Welcome to Boomb Tube, where all of your favorite TV shows and Ultimate Spider-Man recapped on a weekly basis! This week: the return of DC Nation! Spoilers ahead!
Thanks to the return of DC Nation, I can finally talk about two of my favorite shows! The first one, Green Lantern: The Animated Series, marked its return in the best way possible by introducing Guy Gardner: The Feisty Ginger Green Lantern! After all the space shenanigans of last season, Hal returns to Earth to find that he’s been replaced by Guy as Earth’s new champion. Instead of the usual formula of heroes fighting over a misunderstanding and then teaming up to save the day, Green Lantern completely reinvents the formula by having Guy and Hal bond over hot wings before fighting. If only all fights were preceded by hot wings. It would make UFC much more interesting and get me to watch the presidential debates! Hal and Guy ticklefight over who gets to be the real Green Lantern until Generic Scientist Who Uncovers Ancient Evil #239984 finds an ancient temple containing the Manhunter robots that tried to wipe out all emotional life from the universe. Guy and Hal team up to slap some Manhunter robots and The Guardians keep Guy as champion of Earth, but promote Hal to Honor Guard of the Green Lantern Corps. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure takes over a Manhunter graveyard planet, his identity a mystery to everyone who has never wiki’d how DC’s continuity works! It’s the Anti-Monitor is what I’m getting at. I thought I’d write that he was looking to buy a Monitor for his Auntie but that seemed too ridiculous.
Switching over to Marvel, this week on Avengers, Red Skull continued his evil plot of confusing Captain America! This time, instead of releasing a gas that gives everyone a wicked sunburn, he has secretly hidden gigantic robots all around the United States that begin to wake up and cause property damage. Captain America doesn’t care so he turns his focus to finding out the identity of the Winter Soldier. One thing I appreciate about this show is the writers know that the viewers all know that Bucky is Winter Soldier so they don’t even try to make it a huge mystery. The episode opens with a flashback to Bucky and Cap punching super-Nazis in World War II! I’d much rather have scenes like that than a season-long mystery everyone knows the answer to. Anyway, Steve, along with Nick Fury who had a previous run-in with Bucky that cost him the lives of the rest of his squad, Cap tracks Bucky to a HYDRA base where Bucky just trips over everything and causes the robots to attack DC. The town, not Marvel’s competitor. Cap and Bucky make amends and The Avengers regroup to fight the giant robots which, no joking, turn into a Voltron version of the Red Skull. Cap and Bucky arrive at DC and decide to fight the robot by jumping out of a plane and crash landing face first into the eye of Voltron Red Skull. Because you know, 1940’s. After slapping up the Red Skull, Winter Soldier makes an explosion vanishes before Cap can say goodbye. Since in the Forties, the only way to leave a room was explosions.
Back at DC Nation, Young Justice‘s first 10 minutes decided to focus not on action, but on tears as everyone remembered how last episode ended with Artemis’s apparent murder at the hands of Aqualad. In reality, Aqualad is a mole for the league and Artemis survived and is in hiding because… question mark? Meanwhile at the hospital that never asks any questions; Green Arrow, Speedy, and Red Arrow; Speedy’s clone who replaced Speedy for the entirety of the series, are discussing what’s changed since Speedy was kidnapped and cloned by Lex Luthor. After learning that he’s been out cold for 8 years and replaced by a more muscular version of himself, Speedy goes “aw hell naw” and goes after Luthor for revenge. However, before escaping the Arrows to enact his vengeance, Speedy raids one of Red Arrow’s safe houses, takes all of his guns, puts on his old costume, and teleports away before a grenade he left behind nearly kills the Arrows. Keep in mind that Speedy does this all with one arm. Later, while Lex Luthor is doing paperwork concerning the alien invasion he is secretly backing: the activity I would do everyday if I was Lex Luthor, Speedy takes a rocket launcher and just blows the crap out of Lex Luthor’s office. Lex’s bodyguard, Mercy Graves: a robot with missile launchers and machine guns built into her, then fights Speedy, THE ONE ARMED SPEEDY, in a nearby parking lot. I have no idea what Speedy, who just got out of an 8 year coma, did to prepare for this fight but it must have included a lot of “snowbirds”. Right before Speedy kills Lex, Luthor offers a gift to Speedy: a robotic arm. The Arrows meet Speedy outside of the LexCorp building where he walks out with his new appendage and codename: Arsenal! All cats in future episodes beware!
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On Ultimate Spider-Man, Doc Ock took over Iron Man’s armor and slapped around Norman Osborn, who previously screwed him over, but then Iron Man and Spider-Man stop it. That’s all I can say of the plot. I mean, this show tried to play this episode as vaguely serious, but you can’t really take something serious when it dedicates a minute of screentime, around a 20th of its total airtime, to a bit where Spidey’s good conscience and bad conscience debate Fred Flintstone style whether or not Norman Osborn can be trusted. The main problem with Ultimate Spider-Man isn’t necessarily that the plot is pretty basic, Green Lantern’s plot was the standard hero beat-up-then-team-up plot used in every other superhero story released in the last ten years. Yet, Ultimate Spider-Man is littered with non-consequential sequences that ape Family Guy’s “cut-away” scenes without any real humor within. For example, Spidey would say a line where he says something like “That’s as scary as Doctor Doom wearing a dress!” Then the scene will shift to Doctor Doom wearing a dress. We’ve already gotten the joke, we know what Doctor Doom looks like and we can imagine him in a dress, but the flow of the already hard to care about plot is broken by this joke that we’ve already been told. One of the biggest rules in visual storytelling is show, don’t tell but that doesn’t mean show every little thing. It’s the equivalent of the guy in the “U MAD BRO?!” shirt pointing to his shirt every 10 minutes. I know that this show is supposed to be geared towards kids, but so are the rest of the shows in this column and they do one very important thing: they trust their audience. Shows that trust their audience are usually much more satisfying than shows that don’t and feel the need to repeat a joke over and over until the viewer gets it. This isn’t a personal attack against the creators on Ultimate Spider-Man, some of the writers have done great stuff in the past. They just seem to be in this mind set that since this show is aimed towards younger audiences than normal, they should write for children instead of writing who every children’s writer should write for: a general audience.
Next week: The return of the Hulk! Aqualad does more undercover shenanigans! And Hal Jordan eats some more hot wings!(?)
