Stocking Stuffers: The Tick vs. Season One / Batman: the Animated Series V1
Let's get right down to brass tacks on The Tick vs. Season One: the video quality is terrible, the sound drops out in places, it's missing an episode and there are Internet People who think that the others might even be edited down a little here and there. The antagonism of the title arguably mirrors the struggle between the publisher and their theoretical market for this DVD, namely the people who were super-into the cartoon when it came out and yet for whom they produced what is a decidedly inferior product. You know what? None of that matters to me. When I think of The Tick New Series I automatically am enveloped in simultaneous and parallel nostalgia for the '90s cartoon iteration, The Tick. This first season has some great stuff - Chairface might be chief among them - and some shoddy production values can't blot that out. The cartoon never looked good in broadcast, anyway, did it?
For some perspective, recall that this cartoon was a contemporary of the gold standard for '90s animation: Batman: the Animated Series. Nothing could be expected to raise the bar higher than Warner Bros. had just done. Batman turned the whole meritocracy of animation on its head: it was so good it made everything else easier to forgive.
In 1992 I was running home from classes in the afternoon - a freshman in college - to catch Batman in the afternoons. I was scheduling classes around it. The story of its creation, the new ideas its makers brought to the table and the support the studio and the publisher gave them to encourage this magnificent new vision of a classic is really fascinating. Whereas The Tick vs. Season One has zero special features and, instead, fills the bare-minimum requirements of being worth keeping around - in no way exceeding the possibilities of a manually-edited VHS copy made by a friend and yet perhaps just as cherished by those for whom there is no other source - the special features of Batman: the Animated Series Volume 1 are fascinating without trying to outshine the show itself. Some shows or films have so many special features that I find the idea of trying to ingest them all an insurmountable task; in this case, it was just another part of the whole fantastic package.
Klarion
Posted to Television on 17 December 2010
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: Batman, Stocking Stuffer, The Tick
I wish they'd release more of the Batman: Animated Series on DVD.
They never did release the full series. Not in Europe anyway.
Only two boxsets, which I think equated to the first season.
I believe it's all been released here in the US. Depending on region/player issues, you might be able to buy it from a US website and pay the (potentially very high) shipping to get it sent to you.
It is completely dreamy.