Toon Zone Talkback - "Justice League Unlimited": The Ultimate Fanfic

[Ben]

This is the talkback thread for "Justice League Unlimited": The Ultimate Fanfic (http://news.toonzone.net/article.php?ID=2878).

That has got to be the most ginormous review of a throwaway release I have ever read (and the funnest).

[adoptedBatpuppy]

It was interesting. What bugs me the most is that JLA is not released yet on DVD Box Sets. Well, I guess you can't have everything.

[Robin]

I actually thought it was a bit of a bad review, and seemed a bit pompous. It's nice to hear thoughts on the show, but what about the DVD? I know it's a crap release, but I still want to know more than just a throwaway line to justify it as a DVD review. And it does that just barely. I thought the review of Teen Titans Volume Two was a great review, better than this one.

[Revelator]

The review makes you feel rather immature for liking the show and its "cheerful inanity". Apparently the people best capable of appreciating JLU are fanboy geeks able to relive their childhod days of playing with action figures. Considering that 99.9% of all fanfiction is stupefyingly awful, calling the show the ultimate triumph of fanfiction ultimately seems belittling: isn't it crafted by writers good enough to actually write for a living, rather than amateur fanwankers? Like BTAS and STAS, JLU plunders the original comics for inspiration--unlike them, it source material is far more epic, weird and sprawling, especially once one goes beyond the big seven characters, and so the show itself has became more epic, weirder and sprawling. And unlike most fanfiction, the show's crafted by people who know the original comics inside-out in scholarly detail. It's a tribute and transformation of the comics, not a fanfiction, which tends to hew quite closely to the established universe it transpires in, while Timm and company have quite often drastically revamped the comics to suit their needs.

Maxie made his opposition to the Cadmus plot quite clear back when Ultimatum rolled around, though any plotline that can justify Doomsday Sanction seems quite commendable to me, and think by the time the season finale has ended we'll see most of those doubts laid to rest. I don't see how the Cadmus arc is sucking the fun out of the series, though I do see how it's making the series considerably exciting to watch, as each week we see more bricks fall into place and anticipate with bated breath what the final structure will be like. Perhaps the Cadmus arc is sucking the fun out of the series because it isn't delivering that "cheerful inanity" Maxie is so fond of (thank God) -- instead it's created an atmopshere where much more is at stake, and the show realy does carry an a "dark electric jolt" that more than compensates for the loss of cheer. From Watergate onward to the current murky motivations behind the second Iraq war, we've been publicly aware that we're living in an age of real-life conspiracies. I wouldn't want a gaudy and superheroic show like JLU to become fully realistic, because that would offer us frustration, anxiety and depression in place of that romantic notion of superpowered Gods able to save the world and make it a good place to live in. On the other hand, I think it's quite thrilling when an escapist, non-realistic show makes stylized gestures to the world we're currently living in; it's escapism taken to to the next level, because it takes note of our real world concerns and realistic expectations and subsumes them within a fantasy world where the anxiety is lifted or transformed or even given wish fulfillment. (Wouldn't we have loved to have seen Superman kick Nixon's ass?) Let's face it, no matter how awful the Cadmus plot becomes, we still know that the JLU will ultimately win.

[Christophe]

For a disc-specific review, that wasn't really disc-specific. hahaha. My editor would kill me if i pulled that in the DC Kids digest.

[Karkull]

Wow...this is a really old thread. Still, it's a talkback, so I guess it's okay.

[Temple Fugate]

So apparently we're just past the first anniversary of a classic, witty TZ review. I just read it over again and I think its words ring truer now than they did a year ago. Cadmus was a huge step for the DCAU in terms of establishing over-reaching continuity, and maybe the plot ran away from itself a little, but all superhero shows are about wish-fulfillment. "I want to fly." "I want to fight crime." "I want spandex pants." So we can't really blame the creative staff for crazy plots like "Chaos at the Earth's Core" and "Dead Reckoning."

JLU is (nearly) every superhero we could have dreamed about seeing on television...on television! It's fun. It's nuts. It's good guys fighting bad guys on an impossible scale. Yeah, he could have talked more about the disc itself, seeing as it was a DVD review, but still the review had a point. Zeus reminds us not to take the show or ourselves so seriously, lest we change from the immaginative kids who play with their action figures to the stingy collectors who keep their dreams sealed in a pretty box.

[Maxie Zeus]

For a disc-specific review, that wasn't really disc-specific. hahaha. My editor would kill me if i pulled that in the DC Kids digest.

Uh, it wasn't meant to be a disc-specific review. ("On Justice League Unlimited: Saving the World (the disc that is the excuse for this review) ...") It was a review of JLU, and the disc was a hook.

[Christophe]

Uh, it wasn't meant to be a disc-specific review. ("On Justice League Unlimited: Saving the World (the disc that is the excuse for this review) ...") It was a review of JLU, and the disc was a hook.Ok, I get it. Still my editors won't let me pull somethin' like that. haha. I NV U.:p

[Maxie Zeus]

Ok, I get it. Still my editors won't let me pull somethin' like that. haha. I NV U.:p

Well, I was TZ News editor at the time, so I didn't have that problem! :D