Only Legends could pull off, let alone even attempt, an episode about a tickle me Elmo becoming a Viking god.
It was sort of a hybrid of Tickle Me Elmo and Furby.
But yeah, this one went all-out on the comedy while not skimping on the emotion in the wake of Stein's death. It had a lot of fun bits, from the opening shopping-mall scene to the montage of the Legends working out the attack plan (nice fakeout there).
And they even managed to provide a plausible explanation for the ridiculous premise. Nate pointed out that trolls and gnomes and such were part of Viking lore to begin with -- and, more importantly, the episode showed that Freydis embraced Beebo as a god, not out of gullibility, but because it served her own political agenda to do so. I learned in my college history studies that that was often the way religious conversion actually worked -- it wasn't just ignorant, superstitious natives blindly embracing whatever evident miracle they were exposed to, it was smart, calculating indigenous operators exercising their own political/social agency and exploiting the foreign religion to advance their own agendas. This is one of the only episodes they've done that actually satisfied the history geek in me.
By the way, Beebo was voiced by
Ben Diskin, whose filmography to date has had much more Marvel voice work than DC -- including two different Venom hosts in two different animated Spider-Man continuities, Eddie Brock in
The Spectacular Spider-Man and Flash Thompson in the current
Marvel's Spider-Man. Hard to look at Beebo the same way when you know he's speaking in Venom's voice, isn't it?
