Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 136: Batman Beyond: "The Winning Edge" and "Spellbound"

A stinker for a Slapper!

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.

Like a lot of folks, my first real exposure to Batman villain Bane came from his wildly anti-climactic introduction in Batman & Robin. Joel Schumacher’s take on the iconic heavy seemed to be that he was strong and dumb, and dead, and tacky or whatever. 

In the process Schumacher did more injury to Bane and his reputation as a super-villain than Batman could ever dream of. In Schumacher’s colossally misguided misinterpretation, Bane wasn’t just a clown; he was a secondary clown cursed to live and die and get shot up with Venom super-soldier serum in the outsized shadows of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wisecracking Mr. Freeze and Uma Thurman’s tragically misguided drag queen take on Poison Ivy. 

It wasn’t until The Dark Night Rises that I realized that Bane was pretty much the antithesis of how he was portrayed in Batman & Robin. In Nolan’s shadowy universe, he was a genius rather than a buffoon and a figure of danger, mystery and intrigue rather than a stupid cartoon for dumb babies. 

Not his best look, to be honest.

Bane returns, after a fashion, in “The Winning Edge” but while golden years Bruce Wayne warns his brash protege and trainee Batman Terry McGinnis of his old foe, “He was a formidable opponent” what little we see of Bane inspires pity rather than fear.

Batman’s back-breaking enemy is now a sad old man who has used and abused his body by pumping it so full of the super-steroid Venom that he’s devolved into a withered husk of his former glory.

It’s an audacious move: bringing back a legendary villain and establishing through dialogue that Bruce Wayne considers him an eminently worthy adversary only to reveal Bane to be a pathetic drug casualty, a steroid freak who ended up paying the ultimate price for cheating with dangerous and illicit substances that once upon a time gave him ultimate power but over time have rendered him powerless.  

Then again Batman Beyond is an audacious show. The more I see of it the more impressed I am by its world-building, character design, writing, animation and the depth and richness of the central relationship between cranky old Bruce Wayne and his agile boy protege.

Terry McGinniss’ future Batman begins the episode busting up the purchase of a medium-sized arsenal by the Jokerz gang. Wikipedia says that the Jokerz were inspired by the fashion, hair and culture of Juggalos but Wikipedia also says Juggalos are a violent, dangerous gang so its assertion should probably be taken with a grain of salt. 

In an ingratiatingly realistic development, Terry’s double life as an angsty high school student by day and high tech vigilante by night is taking a toll on his psyche in general but his sleep schedule in particular. He’s tired all the time, which isn’t good for his crime-fighting or his studies. 

One of the many things Batman Beyond does right is capture the nightmare, Noir quality of high school, how it’s less the best years of our lives than a grueling crucible we survive if we’re lucky, but not without a lot of trauma and scars. 

In “The Winning Edge” the student athletes of Hill High, the high school where Terry matriculates, are getting a Barry Bonds-sized unfair advantage over the competition by applying patches of Venom known as “Slappers.”

Slappers give addicts a quick burst of power, not unlike a Power-up in a video game, and ingesting a lot of Venom can give users Bane-like super-strength. This leads Bruce to suspect that his old nemesis Bane is behind the spread of Venom. 

Bruce and Terry are both relieved and faintly disgusted to discover that the ancient Bane, once the very image of macho perfection, is now barely alive and the real culprit is Bane’s attendant Jackson Chappell. The sinister flunky was given the secret to how to make Venom when Bane became too sick to manufacture it himself and has used that knowledge to become the city’s top Venom supplier.

One of the great ironies of Batman Beyond is that making Batman a teenager was supposed to lighten things up after the grim, foreboding Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures and appeal to a younger audience. Instead Batman Beyond was, if anything, even grimmer than its predecessor and appealed to an equally adult demographic.

“The Winning Edge”, for example, is surprisingly, refreshingly frank and adult in its depiction of the physical and psychological consequences of addiction. It does not sugarcoat the horror of being unable to control your compulsion to an illicit, illegal and deadly substance but it does not sensationalize it either. 

This cartoon, ostensibly for children, ends up being far more adult and sophisticated in its understanding of the psychology and biology of steroid addiction than the vast majority of grown-up, live-action portrayals of the downside of drugs.

“Spellbound”, the tenth episode of Batman Beyond’s first season, is similarly concerned with the existential horrors of high school life. It re-imagines Spellbinder, an old school Batman villain who first appeared in 1966, as Dr. Ira Billings, a school psychologist at Hill High who becomes so envious of the snotty, privileged little punks he’s cursed to work with that he develops a hypnotism-crazy super villain alter ego to trick them into doing his bidding. 

As the husband, son and brother of teachers, I understand his frustration acutely. With his nifty, trippy red and black psychedelic costume, Spellbinder is no garden variety mind-manipulator. 

Spellbinder lives up to his name by delving so deep into the psyches of his brain-washed puppets that they think they’re in fantastical new realms far removed from their everyday lives. 

First Spellbinder hypnotizes a classmate of Terry’s into thinking that she’s inhabiting an Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider world of adventure and derring-do when really all she’s doing is purloining a statue from her father. 

Next Spellbinder uses his malevolent mind magic to deceive a middle-aged man into thinking he’s in the middle of warfare, desperately trying to lead a fellow soldier to safety when all he’s really doing is stealing a valuable dress.

One of the things that sets Batman Beyond from the seven zillion other film and television depictions of the Dark Knight is that it’s science-fiction but it also has elements of horror as well. The elderly Bruce Wayne even looks more than a little like Boris Karloff and the massive, barrel-chested men of its noir-hued dystopian future cut distinctly Frankenstein-like figures. That somehow seems to have emerged as the dominant male body type in the future. 

The next hallucinations are full-on horror. The mother of one of Terry’s high school friends has a PCP-style freakout at her own wedding and thinks that she’s being pursued by stunningly designed giant insect monsters from another dimension while the hallucination after that is zombie-themed. 

Spellbinder eventually uses his powers to manipulate Terry into looting the Bat-Cave under the delusion that he’s participating in a game show before getting his eventual comeuppance. 

The jealousy-crazed high school psychologist ends the episode in the back of a police car for abusing his power by hurting the very people he was professionally and morally obligated to help. By Batman Beyond standards, he’s getting off easy. A lot of the super-villains Terry and Bruce tussle with end up dead or utterly destroyed mentally and physically. But the master hypnosis is just going to spend some time behind bars.

Batman Beyond is a terrific and ambitious superhero show of course but it’s just as inspired as science fiction, high school Noir and horror. 

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