An Update...

I know I promised to have a Prisoner review up this week, and it is coming. I'd like to tell you I was so blown away by the new series that it took me this long to collect my thoughts, but the fact of the matter is, I've been sick as a dog all week. Not sick about the show, just physically ill. I even had to take some time off from work at my "day job." So I haven't been in any condition to sit down and write. And as I have quite a bit to say about the new series, I don't want to do a rush job on it. So my Prisoner review will go up on Monday, along with the second part of my history of Batman and the Outsiders. In the meantime, you can now watch the first episode of The Prisoner at the AMC website, and AMC will re-air the first two episodes on Sunday night.

A Final Observation on Star Trek

by Max Doomsday

JJ Abrams' Star Trek comes to DVD tomorrow. The two-disc "special edition" will have deleted scenes that fill in a few of the movie's gaping plot holes. So, FYI.

I've talked a lot about Star Trek here. In fact, it was almost a year ago that I discussed my reservations about the film's cast, tone, and creative team. Happily, my concerns were unfounded. Star Trek was my favorite film of 2009. Not the best film, but a pretty damn good one.

(I can make a distinction between what is "the best" in terms of overall quality and what is "my favorite" in terms of personal enjoyment. People seem to have a hard time getting their heads around that.)

With the DVD hitting the shelves, I thought I'd take the occasion to talk about something I observed since the movie opened.

In the months leading up to the movie's release, a lot of anger was directed against it by Trekkies, much of it having to do with the fact that the filmmakers were ignoring or disregarding elements of the precious Star Trek "canon." (I wrote an article ridiculing those people just last month, if you're interested.) But when the movie opened to critical acclaim and box office success, a lot of the naysayers went quiet. They were able to accept that this was a reboot, a new version of Star Trek, and appreciate the movie on its own terms.

Now here's what I found interesting.

The people I expected to be the most hostile toward the new Star Trek were longtime fans, the baby boomers who were around when the original TV series first aired. People who'd been fans for forty years and had the most emotional investment in the franchise's history and mythology.

But what I observed was just the opposite. Longtime Star Trek fans I know - even those who were skeptical about the new movie before it opened - loved it. They embraced it whole-heartedly. The people who utterly hated the new movie - who denounced it in the most vitriolic terms and who were overcome with blind, unreasoning hatred for J.J. Abrams - were people my age (34) and younger. People who grew up on The Next Generation and its stuffy, sterile spinoffs. People for whom Star Trek was never about Captain Kirk's brand of frontier derring-do, but about calm, reasonable people in tight jumpsuits having calm, reasonable discussions about abstract concepts. While sipping tea.

I never would've guessed it. I would've thought younger fans would be the most accepting of a Star Trek reboot, but the opposite was true. I haven't drawn any profound conclusions from that. Maybe older fans were just happy to have Kirk and Spock back onboard the Enterprise, in any capacity. Maybe baby boomers really are more open-minded than the rest of us, like they've been telling us all these years. Or maybe the people who are spewing such venom over this movie are just unstable fanatics, and we should feel happy that they're not climbing towers with high-powered rifles.

I mean, lighten up. It's a space opera about aliens with pointy ears. It's not 9/11.

So that's a phenomenon I found fascinating (as Spock might say), and also a little disappointing. But if you've been reading this blog for very long, you might've noticed that I'm often disappointed by the behavior of my fellow geeks.

Anyway, like I said, Star Trek goes on sale tomorrow. You can read my review of the movie here, Fearless Young Orphan's review here, and my hopes for the future of the franchise here. And just for fun, here's my look back at some truly terrible episodes of the original series that I absolutely love.

Now if only we could get J.J. Abrams to reboot Star Wars!

Guide to Batman: The Brave and the Bold - The Outsiders

by Max Doomsday

The B&B episode "Enter the Outsiders!" (which you can find on the new DVD set, on sale now) introduced audiences to three troubled, super-powered teenagers: multicolored shapeshifter Metamorpho; angry, electrically-charged Black Lightning; and silent samurai Katana.

Viewing themselves as misfits and rejects, these three banded together as a team of supervillains called the Outsiders, working in the service of a sewer-dwelling creature called Slug. But in the end, Batman and guest star Wildcat (who I'll profile in a few weeks) turned the Outsiders to the side of the angels. In fact, the trio just returned in last week's episode of B&B, where Batman had to rescue them from a creep called the Psycho Pirate.

By the way, I've learned that Cartoon Network is now airing B&B on Saturday night, rather than in the wee hours of Saturday morning. Well congratulations, CN. You've figured out that if you have a show starring a beloved pop icon, maybe you should broadcast it at an hour when people are actually awake to see it. You pass TV Programming 101.

Anyway, as we're going to see, the animated Outsiders bear little resemblance to their DC Comics counterparts. Just for starters, Metamorpho, Black Lightning, and Katana aren't teenagers. They were never supervillains and, as far as I know, they've never had any affiliation with anybody named Slug.

Slug is not a character found in comics, though it appears he was based on a very minor Superman villain called Sleez, an alien with psychic powers who was exiled from the planet Apokolips and reduced to living in the Metropolis sewers. In an infamous 1987 story by writer/artist John Byrne (because I feel it's important to identify the guilty parties!) Sleez tried to force a brainwashed Man of Steel to act in a porn film. Needless to say, it was not a high point in Superman's publishing history. (And I'm not making any of this up!)

But let's get back to the Outsiders. The team's history begins in 1983, a time when DC had a real problem with what to do about Batman. Readers' polls showed he was one of their most popular characters, but sales on his titles were consistently poor. One of those underperforming titles was The Brave and the Bold, the very book on which the animated series is based. (I discussed that book's long history here.)

DC decided to cancel the B&B comic and launch a new Batman book with the creative team of Mike W. Barr, who'd written a lot of the final B&B issues, and Jim Aparo, who'd been the primary artist on B&B during the previous decade.

One of DC's hottest titles at the time was New Teen Titans, about a superhero team with a roster mixing familiar faces like Robin and Wonder Girl with new, angsty characters like Cyborg and Raven. Two other popular, teen-centric titles, DC's own Legion of Super-Heroes and Marvel Comics' Uncanny X-Men, had similar lineups.

DC thought lightning might strike again in a new team book with Batman at the helm. So Barr and Aparo put together a group that included both established characters and new creations of their own, with a couple of teens thrown in for good measure. The result was Batman and the Outsiders.

Here's how it went down.

A violent revolution broke out in the fictional European nation of Markovia. Lucius Fox, the head of Wayne Enterprises (a.k.a. Morgan Freeman in The Dark Knight), just happened to be in the country on business when the shooting started. He went missing. So Batman summoned the Justice League to go in and rescue him.

The thing is, the Justice League doesn't get involved in wars. At least, not conventional wars. They'll stop an alien attack or an invasion by the mole men living below the Earth's surface, but they generally steer clear of international conflicts and other touchy political subjects. This is generally true of all mainstream comic book superheroes, and I think we can see why.

If superheroes started involving themselves in fictional wars, readers might start expecting writers to address why these same superheroes don't get involved in actual wars. Why doesn't Superman look for WMDs in Iraq or track down Osama bin Laden? It should only take him a few seconds, scanning the Mideast at super-speed with his telescopic x-ray vision. Hell, he could do that from his office at the Daily Planet!

But if he did that, it would destroy any suspension of disbelief. Comic book publishers sidestep the issue by keeping superheroes out of war and politics entirely (except, of course, in allegorical stories). The Watchmen subplot about Dr. Manhattan's incursion into Vietnam was partly writer Alan Moore's comment on the tradition of keeping superheroes out of real-world international affairs.

So when Batman decided the Justice League should go charging into Markovia, he was breaking the rules. He was asking them to take the unprecedented step of invading a sovereign nation to end a war - all so he could look for a missing employee. But things didn't go the way he planned.

Superman had been on the phone with the State Department and assured them the Justice League wouldn't get involved in the Markovian crisis. Why the phone call was even necessary, given the League's history of non-intervention, was not explained. Superman declared Markovia off-limits to Justice Leaguers - though, not being the team's leader, he didn't actually have the authority to make that stick. Nevertheless, everyone seemed willing to go along with it. Everyone except Batman, who threw a tantrum and quit the team.

After storming out of the Justice League meeting, Batman went into Markovia himself. He took along Black Lightning, who'd been dwelling in the background of the DC Universe since his own title was cancelled back in the late '70s.

Apparently, Markovia was the site of some kind of swap meet for aspiring superheroes. In quick succession, Batman and Black Lightning encountered Metamorpho, a B-lister dating back to the '60s, and three newbies created by Barr and Aparo, each of whom just happened to be in Markovia at the time for their own reasons. These were Geo-Force, a young Markovian prince granted superhuman powers by a scientific experiment; Halo, an American amnesiac who exhibited an array of light-based abilities; and Katana, a Japanese martial artist in possession of a mystic sword.

Batman and his ad hoc team quickly ended the hostilities and restored the government of Markovia - which was a monarchy, by the way, so ... good job? Then Batman decided to take them all back to Gotham and train them as his personal strike force. Ostensibly, they were called the Outsiders because they'd take on the kind of jobs that mainstream groups like the Justice League wouldn't handle. But in practice, the Outsiders became a pretty standard superhero team.

So who were these Outsiders, and what did fate have in store for them? I'll cover that next week!

Batman: The Brave and the Bold airs on Friday nights at 7:30 Eastern, and now on Saturday nights at 8:30 Eastern. And once again, here are the links to previous entries in this series:

Blue Beetle and Kanjar Ro.
Green Arrow.
Clock King, Green Fury, Gentleman Ghost, and Dinosaur Island.
Plastic Man, Kite-Man, and Gorilla Grodd.
Aquaman.
Black Manta, Ocean Master, Felix Faust, and The Atom.
Red Tornado, Sportsmaster, and Toyman.
Green Lantern.
Etrigan the Demon and B'wana Beast.

I Remember Freddy: A Nightmare on Elm Street Revisited, 25 Years Later

by Fearless Young Orphan

The 25-year anniversary of Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (November 9, 1984) makes me feel incredibly old but cheerfully nostalgic (or maybe that's senility sneaking in on me). Perhaps one must be somewhere around the age of 40 to really appreciate NoES. I watched it again a few years ago and enjoyed it, but realized that what I was enjoying more was my memory of the good old days.

Not that it's a bad movie, far from it. NoES is a solid, fun horror movie, more imaginative than most, with some unforgettable imagery. Still, it's not brilliant or perfect, and cobbles on an ending that is a real head-scratcher. Younger viewers may wonder what all the fuss was about, so I will try to provide a little perspective.

In 1978 John Carpenter made Halloween, the original slasher movie (though it is, by today's standards, a model of restraint using long periods of suspense-building and comparatively little actual onscreen gore). Then, in 1980, Friday the 13th appeared, upping the ante and the body count on the dead teenager movie.

As is always the case, the commercial success of these movies spawned a legion of imitations. In the years between 1978 and 1984, 800,000 copycat slasher movies were released and they varied in plot somewhat less than the usual Harlequin romance fare. A group of teens are picked off, one by one, in various states of undress with various sharp and improbable objects until finally one sobbing virgin makes it out alive. Most teens during this time watched these more as body-count comedies rather than horror movies, because they were never scary. My friends and I watched almost every damned one of them. This was the marvelous new age of the VCR and you could rent these things and watch them at home!

But even idiot teenagers can have common sense and taste, or at least a craving for something new and different, so A Nightmare on Elm Street arrived in our world as a little miracle. This was a dead teenager movie, yes, but with a three-dimensional plot that was actually frightening. Freddy Krueger, the evil spirit of a child murderer, wreaks vengeance on the children of the vigilantes who killed him, picking the kids off one by one as they sleep.

Recently I saw Paranormal Activity and I understand why that creepy and rather understated little film has become a horror hit: because it's about things happening to people while they sleep. You're never more vulnerable than when you're snuggled up in bed and unconscious to the world.

Freddy Krueger operates under these terms, killing teens in their ookiest nightmares with some cheesy but effective FX. Robert Englund plays Freddy with a good deal more menace in the original film than he did in later entries, when Freddy became a lousy murderous comedian spouting off puns like "Don't lose your head!" Our heroine is Nancy, who is smarter, braver and angrier than your average teen screamer, and she fights Freddy on his turf with admirable ingenuity. And yes, a very young Johnny Depp is in it. He is the prettiest girl in the film, up until he dies horribly in a geyser of blood.

Teen horror fans ate this movie up. We loved it. In my personal group of friends I am sure that we watched it six times. The movie made the horror genre take a left turn from our desensitization. People younger than me may recall that director Craven performed the same trick again with Scream in 1996, but I believe that NoES's impact was larger, not least of all because it made Scream possible.

I cannot judge the real quality of NoES without factoring in how much I loved it as a bloodthirsty kid. The power of nostalgia is formidable, which is why we hear so much howling about the raping of childhoods whenever anything is revisited and changed. I was very skeptical when I heard they were remaking NoES and I was particularly horrified to hear Michael Bay's name involved. Learning that Jackie Earle Haley is playing Freddy Krueger gave me hope, because he's scary just standing there. Regardless of how that turns out, the original NoES is a prominent landmark from my early teen years and it will always be indulged as one of my favorite horror movies.

Review of Battlestar Galactica: The Plan

by Max Doomsday

The Cylons were created by man.
They rebelled.
They evolved.
They look and feel human.
Some are programmed to think they are human.
There are many copies.
And they have a plan.

There was an all-too-brief time in my life when seeing those words flash across the TV screen almost gave me chills. It signaled the beginning of an episode of Battlestar Galactica. It meant I was about to see some epic television.

And then Season 3 happened.

That's the season when BSG went sailing over the shark. That's when we learned that not only did the Cylons not "have a plan," neither did the show's writers.

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan, released straight to DVD on October 27, purports to reveal the Cylons' grand scheme.

I stuck with BSG through its decay, right up to the insulting series finale. After that, I probably should've washed my hands of the franchise entirely. But like a battered wife, I came back for more punishment.

So what was the Cylon "plan"? Nothing too elaborate. In fact, it can be summed up in the immortal words of Bender Bending Rodriguez: "Kill all humans." Turns out, the Cylons expected their attack on the Twelve Colonies to wipe out all of mankind in one swoop. When that didn't happen, the Cylons had to wing it.

In other words, the much-touted "plan" (such as it was) went wrong in the very first episode of the series, and we spent four years watching the Cylons improvise. That's just the sort of copout explanation I've come to expect from BSG, and an apt metaphor for what happened in the last two seasons.

But this is supposed to be a movie review, not a retrospective on the series. Fearless Young Orphan did a BSG moratorium a couple of weeks ago, and it's probably the funniest thing we've posted. You can read that here. Now back to the movie...

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan is not a conventional film. It's essentially a procession of scenes depicting events that occurred offscreen during the first two seasons of the series, all shown from the Cylon perspective, with segments from the original episodes sprinkled in to give the new material some context. It's a lot like going to the menu of deleted scenes on a DVD and hitting "play all." If you're not already versed in BSG, you'll be completely lost.

It's as if the writers went to a BSG message board, found a thread called "Unanswered Questions from Seasons 1 and 2," wrote a list of everything that was posted there, then came up with a corresponding scene for each item on the list. So we get to see, for instance, how Ellen Tigh survived the Cylon attacks and made it into the human fleet, the beginning of Leoben Conoy's obsession with Starbuck (the most ill-conceived subplot in the entire series), and Boomer's contacts with other Cylons while a sleeper agent aboard the Galactica.

All of this makes for mildly interesting trivia, but the writers of The Plan seem to be going out of their way to fill in blanks that I'm not sure really needed filling, particularly in light of the nauseating deus ex machina employed at the conclusion of the series.

Still, I enjoyed The Plan far more than I expected, and probably more than it deserves. Because it's set during the first two seasons, it was a chance to revisit BSG's glory days, before everything started to go so horribly wrong. But that's not the main reason I liked it. The main reason is Dean Stockwell.

The plot that holds all these "lost" BSG moments together focuses on two Brother Cavils, played by Stockwell. One is hiding in the human fleet, directing Cylon activities. The other is living among the resistance fighters on old Caprica. Their experiences shape their attitudes toward the human-Cylon conflict.

In Brother Cavil, Stockwell created one of the small screen's most unforgettable villains, and The Plan is his moment to shine.

What I'd really love is for Cavil to get his own show. Not a BSG spinoff. I mean a talk show, a political talk show. Stockwell can do the whole thing in character - berating his guests, making light of sensitive issues, mocking the general public, and daring viewers to change the channel. I'd pay real money to see that!

What you won't find in The Plan is some kind of redemption for BSG. The film offers no new insight or revelation that makes the series' conclusion any more palatable.

Guide to Batman: The Brave and the Bold - Etrigan the Demon and B'wana Beast

by Max Doomsday

Continuing my profiles of the DC Comics characters appearing in the second DVD set of Batman: The Brave and the Bold (on sale tomorrow).

ETRIGAN THE DEMON

The B&B episode "Day of the Dark Knight!" sees Batman and Green Arrow (who I profiled here) time-travel to medieval England for an encounter with one of DC's quirkier (anti-)heroes, Etrigan the Demon.

Etrigan was the creation of comics legend Jack "the King" Kirby. During the '60s, Kirby co-created half the Marvel Comics pantheon with Stan Lee. After a falling-out with Marvel, Kirby defected to DC where he spent the early '70s creating offbeat characters like Mr. Miracle, OMAC, and Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth (each of whom turn up in later episodes of B&B).

Etrigan debuted in the first issue of his own title, simply called The Demon, in 1972. Although the series lasted only sixteen issues, Etrigan's been a fixture in the DC Universe ever since and has starred in several mini-series and ongoing titles, with varying degrees of success.

The story of Etrigan begins in the Arthurian age, when Merlin summoned him up from Hell to defend Camelot from an onslaught by the sorceress Morgaine Le Fey. On Earth, Etrigan has superhuman strength (he can hold his own with heavy-hitters like Superman) and an array of supernatural powers, the most striking of which is the ability to breathe fire.

We all know the story of Camelot. Morgaine (a.k.a. Morgan or Morgana) was the scheming half-sister of King Arthur. They had a Damian-like spawn named Mordred, he attacked Camelot, Arthur was killed, they threw his sword in a pond ... it was all covered in the movie Excalibur, where Morgana was portrayed by a tasty young Helen Mirren.

(That last bit's not really important. I just like felt like doing the Google Image Search.)

Anyway, after Merlin was finished with Etrigan, I guess he didn't want to send him back to Hell, so he gave him a human form with a very non-demonic temperament. The human took the name Jason Blood, became an occultist, and basically walked the Earth for 1500 years - a la Jules Winfield - until he came upon a spell that would unleash his foul-tempered, fire-breathing other half: "Gone, gone, the form of man! Arise the demon Etrigan!"

Morgaine Le Fey was still around, too, having used magic to prevent aging, and she and Etrigan renewed their hostilities. She's also clashed with Wonder Woman in modern times, and appeared in a couple of episodes of Cartoon Network's Justice League and Justice League Unlimited with Mordred, depicted there as an eternally-youthful spoiled child.

The exact nature of the relationship between Blood and Etrigan has been retconned over the years. Most recent accounts have it that Blood was a separate person who Merlin, for one reason or another, "bonded" with the demon. Of course, that gives Blood's tale a tragic, Bruce Banner/Incredible Hulk angle that comic book readers just eat right up! Whatever version of the story you're reading, the main thing is, Blood and Etrigan aren't too thrilled about having to share the same space.

During the '80s, Etrigan picked up the habit of speaking in rhyme, something writers have used inconsistently. Here's a sample of his verse, as Etrigan leads the Swamp Thing on a guided tour of Hell.

That's courtesy of Alan Moore, author of Watchmen and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Although he was not the first writer to have Etrigan speak in rhyme, he came up with an explanation for it, after the fact. It seems Etrigan had been promoted to "the Rhymers," an elite rank of the armies of Hell.

And that's the thing about Etrigan. He's a demon whose diabolical nature is held in check only by Merlin's magic and his bond to Jason Blood. So he's cruel, sadistic, and cheerfully amoral. It definitely makes for a unique brand of superhero-ing.

Etrigan has frequently teamed up with Batman in the comics, and that relationship carried over into television, where Etrigan has guest-starred in The New Batman Adventures, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited. He also appeared in a later episode of B&B set in Victorian London, where a time-traveling Batman teams up with Sherlock Holmes.

B'WANA BEAST

I really wish I didn't have to write this entry. That is to say, I wish this character hadn't turned up in an episode of B&B. He's one of the lamest superheroes in the DC lineup, and I wish he'd just go away and stay away.

B'wana Beast appears in the teaser for the B&B episode "Enter the Outsiders!" There, he helps Batman take down Black Manta (who I profiled here). Before that, he showed up in an episode of Justice League Unlimited, too. And I hear he'll guest-star in a future episode of B&B. With so many great comic book characters who've never made the jump to the screen, I don't understand why this loser's getting so much attention.

B'wana Beast debuted in a 1967 episode of a DC title called Showcase. This was a "try-out" book, where the company would introduce new characters. If the character took off, he'd graduate into his own series. B'wana Beast appeared in two issues of Showcase, and he went over so well with readers that not only did he never earn his own title, he wasn't seen again for nearly twenty years.

B'wana Beast was Mike Maxwell, a white American working as a ranger in Africa. He found a magic helmet and "elixir" inside a cave in Mt. Kilimanjaro, which gave him the power to communicate with and mentally control animals. Sort of like a land-based Aquaman. It also gave him the ability to take two nearby animals and combine them into one creature, which he called a "chimera," and which he could control.

So say he's trying to stop some poachers who are escaping in a jeep ... and there just happen to be a gazelle and a rhinoceros standing nearby. B'wana Beast could merge them into a rhino-headed gazelle, which could catch up with the poachers and knock their jeep over!

Ladies and gentleman, I submit for your consideration, my nominee for Hokiest Superpower in the History of American Comic Books.

Oh, and I almost forgot. B'wana Beast had a sidekick, a gorilla named Djuba.

B'wana Beast should've just been forgotten after his two-issue run in 1967, but in comics, no character ever goes away forever. In the mid-'80s, DC put out a sort of encyclopedia of all their characters called Who's Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe. Researchers came across those old issues of Showcase, and instead of calmly and deliberately lighting them on fire, the researchers actually wrote up an entry for B'wana Beast. Next thing you know, he was making guest appearances in DC titles, most notably in writer Grant Morrison's otherwise-groundbreaking series, Animal Man.

Mike Maxwell eventually decided to pass the mantle on to a successor, South African activist Dominic Mndawe, who took the dopier-sounding name, "Freedom Beast."

Maxwell showed up in a later issue of Animal Man as a supervillain called the Shining Man, then died. Freedom Beast made a handful of guest appearances over the last twenty years. In early 2009, he was killed off in a book called Justice League: Cry for Justice for no other reason than to give another lame, Africa-based superhero, Congorilla, a motivation to track down his killers.

So both versions of B'wana Beast are dead in the comics. Hopefully the people in charge of B&B and other DC animated projects will get the memo.

* * *

Here are links to the previous entries in the B&B series:

Blue Beetle and Kanjar Ro.
Green Arrow.
Clock King, Green Fury, Gentleman Ghost, and Dinosaur Island.
Plastic Man, Kite-Man, and Gorilla Grodd.
Aquaman.
Black Manta, Ocean Master, Felix Faust, and The Atom.
Red Tornado, Sportsmaster, and Toyman.
Green Lantern.