Wadpaw in Maakies!
In my ongoing attempts to dominate all media, I am proud to announce that I have succeeded in landing a gag in world-class cartoonist Tony Millionaire’s Maakies.
How, the reader may ask, does one accomplish this feat?
It probably helps if you know Tony, whom I met through a number of acquaintances, including
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
and Snake n Bacon creator Michael Kupperman (if you don’t know Snake n Bacon, you will — it, along with the Maakies-derived Drinky Crow Show, is set to become yet another [adult swim] show starring the voice of
).
I was nodding acquaintances foryears with Tony before I discovered his “for kids” comic book Sock Monkey. At the time I was riding high off my kids’ movie success Antz and all anyone in Hollywood wanted to know from me was what kind of kids’ movie I wanted to write next. If you’re unfamiliar with it, I advise you to get thee hence to your nearest Sock Monkey collection — the stories are sweet, tender, funny, weird, scary and painfully well-rendered. I immediately saw the commercial potential of a Sock Monkey movie, saw it as a kind of 19th-century Toy Story, contacted Tony and put together a full treatment. Tony and I and an enthusiastic young Canadian director toured all the studios and gave the pitch our best efforts, but Hollywood somehow did not “get” Sock Monkey and we all went our separate ways.
Since then, every now and then I will get an email from Tony saying something like “Quick! My strip is due in six hours and I need an idea!” Not a natural gag writer, I will respond to these emails with some meticulously worked-out concept that sounds great to me but is completely wrong for Maakies. The other day I woke up to find another one of these emails in the inbox and this time took a different tack: I simply thought of the most horrible, saddest, most pathetic examples of bodily harm that could befall a creature, and then tried to think of a gag to work around it. Prolapsed intestines, self-inflicted gunshot wounds, vehicular manslaughter, crablice — and the idea above.
DVD note
Renaissance, last fall’s completely-unseen tour-de-force animation triumph, was released today on DVD. I don’t know how it will look on your TV set, but it blew my mind in the theater.
(Here is what I had to say about it last fall.)
(And here is the official site, where you can see some of this imagery in action.
Attention people
Tony Millionaire is a friend of mine. A few years ago I tried very hard to get a movie made of his rather astounding Sock Monkey comic.
Now, in the world of showbiz coincidences that is Los Angeles, this fella Eric Kaplan, who just happens to have a child at the the exact same school as my own son (thus proving that Tony Millionaire controls the universe, to borrow the title of another Eric Kaplan show), has created (with Mr. Millionaire) The Drinky Crow Show, for everyone’s pals at [adult swim].
This show is destined to be a paradigm-shifting event especially if you make it so. It’s easy — you go to [adult swim]‘s website, watch the Drinky Crow Show pilot, take a moment to absorb the sheer strange, horrible beauty of it, then rate it on the little rating-button thing.
One thing I will guarantee: You have never seen anything like it.
Literary Oddities: Tumbleweed Trouble
As a Hollywood screenwriter, I am exposed to bad storytelling on a daily basis. One tributary of the river of bad storytelling is misguided adaptations of pop-culture icons. “What if Superman were a gypsy farmer?” “What if Mickey Mouse was a molecular physicist?” “What if you re-imagined the Green Lantern Corps as the team from Reservoir Dogs?” (Hey, that one’s not bad — hang on, I need to make a phone call.)
In the sweepstakes of inept pop-culture adaptations, I have, I believe, a winner. This is, I believe, as bad as it gets. This is not fanfic, this is not slash Smurfs, this is not Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. This is The Road Runner: Tumbleweed Trouble by Jack Woolgar (although apparently not this Jack Woolgar.) This is a real book, sanctioned (but apparently not read) by the creators (or at least the owners) of the Road Runner (that is, Warner Bros Inc.) and associated characters, published by a real publisher, Whitman Books (a complete list of other Whitman “Tell-A-Tale” books can be found here).
What makes this book so bad? How does it rise above (or, rather, sink below) the ranks of all other bad pop-culture crap?
Let’s take a look inside, shall we?
brace yourself
Happy Almost Valentine’s Day
For your romantic inspiration, some tender moments from Justice League.
This is, of course, the real reason why I watch the shows of the DC Animated Universe — it’s all the hot, hot man/woman, woman/alien, man/mythological figure, man/scientific experiment, man/winged alien, woman/alien, psychopath/psychopath, woman/scientific experiment, alien/robot, martian/martian, man/psychopath, mythological figure/martian, alien/winged alien, woman/mythological figure love going on.
As my son Sam (5) exclaimed after one episode of Justice League: “Everybody on this show is in love! I thought this show was supposed to be serious!”
Justice League vs. God
The Magazine Editor was visiting the other day and conversation turned, as it often does in my house, to the Justice League.
My son Sam (5) is, to say the least, obsessed with the Justice League, an obsession I’ve done little to discourage. He sleeps under a shelf full of Justice League dolls action figures (he has 80 or so, not including the inevitable copies, and also not including the various members of the Green Lantern corps, who, although appearing on Justice League, are not actually members of the Justice League), as well as banks, comic books, encyclopedias, posters, and a wall covered with his own drawings of various members.
TA. I don’t know — I think I might have gone too far with the whole Justice League thing.
TME. Could be worse. You could send him to Sunday school.
(laughter)
TA. I mean, I don’t mind, you know, the intensity of it — and it’s not violent like Batman is violent — but I just worry that he’s watching something that he isn’t really getting. I mean, there are all these moral and ethical concepts in the show that are just too sophisticated for him –
TME. That’s what I mean. It could be worse, you could be sending him to Sunday School.
So be it. Sam likes Justice League because it’s more interesting to him than Superfriends or Magic School Bus (both of which delight his four-year-old sister) and he’s too old for Maisy or Thomas the Tank Engine. Its moral lessons are couched in high drama, well-drawn characters (in every sense of the word) and fluid, exciting, colorful action, more so than any Sunday school class I remember (although the Bible is certainly not lacking in colorful, absorbing, morally complex action stories).
Sam confessed to me the other night:
SAM. Dad?
DAD. Yeah?
SAM. I believe in superheroes.
DAD. Sure.
SAM. No, I mean I really believe in them. I think they’re here, I think they’re hiding, so they can be there if we need them.
Well, okay, he’s five, so I’m not too concerned about him having actual paranoid delusions. If he believes there really is a Superman who is good and strong and (mostly) invulnerable, a vastly powerful being with an unerring sense of right and wrong (or at least a team who will correct him if he’s wrong), if he believes in a collection of smart, quick-witted, eloquent heroes who will help him out when he really needs it and never let him down, well, that’s the message of Justice League, but it’s also the message of Sunday school. And as far as I’m concerned, as far as belief systems go, I would rather have him believe in the brightly-colored pop-culture fantasy of Justice League than in the blood-encrusted gothic tales of organized religion any day.
Superfriends vs. Justice League
When a child first sees a cool new superhero, the first question is usually “What does he do?”
This is a fitting query regarding characters of action, but it is no way to structure a TV show. And yet, it is seemingly how the producers approached the structure of Superfriends. In contrast, the producers of Justice League took the “What does he do?” question for granted and instead asked the far more important question “Who is he?” The characters in Justice League are individuals with points of view, motivations and personalities, the characters in Superfriends are merely agglomerations of abilities.
The cape is not the man, and this, I opine, is the basis of why Justice League will be treasured for generations to come while Superfriends will always be regarded as a camp classic fit only for the simple.
In Superfriends, Batman has a computer and a cave full of gadgets, Wonder Woman has a magic rope and an invisible plane, Green Lantern has a magic ring, Flash is fast, Superman has his multitudinous powers, Aquaman talks to fish. Those are all fine attributes, but they do not, in and of themselves, constitute character. If all that mattered was the number of powers, Martian Manhunter would be a more popular superhero than Superman. What the producers of Superfriends chose to do is give all their heroes the exact same personality, whether they are the Last Son of Krypton, the Dark Knight, the Amazon Princess or The Guy Who Talks to Fish. The heroes of Superfriends are uniformly game, brave, chipper, chatty, easily startled and, paradoxically, unflappable. No sooner do they exclaim “Great Krypton/Hera/Gotham/Neptune!” than they pull some improbable solution out of the air and calmly implement it (as Seanbaby mentions, this solution often involves “spinning around” the bad guy/explosion/missile/lava/monster/lava-monster until the spinning affects it somehow). This conceptual blunder, not the dumb plots or the cheap animation, is why Superfriends is so reviled. Television can soar on dumb plots and cheap animation, it cannot survive without characters. This is why episodes of Superfriends feel so shallow, repetitive and lame; there are seven main characters and they all think and act exactly the same way. Think about it: Hanna-Barbera actually gave the members of the Justice League less personality than they gave to the members of the Mystery Gang.
Because their protagonists have no personalities (or, if you like, they all have roughly the same personalities as Batman and Robin do on the Adam West Batman show, the source of Superfriends‘ most likely inspiration) there is no dramatic tension in the scripts. That means that the writers must come up with ever-more-improbable, ever-more-lame, ever-more-fantastic, ever-more-bizarre plots of exhausting, spiraling action to put their heroes and their various abilities through their paces. These plots can be wonderful diversions, but they do not constitute drama.
The producers of Justice League, coming from the success of their Batman and Superman animated series’, understood from the beginning that it actually doesn’t matter what a superhero’s abilities are; what matters is who the superhero is.
Take Green Lantern. The beauty of Green Lantern is not that his ring can make anything happen, it’s that his ring can make anything happen within the bounds of his imagination and that that magic is limited to the force of his will-power. Green Lantern is not about a magic ring, it is about Imagination and Will. If the wearer is a dullard, he makes a very poor Green Lantern indeed, and his ring is useless if one can wear down his will. (The creator of Green Lantern borrowed the magic-ring idea from Arabian Nights; the first Green Lantern’s name was originally to be Alan Ladd, off of Aladdin.) Green Lantern’s appeal lies not in his ring, the ring is a tool, like a badge or a gun; Green Lantern’s appeal lies in the personality of the man/woman/space-creature wearing the ring. Like a western or police drama, it’s doesn’t matter that one carries a badge, what matters is who carries the badge. One can be a great policeman, a corrupt policeman, a shy policeman, an incompetent policeman, a sly policeman, a duplicitous policeman. The same principle applies to doctors, lawyers, detectives and space explorers, to name only the most prevalent of TV professions. And yet, in the minds of the producers of Superfriends, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Mike Hammer, Jim Rockford and Barnaby Jones are all the exact same person.
In Justice League, what was important to the producers about Wonder Woman is not that she’s super-strong or has a magic rope, but that she’s a princess who has led a coddled, innocent, priviledged life apart from man’s world. The strength and the rope are tools that happen to be sitting around, useful in fighting alien menaces, but the point is that her naive personality and optimistic attitude give rise to drama as she clashes not with bad guys but with Batman’s scowling cynicism or Hawkgirl’s brazen forthrightness (favorite Hawkgirl line: “Less talking, more hitting!”). The producers of Justice League didn’t get around to mentioning that WW’s lasso is a lie-detector until the third season, and even then it was total surprise to WW. What makes Flash work in Justice League is not that he’s fast but that he’s a careless goofball. What makes Batman work is not that he’s a brilliant detective but that he’s bitter, remote and scornful. And, as I’ve mentioned before, what makes Martian Manhunter a different character from Superman is not his powers but his soul. The characters in Justice League aren’t a bunch of superheroes, they are a bunch of people who happen to have super-powers. This seems like an obvious distinction to make, and has been in the comics since their inception, but it never occurred to the producers of Superfriends.
When any seven people are thrown into a high-stakes, high-pressure situation, drama inevitably occurs. While the plot contrivances of Justice League are more carefully, logically and elegantly presented than those of Superfriends, they are not more interesting or believable. A talking gorilla, an evil computer or an alien overlord are of the same narrative value whether they are designed by Alex Toth or Bruce Timm. What keeps Justice League alive is the drama that arises from the clash of personalities responding to the crisis.
Clayface vs. Grey Ghost
Clayface vs. Grey Ghost. Clayface is pictured on the right.
After many months of watching Justice League, Sam (5) abruptly asked to watch “some Batman” today. I got out our old DVD sets of Batman: The Animated Series and asked him which episode he’d like to see. Sam decided the way he usually does, by looking at the pictures on the DVD box, and chose “the one with Clayface.” That would be “Feat of Clay,” the two-part episode introducing the new villain.
I think what he was expecting after a not having seen the show since he was 3 years old was a plot where Clayface wants to do something bad and Batman has to stop him. Instead, this is what he got:
Lucius Fox, an employee of Wayne Enterprises, goes to meet Bruce Wayne in the middle of the night in an abandoned tramway station. Lucius, it seems, has some information on a crooked industrialist named Daggett that he’s turning over to Bruce so that Bruce can give it to the district attorney (which would be Harvey Dent, but that’s another story). Bruce Wayne, however, turns out not to be Bruce Wayne but rather an actor impersonating Bruce Wayne, on the behalf of some gangsters working for this Daggett fellow, who want Lucius dead. This actor turns out to be a Lon-Chaney-style “Man of 1000 Faces” named Matt Hagen. Hagen was in an accident years earlier and sold his soul to this Daggett creep in exchange for a miraculous makeup compound that gives Hagen the ability to fix his scarred face enough to keep working in movies. Trouble is, the makeup is addictive and makes your skin fall apart if you stop using it (a plot that WB would use again, to little effect, in their movie Catwoman, which might as well not have been based on a comic book at all for all it resembled the DC character). Meanwhile, Daggett has gotten tired of Hagen’s unpredictability and puts a hit on him. Daggett’s hit men could easily shoot Hagen, but they decide at the last minute to, instead, dump a beaker full of this magic makeup gunk on his face. The gunk soaks into his skin and affects him on a cellular level, turning Hagen into the hideous Clayface, a monster with the ability to mold his features into any form.
And that’s just Part One.
Setting aside thedarkness of tone and the ugly, brutal quality of the violence, Sam was utterly baffled as to what was going on. As well he might be. He kept turning to me and saying “What’s going on? Where’s Clayface?” (Clayface, indeed, does not even put in an appearance until well into Part Two.) Once Clayface appeared and Batman started pursuing him, he was still confused. “Wait, why is Batman after Clayface? What did Clayface do to Batman?” (Imagine: he’s five years old, yet he already grasps the notion of “probable cause.” A costumed vigilante can’t just pursue a shape-shifting monster merely on a hunch, there are rules!) I tried to explain as simply as I could what was going on, how Batman (that is, Bruce Wayne) isn’t after Clayface per se, he’s after whoever tried to kill Lucius Fox, and that leads him to Hagen (but not before a couple of dead-ends and having to spend the night in jail), and Hagen, after a great deal of angst, embraces his new-found powers as Clayface and uses them, not to commit crimes, but to get even with Daggett, the corrupt industrialist who made him this way. So Batman, by the end of the show, isn’t even fighting Clayface, but trying to help him reintegrate his fractured personality, an issue close to the heart of the 1992 Batman.
It’s impressive how much these early episodes of Batman TAS were real detective shows; there are gangsters and murderers and briefcases full of incriminating evidence and surprising amount of innuendo, references to things unsaid and shady, mysterious moral zones. Characters sometimes have complex, perverse or contridictory motives; you have to really pay attention to follow the plot, even as an adult. Also impressive, after watching so much Justice League, is how dark and painterly the animation is (that is to say, it looks like the Fleischer Superman shorts). Justice League looks like a kids’ show in comparison.
But the darkness and complexity of the plot was a little too much for my little guy to soak in and he needed a pallette-cleanser. He chose “Beware the Grey Ghost,” an episode where Batman teams up with the actor who used to play Bruce Wayne’s favorite costumed crime-fighter, the Grey Ghost, to solve a series of mysterious Grey-Ghost-inspired bombings taking place in Gotham.
This, especially after the scary, sophisticated Clayface two-parter, was right up Sam’s alley. Bruce Wayne watched superhero shows with his dad when he was a kid! Sam was right there. He completely understood who the Grey Ghost was and what he meant to Batman, and it was revealed that Batman has a secret cache of Grey Ghost toys and action figures, you could see the Batman universe snap into sharp focus for him. And when Batman teams up with his childhood hero in order to solve a crime, it was wish-fulfillment on a meta-level.
For Sam’s 45-year-old dad, there was great humor in the episode as well, since Adam West voiced the part of the Grey Ghost and the mad bomber turned out to be a demented toy-collecting manchild played, both in looks and voice, by series producer Bruce W. Timm.
For a bedtime story, it was the new issue of Justice League Unlimited, where B’wana Beast saves the day by punching a giant bee. That was one he could easily wrap his mind around.
For my readers who wonder if I’m ever going to write about a movie made for grownups again, go see the hugely entertaining, compulsively watchable Notes on a Scandal. It features a deft, accomplished script by Patrick Marber, a thunderous, tumultuous score by Philip Glass and a couple of stunning, detailed, utterly lived-in performances from Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.
The Joy of Lex
SAM (age 3): Who is that?
DAD: That’s Lex Luthor.
SAM: Is he the bad guy?
DAD: He is the bad guy.
SAM: Then why isn’t Superman fighting him?
Lex Luthor is the greatest, and most difficult to define, villain in the comics universe.
In 1940, when he was just Luthor, he was a mad scientist, much like many other mad scientists of the day. He created amazing machines and planned to use them to take over the world. There was a lot of that going around in the 1940s, when there were plenty of scientists, mad or not, and they very much did take over the world. People understandably were nervous about technology and its ability to shift the balance of power in the world.
The idea was, if Superman was Strong and Good, then his nemesis must be Smart and Evil. Lex created Superman robots, Superman clones, anti-Superman rays, all matter of ingenious devices for no other purpose but to destroy Superman. (In one of the many delicious plot twists of the the stunning Red Son, Superman comes to the realization that, if not for his existence, Luthor would have been able to use his vast intellect to solve every problem humanity faces — he would have been the greatest leader in human history.)
In the 1980s, John Byrne re-created Lex as a businessman, a tycoon, the head of Lexcorp. Again, it fit with the times — the villains of the 1980s were men like Gordon Gekko, bloodthirsty capitalists who cared nothing for people, lives or even businesses — they yearned only for money. Again, it’s a good foil for Superman because it’s natural strength vs. economic strength.
In the 2000s, Lex became President of the United States. One has to wonder what took him so long.
On Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League, they put all of these visions together to arrive at the fullest, most complex version of Luthor yet. This Luthor is hugely wealthy, employs millions of people, controls the economy of Metropolis, runs for president and, when the mood strikes him, finds time to tryto destroy Superman.
Maybe that’s what makes him interesting: he actually has other things to do besides destroy Superman.
The conversation quoted at the top of this entry occurred while Sam and I were watching one of the first episodes of Superman: TAS. They were taking great care to show who Lex is, how his business is constructed, how he’s an important and vital member of the community, not some penny-ante thug with a crazy plan — all of which completely baffled my (then) 3-year-old son. He couldn’t understand Lex, Lex’s legitimate business, he couldn’t understand that not even Superman can just fly into Luthor’s penthouse suite and punch the guy who employs more people than anyone in Metropolis and also controls municipal government. How do I explain to my son that you can’t punch someone merely because they’ve risked the lives of millions of people in their pursuit for power, that, in fact, in our country men are greatly rewarded for that kind of behavior?
(Note: I began this piece before I was aware of the president’s speech on Iraq tonight.)
When I was a kid I kept hearing about the Mafia and how there were these terrible criminals running organized crime in America, and everyone knew who they were but they were still running around free. I just kept wondering “If everyone knows who they are, why can’t the police just walk in and arrest them?” Like those Mafiosos, Lex is too smart to get caught in any of his nefarious schemes, and, more often than not, Lex’s schemes for power-grabs backfire on him in ways that have nothing to do with Superman’s interference. The Lex Luthor of Superman: TAS and Justice League is no two-dimensional bad-guy. The Joker is a psychopath in a garish costume, Sinestro is an evil guy with a magic ring, Mr. Freeze is a guy with a gun; you can see those guys coming a mile away. But Lex? If you foil a Lex Luthor scheme, chances are it’s because he wanted you to foil it because it somehow serves his greater plan. Only the Lex Luthor of Justice League could devise a presidential bid that’s actually a distraction to divert attention from his REAL plan.
As the earlier Luthors served their times, this Lex serves ours. A brilliant scientist, who is also the head of a multinational corporation and also president of the United States? The only thing that sounds out of place there is that we would have a brilliant man as president. Just as we once felt suspicious about science and capitalism, we now as a nation are starting to get the same sense of ill-ease about our corporate-owned political leaders. Despite their rhetoric, we get the feeling that maybe they don’t have the best interests of us, or the Earth, in mind when they make their decisions.
(The climax of Season 1 of Justice League Unlimited features a jaw-dropping team-up of Luthor and Brainiac that plays to both of their strengths — Brainiac wishes to destroy the universe (yes, the universe) and Lex seeks ultimate power — and in this case is offered the chance for godhood. The — ahem — “surprise reveal” of the team-up is one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen in children’s programming.)
For some reason, for the live-action movies, Superman, Superman II, Superman IV and Superman Returns, Warner Bros neglected every possible valid aspect of Lex Luthor. In these movies, Lex is not a scientist, a businessman or a politician. He’s a fop, an opportunist and a jerk. Far from being a genius, he’s not even bright. His plans are ridiculous, obtuse and fatally short-sighted. He is, in fact, the opposite of a genius — he is a man who keeps saying he is a genius. He’s a blowhard and a poser, vain and obvious, surrounding himself with morons and sycophants to make himself feel smarter. The Lex of the animated show doesn’t have a two-bit hussy and a slobbering idiot in a straw boater for a staff, he seeks out and hires the best and the brightest people in the world (a strategy that sometimes backfires for him when they get wise to his plans for universal domination). What does it say if I’m watching the $200-million-plus Superman Returns and I keep wishing I was watching a cartoon instead?
Christ, in Superman they wouldn’t even present him as bald! It seems obvious to me that the screenwriters of the first Superman movie never even bothered to read one of the comics they were supposedly adapting. I can just see the first meeting between Mario Puzo and Alexander Salkind:
M. So, Superman, blue suit, right?
A. Yes, and the red cape.
M. Super-strong or something, right?
A. Good-looking. The ladies like him.
M. Right. And who does he fight?
A. Um, let me — Ilya!
I. (from the other room) Yes?
A. Who does Superman fight?
I. Lex Luthor.
A. Lex Luthor.
M. (writing it down) L-e-x, L-u-t-h-e-r.
A. That should be an “o” in Luthor.
M. What?
A. Nothing.
M. So this Luthor guy, what’s he like?
A. He — Ilya?
I. WHAT!
A. Come in here so I don’t have to shout!
(Ilya comes in)
I. What.
A. Tell us what Luthor is like.
I. He’s a, a guy.
A. Yes?
I. And he hatches evil plots.
M. Mm. Yes?
(pause)
I. What.
M. That’s it?
I. And he’s bald.
(M winces)
M. That’s going to be a tough sell. They’re never going to get Hackman to shave his head. Does he have to be bald?