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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Serge" data-source="post: 1684897" data-attributes="member: 4049">Saw 'em both last night.  Enjoyed TT, but I went nuts over JLU.What I liked about JLU was the animation, the revamping/expanding of the Watchtower, and the breadth of new opportunities for characters.  The animation was phenomenal.  Although in the past I would have been concerned about "first episode" greatness (in which subsequent episodes reveal shoddy animation), I'm not so concerned in this case since the last two season featured excellent animation in every episode.  I especially love how we see Superman, The Batman, and Wonder Woman as the "centerpiece" of the JLU in the title sequence.  This story was also very well done.  Didn't like the guitar in the score for either the titles or the action sequences.  Too... hokey.  It's something I'd expect for a Marvel cartoon, not a DC cartoon.  DC has always been about great orchestral sounds, classic sounds that have a timelessness and religiosity to them.  The guitar is jarring and too modern.  I'm also going to regret the removal of the two-parters.  I really liked the two-parters.As for the new GL...  Well, if you look at most black characters in most genre related stuff, they're very rarely left looking like "generic" black people.  Storm, for example, has blue eyes and white hair.  Geordi wore a hair-brace over his eyes and Worf had a crab on his head (yes, I know he's a klingon, but Michael Dorn's the only other black actor in ST:TNG).  And GL has glowing green eyes.  There's always some physical change in the most popular black characters and I wonder if this is to make them more appealing to white audiences.  If you look at the most popular white characters, rarely to they carry some kind of ethnic badge (like many of the black characters that appeared in the 70s) and the greatest, like Superman and Captain America, have no real changes in their physiognomy...  They're just white.  The only white characters of note that have such changes tend to be the mutants from Marvel (and this would include the whole gamut of "the beast within" characters all over Marvel like The Think and The Hulk).  Is this racist?  Well, certainly not from an explicit intent.  Is there some form of implicit racism?  Perhaps.  I mean, we rarely see black characters out there and when we do, the better know have features that are typically associated with black people.  Is this bad?  In some ways, yes...  And it's to be expected.  In neither big company is there a single huge, well regarded black character.  The closest we get to that -- in terms of popular recognition -- is Blade and that's because of the success of the movie franchise, not the comic book.  If anything, perhaps there need to be more stories like those that featured GL in JLU in which his race is never an issue (aside from that amusing comment from the one two-parter from that dimension in which one of the Justice Guild or whatever tells him that he's a credit to his race).  Hell, IIRC, this is the first American cartoon that prominently featured an interracial relationship (take away her wings and Hawkgirl's a white woman) and that's a great thing.  So, I'm willing to ignore the bald head and goatee.  On some of us black guys, it's quite sexy.</blockquote>

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