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laughing with Pam
TNN's cartoon spoof deflates as self-parody
By Ethan Alter
Comic-book movies are all the rage at the multiplex this summer, so it was only a matter of time before the television industry decided to get into the act. The past few weeks have seen the debuts of three new superhero cartoons, each one aimed at a vastly different audience.
The most high profile of these animated half-hours is The New TNN's "Stripperella," part of the network's heavily hyped cartoons-for-grownups line-up, The Strip.
Created by comic-book legend Stan Lee, the series follows stripper extraordinaire Erotica Jones, voiced by -- who else? -- Pamela Anderson.
When she's not onstage wowing her legions of male fans, Erotica battles the forces of evil as crime-fighting babe Stripperella.
Naturally, her foes all bear outrageous names and powers like Dr. Cesarean, a plastic surgeon who injects his patients with exploding breast implants, or the man-hating Queen Clitoris.
To defeat them, Stripperella must employ brains, brawn and her natural ... er ... assets.
Although she sports a different name and rogues gallery, Stripperella is basically a rip-off of Barb Wire, the futuristic vigilante Anderson portrayed in a disastrous 1996 live-action film.
Unlike that humorless movie, "Stripperella" is played entirely for laughs, with the writers constantly acknowledging the ridiculousness of the premise and characters. While this high level of self-parody is welcome at first, the show grows too silly for its own good.
Maybe it's Anderson's flat-line readings, maybe it's all the juvenile sex gags, but "Stripperella" is never quite as funny as it seems to think it is. There's a chance that a true satirist like Harvey Kurtzman, one of the founders of MAD Magazine and the mind behind the classic Playboy strip "Little Orphan Fanny," might have turned it into something memorable. In this incarnation, though, "Stripperella" is as disposable as an issue of Stuff.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from the adult-oriented "Stripperella" is Cartoon Network's kid-friendly series "Teen Titans," which premieres tomorrow at 9 p.m.
Based on the popular comic book, which had its heyday in the early '80s, the series assembles a group of teen heroes and sends them off on elaborate adventures. The members of this junior Justice League include team leader Robin, his alien girlfriend, Starfire, and a cyborg named ... Cyborg.
There's also a goth chick with psychic powers named Raven and Beast Boy, a green kid who can assume the form of any animal.
In between scrapes with super-villains, the five teens hang out in Titans Tower, where they train and crack wise, albeit always in full costume. Don't they ever have to wash those things?
The makers of "Teen Titans" are obviously huge anime fans, and they've tried to give their show a similar look.
While this translates into uneven character designs -- Robin is far too thin and Starfire's gigantic eyes threaten to swallow her face at times -- the action is very well drawn. There's a grace and fluidity to the animation that you don't often see on cable cartoons shows.
If only the series were better written.
The first two episodes of "Teen Titans" recycle stories that have been told a thousand times before in previous superhero cartoons. In the premiere, the Titans are defeated by a particularly tough group of adversaries and must relearn how to function as a team to beat them.
The second episode finds Starfire's older, cooler sister Blackfire arriving on Earth for a visit, setting off a bad case of sibling rivalry.
To be fair, the show is primarily aimed at kids and young adults, so there's a limit to the kinds of stories it can tell. Still, the writers should be able to come up with more original plots than this. "Teen Titans" is filled with enough action to hold the interest of the under-10 crowd, but older viewers will most likely be rolling their eyes.
For audiences that are too old for "Teen Titans" and too young, or too sophisticated, for "Stripperella," there's MTV's "Spider-Man," a largely successful adaptation of the beloved comic-book hero. Thankfully, the series skips re-telling Spidey's well-known origin story and leaps straight into the action.
In the first episode, the wall-crawler squares off against a fellow teenager with electrical powers, while the following installment sees him fighting a deadly ninja warrior.
Meanwhile, his alter ego, Peter Parker, must deal with such life-threatening challenges as college exams and a crush on pal Mary Jane Watson.
Like "Teen Titans," what really distinguishes "Spider-Man" from the majority of television cartoons is the excellent animation. Employing a mixture of traditional and 3-D animation techniques, the animators have hit upon a bold visual style that suits the character. Spider-Man has never looked this good in action, and that's including the recent film version.
The scripts aren't bad either, thanks largely to the involvement of comic-book writer Brian Michael Bendis, who currently pens the excellent "Ultimate Spider-Man" title. The soap opera aspects of the show, most notably Peter's relationship with Mary Jane, are a little tiresome, but so far such storylines have been kept to the background.
With its 10 p.m. timeslot and surprisingly high violence quotient -- there's even a decapitation in the second episode -- this "Spider-Man" has clearly been designed to grab MTV's usual twentysomething audience.
Whether it will retain this crowd after the first few episodes remains to be seen. Nevertheless, this is easily the strongest superhero series on the air right now and the one with the most creative potential.
July 18, 2003© 2003 Media Life
-Ethan Alter is a New York writer and a frequent contributor to Media Life.
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