of course there can be no direct reference to Bane's big moment in the comics: that of breaking Batman's back.

THE CAT AND THE BAT (F)-- This Catwoman-debut is no match for BATS' iteration, "The Cat and the Claw," and the quasi-romantic encounter of hero and villainess is only adequate. I wasn't a big fan of the grey BTAS costume, but I can't stand a Catwoman with huge ears on her cowl, less like those of a cat than a fennec fox. But Selina Kyle in regular clothes is arguably sexier than BTAS Selina.        

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE BAT (P)-- It's a new origin for Kirk Langstrom, Man-Bat. In the comics, the scientist foolishly injects himself with his serum in Doctor Jekyll fashion, thinking he'll develop a bat's natural sonar. There's a brief mention of his outdoing Batman, but the 2004 show gives its Langstrom a major case of bat-envy, and the scientist wants to mutate himself into a Man-Bat from the start. His character's not believable and the Man-Bat design is unexceptional.

THE BIG CHILL (F)-- Like Man-Bat, this version of Mister Freeze elides all potential for tragedy, for this Freeze is just a professional thief who gets turned into a cold-dependent freak. Since he's not a scientist, this means the script has to give the villain ice-powers. The only thing that elevates this episode to "fair mythicity" is that Young Batman hasn't grown a hard shell over his emotions, and so he's briefly traumatized at the result of his actions when he inadvertently caused Freeze's mutation.

THE BIG HEAT (F)-- This episode arguably places less emphasis on the debut of a new villain-- the fire-spewing arsonist Firefly-- than on Bruce Wayne's problems with his corporate image. This Wayne is perhaps more concerned than the BTAS version with keeping faith with the heritage left him by his parents, which proves a welcome variation.

Q&A (P)-- I'd like to grade this one higher, given that the script addresses the fact that as a child Bruce Wayne ceased to have any sense of "child's play" in his life, once he'd dedicated himself to a life of crimefighting. However, the villain is jejune and predictable, a guy who obsesses about having lose a TV quiz-show as a child, and so becomes The Cluemaster to take vengeance on those he thinks he cheated him. In the comics, The Cluemaster is just a C-list villain, but he's still better than this conception.

THE BIG DUMMY (F)-- This episode debuts a new version of The Ventriloquist, who commits crimes under the apparent "leadership" of his dummy Scarface, who represents his criminal alter ego. No better or worse than the BTAS version.

TOPSY TURVY (F)-- Joker returns with more chaotic crimes, but the emphasis is more on the two of the cops tasked by their commissioner with bringing in The Batman. Of the two, Ethan Bennett, a friend of Bruce's, is nominally sympathetic to Batman's crimebusting activities, while his new partner Ellen Yin is more a traditional cop, resentful of the hero's vigilantism. 

BIRD OF PREY (F)-- Oswald Cobblepot, having fully embraced his supervillain destiny, gets a mad-on for Bruce Wayne, so he and his taloned ninjas show up to loot Wayne Manor. But at the same time Wayne has scheduled an interview with an ambitious news reporter, the first person in the show to suspect a Batman-Wayne connection. Penguin's ego gets full display as he interacts with the reporter and tries to make the news story all about him.

THE RUBBER FACE OF COMEDY/ THE CLAYFACE OF TRAGEDY (F)-- These interlinked episodes come close to being a "villain crossover" between Joker and the new version of Clayface, though I disqualify it on the grounds that the two don't meet in their villain-forms. The commissioner-- just a fool here, rather than a corrupt Gotham cop as in many other versions-- demands that all Gotham cops bring in The Batman. Ethan Bennett gets the commissioner's particular attention, so Bennett seeks to be more pro-active, like his partner Yin. Wayne considers revealing his true identity to his sympathetic buddy, but fortunately does not, for Joker has a new game, involving a putty able to mutate people. As Batman seeks to stop Joker, the two detectives get involved, and ironically, it's the hard-ass Yin who ends up cutting Batman a break for exigent reasons. But in the battle, Bennett is exposed to the putty, and he gets mutated into the shape-changing creature, Clayface. The Clayface of BTAS was only moderately impressive, but I liked Bennett-Clayface better for the way the script captures his confusion at becoming a monster-- giving him the sort of tragic dimension the show elided from Man-Bat and Mister Freeze. As of the end of Season One, Bennett is still a victim of the Clayface curse, though he's cured in a later season. Further, while Bennett loses himself to his monster-self, Yin becomes Batman's unofficial partner. 

                     

                 

JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED, SEASON THREE (2005-06)

 

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

The story goes that the producers of JLU thought that Season 2 was going to be the show's final hurrah, and that's why the last episode was meant to be a circular callback to the beginnings of the DCAU, with 1992's BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES. Then someone gave the order for 13 new episodes, which would end up being the last ones made under the DCAU banner (though a new more DTV movies were made afterward). I don't have a hard time believing this, for Season 3 has a much looser feel than Seasons 1 and 2. While those seasons were preoccupied with the geopolitical results of having an army of superheroes operating under League auspices, Season 3 is nothing more than a salute to the 1978 cartoon series CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER FRIENDS. As in CHALLENGE, the heroes of JLU Season 3 are still the stars, technically. Yet in both shows, the heroes' opposite numbers, the villains, are the ones who initiate most of the action in the episodes-- though for some reason, the villain-group doesn't use the classic name "Legion of Doom."

Luthor is the MVV (most valuable villain) in this quasi-Legion. In the next-to-last Season 2 story, he's separated from his merger with the computer-intelligence Brainiac, and the components of the criminal computer are dispersed across the universe. For some reason that the writers never fully explain, Luthor's torqued off at the separation, and the closest one gets to an explanation is a line from one episode in which Luthor says he felt like "a god" when merged with Brainiac. This could have been worked into a general concept of the "deity envy" Luthor experienced whenever Superman outclassed him, but none of the scripts here delve deeply into the Luthor-Superman psychology. I'll also note that all of the episodes are either fair or poor, with no outstanding mythicity here.

I AM LEGION (F)-- Gorilla Grodd recruits Luthor for his reworked Secret Society, which now includes dozens of members, not unlike the expanded Justice League. Grodd tantalizes the scientist with a fragment of Brainiac, with which Luthor hopes to re-integrate with the computer (who also speaks to Luthor invisibly, though this was probably meant to be in Luthor's imagination). The sinister simian forces the aggrieved villain to sing for his supper, by joining two other villains to make a raid on Blackhawk Island for a mothballed super-weapon. But the villains are opposed by three Leaguers, as well as by the last surviving Blackhawk. Of the seven WWII pilot-heroes, who more or less met the League in the JL episode "Savage Time," only the one named "Chuck" makes it to old age-- and that character was probably chosen because the character was named for the BLACKHAWK co-creator Chuck Cuidera.

 SHADOW OF THE HAWK (F)-- This is one of the few Season 3 developments to build on the soap-operatic lives of the heroes. In the comics, Hawkman was the first hawk-hero at DC, debuting in 1940 with "Shiera" as his main squeeze, who only became "Hawkgirl" a couple of years later. Subsequent iterations of the Hawkman franchise always paired Hawkman and Hawkgirl as a team, but JUSTICE LEAGUE was the first iteration to spotlight Hawkgirl as a solo crusader. In "Shadow," HG is approached by archeologist Carter Hall, who has evidence of Thanagarian rulership in ancient Egypt. Intrigued, HG accompanies Hall to an ancient Egyptian pyramid, but both Batman and Green Lantern think Hall's some sort of stalker. It turns out that Hall believes that he and Shayera are reincarnations of the two ancient lovers who ruled Egypt, and the archeologist has even designed his own Hawkman outfit, complete with wings (presumably based on extrapolated Thanagarian tech). The drama of the possible "reunion of lovers" trope is interrupted by a tomb-raider named Shadow-Thief, and by Batman as well. "Shadow" is at least an interesting fusion of two divergent origins for separate DC hawk-heroes.

CHAOS AT THE EARTH'S CORE (P)-- Supergirl, Stargirl, STRIPE, and Green Lantern get stranded in the subterranean domain of Skartaris, the location of DC Comics' one successful sword-and-sorcery series, Mike Grell's THE WARLORD. This gives the writers the chance to salute not only titular hero Travis Morgan but three-four of his support-cast. All the heroes unite to prevent the theft of a kryptonite cynosure by two Society villains: Metallo and Silver Banshee. Metallo is captured but Grodd remotely shorts him out before he can talk, and this incident provides the League with the first inkling of the Society's activities. Stargirl is made to resent Supergirl just to create phony drama.      

TO ANOTHER SHORE (P)-- Like "Chaos," "Shore" is largely aimed at celebrating another DC icon of yesteryear: the "Viking Prince" feature co-created by Joe Kubert. However, the scenes emulating Kubert's elegant artwork are the only good ones. Grodd reels off to the other villains a windy story about how the god Odin bestowed immortality upon the Prince, making it impossible for him to die. This led the warrior to set sail for the Arctic, where he apparently gets around the spell of Odin by getting deep-frozen-- presumably without being conscious of his "living death." But the ship of the Viking is about to be unearthed from its ice-tomb, and Grodd sends some villains to rip off the secret. The inanity of Grodd's plan-- to obtain immortality based in legends he can't even verify-- spoils a decent battle between the villains and the League, and the conclusion in which Wonder Woman figures out a way to give the Prince a "Viking funeral." On the soap-opera front, J'onn J'onzz steps down as leader, feeling that he's become alienated from his adoptive culture, and seeking to learn more about humans. This might have spawned a decent episode had there been time to do one.

FLASH AND SUBSTANCE (F)-- Flash is about to have his heroic career celebrated in Central City, and he begs Batman to attend. The crusader does so, dragging the "New God" Orion along with him, so that three heroes are on call when three Flash-villains attempt to gang up on their frequent opponent. (Technically, there's a fourth Flash-villain involved, The Trickster, but in a clever twist, Flash reveals that he's not really dangerous when he takes his meds. Trickster is voiced by Mark Hamill, who played the character in the live-action FLASH series.) This is one of the better "homage" episodes, seeking to boil down what made the 1960s FLASH comic so successful -- even though technically the hero involved is Wally West, who took over the mantle of The Flash from his Silver Age mentor. 

DEAD RECKONING (F)-- This is partly a homage to the Deadman franchise, given that much of the story hinges on the undead spirit seeking to avenge the (apparent) slaughter of his allies, the warrior-monks of Nanda Parbat, by the Society. Grodd's acquisition of some mystic power from this city plays into his plot to take over his former home Gorilla City and to turn everyone on Earth into an ape. This goofy plan helps Luthor take over the Society, placing Grodd in prison. However, obtaining the Brainiac fragment from the super-ape doesn't solve Luthor's little problem.

 PATRIOT ACT (F)-- The title is an odd choice for what is essentially a homage to another of DC's 1940s super-teams, the Seven Soldiers of Victory. That group was comprised of Green Arrow, his sidekick Speedy, the Star Spangled Kid and his sidekick Stripesy, the Vigilante, the Shining Knight, and the Crimson Avenger. Only Green Arrow had a major standing in the League up to that point. The characters of the Vigilante and the Shining Knight had made many minor appearances in the cartoon, as had Stargirl and STRIPE, who were modern analogues of Star Spangled Kid and his partner. Speedy had no association with the JLU, while the Crimson Avenger only made non-speaking cameos. So "six soldiers of victory"-- excluding the Avenger-- are available to face the new threat, and as it happens, only a couple of them, Stargirl and STRIPE, have super-powers. The villainous General Eiling from Season 2 takes a superman-serum, which just happens to make him look like the "Shaggy Man" character from the Grant Morrison LEAGUE run in the comics. Eiling attacks the heroes during a parade and largely overwhelms them, though the semi-ordinary heroes are saved by even more ordinary forces. Eiling departs without killing anyone and is not seen again.

THE GREAT BRAIN ROBBERY (F)-- In an episode showing the heroes being pro-active, the heroes attempt to use Flash's brain, due to previous contact with Grodd, to locate the super-gorilla. Unfortunately just as they begin their procedure, Luthor's trying to probe Grodd's brain, and the two processes cause Luthor and Flash to switch bodies. While the League spends the episode trying to catch a super-fast Luthor, Flash has to play the part of the leader of the Secret Society, amid villains who would cheerfully kill him if they knew his identity. "Brain" has a clever moment in which "Luthor" has sex off-camera with "his" girlfriend, the sorceress Tala, in so discrete a manner that most young kids won't know what's going on.

GRUDGE MATCH (F)-- Huntress, despite not being on good terms with Black Canary, notices that she's off her game. Her investigation uncovers the Society's revival of Roulette's "Metabrawl," which now involves using devices to mind-control superheroines into being the fighters. Again, the writers only loosely suggest that the paying audience is brought in by the attractions of seeing hot women fight one another, with Black Canary being one of the hottest attractions. Huntress frees Black Canary, and the two of them must seek to liberate Roulette's other captives-- one being a certain super-powered Amazon. The episode sports a lot of good battles, but they have a special nuance since they concern the "fair sex" in combat.

FAR FROM HOME (P)-- Supergirl, Green Lantern, and Green Arrow get shifted to the era of the Legion of Super-Heroes by the only two heroes not controlled by evildoers: Brainiac 5 and Bouncing Boy. Most of the episode is fighting between the heroes and the villains of the day-- the Legion's most celebrated badguy-group, the Fatal Five-- but there's also a historical prophecy that makes the Leaguers wonder if one of them may never return to the 21st century. However, all goes well in that the Girl of Steel takes a shine to the Boy of Intellect, mirroring a similar romantic fling in the comics.

ANCIENT HISTORY (F)-- Since his previous appearance, Carter Hall has started his hero-career as Hawkman, and he still wants to date Shayera because he believes that they're reincarnated lovers. Green Lantern, even though he's dating Vixen, is visibly jealous, not to mention confused, since in "Epilogue" he learned that a future-version of himself would wed Hawkgirl and spawn a superhero-son. However, the triangle is resolved by the villain of "Shadow of the Hawk." In this iteration, the old Hawkman comics-villain is not just a crook with a gimmick; he's a shadowy creation of Hawkman's own soul, given substance by Thanagarean tech. The Thief brings together the two Hawks and the Lantern in order to show them that Carter Hall's theory is true, insofar as the Hawks are spiritual descendants of the Egyptian Thanagareans. Hawkman re-absorbs his errant fragment, but the episode leaves the conflict unresolved for eternity-- should Hawkgirl's romantic life be guided by oracles of the past, or of the future? I suspect that the writers wanted that ambiguity and would not have rendered a verdict with all the time in the world.

ALIVE! (F)-- Luthor's inability to figure out how to reunite with Brainiac makes him a bigger jerk than usual, and so girlfriend Tala decides to release his enemy Grodd from bondage. (Talk about covert naughtiness: it's strongly suggested that Tala was banging the ape before hooking up with Luthor and intends to do so again once the mad scientist is out of the way.) Before Grodd's release, Luthor is visited by Metron of the New Gods, who foresees that the human's quest for supremacy will bode ill. There's a big battle between the villains loyal to Luthor and those partisan to the gorilla, but the conclusion ends with Grodd's defeat. Luthor uses Tala's magic in an attempt to reconstitute Brainiac, but for some reason, the spell revives Darkseid, out of circulation in the DCAU since the end of the SUPERMAN series. Darkseid returns to Apokolips and rallies his minions for a direct assault on Earth.

DESTROYER (F)-- This is, I suppose, a callback to the ending of the SUPERMAN series, where Superman became majorly torqued after Darkseid brainwashed him to act the villain. As for the rest of the League, they're obliged to work alongside their long-time foes to repel the warriors of Apokolips, while it falls to the Man of Steel to trounce Darkseid. However, Luthor doesn't fight in the trenches. With Metron's help, the scientist gets ahold of the thing Darkseid wants most-- the Anti-Life equation-- and uses it as bait to lure the overlord into his apparent destruction, and that of Luthor as well. Superman does not believe that either evildoer is truly gone, and the series ends on a clever note: the villains' reward for fighting for Earth (admittedly after creating the danger) is a five-minute head start, after which the heroes come after them. The writers, who meant to end the show with a story focused on Batman, still manages a similar moment for the final shot. 

I think this conclusion glosses over the fact that Superman remains the real genesis of the costumed superhero idiom in comics-- despite a few outliers like the Clock (1936) -- though I would qualify that statement by saying that the BATMAN comic was arguably the first GOOD costumed hero comic. But to return to the LEAGUE subject, I think both JLU and its predecessor series offer top-of-the-line formula superhero stories. I don't think the writing staff ever managed to consistently tap into the deeper mythic discourse offered by the best superhero comic books. But television superheroes just don't have the comparative associative freedoms, so "really good formula" is still better than one can usually expect.