Era of Mediocrity

Just the other day, I was watching the third season-opener of Static Shock, a program featuring a retooled, adolescent African-American superhero. I say retooled, because he's wearing a new costume and rolling with a new crew-and, for the sake of argument, an older crew as it were.

In the season-opener, Virgil Hawkins-aka Static Shock, of course-along with his friend Ritchie, discover another fellow teen afflicted with the Bang Baby Syndrome. Of course this afflicted girl is misguided, is carrying dump trucks worth of baggage on her shoulders, ran away from home, etc.

So this Bang Baby has standard-issue adolescent probs, and it's up to Static to right the wrongs and take down some villains from the DC Universe-Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn-alongside the world's greatest detective (sic), Batman.

You know what? The term "sic" is not adequate enough to describe Batman's overrated abilities. I prefer to believe that Sherlock Holmes is the world's greatest detective, simply because he was the first, and he is timeless. Batman isn't-he's been around for sixty years, and he is one of my favorite characters, but he is not the world's greatest detective.

This episode, which according to my notes was written by Paul Dini (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), is as mediocre an installment into the Static Shock universe as possible without being bad. Paul Dini's writing is not as top-notch as usual, but then he can be forgiven for dealing in unfamiliar territory with unfamiliar characters.

An unoriginal setup, coupled with an annoying hip-hop soundtrack that plays it too safe with its lyrics (and too repetitive, to boot-the line "Me and my home girls . . ." so on and so on is repeated so much that I pressed the mute button on my remote control and just closed-captioned the program so that only the dialogue would be revealed), and you have a sub-standard and kid-friendly opener to a season of a series that seems to be on its last legs.

So far, I've been talking about a specific program. Unfortunately, the episode of this particular program symbolizes the overall quality of the content of animated programs currently on air. Ed, Edd, & Eddy, far more inferior than Static Shock both in style and in substance, has been allowed to continue airing for the near future on a network that supposedly raises the bar every season in reference to quality animated entertainment. Since I began writing for Suite 101 in late July of 2002, I've seen the terrible become the horrific. Teamo Supremo, the crap-tastic cheap-looking program that it is, continues to be housed by the Disney channel-obviously, they need to cover some requirements, otherwise they'd rather be airing animated programs that exude charm and sophistication and more importantly, programs that give us an awfully-good reason to continue to tune-in to Sat-AM shows.

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