JUSTICE LEAGUE (animated film)

JUSTICE LEAGUE (vt "JL", "JLA", "Justice League of America"—USA promotional, abbreviated, and informal titles—IMDb). Rich Fogel, script, one of four producers, series story editor (with Stan Berkowitz). USA: Warner Brothers Television Animation. Premiere 17 November 2001, Cartoon Network. Andrea Romano, casting, voice direction. Butch Lukic, Dan Riba, series dir. "Based on DC Comics Characters," then individual credits for creation of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Kelly Ann Foley, dialog/ADR ed. Sungman Huh et al, animation dir. Namgil Cho et al., animation. 75 min.

The opening sequence of an astronaut on Mars with the name, we eventually learn, of J. Allen Carter alerts sophisticated viewers that there will be some allusions in this episode. (Note the John Carter of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs [published 1912-64], J. Allen St. John as a Burroughs illustrator, and the secret identities of the comic book Golden Age Flash, Green Lantern, and Hawkman: Jay Garrick, Alan Scott, Carter Hall). Most of the allusions are just playful, but the invading Martian fighting machines are from H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (q.v. under Fiction), and are in "dialog" visually with the manta-ray Martian warships of Byron Haskin and George Pal's WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), the Imperial Walkers of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and the shadow-casting Imperium ship of INDEPENDENCE DAY. According to a reliable contributor, "there are" in addition "visual references to the film STARSHIP TROOPERS" in the "arthropoidal pointy appendages on the ends of the legs of the alien tripods [= fighting machines]" (films listed under Drama). Note that the heroes and general mise-en-scène are in 1940s/50s comic-book style, with hard edges and clear colors, while the shape-shifting invaders from Mars—conquerors of Mars, not Martians—their machines, and all things associated with them are amorphous and High Modernist. CAUTION: Parents might want to tell kids viewing the show that advocating nuclear disarmament is not necessarily evidence that one is a shape-shifting agent of an alien power seeking to render Earth vulnerable to invasion. (17/XI/01; JoeK, George Nicholas, 20/I/02)