My news portion today is that WBD, the parent company behind niche streamer Boomerang, has decided to shutter the service and move its content to MAX. So, for people who were paying for both, congrats on saving money. And for people who didn’t have Boomerang, they had a lot of older cartoons on there, like Tom and Jerry, Scooby Doo, The Flintstones, and others. It’ll be great for nostalgic adults and little kids.
TV Shows Watched: A Good Girls Guide To Murder: S1E3 and S1E4 (Netflix) with audio description, The Goat: S1E? (Amazon) with audio description, and Manhattan: S1E6 (AMC Plus) No Audio Description, plus today’s feature.
Podcasts (All listened to using speed modification on Apple Podcasts)- The Ezra Klein Show (interview with the Governor of Minnesota), Consider This (about the video game strike from SAG voice talent and mo-cap performers), The Interview (Vince Vaughn), Hysteria (politics, guest host Katie Couric), and Matter Of Opinion (politics)
YouTube: Chris Stuckmann (Deadpool and Wolverine Spoiler Review) and Jeremy Jahns (Trap Movie Review)
Films I Watched: Rebel moon Part One: Directors Cut (Netflix) with audio description, The Fall Guy (Apple Store) with audio description, Summer Camp (Apple Store) no audio description.
Today’s Feature:
Batman: The Caped Crusader- S1E5 and S1E6 (Amazon)
Last year, I thought it was odd Amazon had Merry Little batman, which ended up being one of my favorite animated features last year. Now, JJ Abrams and Matt Reeves exert their creative juices into Batman, with an animated series. The story is the same, just the order of these characters is a little different. it isn’t necessarily any more violent than a few of the animated films they’ve made, like The Killing joke, so it feels still pretty PG-13 to me. I thought this would be a bold new version of Batman, but this is just content creation for bored nerds. Every episode puts Bruce against a new villain, who might have been previously established as a regular person in another episode, or not. Like, Harley Quinn appears as a legit psychologist before donning her usual villain garb. The characters are all pretty recognizable, even for a passing fan. Detective Montoya is given quite a bit of screentime, and would be considered obscure if you weren’t someone who watched the Birds of Prey movie. Same with Firebug, who I think was who Brendan Fraser was playing in the Batgirl movie we will never get to see. It’s not really a well designed Gotham, so what is the audio description supposed to do?
What I Look For In The Audio Description?: it is still a Batman series, and still deeply rooted in the comic book origins. Action sequences need some spark, and the villains costumes need to pop so we can have that connection we likely had to these characters in any previous iteration of them.Sadly, this is the weakest animated Batman show I’ve experienced, and with its unwillingness to truly push new ground, in either a lighter or darker tone, makes it hard for the audio description to creatively support the show. I’m not really sure whaat this is going for, other than almost a crime procedural effect, with a villain of the week, and a Batman that lacks depth. In many of the episodes, i found the villains to be more entertaining, so support them and their vibe and we’ll get the best effect. it’s barely a detective story, because the show can’t really be bothered to do that. Despite the influence of Matt Reeves, who really turned The Batman into an old school gumshoe style story, this is just a fired batarang that went off into the abyss.
What It Does: For the most part, yeah, it is trying to make something out of nothing. I thought the character description of Harley was well done, specifically referencing her makeup, as well as the Clayface episode, and how his mechanics work. There’s a few action sequences that work, where someone feels like they might be in danger, until you realize Batman isn’t going to be killed off in a series that is titled for him and has no viable replacement (no robin). Roundabout is responsible here, and I didn’t jump on the show right away, because it was such a confusing experience, but halfway through the first season, I think Roundabout was handed vanilla and described it as vanilla.
Final Thoughts: I’m sure Batman fans will watch, but notably, this isn’t making them happy. It has a pretty low score from Prime users on the app, and I can understand why. I’m normally a Bad Robot fan, and stand behind JJ Abrams, but with so many versions of Batman out there, I’ve never seen a version of him with less to say, or to offer fans. For all the crap Batman and Robin gets, at least the campy nature of that film makes it fun to sit through. This isn’t even that. They managed to make Batman boring.