MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*
At some point of my hardcore comics-fandom, I remember thinking that DC Comics' LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES ought to have been perfect for a Saturday morning kids' cartoon. After all, the Legion had started in 1958 as a toss-off notion in a SUPERBOY comic. That one story-- which showed three superheroic teens from the 30th century interacting with 20th-century Superboy-- grabbed enough fans that DC developed the idea of the Legion into a successful franchise, still being published today.
Since the Warners Animation series lasted two seasons, it can't be considered a total failure. Still, it can't be called a success either, and since producer James Tucker has a fair range of good and bad in his animation career, I tend to think that the juvenile fantasy of the sixties LEGION just wasn't transferrable to the "future" of the 21st century. The teen heroes of the comics were barely even one-dimensional as characters, so their appeal in the Silver Age depended largely on writers being able to come up with ingenious uses of their multifarious powers, linked to a few very basic "teen torment" tropes regarding guilt, sexuality, et al.
Tucker's LSH, though, tries a little too hard to quickly re-imagine the Legionnaires as two-dimensional characters, but without really coming up with anything compelling. Though many members make token appearances in the show, the producers sought to concentrate on seven core Legionnaires-- Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, Bouncing Boy (the inevitable comedy relief for the most part), Phantom Girl, Timber Wolf (given a Wolverine-ish makeover), Triplicate Girl, and Brainiac 5 (who's a cyborg rather than a humanoid with a computer-like intelligence). These characters are also the gateway for 21st-century Clark Kent as he joins the future-supers club-- though, for reasons that may be tied to a trademark challenge around that time, the hero is always called "Superman" rather than "Superboy," despite the fact that he looks to be as much a teen as the other heroes.
The main problem is that in the first season at least, the stories just seem overly derivative, and that might be the main reason that young viewers just didn't choose LSH over whatever competed with it on other channels. There's a "haunted spaceship" episode, a "crisis of confidence" episode, and an "interfering parent" episode. The writers loosely adapted some decent comics-stories-- the origin of Timber Wolf and of the daffy "Legion of Substitute Heroes," the Legion's struggle with the colossal space-monster, the Sun-Eater. However, at no time does the series seem grounded in even a very simple space-opera universe. There's also a near-total avoidance of the romantic element, which I think was a crucial reason the sixties series both caught on and prospered for decades. Ironically, though I'll be reviewing the second and final season separately, I have a feeling I'm going to see the same flaws in that review-- a show that needed to reach young viewers, but may be greater interest to old farts, who get the in-joke when the "haunted spaceship" is given the name "Quatermass."
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