Teen Titans S01E01 Review: When There's Trouble

Teen Titans, Season 1, Episode 1: Final Exam

A couple of months ago I made a vote on this blog about which old superhero cartoon I should review, because I'm planning on binge-watching some of the older superhero cartoons I've watched as a kid (and some that I haven't watched at all and would welcome watching). Admittedly, Batman: The Animated Series, my all-time favourite cartoon, was not in the list because I just rewatched it somewhat recently... but Teen Titans and Justice League took the lead by a storm. We finisheds season one of Justice League last month, so let's crack open Teen Titans.

What's the Teen Titans, you ask? They're a group of superheroes from the DC comics made up of sidekicks, led by the first Robin, Dick Grayson, and has since grew to have a lot of members that aren't just simple sidekicks. In 2003, Cartoon Network has been pushing a lot of DC-based cartoons. Batman: TAS, Superman: TAS, Justice League, Static Shock... and among them, Teen Titans took the channel by storm. What is this? It introduced a young me to a group of characters I barely recognize -- Robin was the only dude in the team I knew about. The tone was different from the more 'let's adapt comic book stories' cartoons of that time period, taking a zanier and more fun-based approach to superheroing. Even the animation was different, heralding a more stylized thing that was a hybridization of Japanese Anime and American cartoon animation... which would herald several other Cartoon Network shows (The Batman, Ben 10, Transformers: Animated, et cetera) that would shy away from the 80's and 90's more American style and adapt this "Animerican" thing.

And the show was... half-comedy-action half the time, which makes the couple of super-serious episodes actually have a large impact. It's very, very focused on its main five characters, the titular Titans, and we don't really get long origin stories about the good guys or the bad guys. It takes a different approach from the TAS-verse, with a more childish and Superfriends-style approach to the cast. The Titans live in costumes a near 100% of the time, living in a gigantic T-shaped tower, and there's absolutely no focus on secret identities and whatever. It's definitely aimed for a younger audience, but there are some episodes and plotlines that can definitely impress older viewers.

There's a lack of realism, probably, in blatantly shoving aside all of the secret identity thing, taking nearly nothing seriously and the superheroes are just, well, full-time superheroes. There's little to no backstory to the characters, with the barest hints dropped, and the villains also don't have complex origins either. They're just... there. It contrasts very wildly with the more serious and traditional Justice League series running alongside it, but it's part of the show's charm. The lack of burden to explain backstories and going through the superhero secret identity drama actually frees the show to focus more on more powerful storytelling and developing the titular five characters. And while it would be great to see what they could do if they had actually tried to do otherwise -- I would definitely love to see a more mature take that explored all the facets of the Teen Titans' rich backstory -- this was what we got and it's surprisingly endearing and impressive.

Yes, Justice League might go for the big and spectacular, featuring all the big names and retelling some of the greatest DC stories, but the inherent hyperactivity, character development and sheer fun of Teen Titans is one part of why I love these superhero stuff. Thanks to reruns and DVDs, I probably watched nearly every episode of the first two seasons of Teen Titans at least twice, but I have scant knowledge about the later seasons.

There's a... sequel? Show-based-on-this-show? Reimagination? Called Teen Titans Go that is running now, but that is a bit of an abomination, honestly, that turns the show into a South Park/Family Guy style parody of the original Teen Titans that felt kind of, well, shit. I will shut my mouth now because I've only watched like ten minutes of the show so am not qualified to trash-talk it, but quick look-sees into other forums seem to echo my sentiment that they'd rather have Young Justice and Beware the Batman, shows that are completely screwed over by the network in favour of promoting doucheTitans.

Anyway, let's not talk about TTG. Let's talk about the 2003's Teen Titans. our first episode is 'Divide and Conquer'... which is actually supposed to be the third episode, but thanks to some shuffling, Divide and Conquer got moved to the first of the slot. And I'm honestly surprised that neither first episodes really serve as a good premiere episode. It's a kinda sad to veer from me hyping up a series and then segueing into the fact that, hey, the first episode kind of sucks.

In a sense... it's honestly a bit of a bad episode to introduce these five heroes to us. We don't know what their personalities are, we don't really know why they hang around together, and it's honestly a bit of a failing of this show that around three or four of their earliest episodes revolve around one of the Titans threatening to leave... which is kind of a strange direction to take considering that the show hasn't given the audience any real indication to just why we should even care about these characters at all. All five bar Robin (and maybe Cyborg, considering he's DC's new favourite poster-boy) are likely new faces to you. 

But it did set the tone pretty well, if nothing else. We get to see the Titans muck around in their tower, we see Cyborg and Beast Boy being 'those two guys' that act like rowdy brothers, arguing about video games and blowing shit up. We see Starfire being like this funny foreigner nice lady who has no idea what's acceptable on Earth. We see Robin being the stoic team leader. We see Raven being this quiet, antisocial girl who still just hangs out with her noisier friends. It's just that, well, the show just transitions from this little ad-style sequence introducing a group of evil supervillains, before cutting to these heroes... and we know next to nothing about them. I mean, yeah, there's this thing called context clues, and it certainly is intended to have us focus on the heroes as characters ('prankster', 'serious leader', 'rowdy tech geek', 'super nice culture shock girl' and 'emo goth') instead of having us think of them in terms of their origin stories or whatever ('Batman's sidekick', 'tragic cyborg', 'demonspawn', 'alien girl' and 'Doom Patrol dropout') but I think Teen Titans skews too much to showing and not telling, at least for its first season.

I did appreciate that we just jump straight to them doing their powers without any long explanation (though the actual intended first episode is guilty of doing that a bit). Beast Boy transforms into any green animal? Yeah, why not? What are the specifics of Raven's shadow magic thing? Well, just kind of magical telekinesis and healing and whatever is suitable for the plot. We learn more as the show goes on, and, y'know, Cartoon Network does have these 'meet the Titans' advertisement that highlight the five Titans and their powers all the time back when the show was on air. So, um, yeah.

We are introduced to HIVE, which in the comics does originate from Teen Titans comics though here it's reimagined as a supervillain Hogwarts, training little young supervillains to go out to the world and work for mysterious armoured men standing in the shadows. We see scant little of the HIVE headmistress and Slade, though Slade is cryptic and scary enough that it's a shorthand for him being important later on. The titular HIVE team is comprised of Mammoth, Jinx and Gizmo, the three of them being portrayed as a well-organized hit squad and will prove to be recurring enemies throughout the run of the season.

The main plot? It's honestly simple. HIVE beats up the Teen Titans, apparently causing them to believe that Robin is dead, but Robin randomly shows up all fine in the third act, and they beat HIVE up with some teamwork. It's nothing too stellar, really, and the writers clearly still have a bit of trouble finding the right grasp for these characters beyond their initial personalities. Robin's serious, Cyborg's the tough guy, Starfire's the sensitive girl, Beast Boy's a prankster and Raven's emo, though I think this episode does get their main personalities across. It's not until around the second half of the first season that some of them truly get fleshed out. 

The three villains? Well, they just act like generic bullies. Jinx (redesigned in the cartoon to look like an actual goth instead of the weird Indian sorceress that she was in the comics) is that bitchy girl that torments you in school. Mammoth is just a big brutish idiot. Gizmo, a little midget with a backpack that sprouts robot limbs and jets, is an irritating little twit that calls you booger-face and laughable kiddy insults like that. And it's pretty easy to hate them yet like their designs, especially when they randomly take over the Titans Tower for... for no real good reason, admittedly.

As far as first episodes go, Teen Titans doesn't have an impressive one. Honestly it's quite underwhelming, with the 'Robin is GONE!' plot not amounting to much, and the whole 'we lack teamwork' bit not really being displayed well. As far as first episodes go it's honestly quite underwhelming. But it does set the tone and introduce the characters to us, and it does have a couple of fun action scenes. Anything involving Beast Boy transforming into a giant dinosaur to rampage and throw villains around is fine by me.


DC Easter Eggs Corner:

Here's a quick rundown about the titular Titans, because I like talking about them, and I don't want to spend every single episode pointing out about their character quirks:

• The Teen Titans starred in the series are actually based on the second incarnation of the Teen Titans team, known to seasoned comic book readers as 'New Teen Titans'. While the first Teen Titans ran for a brief time and only featured sidekicks of DC's biggest superheroes (Robin, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash, Aqualad, Speedy), New Teen Titans featured a cast that mixes old and new characters, having a roster similar to the one featured on the show (though Robin spent most of his career in the Titans as Nightwing, and Beast Boy is known as Changeling), plus Wonder Girl and Jericho as regulars. The cast of the book rotated other Titans in and out sometimes.
• Robin: The cool leader of the team, Robin (Dick Grayson, though the show really doesn't deal with secret identities) is a normal human compared to his buddies and is trying to be as independent as he can, coming out from under the shadow of being 'Batman's sidekick'. The cartoon doesn't reference Batman (not directly and not until later) or Robin's past with him, but Robin is competent, intelligent and far more about planning and subterfuge instead of blindly rushing into the fray. As he series develop we'll see his attempts at emulating 'Batman' clash with the style of open teamwork and friendship that the Titans display. From an origin story standpoint, Batman adopted the orphaned trapeze artist Dick Grayson when his family was killed by a staged accident by gangsters, and trained him as a ward/adopted son, before some arguments caused Dick to strike out on his own away from Batman and form his own team.
• Cyborg: Cyborg is, well, a cyborg. He is half-machine due to a tragic accident (we don't get much origin stories in the cartoon proper, though) and in the Teen Titans, he's a testosterone-filled tech geek, spending most of his time being boisterous and loud, and usually being one of the first to charge into the fray. Early on in the series he's mostly paired with Beast Boy as the loud, arguing duo. In battle, Cyborg generally transforms his arm into a sonic cannon to blast people, and sometimes just charges in because, y'know, dude's a robot. 
• Raven: Raven is cold, detached and snarky as all hell. And 'hell' might be a great word choice there, because, well, her magical abilities come from a far more sinister place than it initially seems. While her powers are usually limited to surrounding items with shadows and levitating them, Raven's abilities are actually far more diverse, and later on in the series she starts using more powerful magic like teleporting herself and her allies in her shadows, unleashing blasts of dark energy and whatnot. Raven's origin story will be the centerpiece of the fourth season so I won't spoil it that much here. 
• Beast Boy: Beast Boy is the comedian of the team, always cracking jokes and trying to prank his friends (mostly Cyborg) and generally causes antics that get the team into trouble in some of the less-serious episodes. He has the power to transform into any animal imaginable (including extinct ones) though the animals are always green in colour. While he initially seems the cheeriest and the biggest clown of the bunch, his origin story and situation (explored in seasons 2 and 5) shows that he hides a lot of pain under his veneer of being a big clown
• Starfire: Probably the least developed of the five main characters, Starfire is an alien hailing from the planet Tamaran, and is an ever-bubbly over-friendly girl who has a huge culture shock coming to Earth, where she is unfamiliar with a lot of the customs, and finds a lot of things that Earthens would find disgusting as something, well, excellent. Starfire's every-bubbly personality and insistence on observing weird and sometimes-irritating Tamaranean culture things will cause some points of contention with the other Titans. She is the physically strongest member of the team, possessing powers of flight, super strength and the ability to launch green starbolts from her hands. 

HIVE, the Hierarchy of International Vengeance and Extermination, is a cult-slash-Illuminati-organization that first debuted as enemies of the Teen Titans, and showed up in the fourth season of the live-action Arrow as well. Over the years HIVE has been allied with bigger villains such as Deathstroke (well, Slade in this show -- we'll talk about him when he becomes relevant.), Brother Blood and Hector Hammond. The HIVE trio are actually based on three members of the Fearsome Five (Psimon and Shimmer are absent), a group of villains that's unrelated to HIVE in the comics. The show has dramatically under-aged the group into the Titans' contemporaries, with the original characters being adults.

• Mammoth: Baran Flinders is a powerful but dumb brute. That's... all there's to say about Mammoth, really. He was the brother of fellow Fearsome Five member Shimmer, but since Shimmer doesn't show up in Teen Titans, well, 
• Gizmo: Mikron O'Jeneus is a bald dwarf who flies around with a jetpack and able to transform ordinary mechanial objects into dangerous weapons. In the comics, like Mammoth he's a middle-aged man, but here he's like six years old or something. The cartoon's version was popular enough that when the comic-book Gizmo was killed, his son took over the mantle of Gizmo in an incarnation similar to the cartoon's version.
• Jinx: While the rest of the cast were relatively unchanged visual-wise (beyond the age lift) from comics to the cartoon, Jinx was... very different. Her comic-book incarnation was a bald Indian lady dressed very provocatively like a belly dancer, and had the powers to manipulate the elements and control fire, air and earth. The cartoon version of Jinx changes her to a cute little witch-girl who's definitely not bald -- she's got pink hair done up to form two large horns that definitely took a crapton of hair gel. Her powers here are attributed to 'giving bad luck' to whatever she hits with her pink blasts, which is more similar to Marvel comics' Scarlet Witch or Black Cat.