Chris and Cindy discuss their family’s favorite JLU episode “Kids Stuff”! Morgaine Le Fey’s son Mordred banishes all adults to a limbo dimension, and the Justice League must make a supreme sacrifice to save the world. They have to…become kids again! Will the “Justice Babies” succeed in deposing the bratty new king, or will their childish squabbling get in the way?
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Clip credits:
Clips from Justice League Unlimited “Kids Stuff”. Justice League Unlimited theme by Michael McCuistion
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Great show Chris and Cindy! Thanks so much for all the hours of entertainment across the entire network.
You both should appreciate these custom JLU Kids Stuff figures made by Cason Pilliod aka Casmir of the Inanimate Objects Website. I love his work and his customs go deep into the entire DCAU.
https://pilliod.net/iopress/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Kid-Stuff-10-3-750×500.jpg
https://pilliod.net/customs/wonder-woman-kid-stuff/
Hope you enjoy the customs,
Travis Morgan
Wow, those are great! I remember Casmir from the old Raving Toy Maniacs board! I lost track of a lot of the folks on there. Thanks for sharing, and for listening!
I’m defintely going to show Cindy these!
While making it would be quite a task, I would buy a plush Baby Etrigan, no questions asked.
I often complement the stories and the acting on JLU, but it’s time to give the animation a shout out. The kid versions of our heroes are cute but not cloying; they look like kids, not just small versions of adults. That’s not always easy to do!
Had I not known beforehand, I never would have guessed this was your second pass at recording the show. I’ve had to do that once or twice, it is NOT fun. Hopefully the second recording wasn’t too soon after the first. No one knows the sacrifices we podcasters make for our art!
Let’s start a campaign to get some Baby Etrigan merch!
And I agree, in addition to acting like kids, they also LOOK like kids. Not easy in comics OR animation. I give you…John Byrne! Legendary artist otherwise, but his young kids…oof!
I guess I should have kept my mouth shut about that second recording!
Nice rhyme, Rob.
This episode made me curious to go look up something, so I googled it, or rather, in keeping with the theme, I used Kids Google, which does the same search of the whole internet except it swivels your monitor away from you if there are boobs. Anyway, I was thinking about the disappearance of adults all over the globe, some of whom must have been, oh, let’s say, flying passenger aircraft. My search says some 8,000 passenger planes would be flying at any given moment. Mostly the adults would have been fine because they’d have all been in the Bad Place – good, they survived the inevitable crashes. But there have to have been kids on board, hm, at least half of those planes?
I’ll just assume that once Morgaine sent our four (4) Leaguers back to the real world, the Super Juniors made sure to safely land those 4,000+ aircraft before going after Mordred. Oh, and took care of all the uncontrolled hundreds of thousands of buses and trains carrying children too. And every, y’know, car on every interstate and such containing a child. That’s quite a lot to get done off-camera, but they don’t call ‘em super-heroes for nothing, so I guess they covered all that ground just fine and The Mordreding was a worldwide event that, all told, had a juvenile fatality total of zero. Whew! That makes it safe to just enjoy the cute cartoon about kids having an adventure.
Oh, and my Out-of-Print Trades Pick this time (I’m making that a thing, we good with that?) is the second volume of the Steve Ditko Omnibus, which includes the Etrigan stories he drew for Detective Comics back in its Dollar Comic / Batman Family phase. Keep that Ditko streak going, eh?
You make a very good point Doug…but one I’d rather not think about, because it sure sucks the fun out of it! We saw crashes and chaos during The Snappening, although we were assured when Professor Hulk brought everyone back he “wished” them to reappear in a safe place. “Kids Stuff” probably should have had time reset so that the adults never “blipped”, but then we would have been robed of Batman’s Captain Bringdown moment.
Good call on the Ditko Demon stories! Also ties into our pals Paul’s and Shawn’s Batman Family Reunion podcast. I don’t think the Odd Man shows up on JLU…
Great episode on a great episode, Franklins! As usual, I have less to add to your commentary than anyone else’s. I’m not sure what that means, but if I were you, I’d take it as a sign you’re doing it right.
On the theme of how you’re doing it right, Cindy is correct: Chris’s responses in the comments thread greatly ameliorate the pain of waiting to hear your on air responses to our feedback. See, for all the Fire and Water podcasts, what we really want is to be in on these conversations with you. Ideally, that would happen at a coffee shop or bar with outdoor seating and amazing weather, possibly overlooking a beach or a lake in the Poconos. Since that isn’t possible, hearing (or reading) your responses to our feedback is a great step toward that ideal.
Happy to oblige Captain! Have you tried the Potato Poppers? They’re to die for!
I missed a lot of JLU, but an adaptation of “World Without Grownups” sounded familiar. As I listened, though, I realized I was thinking of a couple of episodes of Young Justice my nieces showed me. (They were of an age to have first met DC heroes on the Teen Titans cartoon, and to this day are more interested in Robin than in Batman.) As you might guess, a different set of heroes and a different chain of events.
Back to waiting for Cadmus to show up.
Nothing wrong with meeting the DCU through Teen Titans or Young Justice! My kids watched a LOT of those too. I haven’t kept up with the new seasons of YJ, but my son fills me in. I need to watch it sometime.
Cadmus kind of happens slowly and organically, especially in Season 1. We’ll see elements of the storyline show up a few episodes from now, however.
Unfortunately, I did not (or do not remember) seeing this episode of JLU, but it sounds really fun.
While I can’t comment on Kids Stuff, I can say something about the movie Excalibur. For my money, Excalibur is still the best film adaptation of Arthurian legend out there. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), we recorded the movie off of TV, so all the naughty bits were edited out. The soundtrack alone (e.g., O Fortuna and Siegfried’s Funeral March) is worth a listen.
Thanks for another excellent episode.
Between recording the show, and your post, I REALLY want to watch Excalibur now. I haven’t seen it in DECADES at this point! Off to the Roku!
I don’t think anyone should judge Kristen Stewart or Robert Pattinson for their work on Twilight. They have both proven to be great actors after this, though I understand that something high-profile like Twilight is going to loom large compared to the indie fare the two of them often gravitate to.
Unrelated: Are you as much a fan of the Star Trek TNG episode where Captain Picard is turned into a kid?
I shouldn’t have taken the shot at Kristen Stewart. I honestly haven’t seen her in much of anything since those films. I do think she was pretty awful in them, but maybe she just didn’t have enough to work with, either. I’m sure she’s done fine since. Mea culpa.
Hmmm…haven’t seen that TNG episode in a long, long time. Can’t say I was a huge fan of it though. There’s a later Super Friends episode where the Riddler regresses the SF in age, but they lose their mental faculties as well. It’s not really fun at all.
Honestly, the material’s pretty awful. During my Kabul deployment, we had Indian cable that we would leave on in the background at the office. (I would’ve vetoed it if I hadn’t feared mutiny. I’m easily distracted.)
Among many other movies of high budget, big name, and debatable artistic value, Indian HBO played the Twilight series. Sometime we would stop and marvel at how dull the dialogue and the delivery were.
Pinpricks of brilliance broke through, though. At one point Pattinson asks the muscular wolf boy (I forget his name) if he even owned a shirt, and his voice is so dripping with judgment it’s hilarious — an intentional laugh line that worked. My daughter said the books are much better, and as Siskoid says, the actors have proven themselves, so I think we have to blame the production as a whole. I know it’s never been Pattinson’s favorite work.
Very fun episode. More generally I’m really enjoying my first watch of JLU and your analysis of each episode! I dig the wide variety of characters and how sometimes we get the Big Three and other times it’s Green Arrow, Supergirl, and/or lesser known DC heroes. I can see how the series would appeal to kids (especially this week’s episode) and yet it’s a really cool show for grownups too, especially with the deep pulls from DC history. It’s great fun to watch the episode and then listen to your podcast for the episode.
Thanks Mike! Glad to hear your enjoying the show, and very flattered you consider it a part of your first JLU viewing experience!
This is such a fun episode, and was also a favourite around the house with my kids. I also feel like the episode is calling homage to the frequency of characters being turned into child or baby versions of themselves in the silver age, but in true DCAU fashion turning it into a meaningful plot.
I always thought that each of the characters had, via the magic that regressed them, become a hybrid of their adult selves and power and their child attitudes matching the age they became – a side effect of the spell making them younger in body also having to regress their minds enough for Mordred’s “wish” not to banish them. Curiously here, while I agree that females are often much more mature at an earlier age, thereby explaining Wonder Woman’s clearer head, there is another aspect here at work: Wonder Woman was raised an Amazon in a culture that doesn’t have our modern values (and foibles) about children. I believe the young Dianna was expected to be a lot more together than any of the others, who were raised in an era where we shelter kids from a lot of life’s sharper edges.
As a longtime fan of the movie Excalibur, Mordred’s armour did feel like a callback to his golden invincible armour from the film. Cindy, good observation here that Mordred is indeed really trying to be kingly with his deeds and prove to himself (but really to Morgana) that he’s ready to grow up and assume the mantle he’s been groomed to become for centuries on end. He’s long overdue to become King in his head, fed on centuries of an overbearing mother whispering just how special he is into his ear. I also enjoy this element because it reveals the underlying relationship between Morgana and her son: he is a tool for her world domination, and the moment he gets out of control, mother points the Justice League at him to spank him back into submission.
The ending line is truly a downer to the fun filled episode, but I felt it was necessary – just perhaps not the note to leave the show on. Batman saying something melancholic at the end of an episode of wish fulfillment is a DCUA staple (think of his final line in Perchance to Dream). But this could have been an opportunity to show that at least Clark understood how hard this could be for him – maybe even having Clark observe that this must have been difficult for the Dark Knight to relieve a childhood stolen from him.
One thought on why Etrigan was transformed into a baby, other than how gosh darn cute he became. Etrigan is bound to Morgana and Mordred in a “destiny” kind of way, and while in the Etirgan form it’s also possible he didn’t count as an adult human anyways. Also, making him into a baby meant that he couldn’t say the rhyme to return to Jason Blood. I feel like there’s something there, but I’m also aware I’m overthinking a TV series intended for kids and young adults.
Hey, overthinking a TV series intended for kids and young adults is what we do here!
I think your Etrigan theory is along the lines of what Cindy was trying to get at. I buy it.
The Justice Babies were definitely an amalgam of their adult and kid personas. The mix definitely made for a fun time!