Legion of Superheroes DVD Is Fun, But No Futuristic Extras

The fine folks at Warner Bros. have begun releasing their hit show Legion of Super Heroes on DVD with the release of Volume One recently and I’m here to say that it’s a whole lot of fun. This was something that I had missed on Cartoon Network, but was eager to see how it turned out as the Mark Waid run on the newest Legion series was a whole lot of fun and had me becoming a bit of a fan of those teenaged super heroes in the future.

Volume One contains the first four episodes and a featurette about moving the Legion from the page to the small screen. I desperately wish WB would put these things out in seasons, but for whatever reason they seem to think this format works better. It’s a bare bones DVD, but the selling point should be the series itself, and the four episodes that are included here, the first four, are a lot of fun.

The set up in the first episode is great in the Legion coming back in time to retrieve a young Clark Kent who isn’t even Superboy, let alone Superman. The joke in there is that the Legion has traveled back in time too far, but given time Clark will surely become the (super) man that he is destined to be. What’s fun about this is that Clark takes off to the future, being reassured that they can drop him back off before Ma Kent even knows he’s gone. I loved this element because it felt sort of like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends having that sweet apartment that turns into their HQ. I felt like the possibilities were limitless.

However, within these four episodes, Clark never does go back home, and that whole element seems to have disappeared. Clark leaving his time and saving the world only to get back in time for dinner in each episode would have been a nice touch, but alas it was just a way to get Superboy into the future.

Now, that’s not to say that it isn’t a great time while he’s there. It seems that Legion of Super Heroes has found a way to be a great, fun, kids’ cartoon without being as silly as Teen Titans or Krypto. It seems to fall somewhere in between the aforementioned shows and Justice League.

The show itself is something that parents can watch with their kids and have a lot of fun doing it. WB and DC are really doing a great job of bringing some rather obscure characters to animated life with some success, and Legion is no different. Again, I can’t help but think the DVDs could have packed a little more punch, but I guess four episodes at a time appeals more to the demographic of kids getting Mom to buy a reasonably priced DVD as opposed to the comic collector and DVD-ophiles who need it all. But here’s hoping the first season finds its way into a nice collector’s package soon.

Pathfinder Loses Its Way!

The Unrated Pathfinder DVD came out last week, and I've had a chance to give it a once over. At first I thought it was an unfortunate happenstance that this film came out at roughly the same time as 300. Both are based on comic books published by Dark Horse, and both have an extremely stylized vision. Unfortunately Pathfinder's vision is like a blind man in the dark.

For something that I expected to be mildly entertaining, I was fighting the urge to turn it off. The tale in itself should have been one to hold my interest as my own heritage includes both Vikings (My family tree on my Father's side can be traced back to Leif Erricson) as well as Native American's, being 1/16 Blackfoot on my mother's side. A tale of Viking conquest in the new world should have been right up my alley, but it was not.

The meat of the story is that a Native American woman finds a Scandinavian boy alone and scared on an abandoned Viking warship. She takes this boy in and raises him as her own child. We flash forward to the boy as a young man, still not fully accepted by his tribe. Then, a second wave of Vikings invades and a battle ensues.

Unfortunately, the battle is rather uninteresting. Not to mention the fact that the Vikings are given subtitles while the natives speak English in a story that precedes the English arriving in the new world. Why not subtitle everyone, or perhaps subtitle no one? In this it begins its sloppiness. Add in CG blood that is the only real color in the film and it's not even interesting to look at. The film has a blue-grey color palette, but doesn't work with fake blood. The blood should match the rest of the style and it does not.

Clancy Brown gives a decent performance, but that's about all this film has to offer. The action is quick and looks choreographed, and most of the performances are bland. And so, not having seen the theatrical cut, it is tough to say what might make it Unrated. And if this is edgier, I now understand why there was such a minor media push for this film theatrically ... it just never gets to where it needs to be. The costumes are great, the color palette looks interesting, but these are all distractions from the fact that the film has so little going for it in terms of story and filmmaking. With a tale such as this, I would like to see the action, but the camera moves around it all so quickly that much of it is a stylized blur. Rent it if you must, but don't say I didn't warn you.