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Toon Zone Reviews ‘Justice League: The Savage Time’

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James Harvey
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Cartoon Network was kind enough to supply the Toon Zone News team with a screener copy of the much anticipated Justice League season finale, “The Savage Time.” Below is a review of the season finale, written by An Alternate Reality! Site Administrator Bird Boy.

Justice League
Episodes #24 – 26
“The Savage Time Parts 1 – 3”
Original Airdate – November 9, 2002 – First Season Finale

Synopsis: The Justice League returns from a mission in deep space to find a world that has drastically changed for the worse. A ruthless dictator named Vandal Savage has seized control. To restore life as they know it, the world’s greatest collection of superheroes must travel back in time and team up with Sgt. Rock and his military squadron, the Blackhawks. Together, they re-fight a world war in order to stop Savage from taking power.

Review: I’m sure we’ve all, at some point, wanted to change something in a Justice League episode. Change the dialogue there, change the animation here, change the music, change the scene, etc. But this time around, I think the JL team has really captured the “spirit” of the team, showing that they can work together without a lagging plot. This episode just rocked. Period.

  • Plot/Story: By means of a back-to-the-past hole/warp thing, Vandal Savage has sent his past self information on World War II. This causes the Allies to lose the war, thus putting Vandal Savage in charge.

    Coming home from a mission “halfway across the galaxy,” as he puts it, Green Lantern is towing the entire League with his ring. He then quips that he’ll need to do some serious re-charging on his ring. After they reach the watch-tower, Batman (waiting for them inside the Tower) begins to open up the hatch, when a bright beam of light comes over the other side of earth, which causes everything to shake. After tumbling around in the Javelin 7, the light disappears — as does the Watchtower.

    Landing on earth, they realize it’s Metropolis — almost. Posters of Vandal Savage are plastered all around the city, the Daily Planet has a different building-top, and the police aren’t the same. After a brief fight, they see Batman, in a different uniform, but Batman none the less. They follow him down into his under-ground hide out, dodging police fire along the way.

    An Alternate Batman An Alternate Reality! The League

    After Batman fills them on in the details, they realize that somebody’s been tampering with time — the flash of light being the cause. They decide to home in on the space, and they find a hole back into the past, which is how Vandal was able to change the war’s outcome. The League decides they must do the same, and take a trip back into the past, leaving Batman and his League of Rogues behind.

  • Dialogue/Voices: There’s some really great dialogue in this episode. Whether it ranges from the brief bit Batman has, or the wise-cracks by Flash, you can really tell the writers took their time writing this out. Definitely some of the best in the series, and in the end you got hints of a Hawkgirl/Green Lantern relationship coming on (“What kept you?”, “I had to fix my hair”), to some of Superman’s surprising dialogue while he was ripping through the German airplanes.

    The voice actors did another great job on this one, especially some of the stuff that came out of Flash, Green Lantern and Vandal. Great stuff.

  • Animation: Oh boy, the animation in this episode was great! I can’t get over it. The aerial scenes with the airplanes, the dog fights, the smoke, the explosions, the fights, the extremely-detailed WWII weapons made this ep all the more enjoyable.

  • Music: Great score on this one — the music fits the mood at every point. The composers did a really, really good job on this episode.
  • Overall: First off, I want to say this to those who think Superman is being portrayed as being weak, compared to his STAS counterpart: he isn’t weak in this episode. He was especially more STAS-like in Part 2, when his heat vision was used to slice through countless planes, and one he even twirled around and tossed into another. A huge improvement over the “weakling” Superman we saw in previous episodes.

    After all the action (the dog fights are my favorite part of the episode), and the hug between Batman and Superman (Bat’s reaction is priceless—“Am I… missing something?”), this was definitely my favorite episode-arc of Season 1. This is shaping up to be a great series.

    — Bird Boy

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    James Harvey
    Got hooked into Batman at a very early age - thanks primarily to the comics and "Batman: The Animated Series" - and that spun itself into a dozen other interests and hobbies (and, eventually, professions). I started up "The World's Finest Message Boards" on September 20th, 1998, and "The World's Finest" site followed quickly afterwards. After a few years of jumping from server to server, I settled down with "Toon Zone" and I've been apart of this great community ever since. I currently run "The World's Finest," pitch in with "Marvel Animation Age" and occasionally help with "Toon Zone News" and it's affiliated sites, as well as act as administrator, reporter and moderator.

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