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Hey Stay Tooners, hope you are having a great holiday season. With winter in full swing, it’s the perfect time to grab some hot chocolate, snuggle up, and catch up on all your favorite shows and movies you’ve been waiting to see. Also since it’s the gift giving season you might want to check out some of our past reviews of shows and movies that would make great gift ideas for the comic geek in your life by clicking here. Now that we got that out of way, it’s time to get back to your feature presentation.

Title: Young Justice
Written by: Greg Weisman
Director: Jay Olivia (part 1), Sam Liu (part 2)
Company: DC Entertainment
Original Air Date: November 26, 2010
Length: 60 min.
Rated: TV-PG
Episode: “Independence Day Part 1 & 2”

*Spoilers*

Recently Cartoon Network aired the “movie premiere” (actually the first two episodes) of its newest DC animated series, Young Justice. The two-part “Independence Day” aired in late November, however, the series does not actually begin its regular run until January 2011. Loosely based on the comic book of the same name, the series is about a group of teen sidekicks working together as a junior Justice League. The team is lead by Aqualad and includes Robin, Kid Flash, Superboy, Miss Martian, and eventually Artemis, although she does not appear in the movie.

We are introduced to Robin, Speedy, Aqualad, and Kid Flash as they each face off against a different ice powered supervillain with help from their respective adult counterparts. In each of the fights it’s the teen sidekick that eventually takes down the villain. All of the teens are extra excited by the fact that today is the day they finally get to tour the Hall of Justice, headquarters of the Justice League. This excitement is quickly ruined when the teens realize that they are only getting a superficial tour of the base and are not permitted to see anything substantial. Speedy, in particular, gets very upset about this and after a confrontation with some of the senior League members, attempts to rally the other sidekicks into rebelling with him. After realizing that none of the others feel the same as him, Speedy storms out. From his behavior I would guess he was likely on his way to find his next fix.

After Speedy’s tantrum, things get a little wonky for the  Justice League. First they intend to have a meeting about the unusual occurrence of all the ice powered villains attacking all at once, however before this can happen, the League gets an urgent call about a fire at one of the Cadmus labs. At nearly the same time another priority call comes in and the League decides to react to that call instead, because the fire at the lab has already been put out. I found it odd that someone would call the Justice League to help with a fire that has already been put out, and also that the League didn’t consider splitting up and deal with both situations. As the League is leaving, Batman instructs the sidekicks to stay put, even though they offer to help out. Unhappy with the fact that they are being forced to sit on the sidelines, Robin breaks into the JL computer, searches for all the info on Project Cadmus, and convinces the others that they should go with him to investigate the fire.

Once at Cadmus, our heroes realize that all is not what it seems. Robin is able to hack into the Cadmus mainframe and finds some interesting files. One project in particular gives Robin and the others cause to go deeper into the complex to uncover what is really going on. After fighting their way through some genetically engineered creatures and a mind controlled Guardian, the boys end up trapped in the lab were the experiment they were looking for is taking place. As it turns out, the project ends up being a clone of Superman. The three heroes attempt to free this “Superboy” from his cloning pod, but little do they know, he is already being mentally controlled by Cadmus. Once Superboy is freed, he quickly attacks the boys and easily defeats them. The Cadmus board of directors then decide to clone the teen sidekicks and dispose of the originals. It is around this time that Superboy begins to fight off the mind control and question his actions. He finally is able to break free of the mind control with some unexpected help, and decides to save the others. Superboy arrives at the cloning pods just as Robin finally frees himself from his cloning pod. Together they free Aqualad and Kid Flash and destroy the cloning materials. The four teens then set out to fight their way through dozens of Cadmus genetically created creatures and reach the surface.

Young Justice seems like it is going to be a fun show to watch. The style of the show seems to be a mash up between  Teen Titans and Justice League Unlimited. The show is clearly not as silly and stylized as TT, but it is also not as serious and dark as JLU. The only issue that I have with the series is with some of the characters. The version of Aqualad that they use in this show doesn’t seem to be a good fit with the other characters. It is also strange that he is the leader of the team instead of Robin. I also feel Superboy has some major anger problems and was kind of a jerk. Another odd choice is to have this Robin and Kid Flash be Dick Grayson and Wally West! I think it would make way more sense to have had Tim Drake and Bart Allen be the Robin and Flash in this series. In fact, I actually thought that Robin was Tim Drake due to the look of his costume and the fact that he spends most of his time hacking computers in the episodes rather than actually fighting bad guys. In any event, the series looks interesting enough that it will keep any DC fan glued to the screen come this January.

Nick Zamora
nickz@comicattack.net