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Toonami Absolution
54-3 - Batman (1989)
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Before the Nolan trilogy. Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe changed the landscape entirely. There was Tim Burton, Michael Keaton in a rubber suit, Jack Nicholson in clown makeup, and a film that genuinely changed the entire game.
Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Batman (1989) this week, Tim Burton's gothic blockbuster, the first instalment of the initial Warner Bros. Batman film series, and one of the most culturally consequential superhero films ever made.
Crime boss Carl Grissom sends henchman Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson, clearly having the time of his life) to a chemical plant, where a confrontation with Batman goes wrong and Napier falls into a vat of chemicals. He emerges with bleached white skin, a permanent grin, and a personality that has resolved all of its internal conflicts into pure chaos.
Michael Keaton's Bruce Wayne is a genuinely unusual piece of casting that turned out to be inspired: he plays Wayne as a distracted, slightly alien figure who seems most comfortable when nobody is looking at him, and most himself when he's underground. The Joker takes a romantic interest in photojournalist Vicki Vale and uses her as leverage against Batman, leading to one of the most epic showdowns in movie history.
Danny Elfman's score does approximately forty percent of the emotional work in any given scene. Prince wrote the soundtrack, which exists in a different genre from the film it accompanies and is amazing, because its Prince, and that man could do literally anything.
We dig into the film’s wild production history, discuss what Burton's interpretation gets definitively right about Batman, how Keaton's performance compares to every Caped Crusader that followed, what the film meant in 1989 and where it sits in our personal Batman rankings.
🔔 Subscribe for our ongoing watch-through of the DC Animated Universe, the Batman live-action legacy, and everything in the Toonami lineage!
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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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55-3 - Dragon Ball Z: Bardock – The Father of Goku
33:17|Before Dragon Ball. Before Goku. There was Bardock, and he could see the future, and it did not help him at all.Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Dragon Ball Z: Bardock – The Father of Goku (1990), the first DBZ TV special and the prequel that fills in the origin of the entire franchise.Bardock is a low-class Saiyan soldier, scrappy, ruthless, not particularly sentimental about anything, including the newborn son he dismisses as weak before shipping him off to Earth. After his squad destroys the last survivors of a planet called Kanassa, one surviving alien ambushes Bardock and gifts him the power of foresight as a curse. Bardock starts seeing Planet Vegeta explode. He sees Frieza. He sees his own death. He tries to warn the other Saiyans, who laugh at him. He charges Frieza's fleet alone. Frieza uses his Supernova. Everyone already knows how this ends, and the special earns its tragedy entirely from watching Bardock catch up with the audience and accept his place in the Dragon Ball Z timeline, in some of anime’s most impactful dramatic irony as he sees his son as a grown man, facing Frieza on Namek.We get into why Bardock works so well as a protagonist despite being the opposite of Goku in almost every way, what the special adds to the franchise's mythology, and how the various dubs hold up.55-2 - Samurai Champloo - Episodes 13-14
33:40|Mugen has a history. His history has found him. It brought friends.Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover "Misguided Miscreants (Part 1)" and "Misguided Miscreants (Part 2)," Episodes 13 and 14 of Samurai Champloo, and the first two-parter that digs seriously into Mugen's backstory.The group reaches the sea, and Mugen encounters Koza. a woman from his childhood on the Ryukyu Islands, and her associate Mukuro, a pirate who was once Mugen's closest ally and is now running a gang of sea raiders. Mukuro has a job for Mugen: help rob a government ship. Mugen agrees. The job goes wrong in ways that feel personal and deliberate, because they are. "Part 2" reveals the full shape of Mukuro's betrayal, sends Mugen closer to death than almost any episode has managed, and ends with Mugen catching a glimpse of his own past, the island, the violence, what he survived, before deciding to keep walking leading to a moment with Jin that suggests they’re slowly starting to like eeach other.We discuss what these episodes add to Mugen as a character, how his dynamic with Koza differs from Jin's with Shino, and what this episode does right.📌 This episode covers: – Samurai Champloo Eps. 13 - Misguided Miscreants (Part 1) – Samurai Champloo Eps. 14 - Misguided Miscreants (Part 2)55-1 - Space Ghost: Coast To Coast - Season 3 Episodes 5-6
29:23|One episode is a tribute. The other is Bill Nye asking Space Ghost to prove he exists. This week has a lot of mood whiplash.Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover "Sharrock" and "Boo!" Episodes 5 and 6 of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast Season 3."Sharrock" is the show breaking its own norms, dialling it back to present a genuinely touching tribute to a fallen friend. Sonny Sharrock, the avant-garde jazz guitarist who composed the Coast to Coast theme, died in May 1994. The episode aired nearly two years later and takes the form of an extended tribute, the opening theme runs long, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth appears in character as a musician named Fred Cracklin, and the whole thing is structured less like a talk show and more like a music video. Then "Boo!" pivots to comedy: Michael Norman, a ghost expert and author, hopes to use Space Ghost as a subject for scientific study. Space Ghost is not cooperative. Bill Nye the Science Guy also appears, expressing concern that he may never be able to determine what exactly Space Ghost is, a reasonable concern, scientifically.We discuss what "Sharrock" accomplishes as a piece of television that is mostly vibes, what Bill Nye does with a role that gives him almost nothing to work with, and Sonny Sharrock's legacy.📌 This episode covers: – Space Ghost: Coast to Coast S3E5 "Sharrock" (feat. Thurston Moore as Fred Cracklin) – Space Ghost: Coast to Coast S3E6 "Boo!" (feat. Michael Norman & Bill Nye)54-2 - Samurai Champloo - Episodes 11-12
26:47|"Gamblers and Gallantry" is the episode where Jin falls in love and Mugen trains a rhinoceros beetle for competitive fighting. These two boys couldn’t be more different.Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Episodes 11 and 12 of Samurai Champloo this week: "Gamblers and Gallantry" and "The Disorder Diaries.""Gamblers and Gallantry" starts when Jin, wandering aimlessly, encounters a woman on a bridge named Shino who is about to begin working at a local brothel to cover her husband Hanjiro's gambling debts.Jin quickly falls in love with Shino, and uses Jin winnings to pay for Shino's company. In the morning, he arranges her passage out and the whole group fights off the brothel staff so she can get on a boat, leading to one of most tear-jerking episodes of the show.Then "The Disorder Diaries" arrives as a both a breather episode and a way to save money: Mugen steals Fuu's travel diary, triggering an episode-length recap of the journey so far as filtered through Fuu's opinions of both Mugen (rude, terrifying, useful) and Jin (quiet, capable, annoyingly handsome, she admits this in writing) and the food they’ve eaten on the way. 🔔 Subscribe for our episode-by-episode watch-through of Samurai Champloo from the beginning!54-1 - Space Ghost: Coast To Coast - Season 3 Episodes 3-4
31:49|"Lovesick" and "Transcript." One episode about Space Ghost losing the love of his life. One episode that is almost entirely a Jonathan Richman concert.Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Space Ghost: Coast to Coast Season 3, Episodes 3 and 4 this week, and it's worth noting upfront that "Lovesick" exists because the show's creator Mike Lazzo went through a breakup."Lovesick" aired on Valentine's Day, 1996, which tells you everything about the intent. Space Ghost has been dumped and refuses to engage with the show in any meaningful way. Carrot Top appears to do Carrot Top things. None of us here understand how Carrot Top was able to sustain a career in comedy, so if you understand Carrot Top, please send an email to the usual address. Then "Transcript" is its own strange thing: Jonathan Richman, founder of The Modern Lovers appears on the show and plays songs and has very weird conversations with Space Ghost. The episode is called "Transcript" because it essentially is one, a fairly faithful record of whatever happened between George Lowe and Jonathan Richman on the day of recording. It’s one of the oddest episodes of the show, especially if you’re not familiar with Jonathan Richman.We discuss what Coast to Coast is doing right in season 3, why "Transcript" is one of the show's most interesting episodes, and debate if Carrot Top is a way of punishing us.📌 This episode covers: – Space Ghost: Coast to Coast S3E3 "Lovesick" (feat. Carrot Top) – Space Ghost: Coast to Coast S3E4 "Transcript" (feat. Jonathan Richman)53-3 - Is Lupin Still Burning?
32:16|One OVA to celebrate fifty years of Lupin III. With two resurrected villain who drop Lupin into his own past only to learn what makes Lupin and his friends so special. This is a very specific kind of anniversary special.Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Lupin the Third: Is Lupin Still Burning?, the 2018 OVA made to mark fifty years of the franchise, directed by Jun Kawagoe with Monkey Punch himself serving as general director. (Oddly, this is the only Lupin movie to end up on Toonami or Adult Swim, no idea why).The setup is a direct callback to the very first episode of the original 1971 Green Jacket series: Lupin is participating in a car race at the Hida Speedway, hosted by the supposedly dead Mr. X, while Zenigata is also in the race and Fujiko is attempting to steal from a vault on the premises. Mr. X turns out to be very much alive, and is in business with the time-manipulating villain Kyosuke Mamo, who displaces Lupin from the present timeline and sends him ricocheting through pivotal moments in his own history.The OVA's conceit is that Lupin, bumbling through his own timeline, is accidentally unwriting the relationships that define his entire life, and has to find a way to correct them without Mamo noticing. Zenigata follows him through all of it, apparently completely unaware that the timeline is shifting, because Zenigata is simply built differently. The ending leans hard into the idea that the Lupin gang is essentially cosmically inevitable, that no amount of interference can actually keep them apart, which is exactly what a fiftieth anniversary special should be doing.We discuss where the OVA sits in the wider Lupin III catalogue and how it works both as a standalone entry and as a dense bundle of franchise references.🔔 Subscribe for our ongoing coverage of the Lupin III franchise and everything else in the Toonami lineage!53-2 - Samurai Champloo - Episodes 9-10
28:23|Episode 9: Forged travel documents. Prison sentence. Mugen fetch quest. Forest full of bandits. Warrior monks. Large quantity of weird burning plants. Hallucinations. Chase sequence. Episode 10: Jin does the housework, while Mugen recreates Samurai Showdown on the NeoGeo. It’s a week of contrasts.Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover "Beatbox Bandits" and "Lethal Lunacy" this week, Episodes 9 and 10 of Samurai Champloo, a pair of episodes that are basically polar opposites."Beatbox Bandits" is told in flashback by an elderly checkpoint guard named Yamane the Ogre, reflecting on the one day in his career he never wrote into the official logbook. Mugen, Fuu, and Jin get caught with forged travel permits at the Hakone checkpoint, are sentenced to death, and Mugen is offered a deal: deliver a package through a nearby forest of bandits by sunset, or his friends face the consequences. The forest turns out to contain warrior monks who are plotting to overthrow the government. Mugen naturally tries to fight them, but when their crops set on fire things quickly take a turn for the weird.Then "Lethal Lunacy" is another episode built around Mugen. A Shaolin-trained swordsman who has developed a technique powerful enough to split a boulder is looking for someone worthy to fight. He finds Mugen, and the two prepare for an epic duel. Jin, meanwhile, has decided to get domestic.We discuss the specific genius of "Beatbox Bandits'" framing device, how "Lethal Lunacy" uses its fight to say something about the difference between Mugen's style and any trained tradition, and why Jin might be the best househusband ever.🔔 Subscribe for our ongoing episode-by-episode watch-through of Samurai Champloo!53-1 - Space Ghost: Coast To Coast - Season 3 Episodes 1-2
29:58|Season 3. New Seaon. Same Ghost Planet. Lokar is trying to steal Moltar. Space Ghost is about to replace his entire production staff with a machine, this can only go well?This week, Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover "Explode" and "$20.01,” the first two episodes of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast Season 3, a season where Coast To Coast finally works out what it wants to be."Explode" opens with a subplot that would feel at home in a soap opera: Lokar, a villain from the original 1960s Space Ghost cartoon, has been recruiting Moltar to come work for him instead, At the same time, Space Ghost is jointed by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame, and Glen Phillips of Toad the Wet Sprocket, a band name that will mean nothing to you if you were born after the year 2000.Then "$20.01" arrives with a very specific premise, an episode long parody of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Space Ghost fires both Zorak and Moltar and replaces them with MOE 2000, an emotionless computer director voiced by executive producer Keith Crofford. Joel Hodgson, creator of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Penn & Teller are the guests, and as you can likely guess, Space Ghost quickly finds that his automated show plan isn’t going to go as smoothly as he would hope.We get into what Season 3 is doing differently from what came before, why the Lokar subplot is a perfect encapsulation of how Coast to Coast uses lore without committing to it, and question why Joel Hodgson struggled in his interview, despite previously writing episodes for the show.🔔 Subscribe and follow along as we cover every episode of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast in order!📌 This episode covers: – Space Ghost: Coast to Coast S3E1 "Explode" (feat. Terry Jones & Glen Phillips) – Space Ghost: Coast to Coast S3E2 "$20.01" (feat. Joel Hodgson & Penn and Teller)