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47-1 - Batman: The Animated Series - Episodes 17-18
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One episode features Batman catching an invisible man who is creepier than he should be. The other features Adam West and is genuinely one of the best episodes in the series.
This week on Toonami Absolution, Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Episodes 17 and 18: "See No Evil" and "Beware the Gray Ghost."
"See No Evil" opens with a string of gem thefts committed by a man no one can see. The thief turns out to be Lloyd Ventrix, an ex-con who stole an experimental invisibility suit from Wayne Enterprises, a suit that turns out to be slowly poisoning him, and has been using it to visit his estranged daughter Kimmy, who has been calling the invisible man "Mojo" and treating him as an imaginary friend, unaware that it's her father breaking into her room through the window (yeah, its as creepy as it sounds).
Then "Beware the Gray Ghost" arrives, and the show goes somewhere different. A series of mysterious bombings are plaguing Gotham, and Batman finds himself unable to identify the pattern, until he makes a connection to a black-and-white pulp adventure show called The Gray Ghost that he watched obsessively as a child, a show that may have contributed more than anything else to why Bruce Wayne became the kind of man who puts on a cape. To find the missing episode he needs, Batman tracks down Simon Trent, the actor who played the Gray Ghost, now broke, blacklisted, and reduced to selling his own merchandise to pay rent. Simon Trent is played by Adam West, whose casting turns the episode into something the show rarely is: a genuine act of self-reflection about what popular heroes mean to the people who grow up with them, and what it costs the people who embody them.
We discuss why "Beware the Gray Ghost" is one of the most emotionally resonant episodes in the entire run, what Adam West brings to the role that no one else could, and what it means that this version of Bruce Wayne was inspired not by tragedy alone but by a fictional hero in a cape.
🔔 Subscribe for our ongoing episode-by-episode watch-through of Batman: The Animated Series!
📌 Topics covered this episode:
– Batman: TAS Episode 17 "See No Evil" recap & review
– Batman: TAS Episode 18 "Beware the Gray Ghost" recap & review
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Toonami Absolution is a weekly podcast where Alyx, Jon, and Sam revisit the Toonami and Adult Swim shows that made them, and you, you.
From the block's early days with shows like Space Ghost: Coast to Coast and Transformers: Beast Wars to the imported anime that made Toonami and Adult Swim appointment television for a generation of kids, such as Cowboy Bebop, Sailor Moon, and Dragon Ball.
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48-3 - Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman
33:31|A new figure in a Batsuit has been operating in Gotham without Bruce Wayne's knowledge or permission. Gotham's criminal infrastructure is being systematically dismantled. Batman has three suspects and no idea which one is responsible. The film is not as interested in the answer as you might expect.This week on Toonami Absolution, Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman (2003), the third theatrical film in the DC Animated Universe, produced during The New Batman Adventures era and arriving after Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero and Mask of the Phantasm.The film introduces three new characters who could plausibly be the new Batwoman: Kathy Duquesne, the daughter of a Gotham crime boss; Dr. Roxanne "Rocky" Ballantine, a scientist at Wayne Enterprises; and Detective Sonia Alcana of the Gotham PD. All three have motive. All three have capability. Kathy's father is directly involved with the Penguin and Rupert Thorne in a weapons deal that Batwoman has been targeting. Rocky has the technical means. Sonia has the training.The film also introduces Bane as a hired muscle character for the Penguin-Thorne operation, and features Kevin Conroy and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. in typically excellent form. Just a shame that the film totally fumbles its three new women and clearly doesn’t know what it wants to be.We discuss where Mystery of the Batwoman sits in the DCAU theatrical run, whether the composite-Batwoman reveal earns its execution, what the film does with its villain roster, and whether the Bruce-Kathy romance is a feature or a bug.🔔 Subscribe for our ongoing watch-through of Batman: The Animated Series and the DC Animated Universe!48-2 - Dragon Ball Z [Ocean Dub] - Episode 26
35:03|The Spirit Bomb landed. The Great Ape is gone. Vegeta is on his knees and Krillin is holding a sword. One word from Goku is going to define the entire rest of Dragon Ball Z.This week on Toonami Absolution, Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Ocean Dub Episode 26: "The Battle Ends,” the conclusion of the Saiyan Saga, and one of the single most consequential moments in the franchise.Gohan's Great Ape transformation, triggered by the artificial moon Vegeta created, has him rampaging uncontrollably, and Vegeta, still recovering from the Spirit Bomb, is right underneath him when Gohan reverts to normal and falls. Crushed under a child, barely conscious, Vegeta is now genuinely helpless for the first time in the entire arc. Krillin picks up Yajirobe's sword. He is in a completely reasonable position to end this. Then Goku, broken and unable to move, contacts Krillin telepathically and asks him not to. His reasoning, that Vegeta might change, as Piccolo did, and that the fight was the most exciting thing that has happened to him in his life, is presented by the dub as a moral argument.It isn't really that, or at least not in the original version: Goku wants to fight him again when they're both at full strength. The Ocean Dub softens this into something more overtly heroic, and the distinction matters for how you read everything Goku does afterward. Krillin relents. Vegeta, mortally wounded and humiliated, escapes in his space pod. The Saiyan Saga is over. Gohan, Krillin, and a barely-surviving Goku are the only ones left.We do a full Saiyan Saga retrospective, discuss the mercy decision and what the dub's framing does to Goku's characterisation, and talk about what the state of the cast at the end of this arc sets up for the Namek Saga.🔔 Subscribe for our ongoing watch-through of Dragon Ball Z in the Ocean Dub!📌 Topics covered this episode: – DBZ Ocean Dub Episode 26 "The Battle Ends" recap & review – Saiyan Saga retrospective48-1 - Batman: The Animated Series - Episodes 19-20
29:14|One episode is about a fake psychic running a financial cult on Gotham's wealthy elite. The other episode is about an actor who becomes a living pile of clay and cannot stop changing shape, and it is devastating.This week on Toonami Absolution, Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Episodes 19 and 20: "Prophecy of Doom" and "Feat of Clay, Part 1.""Prophecy of Doom" introduces Nostromos, a self-styled seer who has built a loyal Brotherhood of wealthy Gotham citizens by delivering accurate predictions of disaster, disasters his assistant Lucas has been engineering in advance. When Bruce Wayne's friend Ethan Clark invites him to a Brotherhood event and Nostromos singles Bruce out as being in mortal danger, Batman sees through the scam immediately and sets about unravelling it. The animation was by AKOM, the studio notorious for driving Bruce Timm batty, so expect a lot of weird shots.Then "Feat of Clay, Part 1" arrives and the show changes register entirely. Matt Hagen was once one of the most celebrated film actors in the country, before a car accident left him disfigured. A substance called Renuyu, developed by Roland Daggett's company, allows him to reshape his features without makeup, but Daggett has been using the addiction as leverage, forcing Hagen to impersonate people in service of increasingly criminal schemes. When Hagen uses Renuyu to impersonate Bruce Wayne and assault Lucius Fox, Daggett decides the liability has become too great. His men force-feed Hagen an overdose of the compound and leave him for dead. But, he doesn't die. He wakes up in his car, reaches for his rearview mirror, and sees what he's become, leading to one of the series' best origin stories.We dig into what "Feat of Clay" does better than almost any other villain origin in the run, what Daggett establishes as a recurring corporate villain archetype for the series, and the choice to end Part 1 on the rearview mirror rather than the transformation.🔔 Subscribe for our ongoing episode-by-episode watch-through of Batman: The Animated Series!📌 Topics covered this episode: – Batman: TAS Episode 19 "Prophecy of Doom" recap & review – Batman: TAS Episode 20 "Feat of Clay, Part 1" recap & review47-3 - Escaflowne: The Movie
34:21|The TV series gave us a cheerful girl with fortune-telling cards and a slow-burn romance on a world of flying castles. The movie opens with Van covered in blood and Hitomi writing a suicide note.This week on Toonami Absolution, Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Escaflowne: The Movie (2000), the theatrical reimagining of The Vision of Escaflowne, which takes the same characters, setting, and mecha and tells an almost entirely different story about them.Hitomi Kanzaki begins the film in a state of profound depression, estranged from her only friend and holding an unsent farewell letter. She is pulled to Gaea not by a glowing boy on a track field but by a call from the world itself. Apparently, she is the deity figure the world's people have been waiting for, a Winged Goddess prophesied to revive the mech Escaflowne. Van here is no eager young king but a blood-soaked loner with a death wish and no kingdom left to fight for. Allen is recast as a rebel leader rather than a knight-errant. Folken, stripped of his TV series' more nuanced arc, becomes a nihilist who wants to destroy Gaea and himself along with it, a villain whose motivation is, essentially, that he has decided the world does not deserve to exist, which puts him in an interesting conversation with Hitomi's opening scene. The film threads together depression, the desire for annihilation, and the idea that being called from your world into another might be the universe responding to a wish you didn't know you were making. The animation is exceptional throughout. The Yoko Kanno score is one of her finest. The compressed 96-minute runtime leaves almost no room to breathe, and several characters who matter in the series exist here only as faces in a crowd.We discuss how the film functions as a standalone work versus how it functions as an adaptation, what its darker tonal register accomplishes and where it falls short, and whether the "suicidal protagonist summoned to a world that needed her" premise is a compelling reframe or a step too far from what made the TV series work.🔔 Subscribe for our ongoing watch-through of Toonami and Adult Swim's most iconic anime films and series!47-2 - Dragon Ball Z [Ocean Dub] - Episode 24-25
32:42|The Kaio-ken can't hold him. The Kamehameha can't stop him. The Spirit Bomb hits him and he survives. Vegeta has taken everything and the situation is very bad.This week on Toonami Absolution, Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Ocean Dub Episodes 24 and 25: "Vegeta... Saiyan Style!" and "Stop Vegeta Now!""Vegeta... Saiyan Style!" opens with Goku already at the limit of what his body can handle and Vegeta nowhere near done. When Goku gathers energy for the Spirit Bomb, Vegeta notices and blasts him before he can release it. Running out of options, Goku pushes to Kaio-ken ×3, and then ×4, a multiplier King Kai explicitly told him not to use, and hits Vegeta with a full Kamehameha that sends him into the upper atmosphere.Vegeta survives, produces an artificial moon, and transforms into a Great Ape. Goku, broken and running on nothing, tries to fight, but is unable to overcome Vegeta. That is until Yajirobe, who has been lurking in a car eating snacks throughout most of this fight, cuts off the Great Ape's tail with his sword, reverting Vegeta to normal size. In the chaos, Goku manages to pass what's left of the Spirit Bomb to Krillin, who throws it at Vegeta. Vegeta jumps over it. Gohan, alerted by Goku telepathically, deflects it back.We break down why the Great Ape sequence works better than it should, what Yajirobe's presence throughout this fight does for the tone, and if the Spirit Bomb should have ended this fight.🔔 Subscribe for our ongoing watch-through of Dragon Ball Z in the Ocean Dub!📌 Topics covered this episode: – DBZ Ocean Dub Episode 24 "Vegeta... Saiyan Style!" recap & review – DBZ Ocean Dub Episode 25 "Stop Vegeta Now!" recap & review46-3 - Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone
33:42|In 2007, Hideaki Anno released the first of four films re-examining Neon Genesis Evangelion from the beginning. The first question everyone asked was: is it actually different? The answer, for this one, is: sort of.This week on Toonami Absolution, Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone. the first entry in the Rebuild of Evangelion tetralogy, and the beginning of an ambitious project that would take nearly fifteen years to complete.The film covers roughly the first six episodes of the original TV series: Shinji Ikari is called to Tokyo-3 by his estranged father Gendo, placed in Unit-01, and told to fight the Angels, despite having no training, no preparation, and no particular desire to be there. He fights the Fourth Angel, nearly loses himself to the Eva during the process, and slowly forms something approaching a relationship with Rei Ayanami in the lead-up to Operation Yashima, the precision long-range attack against the Fifth Angel Ramiel, here dramatically redesigned from a floating octahedron into a continuously morphing geometric entity that transforms between attacks in a way the 1995 budget could never have managed. Kaworu Nagisa makes a very brief appearance at the end that should not be possible given where he appears in the TV series timeline, in a scene that the film declines to explain.Much of 1.0 plays as a faithful, shot-for-shot re-animation with a significantly upgraded budget, the city of Tokyo-3, the Angel designs, the synchronisation sequences all look extraordinary. What it does not do, yet, is substantially diverge from the story everyone already knows. That comes later. We discuss what 1.0 accomplishes on its own terms, what it means as an entry point versus a re-entry point, how the Ramiel sequence elevates the source material, and what that final scene is setting up for 2.0.🔔 Subscribe for our ongoing watch-through of Toonami and Adult Swim's most iconic anime films and series!46-2 - Dragon Ball Z [Ocean Dub] - Episode 22-23
35:05|Nappa has been functionally unstoppable for four episodes. Then Goku arrives. Then Nappa has approximately ninety seconds of screen time remaining.This week on Toonami Absolution, Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Ocean Dub Episodes 22 and 23: "Goku Strikes Back" and "Goku vs. Vegeta... A Saiyan Duel!""Goku Strikes Back" gives Nappa precisely as much of a fight as he deserves: Goku dodges his every attack with casual effort, lands a blow for each friend Nappa sent to the Other Dimension. Nappa crawls to Vegeta for help, but Vegeta throws him into the sky and destroys him for the crime of being weak, which is one of the series' early great character moments.Then "Goku vs. Vegeta... A Saiyan Duel!" opens the real fight, and immediately establishes that these two are not comparable to anything that came before. Vegeta is stronger, faster, and strategically smarter than Nappa in every way. The episode also contains the Ocean Dub's infamous claim that Goku's father Bardock was "a brilliant scientist," which is not a description that applies to Bardock in any version of events, and which has never been satisfactorily explained.We get into why this fight is so good, why early Vegeta just works, and the brilliant scientist situation.🔔 Subscribe for our ongoing watch-through of Dragon Ball Z in the Ocean Dub!📌 Topics covered this episode: – DBZ Ocean Dub Episode 22 "Goku Strikes Back" recap & review – DBZ Ocean Dub Episode 23 "Goku vs. Vegeta... A Saiyan Duel!" recap & review46-1 - Batman: The Animated Series - Episodes 15-16
33:01|Batman meets his match. Bruce Wayne meets the woman he can't stop thinking about. They are the same person and he has no idea.This week on Toonami Absolution, Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Episodes 15 and 16: "The Cat and the Claw, Part 1" and "The Cat and the Claw, Part 2,” the two-part premiere episode that introduced Catwoman to Batman: The Animated Series, and which aired first despite being produced fifteenth."The Cat and the Claw, Part 1" opens with a rooftop chase: a cat burglar in a form-fitting suit outruns Batman across Gotham's skyline, kisses him, and disappears. Meanwhile, at a charity function Bruce Wayne encounters Selina Kyle, passionate wildlife conservationist, and instantly feels a spark. He has no idea these are the same woman.Adrienne Barbeau voices Selina with a warmth and steel that makes her immediately one of the most compelling characters in the series. Thus, its a shame the episode's secondary plot sucks, as it focuses on Red Claw, a weird European woman who wants to steal a virus for poorly-defined reasons (who is voiced by Kate Mulgrew approximately six months before being cast as Janeway).We get into what Barbeau and Mulgrew bring to these episodes, why the Batman-Catwoman dynamic works as well as it does, and why this episode shows that less is sometimes more when it comes to Batman storylines.🔔 Subscribe for our ongoing episode-by-episode watch-through of Batman: The Animated Series!📌 Topics covered this episode: – Batman: TAS Episode 15 "The Cat and the Claw, Part 1" recap & review – Batman: TAS Episode 16 "The Cat and the Claw, Part 2" recap & review