My Thoughts on Young Justice Animated.
August 15, 2013 in ANIMATION, PODCASTS, SUPERHEROES
ANIMATION/SUPERHEROES – My Thoughts on Young Justice Animated.
Simpsons Quote:
“Oh, there’s no justice like angry-mob justice.” ~ Skinner
I like animated cartoons. I watch animated cartoons. I work in animated cartoons. But my favorite kind of cartoons are action-adventure. And today I’m going to be talking about the cartoon show Young Justice
You can watch the video below or you can read the transcription. Be sure to scroll down for links and other videos too:
Superhero Cartoons
I love action-adventure cartoons. They’re my favorite. I kind of wish every cartoon was an action-adventure cartoon, well, almost. I like comedy cartoons also. But today I’m going to be talking about Young Justice.
This cartoon oh, it’s so good. I love superheroes, okay? I’m a big superhero nerd. I love Superman. He’s my favorite. Second favorite is Spider-Man.
I’ve been watching these shows since the Bruce Timm era when he started his Batman cartoon and then went on to do Superman and then Batman Beyond and then Justice League and Justice League Unlimited. All those shows, love all those shows. They’re so good.
Well then there were Teen Titans. Then there was Legion of Super Heroes, which I made a video about and talked about. And I’m probably going to talk about those other shows later that I just mentioned.
Young Justice
Today I’m talking about this. This show came after The Batman. It came after The Brave and the Bold. It’s about the “sidekicks”.
So we’ve got characters like Speedy, which is Green Arrow’s sidekick. We’ve got Kid Flash, which is Flash’s sidekick. We’ve got Robin. We’ve got Superboy. We’ve got M’gann, who is the Martian girl. She’s Martian Manhunter’s niece. And we’ve got Aqualad. And it’s a very, it’s a different Aqualad.
So I mean, you’ve got all these characters and I forgot Green Arrow’s sidekick’s name. I just wasn’t familiar enough with her, but she’s totally awesome even though I don’t remember her name.
So they wanted to become part of the Justice League, but they were much too young. But they basically got together and said if you’re not going to make us part of the Justice League, we’re out.
We’re going to do our own thing, because we are grown up enough to deal with more responsibilities, which pushed the Justice League to give them rookie kind of assignments. They got their own headquarters and they’re sent on covert missions assigned to them by Batman.
The Appeal of Teen Heroes
It’s a great show because, I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s nostalgia, but I like kid heroes. I like teenage heroes. I like remembering how much I wanted to have superpowers as a teenager and do cool things.
So I guess it brings me back to that, not because I liked being a teenager. Not because I had a great teenage life, but that fantasy when I was a teenager was so cool that I like getting sent back to that fantasy by watching shows about young superheroes.
So they create this team called Young Justice. They are left in charge of doing secondary jobs that the Legion just can’t handle because they’re doing these other primary jobs. And they’re important jobs, they just can’t be handled directly by the main heroes.
Seasons One
So the first season is the whole getting to know you, introducing all the characters, introducing the bad guys, there’s relationships and all this angst, and it’s great. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a big soap opera like superhero cartoons are supposed to be, like teen books are supposed to be.
Teenagers getting together and butting heads and trying to find themselves and the whole bit. They just happen to have superpowers and have to deal with stuff that’s way more beyond regular teenage problems. So the first season is great. I really enjoyed the first season.
Season Two
Second season was incredible. It is so good. For some reason, they skip five years. A lot of the characters in this show are much, much olde. So Robin becomes Nightwing in this show.
And then we also introduce Batgirl and Wondergirl and the Blue Beetle.
And this is the new Robin, Tim Drake.
And relationships have been broken. It’s weird, because it starts off like, still like this and then it skips five years and suddenly like some characters are bad guys. Some characters are married.
Some characters are clones that weren’t clones before because, we’ve got Superboy over here, who is a clone of Superman. I’m not spoiling anything it’s still the same. It’s basically in the pilot episode of this season. It’s great. I love it. I love it. Cool, cool superhero stuff.
Superman, they do something with Superman in the first season of Young Justice that is really interesting, making him uncomfortable with Superboy. And it makes him very human and very, “why are you doing that, Superman?”
Can’t you see that he needs a dad, but you’re not his dad? It’s just like it’s crazy and I like it. It’s great.
So check out the show if you haven’t seen it.
The DVDs
The Young Justice DVDs; these are actually annoyingly they’ve split the seasons in half and sell them in two part. It just drives me crazy. Just give me the whole thing.
I don’t understand why they do that. They’re just gouging, but I guess I’m a sucker because I bought them.
So I highly recommend this show, a lot of fun.
Have You Seen This Show?
If you have seen this show, let me know what do you think of Young Justice? Do you like it? Do you think it’s not all that good? Do you think I’m full of crap?
Let me know.
Go to Amazon. You can pick it up there, too. If you like it enough, please by the print copy and help support me.
PODCAST – The Corner Booth Podcast Episodes 4 and 5
As I mentioned WAY back in May, I was working on putting The Corner Booth podcast on iTunes. Well, it’s up there now. There are currently five episodes of the podcast on iTunes and a new one will be there in two weeks.
In Episode 4: Chance Raspberry and I talk about what it’s like to work on The Simpsons.
In Episode 5: Larry Whitaker and I have a great conversation with Cynthia Petrovic about her work on Tiny Toons, what she worked on at Disney, her company Red Tango, and many other things. Go check it out. It’s a fun conversation.
If you like the show Subscribe to it on iTunes.
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Young Justice was really good; I’m sad it’s over. The five year jump was disorienting at first but got better as time went on. I’m still not sure if I liked that device, though. There are definitely more stories to tell and it’s a pity we won’t see them animated.
I was thrown for a loop when they skipped five years but after a few shows I thought it was brilliant and became one of my favorite things about it. Plus we got a lot more heroes in the show without any of the long set up time. That said, there were some very underdeveloped characters because of it, like Wonder Girl and Batgirl. Still, I really wish they would have continued. The last scene of the last episode really seemed promising. It’s ranked very high with me, along with Legend of Kora.
I was actually pretty disappointed in the show, it had good ideas but they weren’t especially well developped and as such it felt very superficial in a lot of ways (relationships, plot points, character developpment). For example the addition of so many more characters in season 2 ended up making most of them seem one dimensional (Tim Drake for example seems more like a Nerdy rip off of Dick Grayson than his own character, maybe it’s because they intended to develop him in S3 but since there wasn’t it feels a little useless).
Also as a comics reader the use of Young Justice instead of Teen Titans as a title ended up being a put off by the end of season 2. See Teen Titans’s the title for sidekicks trying to find their place outside of their mentors, Young Justice’s the title for fun adventures that teens with powers (+ Robin) but without any actual attachment to other heroes and as such have no real other place to go to.
Truthfully this was very well represented by Superboy. Now the fact that he wasn’t with Tim and Bart in the first season sort of bothered me, just like his personality change but it wasn’t a put off more like an ‘okay this is weird but let’s see where they go with this’. However put off n°1 : his first intimate relationship in the team is a romantic one. n°2: he never really gets any other deep relationships. n°3: most of his issues, though adressed, are never actually delt with (I don’t mean that in a ‘resolved’ way) making it actually lacking depth.
One of the interest of the Kon/Tim(+Bart) friendship is that they forced each other to face and deal with their problems while alternatively offering a safe space from them. Basically I would have been okay with their lack of interations (OK I’d still have been annoyed because they have one of my favorite friendship ever but I could have delt with the lack of it) if it hadn’t taken away their development.
I mean it’s not a bad show but sometimes it felt more like Let’s do something Dark and Mature but not really explore it and leave it at that. Which is pretty much the opposite of Avatar where the themed were classic cartoon themed treated in depth but still in a lightly way making it watchable at different ages.