Movie Review - JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time

JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time [2014]

JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time is a neat little one-shot among the DC Animated Movies that's just a little stand-alone story that's not adapted from any famous comic book, and isn't part of the New 52 based series of movies. It's a fun little 50-minute movie whose premise is simple superhero fun, co-starring two members of the Legion of Superheroes. Oh, and it also features time travel, of course.

Homaging the old Challenge of the Super-Friends cartoon, the movie starts off with Lex Luthor and the Legion of Doom trying to do a generic doomsday plan by expanding the ice caps, and in the ensuing scuffle Luthor is entombed in ice and presumed dead. He isn't, of course, and flash-forward to the 31st century, and impulsive newbie Karate Kid and his responsible partner Dawnstar accidentally unleashes Lex Luthor. Luthor gets a plot device called the Eternity Glass, unleashing the mysterious entity Time Trapper and began travelling back in time to do some time-travel hijinks. 

There's a neat bit as the League and Legionnaires are split into two teams, one to go back in time and stop Luthor's goons from preventing Kal-El from being adopted by the Kents... which the Legion of Doom manages to do, wiping the Justice League out of existence. Karate Kid and Dawnstar are left in the 21st century with no allies, and decide to do a paradox themselves by breaking Luthor out of ice... but it's all for naught because the Time Trapper turns out to not just be a genie, but a malevolent entity that wants to remake the world for... reasons? But Karate Kid and Dawnstar end up beating the Time Trapper anyway because light apparently trumps dark matter. 

It's honestly a pretty fun little movie whose only fault is the lack of promotion or push behind it, unlike the rest of the DCAUOM movies who are either hyped up due to being based on an important story arc, or are part of the New 52 movies. And honestly, being completely stand-alone and having a relatively more juvenile tone (not as badly as the short-lived Batman Unlimited series, though) makes this honestly slightly more obscure than it is. 

It's a fun little story that is definitely worth watching. The story runs like a Superfriends episode with half the cheese trimmed out, and allowing the characters to punch each other, but it's not quite bad. It's a shame that despite being sort of set up as the pilot to a series of "JLA Adventures" movies, this movie is so poorly distributed and generally quite obscure that I didn't even realize it existed until well after a year after its release. Overall, a fun but ultimately somewhat forgettable little adventure. I don't really have much to say about this.