Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #158 Batman Beyond: "Earth Mover " and "Joyride"
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
Ancient Bruce Wayne and his teen protege Terry McGinnis are compelling anti-heroes with a wonderfully complicated dynamic but Batman Beyond lives and dies on the strength of its even more tormented villains.
Since Batman Beyond takes place in the future, most of Bruce Wayne’s classic enemies are dead, ancient, or, in the case of Bane, barely alive. So the show had to create a new rogue’s gallery of nefarious villains for Bruce and Terry to square off against.
In “Earth Mover” the unusually complex villain is Earthmover. Once upon a time the angsty metahuman was Tony Maychek, a father who chose to ignore his conscience and help his ambitious boss Bill Wallace furtively and illegally dispose of barrels of toxic waste for the sake of his career.
Tony ends up paying a terrible price for his crimes when there’s a cave-in in the mine where the dangerous pollutants are being dumped and he’s left to die a hideous death by his partner.
Tony doesn’t die, however. He may be a ghoulish living corpse with glowing green eyes, stuck forever in a crucifix pose but the toxic waste gives him power over the earth, mud and land. He’s able to cause earthquakes and control mud monsters who look like off-brand golems.
Earthmover, immobilized
These mud monsters are surprisingly strong but also surprisingly weak. The mud monsters fall apart with a single punch. They’re dumb as dirt because they literally ARE dirt.
There’s something poignant about poor Earthmover’s limitations, in his endless suffering, in his bottomless, incalculable pain. He made a super-villain’s mistake in befouling Mother Earth with poisons and suffered disproportionately for his sins.
Now he wants to make others suffer the way that he does, starting with his old friend/business partner Bill Wallace, who has adopted his friend’s daughter Jackie and raised her as his own.
Bill Wallace and Tony Maychek are voiced by famous television dads who bring very different baggage to their roles. Bill is voiced by Dan Lauria of The Wonder Years while real-life villain and 7th Heaven star Stephen Collins is appropriately creepy as Tony, a bad dad who sends a mud monster to stalk his beautiful cheerleader daughter who understandably has no idea what her father has become, how he’s not dead, necessarily, but he’s also no longer human either. He’s closer to a malevolent angel of death than he is to a human being.
This is where Terry comes in. Jackie is a classmate he must protect from what has become of her father. Earthmover and Bruce Wayne emerge as weirdly simpatico figures. The former Batman is limited by age but through Terry he’s able to fight crime the way he used to and transcend his own limitations by using the much younger man as a surrogate.
Earthmover is even more constrained by the cruelty of fate and the universe’s relentless sadism; he’d buried just barely alive but through his mud monsters and his manipulation of the earth he’s able to get out and about a little and cause terrible harm to people who have wronged him.
The image of Earthmover in all of his agony is one that will stick with me. “Earth Mover” is so unrelentingly dark that its conception of a happy ending involves its tormented anti-hero finally getting to experience the sweet release of death he has been longing for since his unfortunate exposure to toxic waste made him simultaneously something less and more than a man.
Jokerz: they have fun!
The Jokerz are a unique case when it comes to Batman Beyond’s new/old super villain divide in that they are new bad guys inspired by Batman’s old school arch-nemesis Joker.
Design and character-wise, the Jokerz bear a distinct resemblance to Juggalos, particularly the raver subset of Juggalos with unforgivable hairstyles and those giant pants with four or five times more fabric than is necessary or appropriate.
The Jokerz are like Juggalos if they were an actual gang but part of what makes “Joyride” so unexpectedly deep, poignant and psychologically rich is its understanding of the outlaw appeal of both Juggalos and real gangs, the way they provide a sense of belonging, identity and community to people who feels powerless and alone.
In “Joyride” some Jokerz, led by Scab, are in the process of initiating a new member into the gang when they discover a highly advanced abandoned experimental aircraft that has been abandoned by its pilots for unknown reasons.
The wicked clowns can’t believe their luck. They decide to make the most of their good fortune by using the powerful craft to pick up their fellow Jokerz for the purpose of terrorizing a fast food joint, bringing the pain to a rival gang called the Ts and fighting Batman.
Dr. Price, the experimental vehicle’s inventor, teams up with Terry to try to stop the Jokerz before they accidentally cause a nuclear accident. There’s a great moment deep in the episode when Dr. Price calls the Jokerz “madmen” and Terry counters that they aren’t madmen, they’re “kids.”
Terry is a kid himself, albeit a teenager who has taken it upon himself to save Gotham City, so he’s able to have empathy and understanding for his misguided foes.
Terry tries to reason with Scab, telling him that he has to abandon the vehicle before it causes a deadly accident but he’s not about to give up the one thing that makes him feel powerful in the world.
“Joyride” ends with the aircraft that briefly made Scab feel powerful and strong destroyed. Sitting at the controls, he’s overcome with an overwhelming, all-consuming sense of failure and despair. Without his ship he is nothing, no one, just another bully who derived his entire sense of self from terrorizing other people.
The Jokerz are one of the most compelling aspects of Batman Beyond, in part because there isn’t one Jokerz gang but three distinct Jokerz squads with their own leaders and line-ups.
Batman Beyond just keeps getting deeper and darker and more fascinating. Is it any wonder it’s being bandied about as a DC movie, possibly with Michael Keaton reprising his role as Bruce Wayne?
If that ends up happening I hope they give Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J cameos as Jokerz. That’d delight at least one percent of the audience and Juggalos are such respected taste-makers that their enthusiastic approval would single-handedly guarantee record box-office for the theoretical big-screen Batman Beyond adaptation.
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