Teen Titans: A Review

 

I really, really wish children television networks would stop trying to create shows for children.

As counter intuitive as it sounds, the way that networks approach the creation of television shows that are designed for kids is becoming ineffective. I get it—as a writer, it’s important to know who it is you want to take part in your creation because it gears the entire project in a specific direction. Someone who wants to write for teenage boys probably wouldn’t jump on the teen romance bandwagon, and another person interested in the young girl readership wouldn’t have much luck writing about giant robots that smash each other to pieces all the time. Everything that is thrown at the wall and considered for production on networks like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network needs a specific age bracket tacked onto it in order for the writers, animators, and producers to know how to set up and develop each episode. Having specific people in mind when creating a show helps to keep it focused.

My problem, however, is that this line of thinking can only take you so far, and television networks have become far too reliant on the status quo of “girls like Barbies and pink and cute things” and “boys like cars and fighting and heroes” that they limit themselves in terms of what they will and won’t allow on a show based on what focus groups and marketing tell them interests a particular type of people. After all, it’s a business, and networks create shows to make money. When they can no longer do that, they will drop the show from their lineup, often leaving behind angry fans.

 

In the case of Teen Titans, a show based on five teenage superheroes who live in a T-shaped tower and fight crime as one team, the original target audience was the six-to-twelve age bracket, a section of the population that, at the time, Cartoon Network thought was being largely ignored because of the popularity of shows like Samurai Jack and Justice League which were geared more towards pre-teen and teenage boys. According to Executive Producer Sam Register, the goal with Teen Titans was to create “a good superhero show for kids,” and this idea is prevalent in every episode of the show. What sets it apart from many other shows at the time is that it ended up reaching a larger audience than what the network intended. That younger group of kids remained, but as the show progressed and gained attention, the general audience expanded into a much larger fan base—and one of its primary elements were teenage girls.

Disney Count Down #42: The Black Cauldron (1985)

 Ah, and here we are at The Black Cauldron.

I have mixed feelings about this movie, and I think the rest of the audiences in 1985 felt the same way. It’s considered Disney’s greatest failure, grossing only a measly $21 million dollars in North American theatres and costing the studio $25 million to make.

The history of what it was that happened to make this movie such a head case is long and convoluted. In 1983, Ron Miller, an employee of Disney’s film division and Walt Disney Productions president since 1980, was promoted to chief executive officer. He was the replacement for Card Walker who, during his reign, spent most of his time letting the film division of Disney fend for itself and focused his efforts on the new Disney World theme park that opened in 1971. While there wasn’t much indication that the company was having financial troubles, especially since Disney World was such a success, the general consensus of the outside world was that of a theme park first and the—mostly unsuccessful—creation of films second.

With the Star Wars franchise sucking box office dollars from most other films at the time, Disney realized that the new target demographic that needed to be reached was the teenage male crowd—the ones that were spending their money on things like Star Wars rather than cartoons and would rather attend their grandmother's Bingo night than be caught dead watching a Disney movie. With this in mind, the material presented in The Black Cauldron makes a lot of sense. There would be darker themes, more violence, no music, and the story headed by a teenage boy. At this time, new technology called APT replaced xerography that had been used since the late 50’s and allowed for a broader range of color manipulation and well as more lines and styles. It would also be shot using Cinerama, which hadn’t been used since Sleeping Beauty and has yet to appear since. In a word, this film was expensive.

When Ron Miller was eventually kicked out of his position (as it was clear that not many people seemed to like him), he was replaced by Michael Eisner who brought with him Jeffery Katzenberg. Katzenberg was put in charge of cleaning up the stagnant, festering puddle of mediocrity that had become the film division, weighed down by the costly movie they were supposed to be putting together. Katzenberg arrived to find The Black Cauldron in a complete and utter state of disaster. The film had been created by two separate divisions that didn’t have much contact with each other, resulting in a convoluted and nonsensical plot as well as left many famous animators—including Glen Keane, Tim Burton, Ron Clements, and John Musker—either running from the project or almost taken off because of the bickering. Katzenberg ordered that fully-animated scenes be cut from the movie, something that had never been done up until that point, after realizing that what he had was something unmarketable in its present state. Producer Joe Hale objected, so Katzenberg took the film into an edit bay and carved parts out of it himself. The rest of the development was hustled along to completion until its release in July of 1985.

While it would be easy to disregard this movie as something that was just a big flop on Disney’s part, it’s not a complete waste. The ideas and mythology behind the film are interesting, namely because they come from borrowed material. In this case, it’s Lloyd Alexander’s novels entitled The Chronicles of Pyrdain. The film pieces together the events of the first two books in the series about a young boy named Taran who is put in charge of watching over a pig named Hen Wen who has the ability to see the future when her snout is dipped into water. Through a series of events, Hen Wen is captured by the Horned King who wishes to use her seeing abilities to find the Black Cauldron, a magical device that will allow him to take over the world with an army of undead soldiers. Taran goes on an adventure to rescue her, meeting a combination of friends along the way.

The biggest problem that I have with this movie is the characters, which I think can be credited to the fact that the story itself is a bit of a mess. Despite the simplified explanation I gave above, everything that happens within the 80-minute run time is so poorly-paced and confusing that it’s impossible to even have time for proper characterization. Instead, we’re left with a bunch of questions. Taran desperately wants to be a great warrior, but doesn’t seem to have a motivation to do so. Were his parents killed in a village raid? Did his dad fight in the army? Were any members of his family involved in fighting in SOME WAY? We don’t know. The only thing we’re given is that he ended up with this old man and pig and now wants to be a hero. How are we supposed to root for him? There’s nothing there for us to grab onto.

Then you’ve got Princess Eilonwy, who, bless her heart, is so incredibly useless that you know the only reason she was in the movie in the first place was to cater to the female demographic. She spends the entirety of the film just looking pretty and being nice, never picking up a sword or a shield, or heck, even a rock to help Taran as he’s getting his butt kicked by the Horned King’s henchmen. The only time she does anything serviceable is when she patches up the Luter’s pants. Then, when Taran criticizes her for being a girl and not knowing anything about swords, she blows a tantrum and then proceeds to go cry under a tree. Not to mention the fact that she was also taken prisoner by the Horned King, and yet no one is looking for her. She’s a princess—wouldn’t it make sense for there to be an entire army hunting her down? The girl is gone for possibly weeks and yet makes no mention of home, her family, or the fact that somebody has got to give a damn that she’s missing.

The side characters, Luter and Gurgi. Gurgi looks like the bastard child of Einstein and Geppedo after being injected with dog DNA:

...and sounds like someone punched him in the throat, henceforth severing his vocal chords and producing a sound that makes me choke just listening to it. The Luter is also meant to be comic relief, but in a more subtle and sensible way. He isn’t nearly as rage-inducing as Gurgi, but he doesn’t do anything, either. There’s no real reason for him to be present. At all. He’s just another body Taran has to cart around with him.

And of course you have your villain, the Horned King, who is totally a rip off of Maleficent, except male and lacking skin. Even his minions look similar to hers, minus the whole pig thing:

But instead of an eerie, silent crow perched on his shoulder, we get an irritating, borderline psychotic side kick that is regularly strangled because apparently everything that goes wrong is always his fault.

Aside from the characters, the storyline itself is awkward and strangely paced, with much of the action just sort of launched at Taran and his gang without much warning. The ending is very Deus Ex Machina--forced and very weird, bringing back the revival of a character that probably would have been better off staying dead.

The animation as a whole looks fine, but there are moments where the colors are so saturated that it’s hard to not get lost in everything that’s on the screen. And speaking of animation, the influence of a particular man can be seen all over this film: Don Bluth. You might know him through his other more famous movies such as The Secret of Nimh, An American Tail, Thumbelina, and of course, The Land Before Time. He was also the front runner for the popular arcade game, Dragon’s Lair, which included various scenes of graphic deaths of the main character involving fire or acid or being eaten by something (and of which I have many fond memories of playing). But holy dear gracious, does The Black Cauldron feel like one of his movies. Bluth’s philosophy was that kids could handle anything as long as it had a happy ending, something that you can see played out in every single one of those movies I listed above. There’s a large element of darkness in everything he touches, which can be great if used with care. The problem with The Black Cauldron is that…well, the darkness isn’t. It’s dark without really needing to be, swallowing the flimsy characters and making the bleakness almost unbearable.

Perhaps that’s what ultimately ended up killing The Black Cauldron and forcing Disney to pretend that it never existed: It’s the most un-Disney film they could have possibly put out, and for many people, that just doesn’t cut it. I would argue that it’s a great movie to check out if you’re into animation (even though it’s dark and Don Bluth-y, the animation IS still beautiful) or in a particular brooding mood. If you’re looking for a happy, Disney-esque feel-good film, skip this one.

My Thoughts on Season Three of Korra

I’ve seen the trailer twice now, and I have to say that I like what I see.

Korra’s history has been…tumultuous. Season One was met with general positivity, with a few elements here and there that weren’t handled with the same kind of fineness that we saw in the predecessor (namely that horrible, forced romance subplot). Season Two divided a lot of fans in terms of liking and disliking what was presented. For now, I’ll say that most complaints towards what happened in Season Two are valid. There were a lot of slip-ups, character inconsistencies, and some-what lazy or disjointed writing. On the whole, however, Korra still remains strong enough to stand next to Avatar, and I’m glad to see the fan base is still on fire.

As for my own opinions regarding the series, I was (and still am) generally pleased with most of what Korra has given us. The Head Honchos' decision to run as far away from Avatar in terms of story lines, characters, and world-building is a bold choice that is, for the most part, rewarding. I won’t go so far as to say it’s perfect or even as good as Avatar, but it’s built itself up to be something great on its own, and that’s the best I could ask for in a spin-off series that is, for television, largely unprecedented.

Now, in regards to Season Three: Given the history surrounding the show, this season has a lot on its shoulders. Thousands of fans are crossing their fingers that this one will be the most solid of them all or that it will at least be good enough to bring some lost fans back. After watching the trailer, there are a few things I’ve concluded about this season:

1. Change is being taken seriously. There were apparently a lot of execs at Nick that wanted things to go back to the way they were at the end of Season Two, and because Mike and Bryan are now experts at bucking the system and convincing the network their way is better, that isn’t going to happen. We can see even from the montage of moments that this world is going to look very similar to what we know, but everything involved is going to be much different. In a good way. There’s obviously a lot going on in this new world that involves spirits and people, and it doesn’t appear that any one element is going to be the villain—or the good guys.

2. There’s going to be a crapton of action. Seriously, in the entire two minutes of the trailer, I think there were maybe a total of ten seconds that showed us something that wasn’t action. And that’s good—they’re bringing in more of the elemental fighting that (for me, at least) seemed lacking in the past two seasons. We get to see some more earth and airbending, as well as some other alternate-type benders. Apparently Combustion Man wasn’t the only of his kind.

3. THERE ARE AIRBENDERS. I’m not going to jump onto the Skeptic Bandwagon here, but I DO have some reservations about how they’re going to explain that. I don’t want a cheap plot thread that says “Oh, actually, we can just turn on airbending in people with this certain power.” I’m not sure how else they can suddenly have an army of airbenders when last we knew there were only Tenzin and his kids, but maybe they will impress me with some off-the-wall answer.

4. The animation/music is looking phenomenal. Watching this trailer in HD is amazing. The Korean studios are working their butts off and it’s obvious with the quality that is seen in this animation. It’s still undeniably Avatar, but it’s polished, sharp, and colorful. The backgrounds are highly detailed and beautiful, making this world look so fleshed out and epic. The music, as usual, is beyond remarkable, and given the way it’s presented in the trailer, looks to be as well-synched with the action as the last two seasons. We’re no longer in the pre-industrial cutesy Avatar music; these are fighting tracks. And that’s pretty awesome.

5. ZUKO IS IN IT. Fangirls everywhere are drooling over his little cameo in which we get to see him as an old man and a bad-ass firebender. I’m curious as to what role he’s going to play in this season. Hopefully they won’t treat him like an awkward throw-away character and play it as a cheap fan service. Uncle Iroh’s appearance last season had that reaction from some, and while I disagree with that, I DO think that Zuko has the potential to be that way. I have faith in the Korra team that he won’t, but I suppose we’ll find out.


Overall, I’m excited. I still have faith that this will be a solid, cohesive season. Now if we could just get a release date. That’d be great.

And here's the trailer for those who haven't seen it:

Disney Count Down #48-43: The Package Films

From 1942-1949, Disney released a series of films that are now widely considered "package films." They include:

Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad

Many of you at this point are probably thinking: "Wait, what are these? I've never heard of them. Those are Disney movies?" And I will say that I was in the exact same boat last year when I began to tackle this 50-something feature cannon.

There are reasons why this is this is the case. In the forties, as many people know, the country was involved in a little thing called World War II. In the year or so before the onset of the war, the government asked Disney animators to take a trip to Latin America with the intention of producing a film that could be shown in the United States, Central and South America. The project was a part of the Good Neighbor Policy, enacted by President F. Roosevelt as an attempt to keep peace between the US and the Latin American countries during the turbulence of WWI and WWII. The government gave loans to the Walt Disney company in order to complete the project, as Disney was struggling after the loss of their European markets to the war and a strike within the company that rose up just as the project began. While in various Latin American countries--including Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile-- the animators collected live-action footage of various parts of the continent, including cities with skyscrapers and modern residents. The result of this trip was Saludos Amigos, a combination of live-action and animation not dissimilar to Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The Three Caballeros followed in a similar vein, with animation integrated into film footage and intended as another friendly film towards Latin America. It included several different segments all stung together by the plot point of Donald opening birthday gifts. The film also stars José Carioca, the little green cigar-smoking parrot that represents Brazil who debuted in Saludos Amigos and Panchito Pistoles who represents Mexico. It's also probably the best of the package films, in terms of quality, storytelling, and animation. The Donald-opening-gifts backbone is one of the better ways developed to give the shorts coherency in these films and I like the onslaught of color from the three main bird characters and their backgrounds.

The rest of the package films have much less of a coherent theme backing them. With the US becoming involved in WWII, many of the Disney animators were drafted and those that weren't were recruited by the government to make propaganda and training films. As a result, most of what these remaining films include are not much more than segments that had been sitting around the studio. Make Mine Music and Melody Time included some left over pieces from Fantasia, while Fun and Fancy Free contains two segments that were intended to be made into full-length features on their own.

I'm not going to lie: These films hold my interest very little. I'm not a fan of Latin American culture (not that I don't like the people, but the culture itself doesn't engage me as much as some others), and most of the segments in the following films feel lazy and lackluster to me. It was hard to get through them, even though most of the films barely pass the 60-minute mark.

That's not to say there aren't gems to be found in these movies. In fact, many of the well-known shorts trace their origins back to these films, including the "Sleepy Hollow" adaptation, "Mickey and the Beanstalk," and "Peter and the Wolf." There's a really fabulous scene from The Three Caballeros that demonstrates some amazing animation as well as good humor:

It's difficult to judge these films considering their back-story and how many of them have one or two really great parts amongst segments of mediocrity. As I mentioned above, I found most of these hard to get through, (especially Fun and Fancy Free with it's ridiculous means of linking the two totally unrelated segments via a birthday party with some uncomfortable guests) even with moments of awesome animation and the appearance of Donald, Goofy, and Mickey. I don't believe most of these are strong enough to be full-length features, but that doesn't mean certain segments aren't worth seeing. If you're interested in Latin American culture, loved Fantasia, or just want to see every Disney Animated Feature, check them out.

Disney Count Down #49: Dinosaur (2000)

So here’s a name that most people won’t recognize: Secret Lab.

For the average movie-goer, it’s a pretty well-known fact that Disney owns various different studios, even if they aren’t aware of that fact directly: Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar are all studios that the company currently has jurisdiction over. But back in the late 90’s, there was another smaller studio that Disney created after merging Dream Quest Images (an American special effects company) and their animation’s computer graphics group called Secret Lab. Despite the enthusiasm that went along with the creation of this studio, Secret Lab was dismantled in 2002 and disappeared into the abyss of Disney’s history.

It’s this studio that happened to be responsible for creating #49 on this list—Dinosaur.

Dinosaur was to be an experiment of sorts with the new CGI technology that was developing. Disney played up the technological maturity of this film in their advertizing a lot, declaring that the over-$100 million visual effects “make the film an 'instant classic.’” And while I despise this mentality—the idea that a bad script and hackneyed story/characters doesn’t matter as long as you have awesome visuals—there is no denying that the combination of live-action cinematography and CGI dinosaurs wowed audiences and critics when the movie was released. Dinosaur was a mix between live-action footage and CGI characters, something that, up until that point in time, had never been tried on a large scale. And even today, most of the animation still holds up pretty well for something that was operating off of the baby forms of our current technology.

There was a ton of advertising that went into this movie, as Disney expected Dinosaur to be the biggest and greatest thing of 2000. The Countdown to Extinction attraction in Disney World’s Animal Kingdom was re-named and modified to cater to this film, referencing several characters and the storyline from the movie. They released the first several minutes of the film as its trailer (something they also did with The Lion King) which was received across the board with positivity and excitement from critics and fans.

Dinosaur was a big deal.

Originally, the dinosaurs were not intended to talk. The idea was to maintain as realistic a representation as possible (minus the fact that several of the dinos in this film wouldn’t have actually existed together in real life), but it was scrapped in order to make the film more marketable. A similar situation happened with The Land Before Time, a film that came out several years prior and did everything right that Dinosaur got wrong (which is a lot). The result is a strange mix between reality and cartoon that doesn’t bode well for the overall outcome of the movie.

The story goes like this: A young dinosaur named Aladar (D.B. Sweeney) is misplaced from his home while still in his egg and lands in the hands of a lemur family who raises him as their own. When a meteor shower strikes the island that they live on and throws the family into the midst of a herd on their way to their nesting grounds, Aladar makes friends with some of the older members of the group and learns that things are run by an angry, controlling dinosaur named Bruton (Peter Siragusa). Aladar runs into trouble with Bruton when he tries to get him to slow down so that the older dinosaurs can cross safely. When the herd is attacked by a vicious “carnitore,” and separates Aladar and his new friends/family from everyone else, it’s up to the young hero to get them to the nesting grounds on their own and save the herd as well.

When I re-watched this movie several months ago, my initial reaction was that the characters are good and that the story at least made sense. But now, I see that character and story are one of the intense pitfalls of Dinsoaur. It’s very—very—clear that the creative team behind this movie didn’t give a crap about making the story intriguing or the characters interesting. In fact, they have to be some of the worst things that Disney has ever spit out, and I’m including Aurora and the Prince from Cinderella in that mix. Aladar is the most clichéd hero that has ever been put to screen, and while he’s pleasant in the sense that there’s nothing you dislike about him, there’s nothing that captures your attention or imagination, either. The love interest is a generic, useless love interest and the villain is boring. The lemurs are a little more engaging, but the whole “love monkey” nonsense from the one lemur is enough to make me throw up my lunch. The story is predictable and because the characters don’t draw your attention, it makes the movie feel that much worse.

And to be honest, I’m really not that impressed with the dinosaur animation almost fifteen years later. The textures are great, but the way the characters move just looks awkward to me. I’m not that big of a dinosaur aficionado, and so watching a movie made up almost entirely of them is not an automatic win for me, but there’s something very theme park ride to me whenever they move. Maybe it’s the fact that they are working with gigantic animals that are not as familiar to us, but seeing what happened with the new Godzilla movie and how well that dinosaur was realized, it just falls flat in 2014. For all of that, though, the cinematography is fantastic. There are some really great aerial shots of dinosaurs flying across fields, bursting out of bushes, rock-a-lanches, and all kinds of other good stuff.

The film was, to its credit, successful at the box office. It opened at #1 and grossed approx. $350 million internationally, covering its production cost. Critics praised the visuals but condemned the lackluster story and characters. Nowadays, people seem to have a similar take on the film. While nothing about it sticks out as SUPER CRAZY TERRIBLE, there’s also nothing that is particularly spectacular. And that’s ultimately where Dinosaur falls flat: It’s just an hour and twenty minutes of mediocrity.

Fun Facts

The backgrounds in the movie are actually superimposed photos of exotic tropical locations such as Tahiti and Hawaii.

The job of composing the score was offered to Harry Gregson-Williams, but he turned it down Because of his work on Shrek.

One original concept for the dialogue in the film would have seen the characters not moving their lips and beaks to talk but rather as voice-overs, similar to Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey.

During production of the film's computer graphic effects, Baylene was referred to by the animators as "The Wall of Meat".

Among the sounds that Url the Ankylosaur makes at some points are chimpanzee vocalizations.