YouTube Cinema: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

“Vengeance blackens the soul, Bruce. I’ve always feared that you would become that which you fought against. You walk the edge of that abyss every night, but you haven’t fallen in and I thank heaven for that.”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

IN JASON’S DEFENSE — There were times when Batman: The Animated Series almost made me pee my pants. The writers never had compunctions about making the Dark Knight… well… dark. And that’s what makes it the greatest super-hero cartoon of all time.

As a young teen, most fiction didn’t faze me. But Batman: TAS was downright grim. The Joker, as voiced by Mark Hamill, was coldly psychotic, making him rival only Jack Nicholson as the scariest incarnation of the character (which might change once I see the late Heath Ledger’s performance in the forthcoming The Dark Knight Returns). And Bruce Wayne was a shell of a man, almost a split-personality case unable to connect with other people.

In 1993, Mask of the Phantasm was supposed to wrap up the Warner Brothers cartoon’s storyline. Originally intended to go straight to VHS, it was instead released theatrically. Batman survived, though, his popularity carrying him to the Batman and Robin cartoon and then on to The New Batman-Superman Adventures and eventually to Justice League Unlimited.

This movie does what all good superhero cartoons and comics should do: It uses an external villain as an incidental plot device to explore the hero’s soul. This is no jolly Adam West Batman, prancing around in his Bat-boat with Bat-shark repellent. This is a confused, guilty Bruce Wayne, hiding under his cowl, hunted by the police, and self-defeated in the shadow of his parents’ gravestone.

Mask of the Phantasm adds a new angle to the Bat’s backstory. In addition to the death of his parents, the movie says that Bruce’s transformation into a caped crusader is as much a result of his rejection by Andrea Beaumont, his fiancee, who disappeared after her father was caught up with the mafia. In a flashback, Bruce retreats within himself and dons his mask for the first time, a sight that terrifies Alfred.

Years later, Andrea returns to town and immediately recognizes Batman as Bruce. At the same time, a ghostly figure starts hunting down and executing local gangland patriarchs. Police think the killer, who wears a cape and mask, is Batman, and they nearly manage to capture Bruce. Later, we learn that the Phantasm — who is never directly referred to be name except in the title — also wants to kill the Joker, who was a one-time mafioso.

MotP keeps the 1920s pulp feel of Batman: TAS, with Bruce as The Detective and with grainy, noir backdrops in high relief. There are noir cityscapes,harsh angles, and a low-tech aesthetic. The climax is a three-way showdown between Batman, the Phantasm, and the Joker, set in the later’s inky, dystopic World Fair hideout.

This is what Batman is all about: Heartbreak, unrelenting resolve, pain, a conflicted Bruce Wayne begging his parents’ ghosts to let him be happy, and his demon-haunted understanding that he can’t be.

Read This: The Forever Formula

FROM JASON’S RECENT AMAZON ORDER – Extending the human lifespan sounds like a great achievement, right? A friend of ours recently linked to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article about Resveratrol, a drug that significantly prolongs life and eases old-age ailments.

The write-up also hinted that pharmaceutical researchers are on the cusp — as early as two generations away — from making drugs that will push the average life expectancy to 100, or maybe 120, or even higher.

I was immediately reminded of a book titled The Forever Formula, written in 1979 by Frank Bonham. I had to read it again, and Amazon shipped me a copy. Typically labelled juvenile fiction, you could easily breeze through it in four hours.

The novel is set in 2164 and is seen mostly through the eyes of 17-year-old Evan Clark, brought forward in time from 1984 through suspended animation. When he wakes, he learns his father created a drug called Rejuvenal that allows people to live to 250 years old.

But the Rejuvenal treatments have exacted a horrible toll. Most other nations have banned the drug, but the United States gave rise to a Senior Party controlled by the superannuated. The birth rate has fallen, the elderly have stripped most young people of habeas corpus, and the oldest are dying of terminal boredom — a mysterious geriatric disease called the Logardo epidemic.

In a world where 80 is the new 21, overpopulation is a cancer that eats away at the young. Only the truly elderly are allowed to live under plastic domes and breathe purified air. They have the best food. They play croquet, attend eternal gin parties, squabble with their equally old neighbors.

And worst of all, Rejuvenal has warped their bodies, draining skin of its firmness and color. It leaves users with gelatinous, see-through skin stretched over clearly-visible muscle and sinew. The side-effect is called Guppyism.

Meanwhile, with the elderly sapping the best resources, the young live in the moldering wrecks of cities, their air drained of oxygen because ocean plankton are all but extinct. Roaches and rats overrun everything outside the domes and voraciously attack people. Impoverished vendors sell oxygen on the streets and the government has planted miles of cloned tree farms.

In real life, the idea of overpopulation is a ludicrous one because there is so much landmass in the world completely uninhabited. Right now, more than half of the U.S. population lives within 50 miles of the East or West coasts.

But as Scott Rubin of Geeknights is so fond of pointing out, the problem isn’t so much overcrowding as it is a) finding ways to distribute food from rural farms to urban population centers, and b) dealing with the byproducts of those centers.

Let’s spin some numbers. The global population in 1950 was about 2.5 billion, and today it’s reached 6.7 billion. The U.S. Census Bureau predicts there will be 7.9 billion people by 2025 and 9.3 billion by 2050.

The US is growing at a faster rate than any other industrialized nation. The country has swelled by about 100 million people in the past 41 years and US census experts estimated that the population hit 300 million in October 2006. If it continues to accelerate at a steady rate, it will top 400 million sometime around 2040.

But let’s say the average lifespan did, as Bonham worries, go from 75 to 250 years. Those numbers would exceed the already-burdened curve we have now between supply of essentials and demand for the same. Things get even worse in The Forever Formula when Evan learns the American president, Charlie Fallon, wants to scan his brain for the recipe of another drug Evan’s father was working on — one that would make Man immortal.

A group called the Juvenile Underground decides that such a formula would mean Seniors would establish a permanent slave underclass among the young and consume all the country’s remaining resources. They help Evan escape his hospital cell and go on the run.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, other than to say it comes close to being great, except for a deus ex machina that leads to a (for some) happy ending. It’s all a little too convenient, and manages to candy-coat some pretty grisly deaths. I think Bonham would have been better served penning the last few chapters bluntly and bloodily.

Awesome video game artwork

FINALLY ESCAPING ANDREW’S FREE TIME – This isn’t going to be a super-massive post, but I found these awesome pictures that someone shopped earlier this year. He took several different video game sprites and integrated them with real photos giving a surprisingly interesting effect. Credit to RETROnoob for some awesome artwork. Follow the link for more photos as well as higher-resolution images.
SPACE

How Portal could take its concept another step

FROM JASON’S CHEAP-ASS GAMING ETHIC – So, a day late and a dollar short as always, I finally played Portal.

Yes, yes, I understand that it came out last October — nine months ago, for those of you counting along at home — but I had no desire to play Team Fortress 2 and I am indifferent at best about Half-Life. Andrew posted his analysis of Portal way back in November, when it was still relevant, and I realize how right on the money he was back then.

But I’ve got some thoughts after blitzing through Portal in about three-and-a-half or four hours and I just had to share. First of all, I’m not a puzzler, and Portal is little more than a puzzle game. It’s a mind-bending and slick puzzler, to be sure, but still relies on a figure-this-out-and-move-on mentality.

So the problem, for me at least, was that the game was too much about solving mazes and not enough about outsmarting AI. There were so many times I wanted to find a flesh-and-blood enemy — a Nazi, because that’s what video games are for — and open a portal under him straight into an incinerator. I wanted to open a portal behind a super-soldier and sneak through with a knife to slash his neck before he could scream. I wanted to fire bullets through a portal. I wanted to make portal pits, teleportal baddies into shafts, drop them from so high that they splat on the ground, and make looping portal traps in enemy paths with bullets flying in and out infinitely.

I didn’t get a chance to do any of that. Instead, I (briefly) got to outwit turrets, which turned out to be my favorite part of the whole ordeal. Zapping a portal exit behind a tripod turret and tipping it over a second later was exhilarating. Imagine how much better it would be if the turrets were actually smart….

I think it’s a safe bet that some Portal-esque weapon will make appearance in the next Half-Life episode. The clues are all there; the Aperture logo can be spotted in the Orange Box installment. I can offer one bit of constructive criticism: The gun needs a laser sight to show me quickly what direction I’ll pop out of the exit. That would have been extremely helpful in lining up switch activation puzzles, too.

I really did enjoy Portal, don’t get me wrong. It was just so deterministic. Shoot this place on the wall to get to the next level. Do it this way, not another, smarter alternative. Don’t do it that way. There’s only one, four-step method to get across that gulf. There’s only one way to disable that trap. There’s only one way to get through that map. Ugh.

There’s enough been said already on teh Intarwebs about the game’s humor — which was amazing and original — so I won’t waste time there. I want to dally instead on one specific atmospheric component: The blood trail markings.

There were no NPCs in Portal to give you the story, to point you along toward the end. There was only evidence that someone else had been there before, a weary and insane lab rat trailblazer who scribbled survival tips and ravings on the walls. It reminded me a lot of the film Cube, which was another survival thriller that hinted at a never-ending and deadly testing of human reasoning.

Andrew’s right in his November post: Portal is important. Let’s be honest — PC gaming hasn’t given birth to a new genre in a long, long time. I remember those early adolescent years when things like RTS and FPS were new and shiny and full of hope. That doesn’t happen anymore. Admittedly, Portal is just a new spin on an old genre, but it’s the best spin I’ve seen in more than half a decade. It made me think — really wrinkle that brow! — in angles perpendicular to the ways I usually do. It bent gravity. It made space meaningless. And it taught us about the dangers of lying.