**Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided us with a free copy of the Blu-ray. We reviewed in this blog. The opinions we share are ours.
Let’s face it, there are way too many TV series about comic book superheroes. A few of them have been great fun; a couple of them even addictive. Most of them have been forgettable at best. (Is Cloak and Dagger even still on? Anybody?) But nothing is quite as bizarre and wonderful, in or out of the comic book ‘space,’ as the DC Universe’s Doom Patrol.
The Doom Patrol in comics form dates all the way back to 1963; it was a B- (maybe C?) level super-team created by Arnold Drake and Bob Haney (and artist Bruno Premiani) for DC Comics. They had the distinction of being one of the first set of heroes to be well and truly killed off in 1968, then brought back to life repeatedly, and ultimately transformed in 1989 by the rule-breaking comics writer Grant Morrison. And that’s when things got really weird. The hallucinatory, abstract, basically insane comic Morrison crafted with a variety of is still considered a classic, run, more than twenty-five years later…and it’s that warped vision of the DC Universe, superheroes, and comics in general that was the basis for the ongoing DC Universe TV series.
It’s insane, and it’s great. The production values are very high; the writers understand (as much as any sane person can) the stories and messages of Grant Morrison, and the actors playing the main “heroes,” and we use that term very loosely here, are excellent. Brendan Fraser, who supplies the voice of Cliff Steele (Robot Man), is foul-mouthed and hilarious, and when he is forced to make an actual appearance in the flesh presents a wonderful image of the dissipated heart-throb of decades past. April Bowlby, who plays the uncontrollably gloopy Rita Farr–known in the comics as Elasti-Girl–is both arrogant and charming. Matt Bomer, who supplies the voice and occasionally the face of Negative Man, the irradiated ex-astronaut who is inhabited by a mysterious creature made of “negative energy,” is wrapped in bandages like a Space Age mummy most of the time, but here, too–excellent voice work and in-the-flesh performances when called upon. And British actor and YouTubers Joivan Wade, as the tortured Cyborg, a high school kid who’s unexpectedly turned into half-machine, half-human by his manipulative father, provides a nice combination of classic heroism and rage that you have to admire. Read the rest of this entry »
Little Shop of Horrors–the odd Roger Corman movie about the extraterrestrial man-eating plant that invades Skid Row–is about to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary (it premiered in the summer of 1960). The musical version created by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman was a surprising Off-Off-Off Broadway hit more than 35 years ago, and then immortalized in 1986 by Frank Oz. The performances in that film, notably Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene, and Steve Martin–with the impossibly perfect voice of Levi Stubbs as the alien plant, Audrey 2–still echo in the mind of any lover of musical theater, but you don’t see it revived very often. For good reason: it is a tough show to pull off. It takes creativity, brains, and not a little courage.
