My Take Radio

I hate to sound like a bro­ken record, but DC just keeps putting out qual­ity; title after ani­mated title, they con­tinue to amaze. Bat­man fans are in for a treat. Joker fans are in for a hell of a shock­ing treat because this is pure comic book Joker. The story fol­lows two clas­sic Bat­man sto­ry­lines: the end­ing to “A Death In The Fam­ily” is the begin­ning of this story, albeit slightly altered. The remain­der of the film is not coin­ci­den­tally based upon the events of the “Under The Red Hood” sto­ry­line. Bat­man must face a mon­ster that Gotham one regarded one of its great­est heroes. He must stop Jason Todd, the sec­ond Robin, whom he buried after he’d been beaten and blown up by the Joker.

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Dark­seid is a long­time Super­man vil­lain, seen many times in Super­man and Jus­tice League car­toons as one of the few that could truly stand up to the Man of Steel. Regard­less, noth­ing less of a Kryp­ton­ian mon­ster ever put Big Blue down deci­sively. So what if Dark­seid had a vicious Kryp­ton­ian at his dis­posal? Enter the next big DC team-up movie, “Superman/Batman: Apoc­a­lypse.” Sort of a play on words since Darkseid’s mobile home planet is called Apokolips. Dark­seid recov­ers a female Kryp­ton­ian after her space­ship crashes in Gotham Har­bor. Know­ing what he will do with her, Super­man and Bat­man must infil­trate Apokolips and res­cue her from her new “mas­ter.” Will they be able to save her? I for one intend to find out when this releases on Blu-Ray, Sep­tem­ber 28, 2010.

You have seen the movie, pos­si­bly mul­ti­ple times and you just can­not wait to own it at home. Well, hard­core fans prob­a­bly will want to wait. This is not in any­way bash­ing the film or try­ing to dimin­ish its appeal (as if that were pos­si­ble). I sim­ply want con­sumers to be aware of what they could be run­ning out to get on Earth Day, Thurs­day April 22. If you are a big videophile who has to know all the lit­tle secrets about how your movie was made than this is with­out adoubt not the Avatar blu-ray or DVD for you to buy. There will be one and only one ver­sion of this movie com­ing out on Thurs­day and the only rea­son it has two discs is because one is the blu-ray ver­sion and the other is the DVD.

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20th Cen­tury Fox Home Enter­tain­ment has pulled another great boner in going back­wards on the release of Burn Notice: Sea­son Three. You’ll notice no blue bar with the trade­mark “B” in the mid­dle of the above image (which accord­ing to retail web­sites is the offi­cial cover of the set). The rea­son for this is that Sea­son Three of Burn Notice will release on (gasp) DVD only, despite the fact that Sea­son Two saw a Blu-Ray release. Fox would quickly point out that sea­son two’s blu-ray ver­sion saw poor sales and that the price point may have been the rea­son. Truth isthat the price is not the rea­son. The rea­son the last sea­son did not sell well despite the fol­low­ing of the show is that the blu-ray was not mas­tered prop­erly. TCHE needs to stop being lazy and put the proper work in so that blu-rays are not look­ing worse than their DVD coun­ter­parts and then peo­ple would pony up the money. I for one am very dis­ap­pointed that my Burn Notice col­lec­tion will look so sloppy thanks to the DVD/Blu-Ray/DVD mix I am forced to own.

.…and it’s not the Rid­dler, at least not yet. On the heels of The Dark Knight, Warner Premiere, Warner Brothers’ direct to video pro­duc­tion branch plans to show you an even more dis­turb­ing Gotham this sum­mer. “Bat­man: Under The Red Hood” plans to bring to life one of the dark­est chap­ters in the detective’s his­tory as he has to deal with a loss more tragic than the one that made him first don the cape and cowl. The cre­ators have assured us that this one will be more vio­lent than Christo­pher Nolan’s last block­buster by describ­ing the open­ing scene. Taken straight from the pages of the clas­sic story “A Death In The Fam­ily,” fans will be treated to the Joker lit­er­ally beat­ing (Jason Todd) Robin to death. The irony here is that some might think this scene is too much for a PG-13 movie but it was actu­ally the fans that voted to have Todd killed back in the ‘80s when DC gave them the choice. Bat­man has lit­tle time to grieve as a new vig­i­lante arises in Gotham; one with a name he is already too famil­iar with — Red Hood. The big prob­lem is that Red Hood is ready and will­ing to cross the line that Bat­man never will. Any­one that has kept up with the last few DC ani­mated movies knows that these sto­ries have been enjoy­able and well writ­ten. I look for­ward to this one espe­cially after hear­ing about the cast: Bruce Green­wood is Bat­man, Jensen Ack­les is Red Hood, and none other than Neil Patrick Har­ris will voice the fea­ture film debut of Nightwing! Looks to be a good sum­mer this year in and out of the­atres. I’ll leave you with the fol­low­ing quote by Bat­man on the Joker:

“All I’ve ever wanted to do was kill him…A day doesn’t go by where I don’t think about sub­ject­ing him to every hor­ren­dous tor­ture he’s dealt out to oth­ers and then.…end him.”

Wow.

Sources: www.batmanredhood.com and www.imdb.com for voice tal­ent (Andrea Romano is the voice director)

DC con­tin­ues to out­shine Mar­vel in the film depart­ment, both on the big screen and directly-to-video in your home. With the new “Jus­tice League: Cri­sis On Two Earths,” DC has put forth its sec­ond full-length fea­ture star­ring mem­bers of its pre­miere super team. The manda­tory trio of tri­umph: Bat­man, Super­man and Won­der Woman, head up the team along with favorites like Green Lantern, Mar­t­ian Man­hunter, Flash and oth­ers. The good (and not so good) thing about the movies is that they look to sat­isfy fans of both the comic and the tele­vi­sion shows. The JL car­toon on Car­toon Net­work used Jon Stew­art as the Green Lantern, while the new movie uses Guy Gard­ner who is the more pop­u­lar and arguably the best of the (Earth) Green Lanterns. I am guess­ing that the recent GL movie which showed Gardner’s ori­gin may have had some­thing to do with this choice as well. Any­way, the story is quite the clas­sic one, hav­ing been dealt with on a smaller scale in an episode of Bat­man: The Brave And The Bold, another DC car­toon from Car­toon Network.

The story opens on an alter­nate Earth with Lex Luthor and The Trick­ster (alter­nate Joker) pulling off what appears to be a crime. They steal a small device and try to make their escape as the “good guys” are clearly in pur­suit. The Trick­ster stays behind to buy time for Luthor and is con­fronted by Hawk­girl and Mar­t­ian Man­hunter, only it’s not so much the heroes we know as hawk­girl runs Trick­ster through with her sword (not mace). Luthor man­ages to tele­port to the Earth we know and asks the Jus­tice League for help (and he does it but­tnaked, no really). I will leave the rest for you to see as there is plenty of action and fight­ing to keep you enter­tained. This movie, more so than her own, is proof pos­i­tive that you do not wanna piss Won­der Woman off.…ever.

The voice act­ing, while top notch, always puz­zles me in these films. I never under­stand why they choose to use tal­ent other than the well estab­lished voices for Super­man, Bat­man, Won­der Woman and the Flash. Still, Andrea Romano always puts qual­ity inot the voice direc­tion and it is the minor gripe of a fan of the tele­vi­sion shows. The art direc­tion was incred­i­ble and I can­not wait to watch this again on blu-ray. While not exactly the same, this is prob­a­bly the clos­est that any of the movies have come to the look of the orig­i­nal JL car­toon, which was always a joy to watch; fans will not be dis­ap­pointed. The story is prob­a­bly not as deep as some of the other DC movies, but I would for­give that because any story touch­ing on infi­nite Earths has to be done very care­fully; this was a plot line that almost destroyed the DC uni­verse because it got too out of con­trol for the writers.

Cri­sis On Two Earths releases on DVD and Blu-Ray next week on Feb. 23 and if you have enjoyed any of the last five DC movies then you will love this one. The only one I per­son­ally liked more was Pub­lic Ene­mies and that is because that is the only one that was prob­a­bly the most mature of all the DC movies. This is def­i­nitely one that you want to have in your col­lec­tion. Won­der Woman vs Super­woman, Bat­man vs Owl­man, Super­man vs Ultra­man, Green Lantern vs Power Ring, Flash vs Johnny Quick; who will win? Check this flick to find out.