This week on Boomb Tube: Teen Titans Go! continues its journey into the pit of madness and Ultimate Deadpool somehow delivers one of the best adaptations of the Merc with a Mouth. How? Read more after the cut!
There is something terrifically wrong with the creators behind Teen Titans Go! Not only did they decide that one of the most popular cartoons of the past ten years should be brought back as a sitcom-like comedy, but they have a real penchant for morality-play-like twists, body horror, and existential crises. This week, Cyborg muses on how awesome the cold robot body his father gave him after having the rest of Vic’s body torn apart by an inter-dimensional rift is. Also, he goes on about how awesome the VCRs and the 80’s television show Webster are. He goes on and on about how superior he is to the rest of his teammates, but Beast Boy spills a soda on Cyborg and Cyborg’s body shuts down. That in itself could have been the end, punishment was properly delivered to strike down Cyborg’s hubris. But the gods behind Teen Titans Go! are fickle ones and they will not stop until all are punished.
The rest of the Titans decide to play God by plugging Cyborg’s body into the Titan Tower mainframe and letting Cyborg become the Tower itself. To this end, he almost immediately becomes Hal 9000, knocks out all the Titans, and surgically attaches their heads to household appliances. Realizing that the only way to combat the madness now is to laugh, all the Titans are suddenly so cool with the fact that they’re toasters or lamps. The episode ends with everyone laughing, Starfire shooting toast out her toaster back, Raven as a vacuum using her mouth to suck up the floor, and Pixar Lamp Robin moving his tongue around so that light will burst forth from their mouth. Then that’s it. That’s how the episode ends. Second week in a row with nothing close to a resolution. I don’t know if this is some poly-universe situation where each incarnation of Titans across multiple worlds are being punished, but that’s the only explanation I have.
If I could talk about musical theatre for a second (a sentence that has never failed in getting me beat up)Teen Titans Go! is becoming Into the Woods. In Into the Woods, the first act is all about fairy tale characters going about their lives and being the most annoying people in existence. The second act, however, deals with the characters all facing harsh punishments for their stupid actions during act one. That’s what Teen Titans Go! is doing. The Titans’ faults and horrific manners during the first few episodes are coming back to haunt them as each character has an episode in which their humanity is tested. Last week, Robin fought the power of loneliness and the fallacy of power in a world that has no need of it. This week, Cyborg dealt with the loss of his humanity and tried desperately to change the friends who would never understand him by changing them into a horrific form like his own. Next week, Beast Boy will fart on a taco or something.
Final Verdict: 7.2 – This show’s becoming fun to watch in some very odd way.
Over on Ultimate Spider-Man, Deadpool shows up on a show where Spider-Man is constantly breaking the fourth wall, to break the fifth wall by constantly interrupting Spider-Man’s narration. Spider-Man walks into the SHIELD Helicarrier to find that Deadpool is just hanging around chilling with the other members of Spidey’s team. He charms all of them and accesses SHIELD’s datacore while talking about how he used to be a member of Fury’s young hero program just like Spider-Man, all while doing the typical Deadpool zaniness. From the Datacore, Deadpool finds Taskmaster’s location and sets out to take him down. Turns out that someone leaked the identities of everyone in SHIELD to Taskmaster, so Deadpool takes Spider-Man with him to fight Taskmaster, since Deadpool loves Spider-Man’s style as it’s clearly a rip-off of Deadpool’s own style.
On the way to Taskmaster’s base, Deadpool and Spidey bond over their love of one-liners. Everything goes smoothly until they arrive at the base and Deadpool puts the entire plan in jeopardy about a dozen times. Spider-Man grows steadily uncool with Deadpool, as do the viewers, until her eveals that he plans to “un-alive” all the baddies inside the base. Spider-Man is horrified by this and knocks out the guards before Deadpool can un-alive them. After swiftly taking down Taskmaster through the power of booty dancing, Deadpool reveals that the disk with all the heroes’ identities was actually leaked by him and he wants it back to sell to the black market. Spider-Man and Deadpool then proceed to fight each other by yelling deadly puns in the chibi fourth wall area where Peter narrates. Eventually, Peter hits Deadpool with some morality, and Deadpool reveals his origin as a kid who was always picked on until Fury trained him to be a deadly gun-kata master. Then he refuses to actually learn his lesson, and flies off without the disk.
In setting up Deadpool as a dark mirror to Peter, Ultimate Spider-Man does a really great job translating the character. It is a move that wouldn’t really work in the main comics, and to be honest is a bit on the nose with exactly how alike Deadpool and Spidey are (students of Nick Fury who are sassy and have similar costumes) but it’s a great adaptation of the Deadpool character. Mostly because, Deadpool is actually pretty unsettling here. A lot of writers seem to forget that he isn’t just a sassy ninja who loves chimichangas and meta humor, but a genuinely insane person who kills people for money and somehow that aspect of him bleeds through into the kids’ show version. It’s actually easy to believe here that Deadpool is, while funny, not in complete control of his faculties. It’s a great, and pretty mature, adaptation of the character that I would never have expected from Ultimate Spider-Man.
Final Verdict: 8.8 – Watch.
