Justice League: The Brave And The Bold Part One

Screen Shots

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Episode Credits

Synopsis

Somewhere on the planes of Africa, a pair of western archaeologists dig for evidence that might shed some light on mankind’s origins. Behind them, the image of a distant mountain shimmers and is replaced by a towering, futuristic city. The archaeologists are so engrossed in their work that they don’t notice the change. A trio of gorillas on flying “sledges” emerge from the city. It’s a pursuit, two guards/police pursing and firing upon an escaping criminal. Upon seeing the archaeologists, the leader of the pursuers exclaims “Humans!” and flees back into the city. The illusion of the distant mountain shimmers back over the city, cloaking its presence. The surprised archaeologists are left trying to make sense of the madness.

In a Central City diner, the Flash regales a pair of disinterested young women with stories about his adventures. His anecdote is cut short by a traffic accident that sends a car crashing thought the diner’s window. The Flash plucks the two women to safety, makes his apologies, and then runs off at superspeed to find the truck that smashed the car into the diner. The Flash soon catches up with the truck as it ploughs through the traffic. To keep up with the truck he has to run over and around the cars scattered in its wake. Then, once he gets closer, he has to dodge pot shots fired by truck’s passenger until he eventually runs out of ammunition. The truck’s driver tries ramming the Flash off the City’s elevated highway, but he looses control and the truck plunges through the safety barrier. The Flash pulls the passenger and driver back on to the highway at superspeed, but the truck continues its fall.

The falling truck is caught by a green glow signalling the arrival of the Flash’s Justice League team-mate, the Green Lantern. He had been responding to a police call about stolen radioactive isotopes – the same isotopes that are in the back of the truck that had inadvertently attracted the Flash’s attention. The passenger and driver of the truck seem to snap out of some sort of hypnotism when challenged. Their papers name them as Professor Arthur Chin and Doctor Mark Stevens, workers at the Riverbluffs Research Centre (the site the isotopes were stolen from). The Centre’s director, Doctor Sarah Corwin, can’t explain the actions of her colleagues and suggests that they may have snapped under the pressure of their latest project. She refuses, however, to divulge what that project is and claims that it’s top-secret. Corwin gets angry at the Flash for waving a banana at the gorilla in her research cage and ends their conversation.

Green Lantern and Flash return to Central City to continue their investigation, but Lantern is exasperated when the Flash has to stop at a burger stand to refuel his hyper-accelerated metabolism. The Flash then runs off to investigate screams about an escaped gorilla leaving Green Lantern to pay for the burgers. Police squads have already started combing the park, but the silver gorilla evades them through a child’s play area and steals a car. The Flash forces the gorilla to crash by bursting the car’s tyres with a rake. He expects the driver to be a simple zoo creature, but is shocked when it tells him to “Get your filthy paws off me you stinking human!” Before the Flash can process his surprise he’s hit from behind by an unusal beam fired from a nearby roof top by Dr Corwin. The Flash suffers a series of nightmarish hallucinations and blacks out. When he comes around he finds himself in the police station and is accused with stealing the recovered isotopes from the police pound.

Green Lantern posts bail for the Flash, but even he has trouble believing that the Flash spoke to a talking gorilla. They return to the park to find it still cordoned off. Green Lantern’s ring is able to follow the gorilla’s distinctive footprints and he stuns it with a blast from his ring. The indignant ape then asks, “Was that really necessary?” He finally gets to introduce himself as Solovar, Chief of Security for Gorilla City. His race of super-intelligent gorillas had lived in peace, isolated from humanity, for thousands of years until a power mad genius called Grodd tried to conquer them using mind control technology. Solovar stopped Grodd’s scheme, but he escaped into the human world. Solovar followed Grodd after it was discovered that he’d also stolen the security codes to Gorilla City’s defences. His mind control technology explains the befuddled scientists and Flash’s amnesia because Grodd needs the isotopes to power his devices.

Solovar traced Grodd via an e-mail conversation with Dr Corwin. Lantern says they should call in the other Leaguers, but the Flash is dismissive and races off before Solovar can give him a head band that would have shielded him from Grodd’s mind control device. The Flash reaches the primate lab first and disarms Corwin, but he is ambushed by Grodd. When Lantern and Solovar arrive Grodd tells the mind controlled Flash to attack them. The mind controlled Flash knocks out Solovar and Green Lantern is forced to stun his team-mate in self-defence. By then Grodd and Corwin have retreated behind a force field. Their last act before fleeing is to engage a reactor that generates an expanding sphere of glowing energy. Even Green Lantern’s ring is unable to stop it expanding through the walls of the laboratory and into the city. Once the energy sphere reaches the city limits it vanishes taking the city with it. The only thing left is behind is the barren earth were Central City once stood.

Commentary

The Brave And The Bold

The Brave and the Bold is one of those phrases, like “Secret Origin” or “Year One”, that permeated DC Comics marketing. The original Brave and the Bold was a seminal DC comic-book that ran from the late 1950s into the 1980s. It was originally an anthology title and was one of the books that DC used for trialling new ideas and characters. The Justice League made their first appeared in a three issue run in Brave and the Bold #28-30. Later on, the title became a team-up book focusing on pairs of characters from across the DC universe. The particular characters rotated each week, but it was eventually fixed as Batman plus one other random character. It’s in this format, as a Batman team-up book, that Brave and the Bold became the prototype for the Batman: Brave And The Bold cartoon.

The Archeologists

In the teaser, the male archeologist exclaims “It appears to be older than the Proconsul africanus!” The fossil Proconsul africanus is from the extinct proconsul genus. Its name means before Consul (a well-known chimpanzee in Britain at the time of its discovery) – so literally “before chimpanzees”. The current status of the proconsul genus is debated, it is either an early ancestor of modern apes or a relative of our earliest ancestors from the time the apes were diverging from the monkeys. The implication for the origin of Gorilla City is that Grodd’s people are a naturally evolved species which separated from normal gorillas millions of years ago as compared to the comic book gorillas who were made intelligent recent history by exposure to alien radiation.

The first proconsul skull was discovered by an expedition run the by husband and wife archaeological team of Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey. It would seem that the archaeologists in this episode are an homage to the Leakeys as they are listed in the credits as “Dr Louis” and “Dr Mary.” They’re voiced by Catherine Cavadini and Richard Doyle. Cavadini is probably best known as Blossom from the Powerpuff Girls and has also played Adam Strange’s wife, Alanna, in Batman: The Brave And The Bold. Doyle has played a couple of minor voices in Justice League and recently played Senator Kelly in Wolverine and the X-Men.

The Flash

In the comic books, the second Flash, Barry Allen was killed off in 1985, and his costume was passed on to Wally West (his former sidekick, Kid Flash). The Flash in Justice League is based on the 1980s/90s version of Wally West, although his secret identity isn’t confirmed until the Season Two finale. Wally was less serious than his counterparts and wasn’t adverse to flirting with the ladies. He hid his feelings of inadequacy in his new role with a mask of humour.

During the late-1980′s the Flash’s superspeed was treated in a more “realistic” manner than it had been before. He was limited to loving at only around Mach one and he needed to replenish the calories he spent. Sustained use of his superspeed would leave him ravenous and would result in scenes of him downing burgers, hotdogs, or any other food stuff to keep his superfast metabolism fuelled. The scene in the diner and with the burger vendor parallels that trend.

The Flash’s comic often opened with a narration something like, “My name is Wally West, I am the Fastest Man Alive, The Flash.” The Flash is the Fastest Man Alive in the same way that Superman is The Man of Steel or the Batman is the Dark Knight.

The Flash’s Hallucinations

The distortions the Flash undergoes in his hallucinations are homages to old comic book storylines/covers. The opening hallucination shows the secret origin of the second Flash (Barry Allen) a police scientist who is caught in an electro-chemical explosion and becomes the Flash. While the personality and secret identity of this Flash is that of Wally West (as established in “Starcrossed”), it would appear that his back story and occupation are the same as Barry Allen. This is confirmed in the JLU episodes “” where we see Wally at work in the police lab. The other hallucinations are from the following covers:

Fat Flash: The Flash #115 (Sept 1960) “The Day Flash Weighed 1,000 Pounds!” The Flash fights gorilla Grodd.

Skinny Flash: Mirrors are typical manipulations of the Mirror Master, e.g. The Flash #105 (Feb-March 1959):

Brainy Flash: The Flash #177 (March 1968) – “The Swell-Headed Super-Hero” vs. Trickster:

Puppet Flash: The Flash #133 (Dec 1962) “The Plight of the Puppet Flash!” vs. Abra Kadabra:

Gorilla Flash: Flash Annual #12 (1999) – Part of the JLApe crossover – a plan by Grodd’s supporters to turn the Justice League into gorilla’s just as Gorilla City is about to join the United Nations.

Gorilla Grodd and Solovar

Gorilla Grodd, Solovar and Gorilla City were introduced during 1959, DC’s own Year of the Gorilla. Their first appearance was in the story “The Menace of the Super-Gorilla!” from The Flash 106 (May, 1959). It was written by John Broome and drawn by Carmine Infantino under the editorial supervision of Julius Schwartz. The super-intelligent gorillas of Gorilla City had been normal gorilla until they were given intelligence by exposure to a strange meteorite or by the machinations of aliens (it changes on the telling). Their utopian city existed separate from the normal world behind a special cloaking force field. The only human that knew its location were the Flashes.

In the original comics Solovar was the King of Gorilla City. He was captured by human hunters and played dumb to protect the secret of Gorilla City. It was Solovar who had the “force of mind” power and Grodd followed him to Central City to try and discover his secrets. Grodd then return to Gorilla City in order conquer it. Solovar teamed up with Barry Allen (the second Flash) to stop Grodd. That story from Flash #106 serves as the approximate basis for this episode, but it didn’t original feature Green Lantern or the rest of the Justice League.

Grodd is played by Powers Boothe, President Noah Daniels from the 24 TV series. Solovar is played by David Ogden Stiers, Major Charles Winchester from M*A*S*H. Boothe and Stiers have both played versions of characters in DC animated movies that were loosely based on the DCAU. Boothe played Lex Luthor (normally played by Corey Burton in Superman TAS) in Superman: Brainiac Attacks and Stiers played the Penguin (normally played by Paul Williams in Batman TAS) in Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman. Stiers also has the dubious distinction of playing J’onn J’onzz in the 1997 JLA TV pilot.

Misc

• This episode only features the Flash and Green Lantern, the rest of the Justice League don’t appear until the second episode.
• Dr Sarah Corwin is played by Virginia Madsen. Genre fans may know her as Louise Marcus, the love interest in Highlander II. She played Wonder Woman’s mother, Hippolyta, in the 2009 Wonder Woman DVD animated movie and Raven’s mother, Arella, in the Teen Titans cartoon series. She returned as Roulette for the Justice League Unlimited episodes “The Cat and the Canary” and “Grudge Match.”
• It’s normally assumed that the city where the League’s adventures take place is Metropolis, but that’s a city with a well established port. The landscape shown at the end of this episode is decidedly land lock which, then taken with the Flash’s hallucination, would imply that it’s Central City.
• Solovar steals a parked car from somebody who resembles the comedian George Carlin. He sounds a bit like him as well.
• Solovar: “Get your filthy paws off me you stinking human!” – Solovar’s first line to the Flash. A Planet of the Apes reference. “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!” is the first line spoken by Charlton Heston’s George Taylor to one of the apes in the 1968 original. It’s become one of the most famous lines in movie history and was reprised by Michael Clarke Duncan’s Attar as “Get your stinking hands off me, you damn dirty human!” for the 2001 remake. Maybe the producers aren’t allowed to use the worn “damn.”
• The Flash: “Having fun Jojo” – Mojo Jojo is the chimpanzee enemy of the Powerpuff Girls. But this cannot be Mojo Jojo as there is only one Mojo Jojo in the world and this is not he. Two Mojo Jojos is too many and three is right out.

Opinion

Highlights

The Flash’s hallucinations whilst under Corwin’s mind control are brilliant.

Oddities

If the Flash was fast enough to pull the driver and passenger out of the falling truck why didn’t he do that first of all then they were driving through the city.

My thoughts

This episode is a considerable change of pace from the last story (the grim War World). I’d normally associate Dini with the comic book’s references and comedy, and McDuffie with the sharp dialogue. All those factors are in here in handsome measure. I really don’t know how the writing efforts for this episode broke down, but it certainly helps to have three such strong talents as Fogel, Dini, and McDuffie on the same episode. This is also Dwayne McDuffie’s first writing credit for Justice League TV series. He’d become a significant member of the production team in later seasons and would go on to write the Justice League comic book.

I like Green Lantern’s constant sense of exasperation with the Flash. It’s handled nicely with some nice animation on Lantern’s expressions. The choice to focus on Solovar for the first episode was surprising as Grodd doesn’t really get established as a threat until the closing scenes. However, he’s a strong presence and serves the comedy moments better than the villain would have.