Today is my parents’ anniversary, so there’s that going on. Pro tip if you get married: pick a day you know you can remember so that you never forget your anniversary.
Anyway I am a bit out of it because I had two short work weeks in a row. And that’s cool! But it means that work on Monday is going to be the biggest pain--I might get a burger for lunch that day to make myself feel better.
I considered doing a ‘Things I’m Glad I Did in 2020!’ Note, but I don’t know if anyone cares, and also I thought of that at the next to last minute (unlike this one, which I thought of at the last minute), and I would want to give that one a bit more time to think of what to put on the list.
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The 2003 Teen Titans Was Great
So I got a month long free trial of HBO Max on the Kindle Fire because of some promotion going on or another, and after watching Primal and a few other things I decided I’d watch a few episodes of Teen Titans. Do you remember that show? Started in 2003? It was very silly at times, but occasionally it was very serious, and had likable characters. A bunch of people mocked/criticized it for being a cartoon with heavy anime influences, which is downright hilarious to consider if you look at the state of 2D animation in the US right now.
It’s kind of annoying how popular this show got, though, because every other iteration of the team or these characters is stacked up against the show, even though the show isn’t a particularly faithful adaptation of the comics it’s named after. And it’s not meant to be! So when the first trailer for Titans dropped, so many people were laughing about how DC was stupid in trying to make Teen Titans dark, when in truth the original comics were very dark. That doesn’t negate all criticisms of Titans, of course, but let’s not forget that one of the key members was essentially Satan’s daughter!
I talked a bit more about that whole thing here, but basically: complaining that the comics or other adaptations aren’t like the show is like wondering why the character of Quartermain in King Solomon’s Mines the novel isn’t like Connery’s character in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie.
So I watched a season one episode, “Apprentice, Part 1” and something stuck out to me:
This twenty-two minute long episode has a whopping FIVE fight scenes in it. The episode opens with a dream in which Robin is fighting Slade. When the Titans track down what they think is Slade’s base, Robin fights a bunch of Sladebots. He gets dragged off by Cinderblock and fights him while the rest of the team chases and fights the bot driving the boat with the bomb. And when Robin tracks down Slade, they fight for the rest of the episode.
Look, I don’t think that any of the Netflix Defenders shows are this action-packed. And I get it, it’s aimed at a younger audience, they’ve got to have action to make sure to hold kids’ attention, but HOLY POPE that’s a lot of action. And the handful of episodes I watched this past week all consistently had a bunch of fight scenes. Not usually that many. Even a lot of the silly episodes had a lot of them. They tend to be well-animated, fun to watch, dramatic…
...we did not deserve this quality of action cartoon in our youth, but we got it anyway.
To be clear, this show was not that good at drama. Which it didn’t usually try to do either. But while there are character arcs and development, and it’s good, most of it isn’t that complex, and it’s not really handled in the silly episodes at all. The season-long story arcs were usually only four episodes or so: the one early on that established the story arc, one in the middle of the season to develop it a bit more and remind you it still existed, and the two part finale. They were good, but it wasn’t as if complex Plot was woven throughout a season.
The exception to this is the fifth season, which had huge chunks of the season with the Titans going around the world recruiting.
And continuity wasn’t a strong suite, though it wasn’t that bad either. A lot better than a lot of children’s cartoons of the time. It wasn’t the DC Animated Universe--very few shows can be, as Justice League: Unlimited had a Plot Point that was built off of something that happened in an episode of Superman: The Animated Series a decade previously. Main cast members in the Teen Titans would sometimes suffer trauma and then it’s only referenced once or twice afterward.
I’m also not sure how much time is meant to have passed over the course of the series? Aside from a couple of holidays, and a birthday or two, we don’t really see the passage of time. Which isn’t weird considering it’s an animated show for kids, but by the end of the show, it seems like it’s supposed to have been years that have passed, and it’s not as if anyone has visibly aged at all.
But you know what? This was the early 2000’s. Television in general was not as heavy on things like continuity or telling episodic stories. I think if we looked at a bunch of shows, both animated and otherwise, from the same time period, there wouldn’t be that much difference in the approach to episodic storytelling.
It was a different time, I guess. Teen Titans existed in this weird spot in the evolution of animation and comic book shows. It has heavy story arcs but also a bunch of humor and silly episodes. It was obviously influenced by anime at a time when that wasn’t really the norm in action cartoons. It wasn’t quite comfortable fully tackling serious issues like racism or puberty, but did make not-so-subtle references to them. It made allusions to the comics but it didn’t care that much about making a faithful adaptation because most of its audience hadn’t read them and barely any of us had realized that we could look up these characters on Wikipedia.
And it was great. Maybe it’s the nostalgia talking--I don’t know if someone who has never seen this show before would watch it and still have as much fun as I did rewatching it. But I’d like to think that it would still very much appeal to kids. Aside from meta stuff, I don’t think there’s anything in the show that aged badly.
It’s definitely worth revisiting, if you manage to find the series somewhere, or get a free trial for HBO Max like we did.
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