teen titans review

apologies for the lame post last friday.  while i'm still home sick today, i hope to make it up to you with a couple posts today.

first off, even though we all know illness sucks, one of the perks is having an excuse to be a couch potato for a couple days.  as a result, i finally had a chance to check out the new cartoon series teen titans (cartoon network, saturdays, 9 pm), which i'd been meaning to do for quite some time.

i have to say, i think the creative team behind this one finally got it right.

ever since batman: the animated series, warner bros. has been trying to re-create its success.  batman was the first warner bros. cartoon series based on a mainstream comic book superhero to use a mixture of simplified character design, fluid animation, and seriously written storylines.  these qualities won the series great critical praise and captured a wide audience, both children and adult.

since then, warner bros. has attempted extract those aspects of the series and mechanically reapply it to superman, batman beyond, and the justice league  the results have been mediocre, nowhere near the level of success they had with batman.  while these later series were all technically equal, they lacked the magic of the original series:  a high-tech, brooding hero set against an early 20th century art deco backdrop where the sky is always red and it's always night.  outside of such a specific setting, the concept quickly becomes just another cartoon.

with teen titans, about a younger generation of super-heroes, the producers have kept their formula but have finally given it a contemporary twist to successfully addresses its teen- and college-age audience.  the characters are drawn in the bruce timm style but, departing from the established formula, are animated using popular animé conventions, such as hovering plewts and exaggerated facial distortions.  today's mainstream cartoon-viewing audience, having grown up with sailor moon, pokémon and yu-gi-oh!, already understand and embrace these story-telling quirks.  the icing on the cake is the series' theme song, which sounds as if it were composed and performed by shonen knife, adding the series' japanese influence a tinge of legitimacy.

(by the way, the three animé series listed above have all aired on kids wb and the cartoon network over the past five years, so you'd think warner bros. would have caught on sooner...)

personally, i think teen titans is pop-culture gold.  on the other hand, i have also fallen in love with two stupid dogs, super secret secret squirrel, and clone high, so what the hell do i know...

Posted by jason at August 25, 2003 11:30 AM