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New animated "Justice League" project from Timm and Burnett

"Assault on Arkham" had the beginnings of an overt sex scene.
"Flashpoint Paradox" has pretty gruesome violence - including the killing of children.

I've watched Justice League: Doom with my kids - Throne of Atlantis isn't that bad either. The rest of them since Superman: Unbound (which I didn't think was that great but is probably ok for kids) aren't really for children.

(JL: War isn't too bad that I remember)
 
Kor said:
^ It's probably somebody at their corporate HQ.

Every location I've ever been to has the exact same products stocked and categorized the same way in every department across the whole store.

Kor
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Yeah, generally speaking franchise shops like that to tend to have very precise guidline regarding branding and layout. Which is understandable in a general sort of way, but in this instance you'd think the rating certificate would override the medium.

Mind you, over here (in my personal experiance) movies like that tend to be kept over with the more mature anime titles. The Akira, Ghost in the Shell and Knights of Sidonia end of things. Which are themselves usually right in the sci-fi/Fantasy section. That seems to me to make a bit more sense.
 
Meanwhile, here's a preview clip from the new Batman Unlimited DTV movie that is aiming younger:

http://www.superherohype.com/news/3...om-batman-unlimited-animal-instincts-released

Despite being kid-oriented, it features a version of Cheetah who's apparently naked except for fur. She's also the only female character in the entire thing, apparently; the hero team is entirely male (Batman, Nightwing, Red Robin, Flash, Green Arrow). The toy companies remain stupidly convinced that kids won't buy action figures of female characters, so it's no gurlz allowed in the superhero clubhouse this time.

On the plus side, it has Will Friedle as Nightwing. He's moving up a generation in the Bat-apprentice business. For what it's worth, it also has the same Batman as Arkham Origins (Roger Craig Smith, who's also Captain America in the Disney XD Marvel universe), Alistair Duncan from The Batman reprising Alfred, Charlie Schlatter reprising the Flash from way back in Superman: The Animated Series, Yuri "Ben 10" Lowenthal as Red Robin, Phil LaMarr as Man-Bat, Keith Szarabaika as Silverback, and Richard Epcar (Ghost in the Shell's Batou) as Commissioner Gordon.
 
The first 5-minute episode of Justice League: Gods and Monsters Chronicles is now up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpu6yPAFHrs

I'm not impressed. Gratuitously violent, gratuitously sexualized, not much story or characterization, mediocre character designs, and animation that's no better than routine for direct-to-video. There's nothing impressive about this new version of Batman as a fighter or a detective or anything, not based on this episode; the only distinctive feature he has is the gimmick that
he's a vampire (and yet does have a reflection in a hall of mirrors -- talk about your missed opportunities).
 
well the last few DTV movies were overly violent so i'm not surprised Gods and Monsters continues that trend.
 
Second G&MC short, this one with the new Superman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYSxN4ezhO4

This one was somewhat better; at least there was one moment that I thought was inspired:

'Give me five minutes."

But the ending was all too predictable. The problem with all these "Let's be dark and cynical to show how clever we are" things is that it's so very easy to see the endings coming a mile away, because you know that the worst possible thing will inevitably happen. Not to mention that
Man of Steel already pretty much stole the thunder of this kind of ending.
 
Christopher said:
The first 5-minute episode of Justice League: Gods and Monsters Chronicles is now up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpu6yPAFHrs

I'm not impressed. Gratuitously violent, gratuitously sexualized, not much story or characterization, mediocre character designs, and animation that's no better than routine for direct-to-video.
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Yeah, that was terrible, especially that costume they put on Harley.

It almost makes one wish cartoons were just for kids again. It might force producers to at least stop turning their female characters into caricatured sex dolls.
 
I've liked a lot of what WB did with DC animated character films to DVD in the past like 'Justice League: New Frontier'; 'Green Lantern: First Flight'; and I very much enjoyed 'Justice League: Doom'...

But, after watching the two 5 minute clips linked in this thread, I'm left wondering why they bothered with this, or who in the WB direct to video chain of command thought this take was a good/marketable idea because while the premise sounds interesting, IMO the execution is terrible.
 
Christopher said:
Second G&MC short, this one with the new Superman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYSxN4ezhO4

This one was somewhat better; at least there was one moment that I thought was inspired:

'Give me five minutes."

But the ending was all too predictable. The problem with all these "Let's be dark and cynical to show how clever we are" things is that it's so very easy to see the endings coming a mile away, because you know that the worst possible thing will inevitably happen. Not to mention that
Man of Steel already pretty much stole the thunder of this kind of ending.
Click to expand...

Maybe I'm reading a little too much into it, but I rather thought the bit with Superman felt like it was supposed to be a twisted version of this scene from JLU.
 
And here's the Wonder Woman short, featuring a version of WW who seems to be basically a redheaded Big Barda in a far sillier costume:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOWLqnjFN64

The animation doesn't impress me much in this one, nor does the voice acting, with Tamara Taylor as "Wonder Woman" and Tahmoh Penikett as a far less reinterpreted Steve Trevor. (And Bruce Thomas, the Batman from the OnStar commercials and Birds of Prey's pilot, as the villain, Kobra.) The reinvention doesn't impress me either, because what's the point of reinventing Wonder Woman if you're just going to make her Big Barda instead? Or a cross between Barda and Thor, given that her sword behaves much like Mjolnir. Okay, Mr. Timm, you like Jack Kirby. We get it.

And this does nothing to ease my opinion of the sexism in WB Animation productions these days. That absurdly revealing costume is a constant distraction, not so much for being sexy as for being staggeringly impractical, and it makes it hard to take the character seriously. If she were wearing that to a dinner party or a Hollywood premiere, fine, but nobody would wear that into combat. And she's sexualized in story terms too, with an emphasis on the fact that she's sleeping with Steve Trevor. Nothing wrong with a character being sexually active, but when the female lead is singled out for that characterization -- and dressed in a costume even a stripper would find impractical -- it underlines the impression that these are being made exclusively with a male audience in mind.

And then there's the fact that the Giganta robot basically has nipples. Giant robot nipples. *sigh*
 
Christopher said:
And this does nothing to ease my opinion of the sexism in WB Animation productions these days. That absurdly revealing costume is a constant distraction, not so much for being sexy as for being staggeringly impractical, and it makes it hard to take the character seriously. If she were wearing that to a dinner party or a Hollywood premiere, fine, but nobody would wear that into combat. And she's sexualized in story terms too, with an emphasis on the fact that she's sleeping with Steve Trevor. Nothing wrong with a character being sexually active, but when the female lead is singled out for that characterization -- and dressed in a costume even a stripper would find impractical -- it underlines the impression that these are being made exclusively with a male audience in mind.
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On the other hand Steve Trevor pretty much starts the thing as the distressed damsel who this version of Wonder Woman has to save through out the short, Wonder Woman is pretty much is the most effective fighter in this thing, and Trevor pretty much needs her to bail him out after the giant robot shows up.
 
Ok I just watched these and whaaaaaa?!?

Are we actually supposed to care about what happens to these weird alternate versions of the classic characters? Who are wearing completely unrecognizable costumes and engaging in completely generic battles? And did they forget that most of the fun of JLU was getting to see the various DC characters teaming up and bantering with each other?

It's just mystifying why they went in this direction when they had an opportunity to do something really cool and fun with these shorts. And if the whole point was just to go "dark and edgy," then they should at least commit to the idea and give us more than some skimpier costumes and bloodless stabbings.
 
davejames said:
Are we actually supposed to care about what happens to these weird alternate versions of the classic characters? Who are wearing completely unrecognizable costumes and engaging in completely generic battles? And did they forget that most of the fun of JLU was getting to see the various DC characters teaming up and bantering with each other?
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For what it's worth, these are meant to be teasers for the upcoming DVD movie, giving us a taste of the characters before they team up there. But you're right -- just "It's different! It's adult (as a 14-year-old boy defines it)!" isn't enough to make these glimpses all that interesting. It's really kind of weird that they seem to be riding entirely on the "maturity" of the project, as if that alone were something new and daring, when they've been putting out PG-13 movies for eight years now.

I read an interview with Timm where he said part of his inspiration was the Silver Age reinvention of characters like the Flash, Green Lantern, and Hawkman -- taking the established superhero identities and building entirely new characters and concepts around them. But part of what made the Silver Age reinventions so effective is that they brought something fresh and new to the table, specifically a stronger science-fictional sensibility, and novel additions to the mythology like the Green Lantern Corps, Thanagar, and the like. But this is a different age, when so much more groundwork has been laid within the comics that it's harder to introduce something really new. And what we're seeing here is just a remixing of familiar ideas -- Superman as the son of Zod instead of Jor-El, Batman as Kirk Langstrom, Wonder Woman as one of the New Gods. It's just a set of slight tweaks rather than a truly fresh reinvention. The villain reinventions are a little more radical, but that hardly matters when they've all been killed off anyway. (And the reimagined Brainiac would only seem original if you haven't seen Akira. Or Looper, which was itself drawing hugely on Akira.)

Honestly, I think Timm and Burnett are pretty much coasting on their past glories by this point. They're not doing anything as groundbreaking or important as they were doing in the '90s or early '00s, but just trying to do the same sorts of things taken a little farther, which isn't enough to feel fresh. Maybe they need to do something really different to revitalize themselves. Maybe they should follow Paul Dini over to Marvel -- although the Marvel TV shows that Dini works on these days aren't very good either.
 
I agree that this is a 14-year-old boy's take on an "adult" cartoon. You can imagine the conversations behind the scenes:

"Let's go really dark!"

"Okay. Let's make the heroes kill people!"

"Great! Wait, what about Wonder Woman? Doesn't she already kill people?"

"Oh, yeah...Let's have her have sex with Steve around some dead bodies...That's dark, right...?"

"Works for me..."
 
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