The Evil Tub of Goo
The man who started it all.
In the spring of 1940, an unidentified criminal fell into a tub of goo. From this tub of goo emerged The Joker, and the world has never been the same. Clayface, Mr. Freeze, Two-Face, Solomon Grundy, Parasite, all fell victim, in one way or another, to tubs of goo. Christ, the Creeper fell into the same tub of goo as the Joker! You would have thought that having one person turn into a raving psycho would be enough for that company to stop manufacturing that particular brand of goo, but that’s corporate America for you.
(In the film Batman and Robin, even Poison Ivy falls into a tub of goo, although her comic-book counterpart did not seem to need to take it that far.)
Where would we be without tubs of goo? How many of our psychotics, mutants and monsters owe their existence to tubs of goo?
And not just villains, good guys too. Flash fell into a tub of goo too, and was struck by lightning to seal the deal. Metamorpho, Plastic Man, Swamp Thing — all goo-produced phenomena.
Over in the Marvel universe, in addition to having their own swamp thing called Man-Thing (who fell into the same tub of goo as Solomon Grundy but with vastly different effect) they actually have a tub of goo from outer space, one that will actively seek out people and jump on them, turning super-heroes bad and bad guys evil.
(It should be noted that the Marvel Universe seems to be plagued with radiation instead of tubs of goo, perhaps as a symptom of coming of age after the H-bomb testing began.)
Where is the anti tub-of-goo legislation? Or just lids, what about lids? Just put some goddamn lids on the tubs of goo, would that be so hard? Bruce Wayne needn’t have changed his life and become a fearsome creature of the night, he could have just sprung for some lids and his city would have been perfectly safe.
Road Warriors: It Happened One Night vs. The Sure Thing
Fifty years apart, two American movies, two sterling examples of the screenwriter’s craft, two young couples who hate each other, forced together on an adventure across the heartland, on their way to separate destinies, finding each other.
It Happened One Night was directed by Frank Capra, who had directed 24 other movies before this one, all of which have been forgotten, but who would go on to become one of the most beloved and iconic of American directors of all time.
The Sure Thing was directed by Rob Reiner, who had starred on a situation comedy and directed one previous feature, the classic This is Spinal Tap.
WHO IS THE GUY? In Night, it’s Clark Gable, cocky, charming newspaper reporter. In Thing, it’s John Cusack, cocky, witty college student.
WHO IS THE GIRL? In Night, it’s Claudette Colbert, spoiled heiress on the run from her stifling dad. In Thing, it’s Daphne Zuniga, stiff upper-class college girl with her life all planned out.
WHY ARE THEY FORCED TOGETHER? Night: Claudette is taking the low road to New York to see her husband, and Clark just lost his job and, for some reason, is on the same bus. Thing: Daphne is traveling to LA for Christmas break to see her law-student boyfriend, John is traveling to LA to get hooked up with the “sure thing” of the title.
WHAT DOES SHE WANT? Claudette wants to be free of her father’s yoke, Daphne wants order, calm and certainty — a commitment.
WHAT DOES HE WANT? Clark wants a story so good that it’ll show those bastards back in New York, John wants sex without responsibility.
MODES OF TRANSPORTATION: Clark and Claudette travel by bus, car, and hitchhiking. So do John and Daphne, although not in that order.
NOVELTY SONGS? You bet. Clark and Claudette bond over a busload of passengers singing “The Man on the Flying Trapeze,” while, conversely, John and Daphne silently pout during a torrent of showtunes belted out by their cute-as-buttons carmates (including a young Tim Robbins).
CRUMMY MOTELS? Yes and yes. And arguments over sleeping arrangements, a big deal in 1934, much more ambiguous and amorphous in 1985.
DANGEROUS MEN? In Night, Claudette is menaced by two guys, “Mr. Shapely,” a snide, chatty salesman, and Alan Hale, a jolly traveler who turns out to be a thief. In Thing, Daphne is menaced by a guy in a cowboy hat and pickup truck. In both movies, the guy rescues the girl by pretending to be a dangerous killer, scaring the guy off. For bonus points, in Night Clark Gable goes so far as to beat up Alan Hale, tie him to a tree and steal his car in order to protect Claudette’s honor (or at least her belongings).
BONDING OVER UNUSUAL FOOD? Yes and yes. Claudette has never eaten raw carrots, which Clark swipes from a farmer’s field, while John educates Daphne about cheese-balls, pork rinds and shotgunned cans of beer.
THE ELEMENTS: Clark and Claudette have to spend the night in a hayfield. John and Daphne temporarily get stuck in a rainstorm.
PRETENSE FOR ACCOMODATIONS? In Night, they pretend to be married to get a motel room. In Thing they pretend to be pregnant to get a ride.
T-SHIRT OR NO T-SHIRT? In Night, Clark Gable took off his shirt, revealing that he had no t-shirt on underneath, and all across the US t-shirt sales plummeted. In Thing, John Cusack wears a succession of nutty 80s novelty t-shirts to emphasize his quirky individuality. No report on the effect this had on nutty 80s t-shirts.
COSMIC MOMENT OF BONDING: Clark talks about an island he once visited in the Pacific and how he wants to marry a woman who would run in the surf with him on a night when “you, the stars and the water all become one,” while John talks about a camping trip he went on when he was a kid, where he looked up at the stars and wondered if there was an alien kid on one of those stars, also on a camping trip, looking up and wondering his own self.
A MAN HAS DREAMS: Clark dreams of telling off his editor while John dreams about a young lady in a white bikini. Plus ca change.
WHAT’S THAT STORY AGAIN? Both plots hinge to a certain extent on a story that the guy writes. In Night, Clark is writing the story of how Claudette disobeyed her father and ran away to be with her husband (of whom her father does not approve), but when he falls in love with Claudette his story goes right out the window. John is failing English and when his “sure thing” plans don’t pan out as expected, the story he writes both saves his grade and brings him his true desire.
WHAT DO THEY GET? Clark discovers that he doesn’t want that story after all, he wants to marry this dizzy princess. Claudette discovers that she doesn’t want to disobey her father after all, she wants to marry this cocky, disrespectful bastard. John discovers that the sex he craves so badly is meaningless without a commitment. Daphne discovers that commitment is meaningless if there is no life within it.
HOW DID THEY DO? Night was an enormous hit that made Capra a major director and swept the Oscars in 1934. Thing was a respectable success that won nothing.
SO WHO WINS? I have the utmost respect and admiration for It Happened One Night, but my heart belongs to The Sure Thing.
It’s hard to remember now that The Sure Thing was, at the time of its release, marketed as just another raunchy teen comedy of the sort launched by Porky’s in 1982. The script raises it far above the level of those other movies and the acting is simply extraordinary. John Cusack, actually looking the 18 he’s playing, gives a lovely, confident, multi-layered performance full of wit, irony and genuine comedic skill. Years before he played the “Woody Allen character” in Bullets Over Broadway, he can already be seen here channeling the Woodman with his timing, self-effacement and offhand charm. And Daphne Zuniga is lovely, real and utterly heartbreaking in her part, especially in her Act III scenes with her law-student boyfriend, where we see how far she’s come on her cross-country trip with John.
The climactic scene, where English teacher Viveca Lindfors reads Cusack’s story aloud to the class, is one of the loveliest I’ve ever encountered in a mainstream American film and a peak I have tried many times to match in my career, with little success.
Green Eggs and Ham
The inciting incident.
The unnamed protagonist of Dr. Seuss’s illustrated story Green Eggs and Ham wants only to be left alone — to sit in his chair and read his newspaper. He is content, his world is whole and complete. He is comfortable and complacent in his McLuhanesque media circuit. The only thing missing from his life is a name — an identity.
In the past, people like this have brought religion, political change or military turmoil to others. Sam brings green eggs and ham.
(It is, perhaps, significant that the protagonist reads a newspaper — movable type being, after all, the most important, world-shaking innovation in the history of the human pageant.)
Sam has more than an identity — he has mobility and, as we shall see, boundless resources at his disposal. Maybe he’s a shaman, maybe he’s a leader, maybe he’s a snake-oil peddler. Maybe he’s the marketing executive in charge of the Green Eggs and Ham account and this is a viral campaign. We are never told, and we must sort out the dense symbolism ourselves. Is Sam a savior or a demon? Seuss provides no easy answers.
The protagonist knows one thing: he does not like green eggs and ham. This is the same sort of person who knows they do not like democracy, psychoanalysis, astronomy, penicillin, abolition or stem-cell research (or, if you like, political torture, monopoly, pantheism). And yet, Sam will not stop pestering him. If the unnamed (not to be confused with Beckett’s Unnamable) protagonist will not take Sam’s new food straight, perhaps, Sam reasons, he will take it in a more complex form. In short order, Sam offers the protagonist his life-changing meat and eggs in a house, with a mouse, in a box, with a fox, in a car, a train, a boat, with a goat, on and on. And still the man with no identity resists. He spends the entire story trying to avoid change, even as change surrounds and engulfs him. Eyes closed, head haught, he repeatedly waves away Sam and his unusual food. He doesn’t even seem to realize that his life is continuously in danger as he stands on the hood of a moving car, then atop a moving train as it hurtles through a tunnel.
What can change this man’s mind? Nothing less than a cataclysm — car, train, boat, mouse, goat — all must plunge into the ocean. Finally, with death at his chin, the unnamed man relinquishes hiscontrol over his world (it’s a shame George W. Bush was not reading this instead of My Pet Goat on 9/11).
(What drives Sam? A hatred of the status quo? A religious conviction? Do-goodism? Or a simple desire to impose his will upon others? What does it mean that he wants to get the protagonist’s head out of the newspaper, remove his thoughts from the machinations of the world at large, to concentrate on the fleeting, earthly pleasures of the gourmand? Is he Satan? Is he the serpent, offering the protagonist the eggs-and-ham of carnal knowledge? Do the ham and eggs symbolize the penis and testicles? Is this perhaps a homosexual overture?)
Finally the protagonist submits and eats the food. And finds he likes it.
Of course, the story does not end there. In a shocking denoument, the man, still unnamed, typically, goes overboard. He has no greater a sense of himself than he did at the beginning. The man who knew only that he did not like green eggs and ham now knows only that he does. And, just as he was adamant about not eating it before, he is now adamant about eating it now. He crows to the skies regarding his plans to eat green eggs and ham in every possible situation, whether it is called for or not. For example it is not necessary to eat green eggs and ham in a box — in one’s kitchen, in the morning, would seemingly do just fine. Why insist on eating green eggs and ham with a goat? (Seuss draws the line at animals who would probably be interested in eating green eggs and ham, but it’s not hard to imagine that, before long, the unnamed protagonist will be forcing this food on chickens and pigs, unaware of his callous disregard for life.) So while Sam is triumphant in his quest to spread the gospel of green eggs and ham, what Seuss is really getting at is the unchanging simple-mindedness of the masses. “Thank you, thank you, Sam-I-am” intones the protagonist with the attitude of an “amen,” utterly forgetting that, just one madcap romp earlier, he hated this tiny, furry man and his plate of food. The man with no identity still has no identity — he’s just as happy being a green-eggs-and-ham eater as he was being a non-green-eggs-and-ham-eater. This is the knot of the problem Seuss, the master moralist and social critic, presents to us: things may change, but the masses, on a deeper level, do not change. Today it will be green eggs and ham, tomorrow it will be television or hula hoops or iPods, whatever shiny new thing the persuasive new voice brings. The day after it will be Nazism.
UPDATE: It occurs to me that the name “Sam-I-Am” is almost a homonym for “I am that I am,” the name the Old Testament God gave to Moses. Perhaps Sam-I-Am is God and the “Green Eggs and Ham” represent the new covenant with mankind, a different kind of trinity. This would, perhaps, make the unnamed protagonist Saul who became Paul and the train track the Road to Damascus.
The Princess Bride
Young’ns will hardly believe it, but 20 years ago Rob Reiner was once one of the most interesting and vital directors of commercial cinema in the US.
Check out this string of hits: This is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men, each one unusual for its time, innovative in some unexpected way, smart, and unerringly commercial. Usually if a director has three hits in a row he would be considered a master; this run is impressive by any definition.
The Princess Bride sits smack in the middle of this run and simultaneously the most old-fashioned and post-modern of these movies. The script, by “Nobody Knows Anything” William Goldman, manages to be both a loving send-up of old-fashioned adventure tales and a straight-ahead telling of those conventions at the same time.
A grandfather reads to a sick boy a book his father once read to him. The book is called The Princess Bride and the boy isn’t sure if he’s interested — it sounds like it’s for girls. And in the audience we’re not sure if we want to hear the story either — it sounds quaint, old-fashioned and soft. And in 1987, in the time of The Terminator at the box office, it was hardly the kind of story designed to sell mass quantities of tickets.
The story gets started and, indeed, it seems like it’s a girl story, a gothic tale of princes and princesses, trusty stablehands, pirates, giants and so forth. There is an over-the-top “kidding” aspect to the story and performances (which are scary good, Robin Wright and Cary Elwes being particularly perfect playing the delicate balance of camp and straight). But then something happens. In spite of the kidding nature, in spite of how silly the story is, in spite of the plot machinations being laid bare and discussed, the narrative takes hold. What the writer and director do is tell you “I’m going to tell you a story, it’ll be great, here’s how it will work, this is what you’ll think of this guy, this is what you’ll think of that guy, here’s how you’ll feel by the end,” and the jaded, seen-it-all viewer lets one’s guard down because one thinks that one is, like the kid, above the material. Then, amazingly, it turns out one is not above the material, in fact one can barely keep track of the plot as it changes direction so quickly. And it’s all stuff you’ve seen before but somehow you’ve never seen it quite this way before and before long, like the kid in the movie, one finds oneself completely wrapped up in a story that simultaneously feels ridiculously absurd and vitally true.
It’s like a magician who comes out and says “I’m going to do a trick for you, but first I want to show you how the trick is built, and how it works, and how it fools the audience, and how it’s going to fool you too,” and then goes ahead and performs the trick and it does fool you, even though you know how it works.
It works because, as storytellers have known for millenia, there are a number of fundamental principles that apply to good stories no matter what the genre, the format or the age of the audience. Master those principles and you can tell a story and take it apart at the same time, you can even chide the audience for getting involved in the story, the audience will still feel the same thrills and emotions.
The characters in The Princess Bride know this, certainly, that’s why they all have stories at the ready with which to justify themselves and deceive others. Westley has a story to convince people he’s a fearsome pirate, Vizzini has a story he’s beentelling himself for years about how a brilliant arch-criminal he is, Fezzig had a story he used to get the job working for Vizzini, Inigo has a story he’s been telling himself for years about the death of his father. Story has a vital and central place in the lives of these adventure-tale characters, and the filmmakers show that it has a vital and central place in our own lives as well.
Try this exercise at home: read Robert McKee’s Story, then watch The Princess Bride. For the young storyteller, few experiences will be more eye-opening and rewarding.
Justice League of America
Martian Manhunter David Odgen Stiers fights middle-aged spread, while Green Lantern wonders if he can turn to confront Miguel Ferrer with a straight face.
Strangely enough, in 1997, while the world was waiting for Bruce Timm to create the show Justice League, CBS commissioned a pilot for a live-action Justice League of America. And as it happens, my local video store happened to have a copy of this little-seen pilot. As a “free rental,” no less. How could I resist?
A perfect example of how wrong a thing can go, Justice League of America shows what can happen when a decent idea falls into the hands of the uncaring. Now mind you, I never thought the original comic books (that is, in 1960) were any kind of ground-breaking miracle (they are mostly busy-work potboilers), but the makers of Justice League of America do not seem to have given a thought as to what their show is even about.
The lineup of this particular Justice League, for those interested, is Martian Manhunter, Atom, Flash, Green Lantern, Fire and Ice. The key thrust of the show seems to be “What if the Justice League were ordinary people, trying to lead their ordinary lives, trying to love and work and make friends, but then periodically having to dash off to save the world?”
Now, I’m all for superheroes behaving like human beings (that is, in fact, what makes the Bruce Timm show so successful), but there are limits. In Justice League of America, the superheroes aren’t just ordinary, they are desperately ordinary — sub-par slackers, halfway between The Incredibles and Mystery Men.
Take the Atom, for instance. In the comics, the Atom, Ray Palmer, is a brilliant physicist. That isn’t just a plot convenience, it’s the whole character. Ray Palmer must be a brilliant physicist because he invented the suit that enables him to get microscopic. In Justice League of America, Ray Palmer is a doughy, dull-witted, bespectacled high-school science teacher, unable to fix a television, much less rearrange the molecules of, say, an alien menace’s brainwaves.
Or the Flash. For the purposes of this show, it has been decided that Barry Allen can’t get his life together, attract women, or hold down a job. And so there is much “comedy” mined from Barry’s job misfortunes, lack of money and boredom. Why can’t he hold down a job? Well, because he moves too quickly, of course. Because apparently, in the world of this show, speed in one’s work is something that is frowned upon.
Or Green Lantern Guy Gardner (well, he’s called Guy Gardner, but he wears Kyle Rayner’s outfit, and of Lanterns, most closely resembles Rayner in temperament). The man who carries the most awesome weapon in the universe is a blithe, jokey ad executive, a man who has never given a moment’s thought to the responsibility he carries or the lineage he serves. I once wrote that Green Lantern is a job, but for Guy Gardner it appears to be more of a hobby.
Instead of watching Earth from their Watchtower up in space, this Justice League lives in a dumpy, retro apartment, where they bicker about chores and their love lives. That’s right, it’s Friends with superpowers. Far from protecting the world from intergalactic menace, it takes the whole team to protect one city from a terrorist with a plan that Dr. Evil would pass on as too absurd.
Now then: there is plenty in comics history to suggest that a group of superheroes with screwed-up personal lives could click — something 2000’s X-Men did beautifully — but what happens here is, disaster of disasters, the protagonists, dull as they are, become less interesting when they don their colorful outfits and fight crime. Their costumes are atrocious and laugh-inducing; they look like idiots dashing around their fake city in their bulky, ill-fitting suits and masks, rescuing tykes and dragging cats out from underneath porches. They have no ideas for fighting a menace or saving the city, they just kind of plod along, putting out fires while they wait for evidence to fall into their laps.
For those interested in viewing some representative clips, they may be found here.
The cast and crew of the pilot is a solid bunch of TV professionals, which makes it all the more perpexing that the show feels more like the production of some enthusiastic amateurs, not quite as polished as this.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Bald Chick reacts — or, more precisely, doesn’t react, to the Enterprise entering a field of Cheap Special Effects.
A film of staggering, almost monumental tedium, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is practically an oxymoron. Why title something The Motion Picture when motion is the thing most signally lacking?
In the future, everyone on Earth is required to wear a miniskirt. In space, everyone is required to wear pajamas.
In the future, everything takes a very long time. Especially in narrative terms. A gigantic space-thing is heading for Earth, and it takes the movie a full 40 minutes to get the goddamned spaceship launched.
(I have learned from Wikipedia that I am actually watching the new, improved “Director’s Cut” which reportedly flies like the wind. It is my sad duty to inform the public it does not.)
But, oh boy! Now that the ship is launched, I bet we’ll come in contact with the gigantic space-thing, right? Sadly, no. First, the ship must encounter a wormhole, a terrifying outer-space danger that bears a striking resemblance to cheap 1970s special effects.
In fact, I would say that fully half of Star Trek: The Motion Picture consists of the ship encountering cheap 1970s special effects. A typical sequence goes like this:
1. Someone looks at a screen.
2. On the screen is a cheap 1970s special effect.
3. Cut to: exterior of the ship, encountering the cheap 1970s special effect.
4. Cut to: group of people staring.
5. Cut to: another shot of the cheap 1970s special effect.
6. Cut to: someone else staring. Perhaps a jaw falls open.
7. The principles gather to discuss and theorize about the nature of the cheap 1970s special effect.
8. Repeat every ten minutes.
After taking 40 minutes to get started, the movie marks time for another twenty minutes, until we finally make contact with the gigantic space thing. Director Robert Wise brings to Star Trek: The Motion Picture the light, lyrical touch he brought to The Andromeda Strain and the stolid, grim determination he brought to The Sound of Music.
The theme of the movie is desire. Kirk desires command of the Enterprise, Spock desires to be free of emotion, Stephen Collins desires a bald chick. More to the point, everyone on the ship seems to want to have sex with everyone else. There are more meaningful glances, knowing smiles, wistful exchanges and heartfelt handshakes in any given hour of Star Trek: The Motion Picture than in the totality of The Way We Were.
So it is perhaps appropriate that the gigantic space thing has a gigantic space anus (or, as Spock calls it, “the orifice”) through which one must pass in order to gain the thing one desires. Spock, in a fit of passion, steals a spacesuit in order to pass through the space anus, and eventually Kirk pilots the whole spaceship through, sublimating, no doubt, his desire to pilot his spaceship through the anuses of his beloved crew members.
The gigantic space thing snatches a crew member off the ship, the Bald Chick. Why she is snatched is unexplained. Why she is returned, looking like the bald chick but transformed into a dull-witted robot, in a revealing mini-robe, is unexplained. Why the crew spend a good hunk of time trying to awaken her inner Bald-Chick-ness is unexplained.
Eventually, the plot conspires to have the Bald Chick express the desires of the gigantic space thing, which is to “touch the creator,” which in this case means covering Stephen Collins with sparkly blue lights and self-destructing. If this is how machines have sex, I don’t want to live in the future.
So the gigantic space thing disappears, taking the lives of Stephen Collins and Bald Chick, who get mentioned, and the lives of three ships of Klingons and a bunch of people on a space station, who don’t. Then Kirk, appropos of nothing, decides, on no authority whatsoever, to steal the spaceship and leave. In the future, apparently, there is less accountability necessary than today.
Things pick up in the final half-hour or so, as a handful of acceptable, middle-brow sci-fi “ideas” take hold and the tedium momentarily transforms into viewer interest. These ideas, I’m told, were adapted from earlier, cheaper episodes of the Star Trek TV show (which I have , regrettably, never watched) and would be later presented, in compact, exciting, character-driven, 22-minute form, as “The Return,” a tremendous episode of Justice League Unlimited.
Artist of the day: Carlo Barberi
As I’ve noted in the past, my son Sam’s favorite TV show is Justice League Unlimited. The problem is, there are only a couple dozen episodes of Justice League Unlimited, and there are 365 days in a year. This creates a gap for Sam of Justice League Unlimited stories.
This gap is filled, somewhat, by the existence of Justice League Unlimited comics, which keep coming out even though the TV show ended its run last year. These comics, more often than not, are what I read to Sam at bedtime.
I know relatively little about the superhero comics biz, but I’m guessing that the job of “imitating the character designs of a TV show for a superhero pamphlet” is not the prime job for most comics artists. And it often shows in the sloppiness, abrasiveness and lack of coherence in these titles, which may seem like simple product to many artists and readers, but which form a vital link to another world for people like my son.
An exception, I’ve found, is Carlo Barberi, an artist I’d never heard of before buying Justice League Unlimited for my son, but who has quickly become one of my favorites. Click for larger views.
There’s something about the “plastic” qualities of the characters that matches the subject matter well, invites the reader in. It’s light, brightly lit and colorful. The poses are dynamic without being emphatic. There’s something a little “freeze-dried” about the line that makes it fun and pliable. And I like his page layouts; they have a fluidity and spareness of design that makes the action clear and lucid. Look at all that blank space; and yet it doesn’t feel “blank,” it lets the reader follow the action swiftly and easily (believe me, I’ve gotten such headaches from trying to follow the action in some comic books myself, much less trying to explain what’s going on to my son).
I love this panel of Dr. Fate in his office, the camera angle, the big blank ceiling, the magical, mystical objects floating in air, the colors, and then the humor of it being sold with Dr. Fate’s petty concerns.
Even better is this page where Blue Beetle is left on monitor duty. Bored to tears, he tries paddle-ball, trying on the other hero’s outfits (note that he’s already tried on Wonder Woman’s clothes before moving on to the Flash’s), and, finally, the purest expression of superhero boredom, googling himself. Again, the elegance and cleanliness of the designs helps sell the action. This page made me laugh out loud, even if Sam didn’t quite get all the jokes.
Speaking of action, here are two terrific pages. I love how Parasite is flinging Wonder Woman clear off the page (Barberi will often have characters’ faces disappear off-panel to create tension) and how he’s tilted the camera to make the action more chaotic. Then, at the other end of the story, the dry, unemphatic line and empty space provides an ironic counterpoint to the cataclysmic action of Steel crushing Parasite with the Daily Planet globe.
Finally, he seems to be a master at these moment-to-moment kind of exchanges. Sometimes for comic effect, sometimes for silent, understated drama, all these exchanges leave it to the reader to fill in the blanks (no small feat in this often frantic, overstated genre, believe me). Best of all (and I realize these are script issues, not drafting issues), all these beats work for character reasons — these beats arise out of conflict between personalities, not machinations of plot.
Q: How do you get a 5-year-old boy interested in chess?
A:
Yes, it’s a Justice League chess set, and my son Sam has instantly learned chess.
I’m not the kind of dad who insists that his 5-year-old play chess, but Sam has been playing this Justice League video game, “Halls of Injustice,” in which his heroes move on a grid and make specific actions to defeat their opponents, and it’s about five time more complicated than chess, so I thought I’d give it a shot. No problem at all. He grasps the principles without a second thought. I doubt I have another Mac Pomeranc on my hands — although I would not complain if I did — but it’s a huge leap forward for the boy and, as usual, I have the Justice League to thank for it.
The players, for those curious, are:
White (let’s call them white, even though they’re silver) Superman is King, Wonder Woman is Queen, Flash is Bishop, Batman is (Dark) Knight, and Hawkgirl is Rook. Green Lantern is the Pawn.
Black (gold) are: Shade is King (What? No Lex Luthor? I guess he’s too much of a Superman villain), Star Sapphire is Queen (well, better than Cheetah, I guess) , Solomon Grundy is Bishop (Solomon Grundy? They let him run the diagonal length of the board? Solomon Grundy?) Ultra-Humanite is Knight, Copperhead is Rook (Copperhead, right — guy in a snake suit is going to go up against a flying alien with an indestructible weapon), and an alien robot called a Manhunter (Sam had to remind me which episode they appear in) is the Pawn.
All of this makes sense to me except Hawkgirl, who doesn’t seem to be very rook-like in her attitude. But it was either her or Martian Manhunter, and someone had to get the axe — might as well be the creepy green guy from another planet no one likes.
Martian Manhunter’s mother: “You can change your shape, J’onn, why don’t you change it to look more like that nice Superman boy? I’d bet you’d get your own chess piece then.”
J’onn J’onnz: “Moo-oommm…”
Captured on the sidelines, the Amazon queen steals some time with her Dark Knight. Batman, of course, plays it cool.
John Stewart: “Wait a minute, why is the black guy a pawn? What are you trying to teach kids?”
Superman, for some reason, looks a little put out at having been made King. Little pouty. Like maybe he said “Ooh! I’ll be King!” And then he found out that he can only move one space and everyone wants to kill him.
It’s a little weird to hear things like “Are you sure you want to move your Wonder Woman there? Because my Copperhead could capture her and that would put your Superman in Check. Why don’t you move your Batman there, ’cause that would block my Ultra-Humanite from capturing your Flash,” but one gets used to it quickly.