SPIDER-MAN AND HIS AMAZING FRIENDS (1981-83)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

To repeat my basic sentiments from this review, almost everything that didn't work about the 1981 SPIDER-MAN does work in SPIDER-MAN AND HIS AMAZING FRIENDS. Well, with one exception: '81 SPIDER-MAN doesn't needlessly inject any animals into the stories for comedy relief. Still, the yip-yapping of the Lhasa Apso known as "Ms. Lion" is still not as bad as either of the insufferable funny-animals from Hanna-Barbera's SUPER FRIENDS, on which "SPIDER-FRIENDS" was conspicuously patterned.

Indeed, one might argue that SUPER FRIENDS dumbed down much of the appeal of the DC Universe, while SPIDER-FRIENDS was pretty close to the feel of the Marvel Universe, but with all the continuing soap opera elements left out. Since the web-spinner had no team affiliations at the time AMAZING was produced, the creators apparently played off the way Spidey had often teamed up with The Human Torch of FANTASTIC FOUR, and then decided to give Cartoon Spidey a complementary ice-ally, Iceman of X-MEN. But because Marvel Comics had already leased Torch-adaptation rights to another company, the AMAZING show-runners simply made up a new fire-hero, name of Firestar. Not only did her status as a mutant jibe well with Iceman's heritage, it played up the X-MEN connection, though it would take years for animation to tap the appeal of Marvel's merry mutations. 

The injection of a female hero also had other pleasant effects. Not only did Firestar's presence keep the Spider-Friends from being a sausage-fest, her femininity added spice to the banter between the trio-- which was nearly the only characterization they got, since the stand-alone stories mitigated against ongoing plotlines. Aunt May hovered around, sometimes almost stumbling across the secret shared by Peter Parker and his two fellow collegians, but frankly, Aunt May wasn't much more of a significant presence than Ms. Lion.

I remember being very bullish, to anyone who would listen, as to how good SPIDER-FRIENDS was at getting across the appeal of the hyper-complicated Marvel Universe. One such appeal was that of having other Marvel heroes appear only in their civilian identities, as happened with both Tony Stark and Matt Murdock, thus lending a touch of verisimilitude at times. Of course, there were also standard teamups between the Spider-Friends and such big names as Captain America, the X-Men, and Thor. (In the latter episode, the Friends even visit Asgard, and Iceman almost gets "adopted" by a female Frost Giant.) Consequently the Spider-Friends also go up against the familiar enemies of the guest-heroes, such as the Red Skull, the Juggernaut, and Loki. 

Yet it's interesting that the writers also slotted in a number of, shall we say, unusual selections. In the episode "Seven Little Superheroes," the villainous Chameleon chimerically chooses to play "And Then There Were None" with the three Spider-Friends, and with four other Marvel characters who had no strong connections with one another: Captain America, Doctor Strange, the Sub-Mariner, and-- Shanna the She-Devil? Maybe someone at Marvel Productions wanted to remind people that they'd had their own jungle queen over five years before Hanna-Barbera came out with their 1978 creation, Jana of the Jungle? Almost as odd was having the Spider-Friends go Gothic, when Dracula vampirized Firestar. This forced the other two heroes to journey to Transylvania, where they contended against the vampire-lord, a werewolf, and a Frankenstein Monster.

There were of course some flop episodes, and just as had been the case with '81 SPIDER-MAN, the worst featured Doctor Doom, a character the writers just couldn't get right. Still, on the whole, the action looked good for the limited budget, and the patter between the trio was well done. In fact, some episodes also featured narration by Stan Lee himself, with all his customary gift for hyperbole. The theme song was only slightly better than that of '81 SPIDER-MAN, albeit with better visuals. I won't pretend that SPIDER-FRIENDS was anything but pleasant lightweight entertainment. But it certainly excelled a lot of other Marvel shows in that respect.

HERCULES AND THE AMAZON WOMEN (1994)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

Whatever its demerits, the first of the "pilots" for the syndicated series HERCULES THE LEGENDARY JOURNEYS is one of  the best of the five TV-movies. The choice was propitious, since in many ways the TV producers rewrote the history of Greece's brawling hero-- who, among other things, tended to butt heads with powerful women-- into something of a 1990s "sensitive man." 

I've not been able to find a "myth of origins" for the ancient Amazons; it sounds as if they were just always there, their myth perhaps inspired by stories of matrilineal tribes. AMAZON is indebted to a particular ancient tale in which the all-female tribe acquired progeny from mating with a neighboring all-male tribe, the Gargareans. The script also takes some inspiration from the Ninth Labor of Hercules, in that the Greek hero is forced to fight the warriors of Queen Hippolyte due to Hercules' mean stepmother Hera fomenting strife between the two parties.

At the onset of AMAZON, Hercules (Kevin Sorbo) has already become renowned as a powerful hero who defends weak mortals against the injustices of the gods and of tyrannical mortals. Hercules visits the village where his mortal mother Alcmene (Jennifer Ludlam) lives, and is surprised to find his father Zeus (Anthony Quinn) hanging around. Oddly the young hero doesn't seem nearly as resentful of his "divine deadbeat dad" as he is in the series proper, though he does urge his mother not to let her former lover move in. 

The hero's main reason to return is that his boyhood friend and fellow warrior Iolaus (Michael Hurst) is getting married, and Hercules is supposed to be his best man. Hercules regrets that the marriage will impinge upon his friendship with Iolaus, so he passes a few remarks about women. The two get a chance to fight together when Hera sends one of her many minions to kill Hercules.

Then a tribesman from the Gargarean tribe shows up in the village, talking about evil beasts who prey upon his people. The demigod agrees to go help the Gargareans, and Iolaus, also missing how he and Hercules used to bond in battle, talks his way into the fracas.

The heroes find themselves fighting not beasts but armed Amazons, and one of them kills Iolaus. Hercules is taken captive and meets the Amazon queen Hippolyta (Roma "Touched by an Angel" Downey). Hippolyta has a laundry list of grievances against men, and though Hercules grieves for his slain friend, he can't help being drawn to the comely queen and conceding that women sometimes get the short end of the stick. However, the Amazons worship Hera, though the queen of the gods doesn't seem to have taken any action to bring Hercules into her domain.

The hero escapes the Amazons and seeks out the Gargareans, who relate their true relationship as "breeding stock" to the Amazons, raising all the male offspring in their village while all the female children are raised as Amazons. The script skims past the implication that the female warriors, having been made as strong as men by Hera, foster their progeny by essentially raping the men. Hercules' solution is a model of 1990s sensitivity: the men conquer the women's hearts by acting more "feminine" and listening to the Amazons' "problems."

Though Hercules and Hippolyta "bury the hatchet" (so to speak), Hera possesses the queen's body and initiates a big fight with the hero. Hippolyta perishes, but Hercules invokes Zeus to provide him with a "Superman turns back time" moment, so all the previous events are undone. Not only do both Iolaus and Hippolyta survive, Hercules is able to pass along his dating advice to the Gargareans, so that there's no need for him to venture into Hera's terrain again and bring about the queen's death. A couple of pilots later, the producers would come up with an even better way to reposition everyone's favorite Hellenic masculinist into a lovelorn crusader who was always polite to the ladies.

INTERZONE (1987)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

There's so little dialogue in the first hour of INTERZONE that next to this post-apoc serving, MAD MAX comes off like a Woody Allen talkfest. Did director Deran Serafian lose his sound equipment during part of the shoot?

Regardless, the basic conflict has practically been xeroxed from Apocalypse Moviemaking 101. Once again there's one society of vicious savages (though for once they're all on foot, with no exotic vehicles) and another society of peaceniks (though for once the society's leaders can defend themselves fairly well). This is shown in an early scene when the raiders of muscle-bound leader Mantis (Teagan Clive) attack the peaceniks with heavy gunfire, and the peaceniks just sneer at the bad guys from behind a psychic shield.

Nevertheless, the peaceniks need the help of a macho dude, one Swan (Bruce Abbott), to help them acquire a legendary treasure in the forbidden terrain of the Interzone. The raiders want it too, because they think the treasure is some great weapon from the era before nuclear destruction. I'm going to flagrantly spoil what is one of the worst "reveals" in the history of movies, because the "treasure" is a recording that-- tells the characters how the war happened. In other words, the "big reveal" is the sort of thing almost every post-apoc flick reveals to the viewers in an opening monologue.

Bruce Abbott brings a breezy charm to his tough-guy role despite the fact that Swan is a nothing character, much like his bland love interest, a slave girl employed by the peaceniks, but who barely has anything to do. Only Teagan Clive's scenes provide some spark, as Mantis first seduces Swan and then forces him to fight an underground monster. The climax includes a hand-to-hand fight between Swan and Mantis, and Swan gets the worst of it until the villainess, after nearly knocking Swan's block off, obligingly walks away from the fight to do something else, allowing the hero to blow her away. I must admit that this one scene makes INTERZONE a bit more memorable than a lot of humdrum apoca-flicks, but not until 1990 would director Serafian produce a decent action-movie in the Van Damme vehicle DEATH WARRANT. Amusingly, INTERZONE's other two writers were the terminally awful team of Claudio Fragasso and Rosella Drudi, who would also have one great cinematic moment scripting the "so bad it's awesome" TROLL 2, also in 1990.

THE WARRIORS (1979)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Ever since my essay here hypothesized the influence of Walter Hill's THE WARRIORS on some key examples of Italian cinema, I've been meaning to check out the movie and see if, as I suspected, it conformed to my ideas about uncanny phenomenality. Going by memory I'd tentatively given it that categorization if for no other reason than the protagonists' encounter with the gang called the "Baseball Furies," one of which is in the still above. 

I'm sure I'll never read the 1965 Sol Yurick novel from which the movie took some of its elements, but from two summaries I've read online, it seems to have been entirely naturalistic. The novel focuses on the struggle of an inner-city New York gang to avoid other gangs on their way back to their Coney Island turf, but the gangs they encounter aren't as self-consciously weird as the ones in the film, which director Walter Hill co-scripted with David Schaber.

As in the novel, the film begins with a summit between the various New York gangs, but Hill gives the meeting an apocalyptic vibe, Cyrus, charismatic leader of a gang called the Gramercy Riffs, tells the assembled youths-- most of whom are male-- that if they unite they can rule the city, rather than wasting their lives protecting little areas of "turf." But sooner does Cyrus announce his messianic mission than he's assassinated. The audience sees that the killing is the act of a demented gang-member named Luther, but no one else does, so that Luther easily frames the Warriors for the deed. In the fracas that breaks out, the Warriors' leader Cleon is beaten down. The rest of the gang escapes the meeting-place, and the gang's second-in-command, a youth named Swan, takes command.

Once Hill has established the movie's basic premise, the director focuses almost exclusively upon letting the action unfold. There's no real attention to the individual members of the Warriors, and even Swan is something of a cypher, even though he manages to forge a "romance on the run" with Mercy, a girl from another gang. Whereas the novel's author allegedly wanted to de-romanticize the New York gangs, Hill is to an extent re-romanticizing them. 

That's not to say that the Warriors are romantic heroes. They're not even particularly likable people. At least twice one of the protagonists uses the word "faggot" and it's clear that no one in the gang disapproves: if anything, gayness is a negative against which the gang-members can measure their masculinity. But what Hill is romanticizing is the youths' sheer tenacity, their will to survive the mean New York streets, made even weirder by youth-gangs whose "colors" are not as naturalistic as the Warriors' simple vests. In addition to the already mentioned Baseball Furies, there's also a gang called the Punks, who glide around on roller skates and wear overalls that, to say the least, don't make them look particularly formidable. This is not to say that every gang encountered fufills the uncanny trope of "outre outfits," for some of them, like the Punks and the Lizzies, wear fairly ordinary clothing. Hill, after all, wasn't trying to create a world radically apart from the regular one, unlike the SF-films cited in the above essay. But the script clearly seeks to propel the Warriors-- who are a relatively "ordinary" gang of juvenile delinquents-- into contact with tribes who are positively weird with their fetishes and obsessions.

The action scenes, shot largely in genuine New York settings, are the main attraction of the film; allegedly Hill wanted to shoot WARRIORS with a kind of comic-book flair. However, it should be noted that he does apply some basic psychology to his usually uncomplicated characters. Mercy, a member of the Punks, becomes intrigued with Swan and his persecuted allies when the group passes through Punk territory. After trying to spark a rumble between the gangs, She follows them, which supports Swan's idea that she's a prostitute looking for a new gig. And since Mercy's dialogue suggests that she may have had a checkered past, it's a given that the course of their romance doesn't run smooth, nor is it even certain that it will endure.

In the end, Luther is exposed and the Warriors are exonerated-- though the conflict has demonstrated the impossibility of Cyrus' ambition: the street-gangs are too preoccupied with issues of ego to make any long-term alliances. THE WARRIORS is too wrapped up in the thrills of exotic violence to make any social statements, but there's more than a hint of irony when the gang gets back to Coney Island, and Swan can only say, "This is what we fought to get back to?"

THE LADY CONSTABLES (1978)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Here's a true rarity: a 1970s kung-fu comedy that doesn't pile on silly grossout humor. Mind you, it's only mildly funny. But it also doesn't confuse the viewer with lots of cxtraneous characters, making its lightweight story easy to follow. CONSTABLES is both directed and written by Chang Hsin-yi, and it's impressive that, though he'd scripted over twenty HK/Taiwanese flicks by 1978, this film, a teamup of two popular kung fu divas. was only his second director credit. Chang did not direct but ten films, but continued to script into the 1990s, including such oddball fare as KUNG FU WONDER CHILD, which evinces the very faults avoided by CONSTABLES.

Set in some vague medieval era, the title refers to police officials given broad governmental power to go wherever they pleased to seek out criminals, which is the main reason I label the film's function "sociological." The titular lady cops are Tang Ling (Chia Ling) and Tien Ying Hung (Angela Mao), and as the film commences they're both devoted to chasing down a gang of jewel thieves who ripped off "the Five Shining Pearls." Tien wants to bring in the gangsters because they committed the crime in her town, while Tang has a more personal reason: the crooks killed a relative of hers. One might think that the one with the personal involvement would be the more emotional, but no. Chia's character is the cool logician, while Mao's is the one who's a little more excitable. 

The ladies challenge each other's right to the "collar" and so they often follow separate trails. (One online review claimed that in real life the actresses weren't entirely pleased at their team-up, each considering that she was the reigning Lady of Kung Fu in Asian cinema.) Their gamboling pursuit of the gang-members is further complicated by a third party, Hung Yi (Wang Kuan-Hsiung). This character's presence contributes the most reiterated comedy routine, in that for most of the story he remains silent, communicating only through written documents. A playful little tune sounds every time he whips out one of these visual aids, which are even sillier given that he claims that he's not a mute; he just doesn't like to talk. The two constables peg him as a famous bodyguard to some unnamed prince, and so they tolerate his presence as he follows them around. Similarly, the ladies rack enough of a body count fighting the low-ranking crooks that they're also followed around by a coffin-maker, because he thinks he can drum up more business in their presence.

The fights from all three principals are plentiful, though none of them stand out. Both women use uncanny weapons. Tang's is a small baton with a retractable blade, while Tien can somehow project unfolding cloth sashes from her sleeves to bind and confuse opponents. When they finally confront the gang's chief Star Tiger (Chang Yi), the villain utilizes both a bladed umbrella and spiked deadfalls that, rather than being swung on a rope, are somehow launched like missiles at the heroes. Possibly the funniest scene is one in which the two policewomen take turns torturing (in a funny way, of course) the same criminal for information.

This is another middle-level film for Angela Mao, with a fair number of fights but only so-so choreography. And though Chia never became as internationally known as Mao, CONSTABLES is not one of her best fight-wise either. Curiously, Chia dresses down so that a couple of shady customers mistake her for a man, and Chia scandalizes a female by claiming "he" wants to sleep with the woman. Possibly Director Chang wrote this into the script so that the two actresses wouldn't be competing over their costumes, with the result that Mao is indubitably the sexier of the duo.

TARZAN (1999)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I don't know why I was in any way surprised, back in 1999, at the near-total liberties Disney Studios took with both the Edgar Rice Burroughs origin-tale of Tarzan and the character's cinematic heritage. Some alterations of traditional stories by Disney had taken on their own classic status-- after all, did any American viewers really pine to see "Snow White" adapted from the Grimms?-- but I'd seen the silly-ass distortion of Lewis Carroll in the 1951 ALICE IN WONDERLAND. 

Still, given that the previous HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME didn't entirely skirt the content of Victor Hugo's novel, it was a little daunting to see so many changes. No mutiny on the ship that strands little Lord Greystoke's parents in Africa; just a fire at sea, wherein the parents and their already-born infant escape (with no mention of what happened to the ship's crew). The parents perish conveniently off camera, without any involvement by the African ape-tribes. The bereft female ape Kala still adopts the human infant, but her mate Kerchak isn't a rage-filled brute bent on destroying Tarzan, but a sulky "heavy father" who thinks the human child's weakness endangers his tribe. The apes (specified to be gorillas here) are a fun bunch of goofballs, like a nicer version of the capricious monkey of Disney's JUNGLE BOOK, and Tarzan's best ape-bud is-- horrors!-- a GIRL-ape, one Terk, voiced by Rosie O'Donnell. The ape-boy's other best friend is a juvenile version of Tantor the Elephant.

Aside from the disapproving gaze of Kerchak, and the occasional leopard attack, Tarzan's life in the jungle is pretty good in Disney's carnivalesque jungle (no Black natives in sight, and somehow Tarzan can surf atop tree-branches without picking up a single splinter). But along come a trio of explorers looking for gorillas, and these are the first time Tarzan meets his own kind. 

All three support-characters are loosely derived from Burroughs' parallel characters. Archimedes Porter, the father of Jane, is most like the book-character, because in both media he's a silly-ass, absent-minded professor type. Jane in the book is just a level-headed young woman who becomes the object of Tarzan's ardor. But Disney, concerned with stoking the joke-machine at every opportunity, makes their Jane almost as daffy as her old man. Finally, in the novel Clayton is Tarzan's cousin and competition both for both the title of Lord Greystoke and for Jane's hand in marriage. Here Clayton is just a routine "bad white hunter," who guides the two academically-minded Brits to the gorilla-grounds but plans to betray them and capture all the apes for zoo-sales.

The constant barrage of slapstick jokes, even in the midst of danger, ensures that the romance of Tarzan and Jane lacks even the mild eros of classic Disney-flicks like SLEEPING BEAUTY and the aforementioned SNOW WHITE. This Tarzan is never capable of anything like passion, and neither is Jane. Their unison is never as important as Tarzan's main conflict, that of having to choose between his ape-family and the world of humanity. (I don't think Original Tarzan's aristocratic heritage is even raised.) This trope is given enough emotional resonance that I can rate the movie's mythicity as "fair," even though the script nullifies every other aspect of the Tarzan myth.

Credit where due, TARZAN's fantasy-jungle looks great, much better than the landscapes of LION KING. There aren't a lot of "beast-slayings" in the film's ninety minutes, but when creatures like leopards or baboons attack, they do so with uncompromising speed and ferocity. The jokes are repetitive, but some of them land reasonably well. I'm mildly surprised that any of the music won an Academy Award, because I found all of it mediocre.

Though most of the phenomena depicted are uncanny, like Tarzan's slow accretion of his godlike strength and skill, the animals are marvelous in nature, given that they display human intelligence even though they don't walk on two legs. The film was popular enough to spawn too DTV sequels and a TV show, but I imagine these don't even have the limited appeal of seeing how much the Disney brand distorted the myth of the immortal ape-man.

HONOR ROLL #221

The Disney version of TARZAN isn't the first or best animated incarnation, but he's the only character in the movie worth remembering.

WANG KUAN-HSIUNG has his own form of "sign language."

MICHAEL BECK is the first among equals in a gang of delinquents who are just a little less bad than other gangs.

Muscle up a little closer to TEAGAN CLIVE.

ROMA DOWNEY shows Hercules how it feels to get "punched by an angel."

Some say the world will end with FIRESTAR, some say with ICEMAN.

SPIDER-MAN (1967-70)

  

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

Most of the 52 episodes of the first SPIDER-MAN animated cartoon are pretty dire from every standpoint, and the only ones that justify even fair mythicity appear in the first season, consisting of 38 stories about about fifteen minutes each and two stories of about thirty. So by giving the show an overall "fair" rating, am I just indulging in nostalgia?

I began collecting superhero comics in early 1966 and even though the Spider-Man title had debuted four years previous, I was fortunate enough to have become well-schooled in wall-crawler continuity by the time the first season of SPIDER-MAN hit the air-waves in September 1967. By that time, even as a 12-year-old, I knew that the main thing that distinguished Spidey's comic from its competition was its soap-operatic format, which utilized a greater variety of supporting characters than even the other Marvel titles. 

Some podcast reviewers have faulted the first season of the TV cartoon-- all produced by Canadian studio Grantray-Lawrence-- for having simplified Peter Parker's life to its bare essentials. Some new menace appeared in New York. Peter Parker either encountered the menace directly or found out about it when reporting to his photographer's job at J. Jonah Jameson's newspaper. The only other regularly seen support-character was Jameson's secretary Betty Brant, and sometimes Jameson or Betty would get involved during Spidey's attempts to defeat the villain of the story. 

Both as a kid and in adulthod, I never faulted the studio for this strategy. While there had been a handful of TV-toons that continued from episode to episode, principally ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE, the dominant model for animated shows was to make each story self-contained, so that the episodes could be rerun in any order. There was no real way to counter that trend in 1967, and even when the second and third seasons brought in a few extra characters, that studio followed the same basic procedure.

The key comic-book myth that '67 SPIDEY got right was the reversal of the Clark Kent-Perry White working relationship from the SUPERMAN mythos. Unlike Clark Kent, Peter Parker had to work for a pinheaded newspaper publisher who also hated Peter's superhero identity, no matter how many noble deeds Spider-Man performed. The cartoon's Jameson lacked the psychological tone of the comics-original, but the publisher's overweening egotism in the cartoon equaled that of the comic book, and was just as funny. And though Betty Brant was no Lois Lane, and didn't know Peter Parker's double ID, she and Peter were often in the position of laughing up their sleeves at the older man's clownishness. The standout episode for Jameson is "Farewell Performance," in which Spider-Man uses reverse psychology to trick Jameson into championing a cause, just because the publisher thinks Spider-Man's opposed to said cause. A couple of the direct adaptations of comics-stories spotlight Jameson's role in suborning public menaces like The Scorpion and the Spider-Slayer, to say nothing of the publisher becoming the unwitting pawn of the Green Goblin in "The Witching Hour."

Speaking of super-foes, the first season does a good job, given its very limited animation, in adapting several of the super-foes who had dominated the comic book in the years since the feature began. A few of the stories were directly adapted from comic-stories, but they were done with much more panache than Grantray-Lawrence had managed with their earlier "Marvel Superheroes" line of cartoons (the less said about those, the better). In addition to the Goblin and the Scorpion, the writers used many other major villains: Doctor Octopus, Sandman, Vulture, The Rhino, the Lizard, Electro and Mysterio. Two or three "originals" are essentially reworked versions of comics-malcontents, and even though none of the totally original villains are outstanding, they're at least adequate formula-foes. The best of these might be the two-time-appearing Fifth Avenue Phantom, a hooded chap with a creepy voice and a penchant for "the uncanny valley." (That is, he brings unliving things to life, like lady robots in one story and solidified shadows in the other tale.) But given that the action was only intermittently impressive-- and sometimes compromised by slapstick-- Grantray-Lawrence's biggest accomplishment was nailing Stan Lee's rollicking sense of humor. As far as I know, '67 SPIDEY is still the only TV cartoon to do so. (Quick example. Green Goblin begins committing robberies with a magic wand. Before ripping off the contents of a jewelry-store, Goblin parks his bat-glider at a nearby parking-meter and puts a coin into the meter, Once he finishes robbing the store, he also uses the wand to make the meter cough up all its money, and then flies away with double the loot.) I also have a minor liking for a giant robot (since he had neither name nor rationale, I named him The Living Furnace). The robot went around picking up automobiles with its magnet-arms and consuming the cars in its furnace-mouth.

Unfortunately, Grantray-Lawrence went broke, and the contract for the next two seasons went to New York studio Krantz, but with even tinier animation budgets than the first season received. Upon taking charge of the series, famed animation director Ralph Bakshi largely turned his back on the "hero fights villains" idiom of the first season and began emphasizing wacky otherworldy sci-fi scenarios for the web-spinner. Possibly this was done to overcome the aforementioned budget-limitations. Possibly he wanted to take advantage of some of the talents working for Krantz Studios, like fantasy-writer Lin Carter and comics-artist Gray Morrow. Unfortunately, all of these wild flights of fancy were extremely mediocre. The least groan-worthy is probably "The Evil Sorcerer." In prehistory, two magicians battle, which conflict includes them making two dragons fight each other, a scene that could've been fun with good animation. Evil sorcerer Kotep gets changed into a stone statue. Thousands of years later, a renegade archaeologist brings Kotep back to life, and he dominates New York until Spidey, with the help of one of his short-lived girlfriends, turns the tables.

I must admit that the Krantz seasons do ratchet up Peter Parker's love life a bit, even though he usually strikes out even more than he did in the comics. Betty Brant is barely a romantic interest in Season One, but she gets completely sidelined in Two or Three for various short-term females. The one from "Sorcerer" is one of many stick-figures who admires Spidey but shows contempt toward Parker for his alleged cowardice. But at least Peter Parker is a little more interested in the opposite sex. Indeed, in an episode called "The Big Brainwasher," Peter has a one-shot encounter with major comics-character Mary Jane Watson. In the one sexy line in the whole show, Mary tells Peter to come watch her do a go-go dance at a club, because she likes watching him watching her dance.

The last seasons do have a couple of relatively mundane shows, but they're mostly boring, even the first non-comics adaptation of Spider-Man's origin story. The few new villains introduced are badly designed losers such as "Doctor Cool," "The Sidewinder," and "The Scarf," and the last two seasons make no use of the previously named members of Spidey's "rogues' gallery," except for taking Season One episodes and re-cutting them to present alleged "new episodes." One comics-villain, The Kingpin, makes two appearances, and though the first one, "King Pinned" is unremarkable, "The Big Brainwasher" did a tolerable job adapting a recent Kingpin storyline from Marvel. "Brainwasher" is probably the only half-watchable show of the Krantz years. 

In the final analysis, the only real accomplishment of the Krantz years was that they made enough extra episodes that for many years the show could be syndicated in many markets. Had those extra episodes never been made, then the one good Grantray-Lawrence season could never have been seen in those markets, and so the studio's accomplishments would have been as forgotten as, say, DePatie-Freleng's SUPER PRESIDENT. And subsequent generations would have been denied the pleasure, at the very least, of hearing the jazzy theme song, still the best of Spider-tunes.

REPLICANT (2001)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

If a viewer can get past the utterly boneheaded rationale for REPLICANT, this second collaboration between star Jean-Claude Van Damme and HK director Ringo Lam has a little more emotional nuance than the standard American chopsocky.

Seattle cop Jake Riley (Michael Rooker) is forced to retire before he can catch a serial killer, nicknamed "The Torch" because he targets young mothers and burns them alive. The Torch (one of two roles played by Van Damme) even calls the retired cop at his home and taunts him with Jake's inability to catch him.

Then Jake gets another chance from those helpful folks at the CIA. They have perfected a miraculous cloning technology, which they plan to use in anti-terrorist operations. But since they don't want to mess up any of their own cases, they talk Jake into being the handler for their first guinea pig. The agents have obtained some DNA from the Torch, and they use this data to create a fully-grown "blank slate" version of the killer (the other Van Damme, playing his fourth "double role" in his movie career). It sounds like the resulting Replicant is the first time the CIA boffins have actually carried their experiment to its final conclusion, yet somehow they know their clone will have a psychic link to the wanted man. I guess this link would help the agents use other clones to track down hidden terrorists-- or something. As I said, if a viewer can accept all this folderol the way a kid would accept magic beans in a fairytale, said viewer will be better off.

Though in his home life Jake has a wife and a young son, he doesn't prove to be a very good babysitter for a fully adult copy of the murderer Jake hates with a passion. He's verbally and physically abusive, but the Replicant, not having known anything else, accepts Jake's abuse because Jake also feeds him and teaches him some basic facts of existence. During Replicant's education period, the CIA helpfully provides the clone with videos of gymnasts, and, wonder of wonders, Replicant starts imitating them. The script could have claimed that he was unconsciously emulating the original model, since it will be eventually seen that the Torch is also a super-athlete. But after asking the viewer to believe that the CIA would create a clone of a serial killer for a test run, the bit about the kung fu skills is easy by comparison.

The point of the experiment, to get Replicant to track down Torch, often takes a back seat to Jake's attempts to deal with his charge. The CIA doesn't provide Replicant with so much as an elementary education; he just learns really fast and is eventually able to frame sentences and make elementary connections. In due time, Replicant runs across his original self, and though it takes Torch a while to suss things out, eventually he tries to convert Replicant to his cause, because the two of them are essentially "brothers." 

Will Replicant manage to throw off the influence of the only "father" he's known, and bond with a "brother" he knows to be evil? If one has seen a Van Damme movie before-- or, for that matter, any version of TOTAL RECALL-- it's a given that the "blank slate" self is going to turn out better than the original. The developments of the plot are lively but inconsequential, for they only exist to provide excuses for high-kicking action. The only backstory of any importance is the explanation that the Torch formed his psychosis after his crazy mother almost killed him by burning him alive. This makes for a dodgy parallel between the Torch's history and the treatment of Replicant by Jake, and it doesn't help that Jake's character is too thin to make him anything but a Dirty Harry "clone." Knowing that he's angry at the real killer doesn't really make Jake's treatment of the innocent clone dramatically interesting, even when he does "get religion" about Replicant's essential nobility in the last half hour of the film.

Still, the "blank slate" theme acquires some strong resonance thanks to Van Damme's double performance. The actor is better as the soulful innocent than as the nihilistic misogynist, not least because Replicant gets a lot more scenes. Neither of REPLICANT's two writers, Lawrence Riggins and Les Weldon, have produced a ton of outstanding scripts. Weldon, though, racked up more consequential credits as a producer of big-ticket action movies like the 2011 CONAN THE BARBARIAN  and both the first and fourth entries in the EXPENDABLES franchise.

GOTHAM, SEASON 2 (2015-16)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

I have a theory about the great shift in storytelling priorities as GOTHAM went into its second season. It's not a theory for which I've done any research, but I think it's supported by many anecdotes about DC Comics-- all stating that the company is often extremely protective of even minor IP when they're being farmed out to other media for adaptation.

In Season 1, the showrunners tacitly received DC's okay for reworking the story of Bruce Wayne, many support-characters in the BATMAN franchise, and three major Bat-villains-- Catwoman, Penguin and Riddler-- all of whom receive major continuity-alterations. There are also an assortment of lesser support-characters reproduced without much alteration, like mob-boss Carmine Falcone and D.A. Harvey Dent, with Dent apparently set up for a villainous transformation that never comes to pass. For the most part, though, the writers concentrate on the warring factions of the Gotham City gangland. We see most of these conflicts between the bosses-- Falcone, Boss Maroni and Fish Mooney-- through the gimlet eye of Oswald "Penguin" Cobblepot, who essentially plays the powerful criminals against one another until the final episode of Season 1, in which he becomes, in his own words, "king of Gotham." 

One writer for the show described the first season as a "police procedural," which is nonsense. From first to last, GOTHAM was a big, splashy gangbusters-melodrama, closer to DICK TRACY than DRAGNET. But throughout Season 1, the writers largely avoided most of Batman's rogues' gallery. A single episode is devoted to a character who somewhat resembles the Joker, but seemed at the time to be an unreasonable facsimile. A comics-villain named Victor Zsasz makes a few appearances as an underworld hitman, and James Gordon starts out with a girlfriend whose first name suggests that she might somehow relate to Barbara "Batgirl" Gordon-- only to diverge, making any connections dubious. As for non-gangland villains, the scripts largely produced one-offs with names like "The Goat" and "The Balloon-Man," which suggests to me that the staff didn't have any okays about adopting even lesser Bat-villains. 

But Season 2 shifts into "villain overdrive," and I suspect that the show's respectable ratings meant that DC became less parsimonious with its properties. Gang wars between mundane thugs became a thing of the past, replaced by a surfeit of super-crooks, more in line with the beloved 1966 teleseries than any commonplace cop show. Indeed, Season 2's episodes were divided into two distinct arcs, given the respective umbrella-titles of "Rise of the Super-Villains" and "Wrath of the Super-Villains"-- though neither is a particularly apt title for describing the events.

"Rise" begins with a three-part continuity stressing the return of Jerome Velaska, acting more Joker-y than he did in his single Season 1 appearance, and leading a contingent of Arkham escapees on a murderous rampage. However, Jerome is apparently killed in the third part of this sequence by the real "Big Bad" of the arc, Theo Galavan. Both Galavan and his sister Tabitha are very free-form takes on characters not originally associated in DC Comics, and as such I don't view them as true adaptations. The same goes for a smattering of characters with the same names as DC characters but no other similarities, such as "Silver St. Cloud" and "Richard Sionis" (in comics, the father of the villain Black Mask, who never appears in GOTHAM). The "Rise" storyline focuses upon Galavan's meteoric ascent to the position of Gotham's mayor and his secret allegiance to an ancient order devoted to exterminating the Wayne family-- though the evildoer's descent is just as precipitate. He makes one more appearance in the "Wrath" arc and fades from the series, though his sister goes on to multi-season appearances.

"Wrath" focuses on the long-running plotline of Arkham Asylum, which has become a birthplace of horrors since falling under control of the mad scientist Hugo Strange (B.D. Wong). Strange either takes control of newly-formed super-villains like Mister Freeze and the Firefly, or creates new menaces from the bodies of the risen dead, such as altering the deceased Theo Galavan into a warrior named Azrael. But Strange doesn't seek to control Gotham in the way Penguin or Galavan do. Gotham is simply Strange's experimental laboratory, where the scientist plays God by unleashing on the city various malefic forces, including Penguin, after the latter spends a little quality time at Arkham. In contrast to "Rise," this arc goes absolutely fannish in embracing its massive "super-villain team-up," far beyond anything any other live-action Bat-adaptation had attempted.

How much of Season 2 is aesthetically pleasing? Well, though GOTHAM remains a very violent show, the injection of super-menaces forced the writers to use the violence more carefully, instead of just having Penguin kill random people for effect. The Galavan arc often drags, except for the three-parter with Valeska-Joker, which has a great resolution and sets the scene for more "quasi-Joker" stories in future seasons. "Wrath" is more devoted to pulpy goodness, like having the Firefly and Mr, Freeze engaging in a "fire and ice" battle, or having a new Clayface take on the appearance of Jim Gordon. Even a resuscitated Fish Mooney is a bit more tolerable once she has super-powers. Also, the hints from Season One about the "Court of Owls" are finally given form.

There are misfires too-- the short-lived pregnancy of Lee Tompkins, for one-- but it might be argued that such miscarriages (so to speak) are practically inevitable with a series focused on so many characters. Even Jim Gordon is often treated like nothing more than a loose cannon, on whom the writers can depend to keep the plot-pot boiling. But I appreciate that they retained a good sense of the character of the future Caped Crusader. In the first season, David Mazouz's Bruce is often still a bereaved, confused child. Here, the scripts begin to imbue his character with a deeper resolve, yet not without a sense of the compassion that many comics-scribes omit from the hero's character. Even as a child, Bruce is capable of facing death or refusing temptation. And yet he's capable of showing mercy to Silver St. Cloud, even when he knows she intends to betray him. His quixotic relationship with Selina, the future Catwoman, also hits all the right notes, with Camren Bicondova consistently putting across a complementary sense of a "cat who walks by herself." 

THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE (2001)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

The tag-line for this SORCERER'S APPRENTICE claims it's "one great adventure." But not only is the movie not "great," it doesn't fit the category of adventure at all, but that of the drama. The script plays down all the Arthurian elements of the story-- young contemporary 14-year-old Ben Clark (Byron Taylor) gets drawn into a conflict between the incredibly long-lived Merlin (Robert Davi) and his equally blessed opponent Morgana Le Fay (Kelly Le Brock). In place of high adventure, writer Brett Morris-- until recently, his only such credit-- dilates upon various routines about Ben's relations to his family and his peers at school.

Ben's proximate difficulty is that his father gets a better job that forces the family to move from South Africa (where most of the film was shot by an English crew) to England. Ben resents this heartily, as would any 14-year-old, but he also complains of a lack of attention from his father, who's perhaps a little too buried in his job as a museum curator. 

Accordingly, while trying to adjust to his new school-- where he almost immediately picks up both a possible girlfriend and a bully-- Ben goes looking for another father figure. He approaches a neighbor named Milner (spell it sideways), demonstrating a trick of stage magic, but the older man rejects the young one's attention. Then later, Milner seems to want to make friends after all, and gradually Ben learns that Milner knows real magic, and so Ben wants to become this sorcerer's apprentice.

Apparently synchronicity is responsible for Milner living in the same city to which Ben transfers, because this sub rosa sorcerer is busy protecting both "the staff of Fingal" and some sort of magic crystal from his enemies. Morgana is of course after both items, but she doesn't have much in the way of resources: just two thugs who are actually a transformed cat and rat. (The writer fails to generate any comedy from these two traditionally-inimical animal types.)

So the film trundles along, focusing mostly on Ben's challenges at school and his attempts to learn magic from Milner. The motivations of Milner/Merlin are always vague. Does he believe that Ben is a danger to his protection of the magical doohickies, or does Ben represent some way to defeat Morgana? If the two magi were struggling over gaining the youth's help because Ben inherited some ability to wield the staff from some distant English ancestor, the story would have made a little more sense. But the stakes in the conflict between the two sorcerers are never clear.

The climax more or less attempts to bring these elements together. Ben seeks out his real father and tries to reach out to him, though he's not able to enunciate his problem. Then the father gets time-frozen while Merlin confronts Morgana. The two posture a little, and Merlin defeats Morgana with one quick spell. Does the ease of her defeat have something to do with Ben's decision to side with Merlin? Who knows? Afterward, the so-called apprentice loses all interest in real magic and settles down to his high-school universe.

Most "Arthurian adventures in modern times" have been underwhelming in terms of Matters Arthurian, and APPRENTICE is no exception. But the dramatic arc, the script's main focus, is even weaker than all the magical conflicts. The most positive thing I can say for the film is that director David Lister keeps the simplistic story rolling along without becoming visually tedious. One of Lister's last credited films, the 2010 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, showed that he could do even better with a script that didn't vacillate about its main point.

MAD MAX FURY ROAD (2015)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, sociological*

Though a lot of franchises founder if the audience hasn't seen them in a while, ROAD was immensely popular upon its theatrical release, even though the last MAD MAX film appeared in 1985. To be sure, director/co-writer George Miller conceived the template of ROAD back in 1995, but numerous complications delayed the film for twenty years. 

By that time, former "Mad Max" performer Mel Gibson was scratched from the project, at least partly because of his advanced age, and so Max was for the first time played by a new actor, Tom Hardy. Aside from a handful of other American players, most of the cast was Australian like the director, and ROAD, like the other entries in the franchise, exploits the "wide open spaces" of Down Under in order to capture the untrammeled joy and terror of racing hot rods without any civilized restraints to get in the way. 

In keeping with his established procedure, Miller drops the viewer into his post-apocalyptic world with next to no exposition. But if one does not know going in that Max is a former Aussie cop who's now a very reluctant hero, his psychological conflicts are at least suggested by Max's peculiar flashbacks of dead people he failed to protect. Nevertheless, it will take most of the picture before Max gets religion-- though part of this is due to the "dog-eat-dog" existence of the apocalyptic world. 

Max gets captured by a petty warlord who makes Auntie Entity seem like a benevolent tyrant: elderly Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who rules a desert citadel replete with a bounty of subterranean water. Joe keeps a harem of nubile women and an army of freakish, sometimes diseased warriors called "War Boys." One War Boy hooks Max up to his hot rod in order that the machine can feed off Max's blood-- and this exigency causes Max to be unwillingly drawn into the film's first big chase scene. 

Furiosa (Charlize Theron) has only been pretending to be Joe's faithful servant. Her true purpose at the Citadel has always been to steal Joe's entire harem and transport them to her all-female tribe. (As with most Amazon societies not much is said about how this one perpetuates itself.) Furiosa flees the Citadel in one of Joe's big-rigs, and so all the War Boys race after her, dragging Max with them.

Again, there are so few scenes of character interaction that next to ROAD, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK seems like an Altman movie. Furiosa's nebulous altruism aside, everyone else, including Max, is defined by the need to assert physical independence, and often superiority. Max gets free of the War Boys but is entirely willing to steal the big-rig from Furiosa and the women, being prevented only by Furiosa having gimmicked-up the rig's controls. Then it's one blistering chase scene after another, and even though Max ends up defending the females there are no standard scenes of "bonding with the underdogs." Only after many, many fights and chases, when Furiosa finally reaches her goal and learns that her people have almost died out, does Max make a suggestion that implies his alliance with Furiosa's cause. He advocates making a frontal assault on the Citadel, given that the absence of the pursuit vehicles have left the redoubt unguarded. And, without going into the many assaults and reverses that follow, that's pretty much what happens. But Max, like his ancestor Shane, is fated not to be part of the community he fosters.

Joseph Campbell might term the Citadel's decadent ruler as "the Tyrant Holdfast," the ruler who bottles up resources and deprives all of his subjects of a piece of the action. As such, Joe is more of a concept than a character, and since he spends the whole film in a breather-mask, actor Keays-Byrne must use his voice to project authority, just as, oddly enough, Tom Hardy had done in 2012, essaying the villain Bane for THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. Nevertheless, the scenes of Joe dispensing water to his starving subjects establish the economy of the post-apoc world as well as Joe's cruelty, and his monopolization of the world's pretty women is clearly meant to create a parallel. Joe is the Dead Hand of the Past, and Max must liberate the powers of life from his control. The vague feminist tropes of ROAD are not nearly as evocative. Still, ROAD probably appealed to a 2015 audience in creating a hero who was willing to rescue hot girls but didn't try to sleep with them.

There's no question that ROAD is one of the most kinetically exciting films ever conceived, easily in the same pantheon with the original STAR WARS and the aforementioned RAIDERS. Miller's mythology is not nearly as resonant as either of those movies, but it certainly blows away most of the MCU movies of the time, particularly its 2015 competitor AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, one of the first films to display many of the problems with Hollywood's current approach to adventure movie-making.

ELECTRA WOMAN AND DYNA GIRL (1976)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

It's surprising that ELECTRA WOMAN AND DYNA GIRL acquired enough of a cachet to get serialized on various streaming services. Like most of the live-action shows on the portmanteau KROFFT SUPERSHOW of the mid-1970s, each individual episode was about 12 minutes, not leaving much time to get across anything in the way of charm or style. All of the ELECTRA episodes were comprised of a Part One and Part Two of the same continued story, and each Part One was something of a cliffhanger to lead into Part Two, roughly along the same lines of '66 BATMAN. I assume that ELECTRA's nodding similarities to the camp teleseries are the only reasons it's remembered by aficinados of junky TV shows, while nearly no one remembers "Doctor Shrinker" or "Wonderbug."

Cartoon producers Joe Ruby and Ken Spears are credited with creating the series, which means they probably set the general parameters: no backgrounds for the titular crimefighters (Deidre Hall as "Batman" and Judy Strangis as "Robin"), very minor action with inexpensive effects, and a general day-glo look to the show. I don't get the impression that any particular writer or director had much creative input, though it's of minor interest that one of the writers, Glen Strangis, was Judy Strangis' nephew.

Though the heroes get no backstory, the two superheroines have a single aide, Frank Heflin (Norman Alden), who is the girls' technical expert. This contingency suggests that he may have created all of their tech-- their HQ the "Electrabase" beneath a common suburban house, a "Crimescrope" computer, an "Electracar," and the primary weapons of the duo: "Electracoms," bulky wrist-attached devices from which they can project various forces. Frank also stays in contact with the heroines by radios in their coms, occasionally rendering remote assistance through computer programs. Nothing is said about how the two young women-- known only as "Lori" and "Judy"-- came to know each other, though both are apparently employed as newspaper reporters, meaning that the show's creators dipped into "Superman" territory as well.

So each two-part story has a villain appear (always with just one hench-person with whom to trade lines) and then unleash some threat, to which the electra-adventurers respond. The heroines eschew any physical action whatever, always using their coms to tap various energy-powers to defeat their enemies. The heroes speak in the same "gosh-wow" manner as their West-and-Ward models, except that nothing they say is even slightly clever. Not only are there very few episodes, a couple of the villains make repeat appearances, so the duo has an extremely small rogues' gallery. Oddly from my POV, the two repeat-evildoers include the best acting (Peter Mark Richman as "The Pharaoh") and the worst (Michael Constantine, with whom Strangis worked on ROOM 222, as "The Sorcerer.")

The show's best asset was that Hall and Strangis looked very sexy in their spandex outfits, and we get a fair number of upshot camera angles as they run from place to place in their shorts and tights. By an interesting pop cultural coincidence, 1976 also brought forth another camp-pretender, THE MONSTER SQUAD, which shared the same day-glo aesthetic and gosh-wow dialogue. Its scripts weren't really any better than those of ELECTRA, but being longer they allowed for a little more wackiness-- though I wouldn't want to be stranded on the proverbial desert island with either show as one of my viewing options.

HONOR ROLL #220

DEIDRE HALL and JUDY STRANGIS managed to charge up a lot of people despite the show's low wattage.

HUGH KEAYS-BYRNE isn't a dirty old man; he just plays one in the movies.

Merlin has a magic staff, but KELLY LE BROCK has at least two superior weapons of enchantment.

DAVID MAZOUZ continues slowly toward assuming the mantle of the bat.

Jean-Claude Van Damme is a "good monster" kept under control by his strict father-figure MICHAEL ROOKER.

SPIDER-MAN, SPIDER-MAN, still has the best theme song in the land.

HELLISH SPIDERS (1968)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

Despite opening with a snazzy outer-space prologue trying to build up the awesomeness of the film's alien menace-- "brain spiders" from the planet Arachnea-- HELLISH SPIDERS proves to be a dull slog, thanks in part to director Federico Curiel just phoning the work in.

Inevitably the aliens come to Earth, and specifically to Mexico, looking for new brains to suck, and to do so, the spider-people transform into human-looking beings. The Blue Demon, who's the only heroic wrestler in this neck of the Mexican woods, learns of the ETs evil plans and engages with them in some tepid fight scenes. The hell-spiders are led by a rather dull queen (Martha Elena Cervantes) and one of her minions is played by familiar luchador-face Fernando Oses.

Only two scenes escape the general dullness. When Blue Demon and his companion observe a man burst into fiery nothingness, the wrestler gives a very learned lecture on how spontaneous combustion occurs due to neutrino breakdown. Later, when a hell-spider infiltrates the wrestling ring to kill El Demonio Azul, he makes a partial transformation-- that of his hand, which turns into a black spider capable of biting people. Maybe having a hotter spider queen would have sparked a little more enthusiasm in the filmmakers.

STARGIRL: SEASON ONE (2020)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

In a better world, STARGIRL would have just been an average "teen adventure-drama" that happened to adapt a lot of DC superhero characters. The show didn't try for the edginess of the arguable "mother of all teen TV adventure-dramas," 1997's BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. Nor did STARGIRL trade on the legend of a major American pop-icon, as the 2001 SMALLVILLE did with the legend of Superman. 

Yet, because STARGIRL did have many of the rich character interactions of BUFFY and much of SMALLVILLE's heartfelt regard for popular culture, this three-season wonder stood out from the pack of other 21st-century TV superhero shows (teen and otherwise), many of which appeared on "the CW Network" or some related entity. It would take too long to discuss the developments of the 2010s, during which even halfway-decent CW programs descended into a stinking morass of pandering political correctness and idiotic characters, both original and adapted. STARGIRL should have been just one good show among other good shows. Instead, it ends up being the last good adventure-drama show in the CW venue (a claim I think it safe to make even though the final season of the tedious SUPERMAN AND LOIS has yet to air). 

All that said, STARGIRL's theme is essentially the same as that of other teen-adventure shows like BUFFY and SMALLVILLE, devoted to showing groups of teenagers trying to negotiate their identity as they progress toward adulthood. The base model for the show might be described as "The Superhero Breakfast Club," in that the four principal teen-heroes come together due to their mutual alienation from regular high school life. Unlike "Breakfast Club," though, these teens happen to live in a world where the foremost superheroes were slain ten years ago by a gang of super-villains, who also disappeared from public perception. If STARGIRL has a structural weakness, it's that none of the people in the show's sole locale-- the small, middle-American city of Blue Valley-- ever seem particularly aware that they live in a world shared by costumed heroes and villains.

The titular heroine's alter ego Courtney Whitmore (Brec Bassinger) has nothing cosmic on her mind when her divorced mother Barbara marries again, and her stepfather Pat Dugan (Luke Wilson) initiates a move to Blue Valley for Barbara, Courtney and Pat's son from another marriage, Mike. The blended family is still in its very rough stages, and Courtney is particularly resistant to the blending process. Things change when she accidentally discovers that Pat has a connection to the slain hero-team of the Justice Society of America. Pat was once known as Stripesy, the sidekick to a slain hero named Starman (though by the end of this season Starman's status is revised). Through a series of coincidences, Courtney comes to believe that her long-estranged father was Starman, and so she makes her own costume and assumes the moniker of Stargirl.

But the slayers of the Society, the copycat "Injustice Society of America," have made Blue Valley their center of operations. Overwhelmed by the prospect of facing such fiends as the Icicle, the Brain Wave and Solomon Grundy, Courtney reaches out to other alienated teens at her school. One of them, Rick Tyler (Cameron Gellman), is the son of the slain hero Hourman, so he's something of a legacy choice. The other two, Yolanda Montez (Yvette Monreal) and Beth Chapel (Anjelika Washington), are upgraded to super-status through their utilization of empowering devices taken from dead crusaders, with Yolanda becoming a new Wildcat and Beth a new Doctor Mid-Nite.

To address an earlier point, none of the four comic-book heroes being emulated-- to say nothing of Stripsey-- have the pop-cultural presence of major DC Comics heroes. But this proves a strength for the STARGIRL show. In the comics, the Justice Society included various minor heroes that the publisher wanted to spotlight, but the book sold thanks to big-name Golden Age figures like The Flash, Hawkman and Green Lantern. By eliminating most of the major heroes from the roster, and giving the heroes-in-training the legacies of relatively minor figures, the youths don't have to deal with the overly long cultural shadows of more famous icons.

Another advantage of STARGIRL is that all three seasons were confined to a tidy thirteen-episode run. This obviated one of the worst sins of most CW shows: the tendency to generate worthless soap-opera plotlines as time-killers. Not every subplot in STARGIRL is endlessly fascinating, but they all function well within the greater whole, and all work to counterpoint the action-scenes, to allow maximum identification with the heroes and antipathy for the villains. I found both the fight-scenes and the emotional interludes superlative, though standout performances include Bassinger's Stargirl, Gellman's New Hourman, and Christopher James Baker as the endlessly creepy mental mutant Brain Wave.

STARGIRL's main strength is dramatic structure, and this is all the more remarkable because the first season derives from a lot of comic-book stories that weren't especially noteworthy for strong characterization. Though the plotline of the slain JSA heroes is original to the program, Season One is largely indebted to a 1999-2000 DC miniseries, STARS AND S.T.R.I.P.E., which was the decent but unremarkable debut for the Courtney Whitmore character. Other elements were derived from titles like INFINITY INC., such as the characters of Yolanda and Rick, but the original heroes possessed none of the passionate qualities of their TV analogues. In the concluding episodes of Season One, Yolanda and Rick have parallel arcs dealing the morality of killing one's enemies, and some of this content continues into the next two seasons-- which I intend to explore in the near future.

EROTIC GHOST STORY 2 (1991)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

EROTIC GHOST STORY made money, so it got two sequels, though I've yet to see the third. But for GHOST 2 the former main characters, the three fairy sisters, are dropped and the story focuses more on stopping the new rampages of the sex-demon Wutung. His main foes, however, are once again a trio of characters, this time consisting of a brother, a sister, and the brother's fiancee.

There are some minor references to the events of the first film but on the whole the new director and new writers drop the fairly linear plot of GHOST 1. GHOST 2 provides only the sliver of a basic concept and then piles on even more exotic gyrations than GHOST 1 ever thought of, with the lascivious demon played this time out by fan-favorite Anthony Wong (who must have been paid by the grimace).

The plot-sliver is the assertion that at some point Wutung fell in real love with the mortal girl Hsiao-Yen. Some celestial spoilsports don't approve of this union, killing the girl, but her spirit is later reborn in another body. During her absence, though, Wutung ravages many villages, and some if not all of them sacrifice their nubile maidens to keep the sex demon at bay.

Frankly, though I just finished watching the film I couldn't say just who Wutung's three opponents are, though one of them, the fiancee I believe, is the reincarnation of Hsiao-Yen. I only know this because at the culminating battle scene (in which the sister throws a mean magical boomerang), Wutung strikes the fiancee on the shoulder. Out comes an outpouring of energy over which the face of Hsiao-Yen is superimposed. She appeals to the sex demon to choose love over lust, and such is the power of love that even a lust-demon gives in before its might-- and thus the two of them vapor off, ending Wutung's threat to humankind.

The camera-angles depicting all the sex positions are at least more imaginative than they were in GHOST 1. But the last-minute appeal to righteousness strikes a false note, given that the whole movie has been all about depicting as much lust as its makers could conceive, for an audience that wanted just that. So no, a final coda about the power of love just doesn't hold water.