LEGEND OF THE SEEKER, SEASON ONE (2008-09)

 

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

As I have only read the first of Terry Goodkind's "Seeker" books, WIZARD'S FIRST RULE, I can't speak to the overall quality of the series, or whether it was a crying shame that Sam Raimi's teleseries adaptation didn't get more than two seasons. But the first novel offers in part a theme opposed to most otherworldly Tolkienian fantasies. one that might boil down to, "Power of all kinds-- not just One-Ring power-- corrupts the good and the bad alike." The dramatic consequences of this theme are that even the three pure-hearted heroes are innately capable of harming one another, even with the best of intentions.

Though most of the 22 episodes of LEGEND's first season don't adapt incidents from the first book, the overall outlines remain the same. Large portions of Goodkind's unnamed fantasy-verse have been conquered by the military might of tyrannical Darken Rahl, whose long-range goal is to control all life through assorted sorcerous stratagems. However, it's been prophecized that a rare crusader for justice, the Seeker, is destined to kill Darken Rahl. Young Richard Cypher (Craig Horner) is raised without knowing that he is the Seeker, but soon he's drafted to fulfill his destiny by two other heroes. One is elderly wizard Zed (Bruce Spence), who arranged Richard's concealment from hostile forces. The other, Kahlan (Bridget Regan), belongs to a line of priestesses, the Mother Confessors, and she becomes vital to Richard's mission-- although she threatens it as well, as the two fall in love, causing distractions from their purpose.

Some storylines are definitely derived from Goodkind, as with an arc involving the heroes trying to keep Rahl from obtaining the Boxes of Orden, whose power can corrupt even the Seeker. Other episodes are built around "done in one" problems. Yet even the simpler episodes, despite comedy relief, often reflect grim realities about war and death. This may be a reason why LEGEND didn't catch on like Raimi's more famous fantasy-serials, HERCULES and XENA. 

Only one episode merits a rating of high mythicity, and that is "Denna," a faithful adaptation of a long sequence from WIZARD'S FIRST RULE. In this sequence, Richard is captured by Denna (Jessica Marais), who attempts to break his will via torture. Like Kahlan, Denna belongs to an all-female priestesshood, but where Kahlan's order compels obedience through the emotion of love,  Denna's order uses pain. To some, this might sound like Goodkind importing the Marquise de Sade into a Tolkienian fantasy-setting. Yet because Goodkind structured his world so scrupulously, the concept is both dramatically and mythopoeically compelling. 

One additional point of merit is that the showrunners did contrive a "wrapup" in the final episode of Season One, in case they didn't get another order of episodes. This meant a lot of rewrites to make Season Two come about-- but, going on memory, the game was indubitably worth the candle.           

LOVE AND DEATH IN THE GARDEN OF THE GODS (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

All of the giallo contributions of director/writer Sauro Scavolini took place within the space of about two years, while both before and after that 1971-72 period Scavolini plied his trade in other genres. But since that small sample of works includes one of my ten best giallos, YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM, Scavolini's "farewell to giallos" merits some sustained attention.

Structurally, GARDEN isn't as well-constructed as the best of this subgenre. Like a lot of "old dark house mysteries," the film's eminent character is dead when the main story starts, and the audience must follow an amateur detective sussing out the unhappy lives of rich siblings Azzurra (Erika Blanc) and Manfredi (Peter Lee Lawrence).

The "detective," an unnamed professor of ornithology, rents the sumptuous estate where Azzurra and Manfredi were raised. The professor knows nothing of the former occupants of the estate: he only intends to study the bird life in the adjacent forest. However, in said forest the bird-fancier discovers a pile of wadded-up audiotape. The professor untangles and cleans up the tape, which he's improbably able to replay on a tape machine.

 The tapes reveal the history of Azzurra as she confides in her psychiatrist regarding her twisted history with Manfredi. Both were raised without the oversight of their parents, so that they started sleeping together as kids, which grew into a sexual relationship. Later Azzurra marries another man, and Manfredi takes up with a "free spirit" named Viola, but neither of them is able to let the other sibling go. For instance, the tapes reveal to the professor that after Azzura married, Manfredi left the estate for a while, only to return with Viola, attempting (without much success) to maintain an art studio. In keeping with the title, the forbidden love of the siblings culminates in death, and the surviving sibling even extends his menace to the amateur detective.

GARDEN's pace is slow, possibly to take full advantage of the opulent setting of mansion and vernal paradise. The "love and death" trope isn't uniformly maintained throughout the professor's discoveries, but I assign high-mythicity to GARDEN less because of its rambling plot than for Scavolini's formulation of the transgressive couple, an "Adam and Eve" who exist not to propagate a new future but to be destroyed by their past. To be sure, the script (by Scavolini and a woman with no other IMDB credits) backs off on the incest-theme. Azzurra, who often manipulates Manfredi to keep him at her beck and call, cruelly tells him that they were never brother and sister: that he was a boy adopted by the family after Azzura's actual brother perished in childbirth. But this revelation seems random, since it doesn't hold any consequences for the plot-- and besides, if Azzurra's parents wanted to preserve the illusion of a viable male heir, why didn't either of them stick around to administer the estate and make sure that the two phony siblings made good marriages? The unnamed parents are more like a pair of otiose divinities who just dump their progeny into a beautiful paradise, just to watch them destroy one another.

Oddly, the trope of "perilous psycho" applies to both siblings, and though Manfredi is the one who becomes a murderer, Azzurra's Sadean influence seems far more profound and pernicious.

                  

  

ONE ARMED SWORDSWOMAN (1972)

 PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

A lot of chopsockies emulated the internationally successful ONE ARMED SWORDSMAN, so frankly I wasn't expecting anything much of this five-years-later Taiwanese knockoff. I have to hold the original producers guiltless of a screwup in the English credits: "Ching-Ching Chang als [sic] ONE ARMED SWORDSWOMAN," but I was unfamiliar with any other IMDB credits for the writer-director Sheng-en Chen. Similarly, I didn't know starring diva Chang or any of the other names, so I tend to assume the whole cast was Taiwanese, even if they were attempting to mimic the look of a Hong Kong Shaw film.

SWORDSWOMAN takes the opposite tack from SWORDSMAN in the characterization department. Whereas the viewer learns a lot about the family background of the 1967 protagonist, Chang's character Pan Yi Fung starts out as a one-dimensional "knight errant," who apparently has no other goal in life but to wander about killing ruthless bandits with her sword. Her puissance is displayed in an early scene where four bandits snare her with ropes, after which Pan frees herself and slays them with one smooth move. Then a traveling stranger comes along, praising her skills, which pleases her inordinately. More bandits appear to challenge Pan, and the stranger lends his skills to help her. But the stranger doesn't happen to kill any of the bandits and instead deals Pan a wound in her arm with a poisoned sword. The traveler reveals that he's really one of the bandit gang, and that Pan will soon perish of the poison. The noble fighter tries to take many of her foes with her, but she's clearly losing strength. But then another famous kung fu knight happens along and spirits Pan away.

The heroine's apparently able to direct her rescuer to Pan's estate, where she lives with one female servant. The savior is one Chen Peng Fei, known as the Black Dragon due to his attire: all-black robes and a hat with a face-shrouding black veil. Chen tells Pan and the servant that the only way to save Pan's life is to amputate her poisoned arm. Pan agrees to the operation, after which Chen takes his leave. Three years later, Pan has re-trained herself to compensate for her missing arm, but she's also formed an intense need to see the Dragon again. The terse script does not expound on her motives, but actress Chang conveys an immense feeling of loneliness.

She meets her black-garbed ally, who unmasks before her and sweet-talks her with homilies about the loner nature of martial artists. They have offscreen sex, but in the morning, Chen sneaks away like a dog. Pan follows him, and Chen insults her by offering her a valuable pearl for services rendered. Pan is heartbroken and returns home. Strangely, her maid advises Pan that she might still be united with the man she loves, and Pan decides to look for Chen once more, in case, I don't know, he's changed his mind about being a bastard.

Now, experienced filmgoers may foresee some shenanigans, given that Pan never saw Chen without his mask the first time, and anyone can wear an all-concealing black costume. But even if a viewer suspects trickery, Pan's next experience is unsettling, for suddenly she starts running into more black-garbed men, who, when she unmasks them, are not Chen. Then she kills-- or apparently kills-- a fifth Man in Black, after she's heard a young woman call him "Chen." Jealous, she attacks and kills the man, only to be told he's blind. She's so aggrieved that she almost lets a vengeful mob murder her. But once again, the Black Dragon saves Pan and takes her back home. There he unmasks, showing her that he's not the man to whom she surrendered herself. 

For some reason Chen and Pan fake their deaths to throw off the bandit gang, but the head guy-- Lee Ming-Tse, the fellow who deceived Pan-- sees through the charade. I don't know why Chen, divested of his costume, makes a solo attack on Lee and his goons in the bandit fortress, but the sortie ends with Chen retreating back to Pan's house, half-blinded by spears that eject streams of acid (!) Of course, the reason Chen must be sidelined is because Pan is the star, and to her goes the honor of confronting Lee and his gang, atop a mountain this time. Perhaps needless to say, Pan triumphs over all adversaries, though Lee does get in a mean jab about their romantic time together. And so the film ends with Pan alone amid her fallen foes, though in an earlier scene, the door's left open for a possible union of the two crusaders.

Chang provides a good range of emotions here, though everyone else is strictly Saturday-morning serial, and she does well in the battle scenes. As I commented in my SWORDSMAN review, the mundane removal of an arm doesn't generate an uncanny vibe for the "freakish flesh" trope, but Pan performs assorted superlative feats, particularly for being able to hurl twigs hard enough to pierce an enemy's throat. 

I'm sure that neither Sheng-en Chen or anyone else thought they were making a masterpiece. In the copy on TUBI, the final scene between Chen and Pan is spoiled by a sudden cut, presumably because some censor thought the romantic interlude too racy. Yet though I've seen dozens of flicks featuring kung-fu knights, even the few that address the disadvantages of a justice-seeking life, like CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON, tend to underplay the emotional cost of the martial life. That cost is evident in the ease with which the disguised bandit gets Pan to turn her back on him, and her strange obsession with the real Chen, who relates to her only as patient to doctor, residing at her manor for a month just to preserve her life. Though the villain Lee never explains how he formulated his plan to sleep with her and then gaslight her, it's likely that he figured out how emotionally vulnerable Pan was, precisely because she'd tried to live a totally righteous life and found, like many others, that virtue being the reward for virtue was worse than no reward at all.  

                       

RAWHIDE: "INCIDENT OF THE BLUE FIRE" (1959)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Like INCIDENT OF THE PALE RIDER, BLUE FIRE is one of a handful of tales from the early seasons of RAWHIDE that use uncanny scenarios to throw doubt upon the substantial and rational aspects of the world.

Gil Favor's band of hard-working drovers and the cattle they shepherd are far from civilization when they encounter the "blue fire" of the title. The electrical phenomenon is said to herald lightning-strikes, but the drovers don't need the azure discharge to tell them that they stand in peril of a stampede, if the prevalent storm clouds should panic the easily spooked "beeves." Favor assures his men that the "St. Elmo's fire" is harmless, but the fact that he, like other 19th-century cowboys, don't know what the hell it is makes the situation even more unnerving. The terminally superstitious Hey Soos makes things no better by maundering about deaths and devils.

Into the drovers' camp comes an individual who becomes a flashpoint for all the cowboys' inchoate fears: a footloose fellow named "Lucky" Markley. Markley himself is a would-be drover, as he tries to sell Favor a tiny herd of scrub cattle he's rounded up. The cows are of such inferior stock that Favor won't have them. However, because they're in the midst of marauding Comanches, the trial-boss allows Markley to work for him as a drover, at least until they reach some civilized port. Unfortunately for Favor, Hey Soos openly disparages Markley as the harbinger of bad luck, and the rest of the men are just as leery of the stranger.

 Markley (affably played by Skip Homeier) does nothing to provoke this hostility, though he makes one arguable error. While he and another drover are rounding up a stray steer, three Comanches accost them, demanding not only the steer but also Markley's horse. Markley shoots one brave, and the other two flee, but return later with a larger contingent of Comanches. The drovers resent Markley for bringing on more trouble, though the Comanches probably would have sought to plunder the herd no matter what happened. The men want Markley cast out. Favor alone defends the man, so much so that even Markley wonders why the trail-boss protects him, given that Favor owes Markley nothing. Favor tells a tale of having lost a young male companion during a round-up due to "bad luck," and it's implied that Favor believes in determining life by one's own actions, not through beliefs in good or ill fortune. It's this novel approach that keeps FIRE from being just a dime-a-dozen "it is wrong to give in to mob rule" morality play.

The stunning conclusion suggests that Favor's view is too simple. Finally, just as the Comanches move in for a raid, lightning strikes and the cattle stampede. Only a skillful maneuver has the chance to box the cattle in and quell their rampage, and Lucky Markley performs the deed-- sort of. The viewer alone sees how Markley, riding his cowpony, is struck in the head by lightning, killing him-- and yet, somehow horse and rider curtail the stampede, as well as scaring off the Indian raiders. Later the drovers find both horse and rider. The horse is dead from falling and breaking his neck, but there's nothing to indicate how the so-called "jonah" died, except slight burn-marks on the back of his neck. Was Favor's "favored son" killed, only to complete his task despite being a dead man in the saddle? The episode ends with no pat answers for anyone and thus stands as one of the very best "weird westerns" ever produced for television.         

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.          
                          

STAR TREK: PICARD (SEASON ONE, 2020)

 

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

SUPER HEAVY SPOILERS

Before venturing into this review, I wrote this essay to demonstrate that any nostalgic appeal for the STTNG series the producers hoped to evoke with PICARD was all but absent in me. In part I wrote:  

In the 1980s, as Roddenberry saw the franchise he'd created taken over by other hands, TNG gave him his last chance to infuse a teleseries with his guiding ethos. Yet this time he didn't want a series that stressed heroic action and character conflict. As many TNG critics have observed, Roddenberry wanted characters who had advanced beyond personal interest, not least with regard to that old devil sensuality. As the characters lacked personality in those early years, the players couldn't do much except to pontificate-- though always with the most earnest attitudes possible. For me, as a viewer not much impressed with TNG's early years, the culmination of this tendency appeared most egregiously in the first-season episode "Skin of Evil," which I call "The One Where Picard Has Righteous Conversations with an Oil Slick." 

What little online criticism I'd seen of PICARD had been negative, and I had little reason to extend the show any benefit of the doubt, given that PICARD's producer Alex Kurtzman also had his fingers in the Trek TV shows DISCOVERY and STRANGE NEW WORLDS and in two of the last three TREK theatrical movies. All of these I deemed garbage whose only merit was to make even the weaker TREK entries of the Rick Berman years look like genius. So when I liked PICARD, I can only posit that the crucial difference for me was Season One's showrunner was novelist Michael Chabon. For me, Season One's ten episodes bring out the Liberal political themes of TNG better than any ten episodes of the original series-- though of course PICARD has the advantage of presenting a unified narrative.

It's quite possible that some reviewers didn't like Chabon's labyrinthine storyline, and I must admit that I don't think it fully tracks, though that doesn't invalidate other qualities. Chabon drew strongly upon two TREK narratives I've not revisited since their theatrical debuts-- NEMESIS (2002), the last movie to spotlight the TNG cast, and the 2009 STAR TREK, which did not involve the TNG mythos but which Chabon seems to have retconned into said continuity, at least with respect to one event. Since I think Chabon's reworking of the TNG mythos was key to my enjoyment of the season, in this review I'm going to focus less on the story's dramatic twists and turns than on the phases of the Chabon timeline-- hence, SPOILERS.

PHASE 1-- In the distant past, a mighty civilization is destroyed by their populace of androids, usually called "synthetics." Though the organics die, they exile the synthetics to another dimension, and leave behind a recording, known as "The Admonition," to warn other sentients of the consequences of empowering synthetics.

PHASE 2-- At some later millennium, the Romulans discover the Admonition. A secret society, the Zhat Vash, dedicates itself to the prevention of another synthetic uprising.

PHASE 3-- The events of TREK NEMESIS transpire, culminating in the death of the synthetic Federation officer Data. As I recall, in that time-frame synthetics are not prevalent.

PHASE 4-- The events of TREK '09 transpire, though the only event referenced in PICARD is the destruction of Romulus, the Romulan homeworld. Chabon asserts that this event takes place in TNG time, and that Admiral Picard leads a humanitarian effort to rescue the imperiled denizens. However. not all Federation officials approve of succoring the Federation's rivals, and for that reason, the Zhat Vash takes an action that some might deem counter-intuitive. Apparently synthetics are being used in greater numbers at the time, so Romulan operatives somehow mess with a large number of synthetics on Mars. The synthetics revolt, which somehow impairs the Romulan rescue effort. Reactionary elements in the Federation use the revolt as an excuse to both shut down the rescue effort and to legislate against the further creation of synthetics. Picard opposes both measures and seeks to reignite the rescue effort by threatening to resign-- only to have his resignation accepted. Picard does succeed in rescuing a large number of Romulans and relocating them on the planet Vashti, but then the former Admiral goes into seclusion.

PHASE 5-- Unbeknownst to Picard, Data, prior to his death, created at least two twin female androids, Dahj and Soji, with the help of human scientist Maddox. Both are separately raised by human families without their even knowing they're synthetics, probably to keep them from being destroyed under the new laws. Maddox, wanting to continue his synthetic research, emigrates to another planet with some like-minded associates and populates that world with an android population. (It's a fine touch that the world is named Coppelius, after the robot-making mad scientist of Hoffmann's story "The Sandman.") The Zhat Vash wants to annihilate all the synthetics, but they don't know where Coppelius is. But they are able to locate Dahj and Soji. For some reason, agents Narissa and Narek track Soji to her workplace-- an abandoned Borg cube-- and seek to tap her memories to learn the location of the homeworld that Soji has buried in her subconscious memories. Other agents of Zhat Vash seek to abduct Dahj for similar treatment, but her cyber-skills activate and she kills them. Other memories surface, leading Dahj to seek out Picard-- who then has to learn all of this continuity in reverse order.

Though many details of the scenario are weak, they serve quite well to advance the political ethos of the story, which coheres admirably with a running trope from TNG: "androids are people too." PICARD is almost lyrical in its efforts to champion synthetics as not just an underclass in need of rescuing, but as a species of "children" that deserve the kindness and amity of all sentients. And while the Romulans are "the bad guys" for choosing to make synthetics into scapegoats, they are not, as in many TNG episodes, totally wrong. Toward the latter half of the season, the inhabitants of Coppelius are aghast to learn that a Romulan fleet seeks to destroy their world. Picard and his new crew cannot save them, but the synthetics can reach out to the extradimensional androids to save them. Picard is naturally just as much opposed to a Holocaust of organics as of synthetics, and he manages to sway the Coppelians to renounce the alien synthetics (who are seen briefly as some sort of tentacled Cthuluoids).

Speaking of the support cast, PICARD includes two characters from TNG, Troi and Ryker, and one from VOYAGER, Seven of Nine, but they play only small, though resonant, parts. Picard engages a new motley crew to aid him in his investigation, and while none of them are compelling, they all serve their purposes well enough. The only crewmember that shows potential is the Romulan youth Elnor, who views Picard as the father he never had but resents the admiral for having absented himself. The two villains Narissa and Narek are much better than most TNG foes, though. Narek inserts himself romantically into Soji's life to probe her memories, and his sister Narissa is visibly jealous of the hookup, threatening Narek to make sure he sticks to the mission. Narissa gets a solid demise in a battle with Seven of Nine-- one of several well-choreographed fight-scenes in this season-- but Narek's fate, that of being apprehended by Federation forces, was left on the cutting room floor.

But inevitably the show wouldn't work if Patrick Stewart didn't bring his A-game. I reject critics who said Picard is just "carried along" by events, for he's clearly the moral linchpin of Season One. Stewart's Picard is just as intermittently righteous and self-deprecating as he ever was in TNG, but here he's dealing with an issue far more substantive than most of those seen in the old show. (And I say that as a person that doesn't automatically validate the many Liberal permutations of the save-the-marginalized trope.) PICARD is a rare example of a sequel that improves on the original-- though I see that Michael Chabon may not contributed as much to ensuing seasons as to this one.        

RED SONJA (2025)

 

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

"[Hyrkania] was a place of breathtaking beauty and pristine nature, where people lived as one with the Goddess of the Earth ... it was a time of peace and harmony, until the rise of the barbarian king Anzus, who swept across the land, bringing terror and destruction wherever he went."-- Initial voiceover to RED SONJA.    

"It's knowledge that brings civilization to the barbarians."-- Draygan, haranguing a defeated ruler about the foolishness of theism.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

My first reaction to the voiceover was that writer Tasha Huo was putting some heavy symbolic baggage upon Hyrkania, the native land of heroine Red Sonja. The "Red Sonya" created by Robert E. Howard was a denizen of 16th-century Poland, so Marvel comics editor Roy Thomas probably decided that Marvel's version, "Red Sonja," would hail from Howard's quasi-Russian realm of Hyrkania. Since Marvel writers never made much of Sonja's national origins, it's likely Huo conceived the movie's opposition between a prelapsarian, paradisical Hyrkania, violated by barbarians, and evil Draygan's vision of a grand future that eliminates both gods and barbarians. 

The comics-Sonja became a woman warrior after losing just her immediate family, but this Sonja (Matilda Lutz) loses her whole village when it's ravaged by Anzus the Barbarian. She and a few others escape death in the forests, but the other refugees perish. Sonja spends the next decade or so looking for any other survivors in the vast Hyrkanian forests, accompanied only by her loyal steed Vihur. Aside from her fruitless searches, Sonja does little but worship her people's goddess Asherah (modeled on one of the fertility deities of the ancient Near East) and hone her swordfighting skills, like a blade-wielding Sheena of the Jungle. Meanwhile, her fated enemy Emperor Draygan (Robert Sheehan) has tapped the powers of strange science to conquer many realms including that of Anzus. Then Draygan decides to extend his empire into the Hyrkanian forests, along with a retinue of soldiers and some key henchpeople. The most notable of these is Annisia (Wallis Day), a swordswoman who was given her freedom after killing dozens of opponents in Draygan's gladiatorial games, but who is now haunted by the voices of those slain in the arena. Once Draygan starts clear-cutting trees and caging wild creatures, Sonja utters the classic line, "Now we have a quarrel." (Just kidding, that was from SWORD AND THE SORCERER.)   

Later Huo's script will get confused about whether Sonja should be termed a Hyrkanian or not, despite the voiceover's clear implication that she belonged to that realm. And here's where I unleash my only major "spoiler:" Huo allows this confusion because she wants to sell a "big reveal" at picture's end: that Draygan was also a survivor from Sonja's village. However, though young Draygan was enslaved by the ravagers, the boy somehow kept hold of an incomplete "Book of Secrets, taken from the village temple. While Sonja grew up in the forest, venerating the Earth Goddess, Draygan reviled all deities and used the proto-science from his Book to become a new Emperor. When Sonja gets in Draygan's path of conquest, he gets the idea that she, being a Hyrkanian, can lead him to the missing parts of his Book of Secrets, which supposedly will give him even greater power.

Since Draygan wants Sonja's supposed knowledge, the Emperor tries to break her by sentencing her to the arena. This backfires, for Sonja gathers her fellow gladiators into a fighting-force, and after a nice (albeit short) battle with a giant Cyclops, she and her allies escape. As a further touch of irony, one of the other gladiators, name of Daix, really is one of the "special Hyrkanians" both Draygan and Sonja have been looking for. This development leads to an equally ironic resolution of the Book-subplot, which I'll pass over. Annisia and Sonja duel just twice before both Draygan and his forces are defeated by Sonja and her warriors. After much carnage, I'll state that the concluding face-off between the three opponents isn't like any other sword-and-sorcery film I've ever seen.

It's fair to argue that Huo and director W.J. Bassett may have cadged their dialectic from a lot of earlier, non-Howardian sources, particularly the 2009 AVATAR, with its opposition between nature-worshipping primitives and materialistic, acquisitive invaders from Earth. Yet in one respect RED SONJA plays fair with its dialectic more than AVATAR does, in that SONJA addresses (to revise Ingmar Bergman) "the Silence of Goddess." Comics-Sonja lives in a world of demonstrable gods and sorcery. But there's no real magic in the SONJA world-- only scientific devices and some nonhuman species. Both theist Sonja and atheist Draygan complain that Asherah does not answer their appeals, and the Goddess only speaks to Sonja once, when the wounded heroine hovers between life and death. So is Asherah real, or is Draygan right, that all gods are just conjured from the imagination?

Now I've written so much about SONJA's plot and theme that one might think it's some feminist lecture against toxic masculinity, like the execrable 2020 BIRDS OF PREY, to name another adventure-flick with both a writer and director from the XX side of the gene pool. SONJA might not be a great adventure-movie like the classic 1982 CONAN, but it shows the same excellent bloody-mindedness seen in the early Kathryn Bigelow films. Star Matilda Lutz, despite standing only a little over 5'6", displays a tigerish quality foreign to other Sonja-actresses (all two of them). If all one wants from a barbarian fantasy is throats slashed and guts stabbed, SONJA ought to fulfill those needs. I've avoided looking at other reviews, but if it's true that most of SONJA's reviews have been negative, they must have all come from people who never saw a really bad S&S film.      

THE BATMAN, SEASON FOUR (2006-07)

 

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

A MATTER OF FAMILY (F)-- Season Four launches a credible reprise of the Dick Grayson/Robin origin. The comic-book story was always weak on the motivation of the Zuccos, the crooks who kill off Robin's parents-- what self-respecting gangster would seek protection dough from a business as unstable as a circus? And the tale is not improved by positing that the Zuccos themselves are ex-circus folk-- too much like gilding the lily. But otherwise, "Family" hits the right emotional notes in forging the paternal relationship of Bruce, Alfred and Dick.    

TEAM PENGUIN (F)-- Batgirl, unofficial Bat-sidekick, gets frosted when she meets the official version. Nevertheless, though Batgirl gets sidelined in Season Five, the two teens have good chemistry here, though I prefer the older-younger vibe. It's Penguin's turn to catch a case of "team envy," as he brings together established heavy-hitters like Bane, Firefly, Rag Doll, and Killer Croc-- as well as a new goofball version of Killer Moth. Then, in the midst of assorted hero-villain fights, the Moth gets mutated into a monster. Silly fun.

CLAYFACES (G)-- The Ethan Bennett Clayface had a limited shelf-life since his good side outweighed the bad one-- and Bennett proves that here, capturing Joker and turning himself in. Bruce Wayne gets researchers working on a clay-cure, but the news comes to the attention of flop actor Basil Karlo. He doses himself on the clay-mutagen and finds himself glorying in the attention he gets as Clayface II. Bennett breaks jail and tracks down his successor for a major battle of clay-creeps. Batman dispenses a cure that seems to nullify both shape-changers, but maybe Karlo still retains some power. This Karlo combines the power of the 60s Clayface and the name and profession of the 40s version. That character was named for the two horror-stars of the 1939 movie SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff-- and oddly enough, that's what this Karlo is, the offspring of a monster.   

  THE EVERYWHERE MAN (F)-- Batman and Robin must battle a scientist who can be "everywhere" because he can generate countless duplicates of himself. Or is the scientist really the brain behind the masses? It starts as a mystery and resolves into a big fight-scene with a clever twist. The script resembles that of a 1950s WORLD'S FINEST tale, "The Duplicate Man," though that titular crook could only make a single self-duplicate.

THE BREAKOUT (F)-- Though the main foe is the skull-faced Black Mask, everything else feels like a mundane crime-thriller. Black Mask is confined to Gotham Jail, and his gang tries to break him out, which Batman, Robin and Batgirl must prevent.

STRANGE NEW WORLD (P)-- In the comics, Hugo Strange made monsters, but this tale has the BATMAN version upgrading his act, unleashing a zombie attack on Gotham. Or is he just stealing from the script of the BTAS episode "Dreams of Darkness?"  

ARTIFACTS (P)-- I guess this episode might be considered a condensation of the theme of BATMAN BEYOND: "There will always be a Batman." However, I found "Artifacts" poorly paced and uninvolving.

SECONDS (F)-- How can Batman cope with a time-manipulatitg crook who knows the hero's every move, since the thief can "reset" time and start things over again, to his advantage? Adequate but not interesting.

TWO OF A KIND (G)-- Paul Dini wrote this Harley Quinn reboot, which imagines Harleen as even more of a ditz than her original incarnation-- and this time, she's only a "doctor" courtesy of some online college. Joker spots HQ on daytime TV, dispensing bad psychological advice to her audience-- which leads to her losing her show. Joker professes himself to be her "number one fan," and the psycho-babbler thinks she can profit from his celebrity. Instead, the Monarch of Mirth unleashes her inner criminal-- though he also ends up leaving HQ in the lurch. She makes a few more support appearances in the series, and I suspect that the romantic angle of the first iteration gets played down as it does here.

RIDDLER'S REVENGE (G)-- Grimdark Riddler gets an origin, one that emphasizes some tragic aspects-- but before Batman learns that history, the two enemies have to escape a death-trap by working together. The episode's main strength is its focus upon the sustained illogic of riddles.

RUMORS (F)-- A new vigilante is collecting Gotham's supercrooks, and his name is Lockup-- oops, that was BTAS. This vigilante takes the peculiar cognomen of "Rumor," I suppose because he wears armor with invisibility gear. Rumor succeeds in imprisoning about twenty villains, so the Dynamic Ones must first defeat Rumor and then keep the vengeful villains from killing their jailer. The big battle is better than average, but Rumor's motivation is weak.

THE JOINING (F)-- The final episode of Season Four signals the direction of the fifth and last season, which uses copious DC guest-stars. Here the guest is the Martian Manhunter, who brings Batman news of an alien invasion by a force called "the Joining." The scenes with the invaders are far less compelling than the byplay between the two heroes, and the resolve of the Crusader's two sidekicks to prove their worth (since Batman's flirting with the idea of excluding them to spare their young lives).  The episode is OK if one can keep from wondering what the other DC heroes are doing during this worldwide invasion-- since at episode's end, Manhunter unveils plans for a Justice League. Four familiar figures appear at the finish, and Superman makes his BATMAN debut in Season Five's first episode-- yet somehow their presence does not weigh in the scales of the Joining's defeat.        

THE BATMAN, SEASON THREE (2005-06)

 

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

Ellen Yin gets dethroned from her tenuous position as Batman's sidekick, making room for his costumed counterpart-- Batgirl? Well, I suppose it's a twist on the standard routine, and I could imagine a scenario in which this more "human" Batman gets softened up by this distaff imitator, making him more amenable to adopting Dick Grayson. I'm not sure the showrunners gave the matter that much thought, because this version of Batgirl has no gravitas. She's like a kid sister tagging after her older brother, and not much beyond that.  

BATGIRL BEGINS, PTS 1-2 (P)-- I'm not crazy about a teenaged Batgirl, but I like even less a Poison Ivy who looks like an anime lolicon. Further, there's no payoff to making them classmates who get involved in sabotaging some pollution-making company, except that the plot-device helps the writers condense the origins of both characters. Ivy's botanical mutation comes about when she hires an earthquake-themed evildoer, Temblor, to create havoc. Ivy uses her powers to enthrall Batman, so Barbara Gordon uses her kung fu skills and a distaff costume to become Batgirl, though she's forced to fight her would-be mentor briefly. Once Ivy is corralled, Batman thanks Batgirl but refuses to take her on as sidekick.    

A DARK KNIGHT TO REMEMBER (G)-- This may be THE BATMAN's best single episode, since it's predicated on the series' notion that this Batman is as much Bruce Wayne as his alter ego. In battle with Penguin, the hero sustains a head-blow, and upon resuming his regular ID, forgets that he ever was Batman. In essence, Wayne begins acting in line with the public perception of his identity, and that includes running away when threatened by a super-crook like Penguin. Slowly, Wayne's own altruism re-asserts itself, and Alfred helps him recover his full memories-- but it's a laborious process, the obverse of the crimefighter's unshakeable sense of self in the BTAS episode "Perchance to Dream." On a sidenote, it's a pleasure to see a Penguin who can really fight: he's like a cross between Quasimodo and Sammo Hung.

A FISTFUL OF FELT (F)-- Hugo Strange still seems to be no more than an eccentric analyst, and his newest gambit is to purge the Ventriloquist of his criminal tendencies by giving the demented fellow a wacky felt puppet with no hostile personality. Of course there's no more Ventriloquist stories if he's cured, but this tale includes an epic "battle of the hand-puppets" worth seeing. 

RPM (F)-- Here's a Batmobile-centric tale for a change, and it's arguably a level up from the car just being swiped by Penguin. New villain Gearhead has some bionic abilities and can interface with a car's computer systems to usurp control. Batman loses one Batmobile but builds another to grind the evildoer's gears.

BRAWN (P)-- This is probably the series nadir. Joker gets hold of Bane's super strength chemical and becomes Super-Joker. Batman creates a power suit with which to fight the fiend, and dimwit Batgirl horns in on the action. Grueling.

THE LAUGHING CATS (F)-- Batgirl has her first throw-down with Catwoman, but both the Cat and the two Bats must make an alliance to thwart Joker's latest larceny. Batman doesn't have any response to Catwoman's overtures, aside from not trying too hard to jail her.

FLEURS DU MAL (F)-- "Makin' copies" (old SNL catchphrase) becomes Poison Ivy's new gig, as she starts replacing city officials with her version of "pod people"-- which makes a lot more sense than most of her gambits. Batgirl is understandably torqued when her father is one of Ivy's victims. The title stems (heh) from the name of a poem-collection by Baudelaire, whose own name gets worked into the story.

CASH FOR TOYS (P)-- Batman contends with a poor man's Toyman, name of Krank-- appropriately named, since the episode seems "cranked out."

THE APPRENTICE (F)-- Joker gets a case of "sidekick envy" due to Batman's mentorship of Batgirl. And though I've often liked seeing Joker as a devilish tempter, his selection of a dorky teenager seems counter-intuitive.

  THUNDER (F)-- In the comics, Maxie Zeus seems underwhelming. But BTAS did one exemplary episode with this megalomaniac and his fetish for Greek culture. The producers of THE BATMAN should have avoided Zeus for that very reason, but instead they churned out a routine programmer with no distinguishing virtues.

THE ICY DEPTHS (F)-- Alfred gets some backstory as he's obliged to cope with an obnoxious former schoolmate who drags the butler into a treasure-hunt. However, both Penguin and Mister Freeze seek the same bounty.

GOTHAM'S ULTIMATE CRIMINAL MASTERMIND (F)-- Hugo Strange finally crosses the line, creating a self-aware computer program, DAVE, that believes itself to be the ultimate super-villain. Unlike the comics' Hugo Strange, the mad scientist here seems to be something of a "villain-fanboy," even impressing the program with his own engrams. Thus DAVE is in the grand tradition of all Frankensteinian creations who act out their creators' desires. Once DAVE whips up a robot body for itself, Batman is hard pressed to best the AI on any level, except for that most Socratic necessity-- that of "knowing yourself." And so Strange ends up in his own funny farm, vowing vengeance in some future encounter.     

FINAL CURTAIN (1957)

 

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

“I know that I must find that object, even though I don't know what it is I must seek. I also know I fear that I will find that object. This night the calling is stronger than it had ever been before. This night was to be the night I had looked forward to with fear, knowing all the time that it had to come sooner or later and there was nothing that I could do to heed that call. This was to be the night. This, the last night of our play. This night when all of the others had gone home.”

I'm as surprised as anyone else might be, knowing of Ed Wood's notorious artistic failings, to find that anything he did registers as "good." And FINAL CURTAIN boasts many of the same failings as Wood's full-length movies. But judging CURTAIN only by its symbolic discourse, it is good on those terms. This 22-minute item is like a massively clumsy version of Edgar Allan Poe-- and though I can't prove it, I suspect Poe was one of Wood's inspirations for his sometimes-rambling confessional narratives.

Long ago, SF critic Algis Budrys wrote an essay on HP Lovecraft for some SF-magazine, archly claiming that Lovecraft mastered a POV Budrys called "first person hysterical." The comment wasn't true of Lovecraft at his best, but it was true of a lot of the works of HPL's literary idol Edgar Allan Poe, whether Poe's frenzied narrators dealt with physical danger (the torture-victim of "Pit and the Pendulum") or with internal upheavals (the protagonist of "Tell-Tale Heart"). And "first-person hysterical" certainly fits the unnamed protagonist of CURTAIN, as attested by the snatch of dialogue printed above, from the very beginning of the story.

So, backstory to the project. Prior to August 1956-- the time when Bela Lugosi, the most bankable actor Wood ever worked with, passed away-- Wood had written various spec-scripts, whether original or adaptations of Wood's own prose stories, as potential vehicles for Lugosi. FINAL CURTAIN would have clearly drawn upon Lugosi's iconic Dracula image, by having Lugosi play a stage actor who had just finished starring in a play about vampires, and who remained, throughout the narrative, clad in a tuxedo because that's what his stage-character had been wearing for the play's final performance that day. (Had Lugosi played the part, an audience would have assumed that the actor had essayed the part of Dracula, though the script never says so.) After Lugosi died, Wood managed in 1957 to shoot two pilot episodes for a proposed anthology teleseries, PORTRAITS IN TERROR-- one being FINAL CURTAIN (which came about because Wood secured permission to shoot his film in an empty theater) while the other was entitled THE NIGHT THE BANSHEE CRIED. When no network bought the project, Wood subsequently re-used footage from both in his 1959 feature NIGHT OF THE GHOULS. Ironically this movie also failed to receive commercial exposure until being discovered for the home video market in 1984. Then a copy of FINAL CURTAIN was found and released to said market in 2012. 

CURTAIN's protagonist is an unnamed actor (Duke Moore) who starred in a vampire-play for "months," and now that the play's run is over, he remains in the now-empty theater because he has some unexplained intuition about finding some "unseen object." The Actor (as he's billed in the credits) never speaks out loud, but a voiceover-- the only words spoken in the episode-- purports to be the Actor's inner thoughts, though the often-frenzied mental dialogue was recorded by another Wood player, Dudley Manlove. The Actor never devotes so much as a stray thought to his past, his profession, or anything but the vague unease haunting him. He starts at every cat's yowl, every creaking board.

After ten minutes of these ruminations, the actor heads upstairs, still unusually apprehensive about everything he sees and feels in the theater. He enters the prop room and sees what he momentarily mistakes for a woman with long blonde hair. When the apparition does not move, he remembers that it's the dummy of a vampire that was used in the play. The actor fingers the dummy's dress and her long hair, and he seems to have fallen in a little in love with the image, much the way Poe's protagonists conceived sudden amours. He starts to leave the room, takes one look back-- and suddenly the "dummy" (Jeannie Stevens) smiles and beckons to him. The terrified thespian manages to blunder his way out of the room, and once he's in the corridor outside, he simply goes back downstairs. Since "the Vampire" (as Stevens is billed) does not appear again, the Actor is able to dismiss the experience. 

After more ruminations, the Actor enters the "last room" in the theater. There he discovers a coffin-- though all the audience sees is a boxy shape, like an overturned cabinet. The Actor opens the "lid" of the "coffin," which he decides is the "object" he's anticipated, and he crawls in and shuts the lid, whereon the film ends with the implication that he smothers himself to death with a figurative Premature Burial.

Frankly, I went back and forth a little regarding the phenomenality of this short tale, with respect to "the Vampire." Ed Wood certainly didn't care about making things clear, so any conclusion I make might be my personal preference alone. I wouldn't have put it past Wood to have imagined (a) a real female vampire who just happens to be the spitting image of a prop dummy used in a play, and (b) who decides to stop by the theater in which the Actor's roaming around, as she's been called to him by his "half in love with easeful death" train of thought. Indeed, the plotline of NIGHT OF THE GHOULS-- the movie into which Wood inserted scenes taken from CURTAIN-- revolves around the notion that a phony spiritualist accidentally summons real ghosts. But at least the ghosts of GHOULS actually DO something, forcing the crooked medium into a coffin, where the swindler dies just as the Actor does.

Yet, even granting Wood's capricious plotting, it might be a bit more likely that the Actor simply imagines the prop dummy coming to life and beckoning to him-- which is, incidentally, the only really scary scene I've ever seen in a Wood movie. And the scene works because, in large part, viewers half expect it. And I'm not talking about expecting the Big Reveal because any viewer can see that the "dummy" is breathing. I'm saying that, because the Actor strokes the dummy's hair and clothes as if he's thinking about making out with the mannequin, it's the perfect "revenge of the feminine" for the dummy to come to life and say, "Sure, come on, big boy" with her gestures. Therefore, the Actor conjures up his own punishment, much as the narrator of "Tell-Tale Heart" imagines that he can hear the beating heart of the man he murdered. The Vampire-scene is also a turnaround-- probably unintentional-- on the end scene from Wood's GLEN OR GLENDA, where cross-dresser Glen's wife willingly permits him to share her clothing.

The Vampire-scene also mirrors the episode's final moments, in that first we see an unliving object seem to come to life, after which a living man makes himself unliving. One online review claimed that the Actor is really dead from the first, but I think this interpretation robs the character of any empathy. Wood might not have understood how to make the Actor sympathetic to an audience, but he WANTS viewers to feel for the thespian's inner turmoil. The Actor has played a living dead man for "months," and there's the broad implication that he's been seduced by the idea of death. The setup is not unlike that of the actor-protagonist of 1947's A DOUBLE LIFE, who becomes overly invested in playing Othello, to the extent that the performer begins thinking that he is Othello, with deadly consequences. 

                    

Does Wood come close to tapping Poe's unique exploration of the dark side of human psychology? No, but I think Wood, even though he made this pilot when he was still in his thirties, showed a penchant for death-haunted characters throughout most of his cinematic career. Whatever TV-network might've watched Wood's pilot-episodes would have been entirely justifying on rejecting them as having no prime-time potential. But in some ways, the short CURTAIN does a better job than the full-length features at translating Wood's anxieties into a "personal myth"-- one with at least a little more universality than the director's passion for angora sweaters.

                                  

        

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.