STATIC SHOCK, SEASON ONE (2001-01)

 

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

Full disclosure: I've never read a single issue of the STATIC comic book, and only a smattering of other titles in the 1990s DC/Milestone line that spawned the Static character. Therefore I don't know in what particulars the TV show differs from its source material. However, given that the show STATIC SHOCK was trying to play to a kid-audience above all else, one can certainly countenance a lot of changes for the sake of that target-group. However, a lot of kid-vid adventure-shows have been capable of being entertaining even if they had to "work clean"-- and so there's some irony that a cartoon about a hip 14-year-old superhero should be one of the most vanilla shows in this category I've ever encountered.

In the fictional city of Dakota, a chemical weapon is unleashed, resulting in an event called "the Big Bang." What's created is a sub-universe within the greater domain of WB Animation; a city inhabited by instant mutants called "Bang Babies." Most of these individuals-- replete with the usual range of super-powers (freezing, flying, stretching) -- become menaces, so that they're ripe to become the rogues' gallery of the titular hero. Static-- originally high-schooler Virgil Hawkins-- gains an assortment of electrically-related powers, and being a stand-up guy, he becomes Dakota's defender, and (says Wiki) the first African-American hero to star in his own solo cartoon series. Only Richie, Virgil's white buddy at school, knows his secret; both Virgil's strict father and sarcastic sister remain clueless.

All that said, everything in STATIC SHOCK remains incredibly pedestrian in terms of plot and characterization. Of Season One's 13 episodes, only one, "Sons of the Fathers," deserves some comment. It's an "anti-racism" episode, but without the righteous virulence seen in many cartoons 20 years later. (I'm looking at you, PROUD FAMILY.) Virgil decides he wants to meet Richie's family and wangles an invitation to Richie's house. Richie's dad, however, makes no secret of disliking Black people, so Virgil takes his leave. Richie runs away from home and is captured by a gang of super-villains. But before Static can come to the rescue, Richie's father grudgingly accepts the help of Virgil's dad to find the lost kid. Given the many ways the story might have gone in depicting any character who doesn't automatically like Black people, I appreciate the meliorist approach, showing that Richie's dad is an Archie Bunker type who resents cultural/societal change. But that one episode, and various decently animated fight-scenes, don't add up to much.

 

          

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END (2007)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

Given my poor rating for DEAD MAN'S CHEST-- which film was shot back-to-back with AT WORLD'S END-- I wasn't expecting to rate END highly. In fact, I remember watching the film in a theater in 2007 and being exasperated by its meandering plot, its over-indulgence in trump cards and double crosses, and its make-work mythology. However, watching END back-to-back with CHEST, I accrued a greater appreciation for some of the consistent myth-motifs in the 2007 production, even if they were surrounded by a lot of chaos. CHEST now appears to be a padded middle act that introduces a lot of connective tissue necessary for a stronger third act-- which, to be sure, does have a lot of messy stuff as well. 

END, after all, is noteworthy for providing a pleasing if poignant ending to the story-arc of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann (Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley), who share the spotlight with capricious captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). The 2017 DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES added a coda to the Will-Elizabeth arc, but the conclusion of END still works as one of two major myth-motifs: that of "lovers tragically separated over long intervals," like "The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl." This motif was probably derived from one of the ancillary versions of the Flying Dutchman, where the cursed captain was able to visit the human world from time to time, seeking true romance. The other major myth-motif-- that of a curse that is passed on from one victim to another-- may be extraneous to the major expressions of the Dutchman story, but END uses the motif to provide a reason why Will is forced to loosely duplicate his father's career as an absentee husband and father.

CHEST's strongest moment appeared toward the movie's conclusion, when the good-hearted Elizabeth unleashes her "inner pirate" and so betrays Jack Sparrow, so that he's consigned to the afterlife ruled by the predacious Davy Jones (Bill Nighy). CHEST also concluded with the mercenary Beckett, representative of the East India trading company, gaining the heart of Davy Jones. With this talisman, Beckett forces Jones and his Dutchman crew to serve as his enforcers in a campaign to eradicate all piracy. Here the script builds upon the first film's suggestion that piracy can be a counter-agent to the compromises of respectable society, and so END opens with a series of grotesque executions of everyone even suspected of associating with pirates. This one sequence might be the best scene ever directed by Gore Verbinski.

Will and Elizabeth, along with former enemy Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), plan to rescue Jack from perdition, in part to overthrow Beckett's tyranny. To accomplish this, the trio engage the help of a pirate brotherhood. These "pirate lords" add a fair amount of narrative confusion, but they seem necessary to expound on just how former human Davy Jones was transformed into a soul-collector by the goddess Calypso. The brotherhood also somehow forced the goddess to become human, though they don't know which human, and indeed one of the lords thinks Elizabeth is Calypso's reincarnation. Indeed, Calypso and Jones were lovers in antiquity, making them the precursors of the pattern that will consume Will and Elizabeth.         

                

Actually, because the script concentrates so much on the Will-Elizabeth arc-- and some minor ones involving Will's father and Elizabeth's former fiancee Norrington-- Jack Sparrow doesn't have that much to do. Indeed, one of the best scenes toward the big finish has Captain Barbossa marry Will and Elizabeth while all three of them are engaged in mortal combat. Davy Jones too gets closure to his arc, while END shows Jack and Barbossa still engaged in their perfidious but harmless pirate games-- as they still will be in the fourth installment. END has no end of flaws. But as far as putting across the message that we all need to embrace our inner pirates, this is the best of the Caribbean franchise.     

THE LITTLE MERMAID (1989)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, metaphysical, psychological*

Under the sea


Under the sea
Nobody beat us
Fry us and eat us
In fricassee

Yeah, yeah, everyone's all "THE LITTLE MERMAID, beginning of the Disney Renaissamce." I see "The Little Mermaid, Sellout." "The Little Mermaid, Species-Traitor!"

I exaggerate for effect, but not by much. Fetching mermaid Ariel is both an accomplished songstress and the apple of her father Triton's eye. She often hears, from both her father and her crustacean music-teacher Sebastian, that the humans from the surface-world have a marked propensity to devour the denizens of Triton's subsea domain Atlantica. Yet from the movie's beginnings-- long before Ariel has her "love at first sight" moment with human Prince Eric-- this fish-girl is as nuts for surface-world detritus as a Zoomer for the latest K-pop fad. The script never says why Ariel is such a human-lover, though theoretically one could chalk up her diffidence toward her own world to the seeming absence of virile young mermen. (Maybe Ursula ate 'em all up?) Ariel seems pretty indifferent to the fact that Eric's people would gleefully chow down on her buddies Sebastian and Flounder. Yet in terms of exogamous mating, one must admit that the seaweed looks literally greener in the surface-dwellers' "lake."

The fear of being eaten naturally exists "under the sea" as well as on land, not to mention the fear's prevalence in animated cartoons since the medium's origins. Carnophobia is also a big part of Disney gag-humor, making its presence in MERMAID one of two big divergences from the Hans Christian Andersen story on which the MERMAID writers riffed. The other big change from the source-material is the injection of diabolism. Andersen's Sea Witch has no Satanic propensities; she just tells the Mermaid: "you want to change your nature; here's what it'll cost you." Ursula though is a Tempter who takes sadistic pleasure in the misery of others; Lucifer as sardonic drag-queen. When Triton rages at Ariel for wanting to date outside her species, Ursula sees the chance to up her game. By securing Ariel's soul, Ursula can pull off a Satanic version of an Imitatio Dei, becoming the new ruler of the ocean-domain, the ultimate Big Fish that eats all smaller prey.

Happily, MERMAID's suggestion of heavy themes is more than counterbalanced by all the fun, light-hearted stuff that made Classic Disney possible from the beginning. When Prince Eric meets the voiceless Ariel, he can't believe she's related to the haunting mer-girl who saved his life, and she can only try to draw his love to her through the power of her fundamentally innocent sexuality. "Kiss the Girl" is the sort of musical number that would have been impossible in the days of Raging Feminism: the Awfuls would have been railing that in their world women didn't have to wait for the guys to make the first move. But underneath all the singing birds and frogs in the background dwells a priority older than humankind: if the male can't summon the mojo to make the first move, he might as well be sitting on the sidelines and watching the parade go by.

I recall one discordant note voiced back when MERMAID was new to movie-screens: some ultra-Feminist critic didn't like it when Prince Eric, who didn't do much of anything for the entire story, received the honor of killing Ursula by stabbing her with the "phallic" prow of his ship. There's not much one can say to that sort of dumbass thinking beyond, "sometimes a prow is just a prow." But even if some Disney scripter was actively thinking "prow=penis," who in the audience really cares who cares who kills the Sea Bitch, as long as she's sung her last note?

So, okay. expected happy ending, and maybe when Eric and Ariel ascend to the throne of Wherever, the ex-Mermaid enjoins the whole kingdom to lay off the marine delicacies. Buth human and merman realms are implicitly improved by the joining of houses and the expulsion of the Principle of Evil-- not counting the lesser evils of sequels, prequels, and live-action remakes.          
                          

MULAN (1998)

 

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

Along with the 1999 TARZAN, MULAN was among the last box-office successes of the Disney Renaissance, after which the fortunes of the animation division began taking a downward turn. Though it's not one of the classics, MULAN shows more of the great Disney combinations of humor and pathos than any of the company's animated productions of the 21st century.

Although by 1998 it was standard practice for the Disney heroine to sing an "I want" song near the outset, "Reflections" seems more amorphous than others. Mulan is uncomfortable as she fails to fulfill his feminine destiny by simply making a good marriage for her family's sake. but she's not rebelling against the restrictive, honor-bound culture of dynastic China. (Disney's writers surely knew that China itself was a promising market even in 1998, so they didn't want to suggest a critique of Chinese culture.) Mulan simply wants to find her true self, whatever it is, little suspecting that her identity is going to be revealed through another imposture.

 An invasion of the Huns ("Mongol" being politically incorrect) proves bad luck for China but indirect good luck for Mulan. To keep her infirm father from being conscripted for anti-Hun repulsion, Mulan dresses up as a young man and joins the army. In this endeavor she's joined by a miniature ancestral dragon named Mushu (Eddie Murphy) and an intelligent cricket whose only purpose is to give Mushu a second character (besides Mulan) on whom to run lines. Despite having almost no powers beyond an ability to annoy, Mushu is functionally modeled on the Genie from ALADDIN, allowing him to indulge in assorted anachronistic jokes.

                  

Once she's ensconced at boot camp for new recruits, Mulan, using the name "Ping," meets her other support-characters: the handsome young commander Shang and three funny stooges: Ling, Yao and Chien Po. Initially Mulan gets on the wrong side of Ling and Yao, introducing her to the rough-and-tumble testosterone world. But it's Shang, the demanding drill sergeant, who provides the heroine with a criterion for identity: that "once you find your center, you are sure to win." Mulan's many fumbles almost get her dishonorably discharged, which would have solved the problem of how to keep her father and herself out of the army. But now Mulan wants to succeed, to excel among men even if she can't really "be a man," and she does so by performing a feat no one else in the unit could. As if by osmosis, Mulan finding her center causes everyone else in the troop to do the same.

But to its credit MULAN is much more than a service comedy, though the script plays up more hilarity on the troop's way to its first sortie. The soldiers have stoked their spirits by singing about their amorous intentions-- except for an embarrassed "Ping"-- only to be cut off when they sight a village burned out by the Huns. No dead bodies are seen, and only indirect evidence suggests that Shang's general father perished in the conflict. A little later, a horde of Huns charge the unit. Mulan unleashes an avalanche that kills most of them (bloodlessly), but the sequence captures much of chaos of warfare. And then Mulan's secret is exposed, to the mortification of those who've come to respect "Ping" for his courage and resourcefulness.

But to redeem Mulan for the crime of being a woman out of her place, the writers have to make Shan Yu do a Freddy Kruger and imperil the Emperor of China himself. The big finish includes a few strong moments, as when the Three Chinese Stooges are forced to dress up as women, but the last section is the weakest part of the movie. Still, MULAN manages to put across the ideal of a heroine who achieves masculine goals but who is not, unlike the later girlbosses, some ideological mixture of femininity and masculinity. The romance here is subplot rather than plot, and though Shang and Mulan will come together, Mulan finding her center is the thing that makes her movie a winner.

    

X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, VOLUME FOUR (1995-96)

 

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

One odd note about Volume 4 is that although it doesn't contain all the episodes attributed to "Season 4," at least this time every episode on the discs came FROM Season 4. That said, a few had already appeared on the Volume Three collection, and there's at least one Season 4 tale that I assume will show up on Volume Five.

That said, the selections for Four are the same mixed bag seen in earlier volumes. "Proteus" is, despite cast-changes, one of the show's closest emulations of a Claremont-Byrne story, and it even succeeds in putting across some of that tale's horrific tonality.  One, "Sanctuary," was based on a story I'd not read, but it was tolerable, while "Lotus and Steel" is a complete reworking of the history of Wolverine's occasional opponent Silver Samurai, with mediocre results.

 An event of sorts takes place in that Cyclops and Marvel Girl are finally married, with less folderol than in the comics. That said, the wedding gets lost in yet another of the time-wasting time-travel stories to which the showrunners seemed addicted. Cable, Bishop, Apocalypse and Mister Sinister get four episodes devoted to a forgettable outing. The storyline was intended to conclude the series, but if nothing else, the fifth season deprived this mediocrity of that distinction.  

Strangely, the showrunners devote just one episode to disclosing Magneto's paternity of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. While I don't fault the adaptors for not translating the many continuity-nuggets from "The Yesterday Quest," at this point the show had only briefly introduced Quicksilver in one episode, as a member of an off-brand version of X-Factor. Then suddenly everyone in the story knows both Quicksilver and his sister Scarlet Witch, and Wolverine provides the X-hero connection while the two siblings encounter both Daddy Magneto and a fanatical version of the High Evolutionary. Niggles aside, it's still a better story than most of those on Volume Four.       

PIRATES OF DARK WATER (1991-93)

 

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

Since I've always liked both pirate films and high fantasy, the combination of the two in Hanna-Barbera's PIRATES OF DARK WATER excited my admiration back in the day. At the time I knew that PIRATES was very different in tone from the 1980s product of H-B. With the exception of the Scooby Doo franchise, most of H-B's offerings seemed starved for fresh ideas. I didn't know that a producer named David Kirchner had assumed CEO duties for the company, taking over from William Hanna. Kirchner's reign only lasted from 1989 to 1992, when Fred Siebert took over as CEO. Overall Siebert seems to have done better helming the company in its final years (1992-96) of making serial cartoon shows for television. But even if one views PIRATES as the sole accomplishment of Kirschner's brief reign, it was ineluctably that breath of fresh air many viewers wanted, to judge from the persistence of nostalgic fandom for the series.

Some of that nostalgia, though, stems from the fact that Kirchner treated PIRATES like any other open-ended show. Thus, despite introducing the series with a world-threatening peril, the story ended without even a partial resolution. PIRATES takes place in a fantasy-domain with no connection to Earth: the world of Mer, wherein all land-masses are island-sized, not unlike LeGun's Earthsea novels. Mer lies under the existential threat of "Dark Water," a mysterious, poisonous sludge that infests the seawaters and that boils up from the earth's center. Later, main hero Ren learns that a malefic force lies behind Dark Water, but when the viewer meets the 17-year-old, he doesn't even know that he's a child of high estate, son of King Primus of the decayed kingdom Octopon. Ren also learns that for most of his young life, Primus has been the prisoner of the pirate-lord Bloth. The loose implication is that Ren was raised as a commoner because Bloth killed all of Primus' other relations. Primus escapes, finds Ren, tells him that Mer's peril can only be averted if Ren gathers "the Thirteen Treasures of Rule," and then suffers an ambiguous fate, maybe or maybe not dead.

Ren does have one bequest from his father: a compass that will guide Ren to each of the treasures in turn. Because Bloth also covets the treasure, Ren needs a ship with which to sail Mer's seas, and a crew as well. He gets them all in short order: Ioz, an older male pirate hungry for treasure, Tula, an athletic woman with mystic "ecomancer" skills, and Niddler, a comical "monkey-bird." All three initially have selfish reasons for following Ren, though it doesn't take long for them to be swayed by Ren's altruism, not to mention  their need to escape Bloth's relentless pursuit. 

The design-work for PIRATES-- costumes, vehicles, flora and fauna -- is as good as most animated fantasy-films, and the voice-work is excellent. But as is usually the case with TV serials, the continuing characters evolve certain "tics" that become their reasons for being. Niddler complains about not having enough to eat, chauvinist Ioz makes some rude comment about women at sea, Tula snaps at him, and Ren tells them all to stifle themselves.

Similarly, the "guest stars" aren't much better, and so only a few episodes stand out in terms of characterization. In "A Drop of Darkness," the crew encounters an elderly sorceress named Cray. Ren is surprised to learn that Cray may have had some relationship to his father Primus, though Primus rejected Cray for Ren's mother. Cray wants to relive her life, using Dark Water to restore her youth and trying to romance the naive prince. And in "Sister of the Sword," the heroes meet Ioz's kid sister Solia, who's as larcenous as her brother and who incites Tula's jealousy when Solia outrageously flirts with Ren. 

Yet too often the motives of the guest stars don't bear close scrutiny. The last episode, "The Living Treasure," presents Tula becoming wroth with Ioz's chauvinism. By the wildest coincidence, the treasure-hunt drops the hero-pirates in the laps of a tribe of man-hating Amazons, who enslave Ioz and Ren but invite Tula to join their ranks. Though it's not a horrible story, it's very predictable. At the conclusion, the good guys find a treasure that suggests a way that the Dark Water may be nullified. But then the series ended, so that only devoted fans could complete the abbreviated epic via fan-fiction.

               

           

VIRTUAL COMBAT (1995)

 

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

Hyde Park Entertainment came close to PM in terms of churning out reams of STV products for cable and video rental stores. PM tended to concentrate on action movies, while Hyde emphasized softcore thrillers like the NIGHT EYES series. That said, the redoubtable Don Wilson made three flicks for Hyde Park. I've found a number of Wilson programmers to be passable formula entertainment. But though I've not seen them all, VIRTUAL COMBAT may be the worst thing Wilson ever did, though the fault surely lies with the guys behind the camera.

COMBAT takes place in the near future, and like most such action-fare, it's really just the modern world with one or two SF-tropes added. VR technology has become the big thing in future-Las Vegas, so much so that local cops like David Quarry (Wilson) and his partner John spend most of their time hanging out in VR parlors-- though John avails himself of VR sexcapades, while David hones his martial skills by battling VR opponents. One opponent is Dante (Michael Bernardo), and he kicks real boy David's ass in their first bout. Unfortunately, a world-beater named Burroughs (first and middle names "John Carter," hah hah) has his scientists invent a way of bringing VR programs into the real world-- sort of the 3-D printing of the 1990s. Burroughs' main purpose seems to be to corner a new market on VR prostitutes, both creating regular good-lookers like Liana (Athena Massey) and "specialty types" like whip-wielding dominatrix Greta (Dawn Ann Billings). But the same tech that births cyber-babes also unleashes cyber-villain Dante, and one of his first actions is to kill David's partner.

Avenging his partner then becomes David's only motive in life for the rest of the film, though he finds a little time for a nothing sex scene with Liana. But director Andrew Stevens's idea of a plot is that of providing minimal connective tissue between a bunch of mediocre fight-scenes. Even Liana and Greta get to throw down a little. But only the climactic combat between David and Dante shows decent choreography, which may stem from the two actors working to their strengths. But Dante's never very threatening, not least because he doesn't utter his own lines, but strides around close-mouthed while his dialogue is uttered by the booming voice of Michael Drn.

Eventually all the rogue programs are destroyed, even "good VR" Liana, though David can still visit an iteration of Liana. Where? Why, in the VR sex parlors! And so COMBAT ends by coming "full circle"-- or is that "full-circle jerk?"