New Cartoons
It’s September, and that means new cartoons! I just watched the season premiere of Justice League, the series premiere of Teen Titans, and the series premiere of the new Spider-Man cartoon. Also, new Samurai Jack and Powerpuff Girls episodes are among us.
Justice League second season is supposed to be better than the first. The first one was not bad, they had a lot of good stories. The stuff that bugged me was the writers kept changing the heroes’ power limitations to suit the stories. That’s bad writing.
The new Teen Titans cartoon, based on the first and only episode I’ve seen, has potential. The style is kind of neat, though they are borrowing too much from anime for my tastes. The story was pretty basic, it was 20 minutes of fighting.
The new Spider-Man cartoon, which is computer animated right here in Vancouver by Mainframe (they brought us Reboot and Shadow Raiders) is going to take some getting used to. It’s one of those shows that are CGI but made to look like traditional flat animation. If you watch Futurama, you know what I mean – they computer animate a lot of the tech stuff like the Planet Express ship flying around. I don’t mind this kind of animation but I have the same problem with Spidey that I had with earlier episodes of Reboot – everything seems disconnected from everything else – there are no shadows. It’s hard to describe, it just looks kind of weird. Anyway, apart from the animation, the story really kind of…well, sucked. The series is supposed to take up from where the first movie left off, except Peter Parker and MJ are still kissing (despite the resolution that PP makes at the ending of the film) and everyone is in university. In this particular episode students are protesting the condemnation of an apartment building, and they are going way overboard. One tenant of this supposedly lower class area had built a super-rocket suit that makes him fly really fast and can levitate huge amounts of weight, goes on a crime spree and the protesters make him out to be a hero while at the same time sleighting Spidey. It’s dumb. I am optimistic that future episodes will be better though – I hope they do good things with some of my favourite Spidey villains like Mysterio, Sandman and The Scorpion. I wonder if they’ll include Dr. Octopus, seeing as he is in the upcoming movie sequel (and played by one of my favourite actors, Alfred Molina).