TV Review - Teen Titans Go!

I may be twenty-five and look twenty-one (and proud of it), but in many ways I'm still a kid at heart. I collect action figures, I play games, and I absolutely love cartoons, from Transformers, to the DC Comics Animated movies and TV series, to anime, to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (yes, I'm a Brony, and a huge Lauren Faust fan), but there are few cartoons I've enjoyed more than the old Teen Titans series from a few years back. That show was amazing, from an utterly perfect voice cast, to great stories, to animation that could move fluidly between action scenes and comedic scenes, to an utterly brilliant mix of said comedy and action. It was pretty much perfect, taking queues from seemingly every great cartoon to come before it. When it was cancelled, I wept (inwardly, I am a man), and when I heard that it was being revived as a more comedic show, I was cautiously optimistic, but was my caution warranted? Yes, but not nearly so much as I would have thought.



What can I say about Teen Titans Go!? First, the original voice actors are all back, and as spot on as ever. In fact in recent DC Animated Universe films, when someone else other than Khary Payton plays Cyborg (who is Justice League now in most media, rather than Teen Titans), it just sounds wrong to me and distracts from the experience. The animation is also just as perfect as it was in the original show, with a more chibi (to use a Japanese term) and comedic lean that can still show action well if need be, and a theme that is a great remix of the original's badass theme by J-Pop band Puffy AmiYumi. The new show even fits pretty well into the continuity of the old series, drawing upon details of the original's timeline, though not so much that it can be definitively placed. It is a much stronger show than I ever would have expected, and in fact, if I had to fault it for anything, it would be some of the stories.

Yeah, okay, I know, this is a much bigger gripe than I'm making it sound like here, at least in most cases, but here it's pretty minor, and I'm gonna explain why. Like most modern comedy cartoons, TTG! is split into two twelve minute segments rather than a cohesive twenty-two minute story. This means that the jokes don't have to work too hard, and it's a great setup. Already after only a few episodes, this show has already established its jokes well, too. Robin is a sadsack who constantly overestimates himself around his super-powered teammates, getting himself hurt, Starfire is, well, Starfire, no improvement needed, Cyborg and Beast Boy are pretty much just how you'd imagine them in their downtime based on what we've seen in the old show, just turned up to eleven, and Raven (my eternal favorite, played by my favorite voice actor, Tara Strong) is the "only sane man" of the group. The writers have set up an ensemble comedy cast without taking any of the characters out of, well, character. So what could I possibly not like about the writing? Well, it seems like so far, at least to me, about half of the episode-specific jokes, that being the individual plotlines of the twelve minute segments, have fallen flat.

To explain what I mean, let's take the most recent episode as an example. In the first segment, Beast Boy and Cyborg want more time to hang out, but they seem to always be busy when the other isn't, so they trick Raven into casting a duplication spell on them so they have another Cyborg and Beast Boy to hang out with. The copies, however, begin copying themselves again and again until they outnumber the original Titans by several dozen, and decide that they want the Titan's Tower for themselves, kicking the original's out. This all pans out to be pretty much as hysterical as it sounds, but I guess the writers felt that they needed something stronger to go out on, so we soon find out that the "original" Beast Boy and Cyborg are also copies, and that the real real ones have been lazing about in a apartment downtown playing video games and eating junk for weeks. What this ultimately leads to it a fat BB and Cyborg, something that I never wanted to see, and that just isn't very funny. It would have been more interesting to see the Titans have to round up the copies out of the Tower so that Raven could de-summon them or something. Not an unfunny episode, just an episode that could have been more funny than it actually was. The second segment, however, was significantly better. Robin, nervous about asking Starfire to dinner at a new restaurant, begins to hear a voice in his head. Of course he doesn't acknowledge it and instead goes on with his plan to ask Starfire out, only to find that she is already going with Robin's near-identical rival Speedy, who even has Robin's voice in this cartoon (a detail that literally had me laughing out loud). So, while the voice in his head narrates, Robin kidnaps Speedy, steals his costume, and goes with Starfire to the restaurant to discredit Speedy by acting like a jerk, only to have Speedy arrive dressed as Robin. The two duke it out, leading Starfire to the conclusion that neither is right for her, and she instead goes home with, hilariously, the voice in Robin's head. It was random, but it also made so much sense. Every element came together perfectly, and had me laughing the entire time.

So it's not that this show isn't good, isn't funny and exciting, isn't a worthy successor to the original, its that it could be better, and I think that it'll get better if some of the better segments are any indication. While it's not a mostly-serious continuation of original like I'd originally hoped it would be way back when it was first announced, it's still a fun show in the tradition of the original, combining interesting stories with action and humor. I'm happy to say that I can give Teen Titans Go! a solid 7 out of 10.