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McFarlane Toys- DC Multiverse: Batman
Continuing my quest to re-watch all the DC Animated features to date and give some thoughts regarding 3 key touchpoints: Animation Style, Voice Acting & Story. These are really just rough notes as I watched the movie and might not make a whole lot of sense unless you have recently watched it. See 290-2, 303-2, 318-2, 331-2, 344-2 & 358-2 for my previous instalments.
Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. 2010
Animation style- Right from the jump the animation style is way better than Superman Batman: Public Enemies and it feels more like the Wonder Woman and Green Lantern movies as well as the other TV animated pictures of the time.
Voice acting- Where the animation is better, the choice of voice actors is lacking this time. I think that was to distance it from the animated Timm Verse shows, but these casting choices are just a bit off for my liking. Batman is played by the 3rd most famous of the brothers: William Baldwin (Backdraft) who actually does an alright job but is no Kevin Conroy. Superman is played by Mark Harmon (NCIS) and seems way too abrasive for my likes. I get that Superman is not always a nice guy, but he’s a bit of a jerk in this movie. Chris North (Law and Order & Sex In the City) does pretty well as Lex luthor. As for others rounding out the cast Josh Keaton (Spiderman from the awesome Spectacular Spiderman Series) plays the Flash, Gina Torres (Star Wars Rebels and Transformers Prime) plays Super Girl and rounding out the WTF choice: James Woods for Owl Man; I mean, he is a bit of a super villain IRL? Maybe his role of Owl Man went to his head. Jokes aside, I do love his voice which is too bad as he is a crazy person.
Story- Based on a 2 part comic series of Justice League of America, Crisis on Two Earths is a relatively classic role reversal story featuring Lex Luthor as the leader of a different dimension’s Justice League who is trying to take down evil versions of the hero’s that we all know and love. Using an inter dimensional portal gun, he enlists the help of our Justice League (well, the normal, comic accurate JL anyways) and eventually saves the day. For me, the most enjoyable part of a movie like this is to see all the new good and bad versions of the good characters that we are familiar with. Thankfully they took sometime with it and didn’t just give Superman a goatee to denote “bad guy”. That said, I would have liked to see more of the “good” villains aside from Lex and Jester (Joker). As with Superman Batman: Public Enemies, Crisis features a lot of side characters including Cheshire, Black Lighting (good and bad), Red Tornado and my fave: Firestorm. Lastly I liked seeing Batman and Owlman (Bad Batman) face off and felt that it was really interesting that of all the good/bad pairs Batman and Owlman were the most similar. If THAT doesn’t tell you that Batman is a bad day away from becoming a super villain, I don’t know what will.
Pros: If you told me 3 years ago that McFarlane Toys would be producing well-articulated action figures based on DC Comic hero’s I would call you a damn dirty liar and spit in your stupid face, but here we are. I’ll be honest, when I first heard that McFarlane got the licence I had mixed emotions. Happy that it was taken from Mattel, a company that has been doing subpar releases for years and given to a company that has a fantastic history of producing quality detailed figures, but a bit worried given that the same fantastic history does not include articulation; something that is a must for figures in this day and age. Lucky for us, McFarlane had relaxed their views on the articulation with previous lines like Star Trek and Fortnite and has suited it well to the world of DC. Overall I think McFarlane has done a really good job with DC’s dark knight; he is nicely sculpted figure with a familiar modern Batman look featured in Detective Comics #1000 has standard McFarlane articulation that works for some decent poses and comes with a few character specific accessories as well as a stand. Lastly I want to commend McFarlane for keeping the price point lower at $25. This might be a small difference, but given the stuff that Hasbro is churning out wave over wave at $5 more, I really appreciate this little price difference.
Cons: I feel that most of the issues that I have with Batman, I’m going to have with the rest of the McFarlane DC figures: The ball joints for the ankles and wrists are a bit of a pain to work with and the hip joints do really have enough movement to work well as a thigh swivel. Lastly his grapple gun rope is made from soft plastic and starts to droop over time.
