I had heard good things about this show, but I had never seen it as a kid. I thought it might be suitable for light entertainment, so I watched a couple of episodes. But it is just awful, I'm bored out of my mind watching it.
The animation is very cheaply done and one consequence of this is that action only confers some basic scheme of participation and outcome. It's so cartoonish that it is no longer tactile, it is not in any way grounded in physical reality. I started a game while watching this show just pointing out the number of times someone realistically should have died while taking a laser cannon to the face. But everyone emerges unscathed from any altercation, every "hit" is treated as if someone at most was pushed away roughly.
I can go on about this. There was an instance where a new villain was introduced and was under fire. He smugly stands there, powers up an attack and takes out the sentries. And this is then applauded as a display of tactical genius, proving his skills. Yet this whole operation was dependent on the inability of "automated sentries" to hit a standing target for five seconds of gunfire.
There are other cases where I just get annoyed at the lack of any tactical insight displayed by anyone. Use a gun! Seriously. I'm fairly certain that I by myself could just walk into this world and singlehandedly shoot down every single Titan. There is an early episode where a team of villains has to take out the titans, and the latter are just out in public eating pizza. Half of them don't have superpowers and can just be shot with no repercussions. But no one does this.
Here is another example why as an adult you cannot take such shows seriously. People don't share powers or outfit themselves in a manner befitting an operator or an assassin. For instance, the boy genius with various inventions etc from one episode could just, I don't know, share his skills with his team. There is no reason why he himself should even have to fight when on that same team is a superpowered giant.
Power levels fluctuate drastically not just between, but within episodes. The titans can be beaten, but then they just get serious. They show some determination and effortlessly mop up the villains. But the episodes are so compressed that we have not witnessed any sort of growth or understanding that can explain these newfound conditions.
And of course because this is a show about a team of heroes, they all must get equal billing and so on. They get a roughly equal number of action scenes to showcase their unique abilities. The problem is that not all abilities are made equal. It's not a fighting game where you have developers actively trying to tweak the balance, it's just an episodic story that should ideally explore setting and characters and so on. And the obvious result there is that Robin has no powers and should immediately lose out and that Beast Boy's power to transform into a bear or whatever should have him destroyed by any villain with actual super powers or advanced weaponry.
And so on, it just sucks and it makes no sense.
But I honestly don't care that much about action sequences, it's only that they're relatively straightforward to criticize and they're so ubiquitous in these shows. After a few episodes you start to treat them as filler or as jokes, once you hear the the faintly ridiculous battle cries and catchphrases you just tune out.
A more serious problem is that plot and character are barely existent. A typical episode introduces some minor bit of tension between two titans about nothing, which at the very least utterly fails at being a poignant depiction of some aspect of teen anxiety. And then they scare away the villain and all is forgiven. Usually you can just wait for the one character to show up at the decisive moment and deliver a cheesy line. It's usually not even explained how they can even find the villains. Half of the time it doesn't even explain where the villains come from. The titans just show up randomly all the time and start to fight. I quickly zeroed in on Robin as one of the most obnoxious characters. He's supposedly the leading man who should investigate, i.e. instigate plot development, but it's never anything more than "Titans Go!".
I might watch a handful more episodes, but I'm not expecting it to get much better. On the other hand, other shows of this type did have good episodes/arcs (for instance the Batman animated series, JL:U).
etc. this is maybe a bit pointless to write. I'm not giving the show a bad grade, because I can't fairly rate it. I can't get into the mindset of a kid anymore who watches this for the first time. All I know is that I just can't take this seriously.
The animation is very cheaply done and one consequence of this is that action only confers some basic scheme of participation and outcome. It's so cartoonish that it is no longer tactile, it is not in any way grounded in physical reality. I started a game while watching this show just pointing out the number of times someone realistically should have died while taking a laser cannon to the face. But everyone emerges unscathed from any altercation, every "hit" is treated as if someone at most was pushed away roughly.
I can go on about this. There was an instance where a new villain was introduced and was under fire. He smugly stands there, powers up an attack and takes out the sentries. And this is then applauded as a display of tactical genius, proving his skills. Yet this whole operation was dependent on the inability of "automated sentries" to hit a standing target for five seconds of gunfire.
There are other cases where I just get annoyed at the lack of any tactical insight displayed by anyone. Use a gun! Seriously. I'm fairly certain that I by myself could just walk into this world and singlehandedly shoot down every single Titan. There is an early episode where a team of villains has to take out the titans, and the latter are just out in public eating pizza. Half of them don't have superpowers and can just be shot with no repercussions. But no one does this.
Here is another example why as an adult you cannot take such shows seriously. People don't share powers or outfit themselves in a manner befitting an operator or an assassin. For instance, the boy genius with various inventions etc from one episode could just, I don't know, share his skills with his team. There is no reason why he himself should even have to fight when on that same team is a superpowered giant.
Power levels fluctuate drastically not just between, but within episodes. The titans can be beaten, but then they just get serious. They show some determination and effortlessly mop up the villains. But the episodes are so compressed that we have not witnessed any sort of growth or understanding that can explain these newfound conditions.
And of course because this is a show about a team of heroes, they all must get equal billing and so on. They get a roughly equal number of action scenes to showcase their unique abilities. The problem is that not all abilities are made equal. It's not a fighting game where you have developers actively trying to tweak the balance, it's just an episodic story that should ideally explore setting and characters and so on. And the obvious result there is that Robin has no powers and should immediately lose out and that Beast Boy's power to transform into a bear or whatever should have him destroyed by any villain with actual super powers or advanced weaponry.
And so on, it just sucks and it makes no sense.
But I honestly don't care that much about action sequences, it's only that they're relatively straightforward to criticize and they're so ubiquitous in these shows. After a few episodes you start to treat them as filler or as jokes, once you hear the the faintly ridiculous battle cries and catchphrases you just tune out.
A more serious problem is that plot and character are barely existent. A typical episode introduces some minor bit of tension between two titans about nothing, which at the very least utterly fails at being a poignant depiction of some aspect of teen anxiety. And then they scare away the villain and all is forgiven. Usually you can just wait for the one character to show up at the decisive moment and deliver a cheesy line. It's usually not even explained how they can even find the villains. Half of the time it doesn't even explain where the villains come from. The titans just show up randomly all the time and start to fight. I quickly zeroed in on Robin as one of the most obnoxious characters. He's supposedly the leading man who should investigate, i.e. instigate plot development, but it's never anything more than "Titans Go!".
I might watch a handful more episodes, but I'm not expecting it to get much better. On the other hand, other shows of this type did have good episodes/arcs (for instance the Batman animated series, JL:U).
etc. this is maybe a bit pointless to write. I'm not giving the show a bad grade, because I can't fairly rate it. I can't get into the mindset of a kid anymore who watches this for the first time. All I know is that I just can't take this seriously.