Classic and new Christmas specials and longer videos. See what I add all year and see if one of your favorites is on the list.
Some days you can’t avoid using the bad jokes.
If it I had caught a few more deadlines, this could have been comic #666, which would have been better for (two days after) Halloween.
Unfortunately, timing led to not being able to do a Clutter Report this week. Next week should be the book report on Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image because tomorrow will be the final two chapters. I can finally read something else! There’s also the final analysis of the first CBS Transformers pitch before we move on to the second one. The rest will depend on what comes up.
Have a great week, everyone!
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I know Halloween was yesterday, but this is when the schedule allows. Besides, when else will I get a chance to show you The Batman beyond the intros? Not that movie that rewrote the Riddler into a totally new character, the one that gave Riddler a weird makeover but still remembered the essence of the character.
We’re talking about the 2004 animated series that aired for five seasons on Kids WB. (Five, not four, HBO Max.) It’s often forgotten because it came so soon after Batman: The Animated Series and the other DCAU follow-ups. The Batman universe gets an action makeover but with all the changes is still truer to Gotham lore than My Adventures With Superman was with Metropolis. Do I like all the changes? No. However, Kevin Michael Richardson is a great Joker and Tom Kenney does a good turn as the Penguin, even if they did go back to the Burton style mutations. Our Batman is voiced by my favorite Spider-Man, Rino Romano, and he gives Batman something we haven’t seen since. Not just Mr. Freeze’s original backstory (though now he has freezing powers instead of a freeze gun), I mean that Batman is allowed to relax, smile, crack a joke now and then. He’s not the grimdark, moody, stare-into-the-abyss Batman we’ve gotten for so long, and yet his Batman is still serious and commands a fearful presence for the superstitious, cowardly lot.
The only story currently on YouTube that I can post to the site is The Batman Vs. Dracula, a 2005 direct-to-video movie (so taking place somewhere around the first two seasons of the show) that introduces a story idea we’ve seen in the comics, Batman versus vampires. This does include the “Bruce turns into a vampire” angle, but this Bruce will work to find a cure as Dracula takes on his own Renfield in the form of a Penguin. (Again, Tom Kenny is really good in this role.) The Joker is also bit. Somehow, this still all manages to be safe for kids, though younger kids might not be as comfortable with it as they would be the TV series. I would advise parents to watch this first regardless of what you think about the show, like with the DCAU movies Mask Of The Phantasm and Batman Beyond: Return Of The Joker. They really do take advantage of the reduced restrictions. In fact, the movie is age-restricted, which I wish I knew before using up my time, so you will have to go to YouTube to watch it. I’ll leave the embed here in case things change, but it does link to the actual video. Enjoy.
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Is it more important for a video game to have the most realistic graphics or the gameplay? While you want a game to look good, the designers of Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, Resident Evil, and other games make the case that the player experience is more important than looking like the real world. I have to agree. There’s a reason Full Motion Video (FMV) never really caught on with gamers.
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One of the things I’ve enjoyed about these pitch documents and writer’s guides is when they include potential stories. In the case of shows we actually got we get to see the early version of episodes we ended up with and which episode ideas were dropped altogether. So I’m glad that this first failed pitch for a Saturday Morning Transformers cartoon has some in there.
Remember, this was AFTER “More Than Meets The Eye”, the first miniseries that aired in syndication, was produced. In fact, the “Story Springboards” section makes note of it:
Note: TRANSFORMERS will be full half-hour episodes, each a complete story in itself. The series, unlike the specials, will not be serialized.
As it turns out, the series we got also wasn’t serialized. G.I. Joe had more serials before they started their series than The Transformers had, though there were a few two-parters and it ended on a miniseries, “The Rebirth”, which is kind of appropriate. Most Transformers series had ongoing plots within done-in-one episodes, which to me is the best way to go about it. I do enjoy a good serial, but it’s not always the best way to go about it.
There are only five sample stories, so they didn’t think out a full season. Thirteen was the average number of Saturday morning episodes, possibly due to the extra work that goes into making a cartoon so even the few live-action options for Saturday morning in the 1980s would be that length, while prime time adult shows got more. This also came about in syndication, at least for weekend shows. Weekday shows would have more episodes but it was still thirteen weeks worth of TV. Still, we have an idea of what the season could have started with while the other eight episodes were thought up and produced. It will still be interesting to see if anything was reworked for the syndicated series or if they would have been as interesting to kids as “Heavy Metal War”, to pull a random episode from memory. Let’s get on with it.
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“Do you mind? I’m trying to redecorate. This would look better near the rose garden.”
Speed Comics #3
Brookwood Publishing Company (December, 1939)
Somehow I missed this one when I was doing December, 1939 comics. I don’t think I really “missed” anything, mind you. My past self in the previous review said this was the last chance to stay in my review list. So if this impresses me, I’ll review the next issue next week. If not, we’ll leave this comic behind, though you can keep reading if you want to.
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Odd one to end on? We’re still taking Saturday morning Transformers, so thematically this worked better. Doing Halloween at all with the Daily Video was more about me having some breathing room. It’s not really my holiday since I’d rather see monsters defeated than win. Frankly I’m surprised I didn’t do more Godzilla. This is also a compilation of individual files on Mystery, Incorporated, which explains the odd editing between characters beyond the AI voice part.
Catch more from Multiversal Wisdom on YouTube
I’m going to assume the writer for this show either wanted to stay out of the Scrappy-Doo debate or actually is going to give him a video in the future. Otherwise, they did Scrappy dirty, and that’s a shame.
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For those of you not reading the Monday Malibu “Yesterday’s” Comic reviews, Malibu wanted their own shared superhero universe. They created the Ultraverse, a reality where people with superpowers, or “Ultras” exist. Some are created by technology, some by mad science, some by space science, and there’s some magic thrown in there for a bit of spice. Malibu’s Ultraverse titles didn’t get a lot of post-comic appearances. There was a live-action version of The Night Man by Glen A. Larson, a one-season Ultraforce cartoon as part of Saban’s weekend “Amazing Adventures” programming block, a direct to video movie I’ve looked at before, and a video game starring their Captain Marvel/Shazam stand-in, Prime!
Malibu Interactive only had 19 games to their name, and only one of them was featuring one of their Ultraverse characters. Oddly, the list includes Batman movie tie-in games, a Battletech game, and a Joe Montana Football game among others. Prime, released in 1994 for the Sega CD and published with Sony Imagesoft, was co-developed with Psygnosis Limited. In it, you play our overmuscled hero (he’s 13 and this was the 1990s) as he searches for his would be girlfriend, Kelly. The game was packaged with another game, Microcosm, and a pack-in minicomic that I don’t recommend trying to track down unless you know what sites to avoid. My usual site that I use for the Ultraverse comics (it’s out of print and I doubt Disney or anyone at current Marvel knows or remembers they have them after Marvel bought Malibu for their now out of date computer coloring process and slowly tossed the rest of it) doesn’t have it, one had so many pop-ups I have to pray I don’t have a virus, and the one I finally found had to shove it into a collection of other comics just to get access to it. Well, at least I can finally review it.
“That stop sign will ever hurt anyone again!”
Prime: Sega CD Edition
Malibu Comics/Ultraverse/Sony Imagesoft (1994)
“The Deadliest Game”
WRITERS: Len Strazewski & Gerald Jones
ARTISTS: Joe Staton & Steve Mitchell
COLORING: Moose Baumann & Violent Hues with Emily Yoder
LETTERER: Dave Lanphear
EDITOR: Hank Kanalz
It’s rare to see a full creator list like this on a minicomic. It pays when it’s owned by the same company.
BW Media Spotlight 