Not to mention the 500 Supermen, the 500 Hulks...
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Batman Beyond was genuinely one of the best superhero cartoons, though. It had no right to be any good, and if a cartoon with that exact premise was made today it'd be trash, but it was excellent.
I agree with u/AnimeAnon about most of the rest, though. Multiverses were a mistake.
The thing that made Beyond so strong that most of these fail is that it was a genuine torch pass. Like, it was way in the future with things changed and the original couldn't just "come back" to reclaim his costume.
It was a sequel instead of a multiverse counterpart.
I love how in the episode with Ra's Al Ghoul and the Lazarus pit, when the possibility of Bruce getting young and being Batman again is brought up, Terry preemptively insists he's not going to be Robin.
Or in Shriek's intro episode, when Terry realizes Bruce still calls himself Batman in his own head. "That's my name now." And Bruce actually has a hint of a smile.
Tell that to my subconscious.
You know what else it did? It treated the predecessor with the respect he fucking deserved! Being far enough in the future that Bruce was a frail old man that couldn't possibly keep up with crime-fighting, he was still an absolute beast that could strike fear in the hearts of men!
I hate how modern cartoons are so fucking braindead compared to what we used to have. A ton of cartoons treated the audience with respect, look at stuff like Static Shock, Clone Wars, Teen Titans, etc. they tackled hard topics and challenged the audience with moral dilemmas and provided well-produced action.
Hell, Teen Titans and Static Shock are some of the best portrayals of racism I’ve ever seen period. They treated the racist characters with respect and allowed them to look past surface-level observations and grow as a character instead of immediately writing them off as deplorable and making them the butt of every possible joke.
Nowadays we have teen titans Go doing an episode about thick thighs and butts or something stupid like that.
The Teen Titans episode where Cyborg accidentally uses a racial slur on Starfire and they have a calm discussion of it and everybody involved grows as a person would be completely impossible to make today, nobody involved in Western animation could possibly do it.
I'll be honest that actually sounds pretty gay.
It was, as another person who liked the show. It very much was.
I liked the characterization displayed between them on it though, with afterwards him trying to awkwardly empathize with her noting that people say mean things because of how he looks too, and she's just 100% not getting the idea of humans hating humans, intra-race discrimination just isn't in her understanding, so he throws her an out with "because I'm half-robot."
It was very 90's "Very Special Episode" energy, but the characters didn't grandstand on it, and the fact the guest protagonist of the episode was a racist actually didn't impact the overall arc of the character. He was a racist. He still solved the problem, still was useful, still helpful, Robin politely asks him to leave Earth after the problem was solved if he's going to be a racist little shit, and he does, noting Starfire is "one of the good ones" from working alongside her but to watch out for any others of her kind, as parting words of wisdom.
The episode basically ends with a "whelp, we saved Earth again, thanks to that guy... Man that guy was a racist bastard though, wasn't he? Oh well. Who wants dinner?"
Even Avatar which was fairly recent relatively speaking was incredible.
Agreed. The entire DCAU/Timm verse was great. Except Static Shock.
I have a soft spot for Static Shock for one specific scene: when Virgil and Riche meet Clark Kent after they'd met Superman as Static and Gear while fighting a giant robot monkey (it's a superhero cartoon, I'm willing to go with it).
To summarize if you don't want to watch (fair enough): hearing that a big-shot reporter is going to be writing a story about them, they naturally wanted to brag about how well Static and Gear did...and then Clark got a notebook out and innocently asked:
Virgil and Riche hadn't thought through any sort of cover story and have no idea what to say to keep their identities secret; Richie ends up saying that the answer depends on the definitions of 'it' and 'is', while Virgil tells Clark that asking hard-hitting questions like that is what makes him a good reporter. And Clark laughs with them.
It's a great scene because it's the exact opposite of the typical crossover "figure out some contrived reason to make the two heroes fight each other" plotline. Clark gives them a hard time and reminds them that keeping a secret identity is hard work, but is clearly on their side and rooting for them. Virgil and Richie are a bit too full of themselves, but it's clearly the normal exuberance of youth and something they'll get better at.
A thirty-second character interaction develops all three characters and is reasonably funny to boot. The writing was good in a lot of places in that show.