Dead Topics: Titans is the worst superhero show

[Music] [ __ ] Batman I know I'm probably going to make a lot less money from this video just because I put Robin saying [ __ ] Batman in the first 15 seconds but I felt like it was necessary to set the tone for what we're going to be talking about today Titans is one of those shows that really makes you question how it even exists this is the kind of thing that should have gotten killed in the pitching phase but it somehow made it to a full production and release not only did this show somehow get made and released but it also got extra Seasons afterwards which is the most baffling part because not only is the first season hot garbage but the other ones progressively get worse and worse so why is this show so Infamous well we're going to answer that today together so I will say hello everyone you're watching dead topics the show where we talk about whatever we want whenever we want for as long as we want and I'm your host Dave welcome to hell I'm the guy unfortunate enough to end up with the job of sifting through every single topic that dies and ends up down here and the liveaction Teen Titans is definitely one of those topics since most people don't seem to even know it exists and you were probably better off not knowing of its existence but now I've brought it up because I had to suffer and you're going to suffer too to show you just what you're in for when I tell you there's a scene of Starfire walking into a room seeing a family of four with their heads blown clean off their bodies including two teenag and her only response is oh no they're going to think I did it I'm not lying that's a real scene in the show and it somehow only gets worse and worse and worse now as much as I would love to show you a ton of clips from this show I really can't because if I do I'm worried Warner Brothers will kick down my door and shoot me with a copyright pistol because God forbid I show 5 minutes of footage from the esteemed show tit Titans you got to pay premium to watch that [ __ ] but before we get started I have to make a few things expressly clear first of all I am not a Teen Titan Super Fan by any means I don't read Comics so I have no idea what their comic versions are like and I've seen the original cartoon for Teen Titans but I haven't finished it and I haven't seen Teen Titans Go at all the reason I bring this up is because I'm going to be talking about these characters as adaptations of their other selves mostly referring to the OG cartoon since that's the version most people are familiar with when you talk about the Teen Titans however despite my lack of knowledge when it comes to the comics I have a sneaking suspicion that these characters are absolutely nothing like their comic counterparts at all in Titans so for any of you comic readers in the comment section down below please let me know how well these creators do at adapting these characters to the screen because I have a feeling it's not well you know I've heard people say they made Teen Titans go too childish and if that is the case Titans does the complete opposite this this show is edgy like so edgy you have to worry about getting Cuts just from watching it the whole show feels like a fanfiction written by a 14-year-old high school student who's filled with nothing but pure unadulterated angst this show tries so hard to be mature that it's comedic now listen I completely understand the desire to make something that was once meant for a younger audience more mature and gritty over time in fact I enjoy that sort of thing Logan is one of my favorite superhero films ever and it is super depressing however Logan feels like it was written by an adult with a functioning brain whereas Titans feels like it was written by a lobotomite this Show's idea of mature as non-stop Gore swearing every 13 seconds in characters who look like they're constipated 24/7 find me one scene where Robin doesn't look like he's constipated I dare you he can't do it cuz he always looks like that look at his face h and in the new edgy era of DC when Titans first showed up they decided to add a new intro which they've used for a while now and it's really weird it's also annoying as hell once you've heard it for the hundredth time I had to listen to that twice before every episode it got old fast so why don't we talk about the story of the first season well it's a story if you can call it that it mainly focuses on Raven and her father Trigon see Raven in the OG cartoon was kind of an interesting character because her powers were tied to her emotions the more emotional she gets the more her powers go haywire and it can cause damage to the people around her because of her emotions being so dangerous she kind of had to become a shell of a person not talking that much or expressing herself or she'd run the risk of you know killing everybody around her add that to her also being being you know a teenager people who are notoriously conflicted with a lot of emotions and you have yourself a very interesting character constantly having to battle the urge of expressing your feelings to your friends because if you decide to do that it might cause your powers to go haywire and just make everything a whole lot worse now I don't claim to be a raven expert but that was my interpretation of this character when I saw them in the original cartoon and all things considered I thought that was pretty cool so how does this show adapt Raven for liveaction and tell her story well it replaces all of her abilities with generic horror movie tropes and the power to vomit that's right she's an emo teenager with Purge powers and their father is a demon it doesn't get more fan ficky than that she's a sheltered child whose mother keeps her locked up in her room with a bunch of crosses on the walls because you know she's possessed by something but then she also just sends her off to public school despite knowing that she has a literal demon inside of her and could you know snap and kill everyone around her at any second out of all the excuses to do homeschooling this is probably the best one and you just decided not to for some reason so the kind of parent who takes the precaution of locking a child in a room with a ton of crosses on the walls is also perfectly fine with them just going out in public with a bunch of bullies and random school students do these kids know they're sitting across from a literal walking hydrogen bomb we barely make it 10 minutes into the episode before Raven's mother is just assassinated right in front of her and of course they go out of their way to make it as gory as possible you know ice socket blown open blood spilling out everywhere and it makes you wonder why should we care we barely know this woman at all and she's hardly a character so why would we care if she dies is it supposed to be for shock value because the only thing shocking here is how someone put that in a script and decided to go through with it this is something that script writers or filmmakers apparently haven't learned for centuries now but in order order for us to Care when a family member is killed off we need to have a connection to them if you're not going to bother to make them an actual character then just kill them off screen we don't need to see it because we won't care if the audience has no emotional attachment to a character when they die they might as well just be pixels on a screen the emotional impact of one of your character's parents dying right in front of them should not be the same as a random goon getting shot Midway through a movie so Raven freaks out runs to a homeless shelter there's a bunch of pointless nonsense that happens before that with her almost getting kidnapped for no reason and then she decides to go to the police station after throwing a brick at a cop car hi there how you doing word on the street is you like playing baseball with bricks and cop cars I'm detective Dick Grayson let's talk about detective Dick Grayson why don't we he his name is Dick ha so funny Robin in this show is kind of a total [ __ ] but on the other hand his fight scenes are some of the only good things in the entire show okay come on you can't tell me that wasn't at least a little cool right and he has a lot of scenes like this that are actually really Baller in the first couple of episodes like a scene where he's in a warehouse just tearing criminals apart and they can't even see where he is and all the goons just start dropping one by one disappearing as he jumps between the rafters and Yanks them into the air with his grapple gun that was some real Batman stuff and it was actually kind of fun too bad those moments are very few and very far between most of the time he's just bumbling around like a baboon getting dogged on by the rest of his team for being such an idiot and also doing absolutely nothing of substance outside of getting his ass beat one thing you have to know about this show going forward is that everybody hates each other and it's constant throughout the entire thing 90% of the main characters in this show are massive jerks who treat each other other like [ __ ] constantly and it is really obnoxious like for instance the first thing he does with Raven is take her to Hawk and Dove which are two really shitty superheroes who have no powers other than tapping people's faces they're next to useless and they're pretty lame and he decides to drop Raven off there and plans on leaving them with her the two superheroes who can barely withstand a couple goons punching them is going to contain one of the most powerful Demons of all time yeah genius move Robin and of course a group of Assassins show up beat the [ __ ] out of Hawk and Dove kidnap Raven and leave because of course they did these people are useless and it's all because Robin is having this inner conflict of will he be Robin won't he be Robin what will he do and it's really annoying listen I get that that can be an interesting storyline but him deciding whether or not he wants to be Robin is Robin us of getting to see cool scenes because the Robin fight scenes are the only good scenes in this whole goddamn show so him not being Robin constantly is just causing us to not get to see those so he just spends most of the show being useless and Midway through the season they blow up his Robin suit and he just stops being Robin one of the only good things in the show and they blow it up before The Season's even finished and he just spends the rest of it bumbling around and being the dumbass detective Dick Grayson who no one cares about and I wouldn't mind this that much if he was an interesting or well-written character but he really isn't this is one of the lamest versions of Robin that I've ever seen and it sucks because he could have had such awesome potential with those fight scenes this show would have been 10 times better if it was just about Robin doing Robin stuff because at least that's something they had the budget for you want to know what they definitely did not have the budget for Beast Boy oh God I won't spend too much time talking about Beast Boy cuz he's a total waste of a character in this show but part of what makes Beast Boy cool is his power to turn into almost any animal that he wants the kid can literally turn into a T-Rex in the show how awesome is that want to know how many animals he can turn into in the first season one he can only turn into a tiger now to be fair he can turn into a snake very very very later on down the line but for the majority of season 1 it is just a tiger it is pretty apparent they did not have the budget to handle a character like Beast Boy you see Beast Boy Powers lend themselves to an animated series because in that you can have him turning into a of different unique animals like Sabertooth cats mammoths and whatever else but here when you need CGI and a ton of money you just get a tiger a really really poorly animated 3D green tiger now it does look terrible but it is CW levels of CGI I don't really know what I expected but the fact that his powers are only limited to him being a tiger is not only incredibly lame but also really bad for the story for reasons I'll get into in a second outside of his characters he's just kind of a nerdy simp who spends the entire show just trying to get with Raven and that's about it he's kind of an obnoxious idiot so I really don't care about him that much in this he's not funny or interesting he's nothing like the original Beast Boy and I just don't care so why don't we talk about the final member of the main Teen Titans Starfire Oh Boy Starfire Starfire is a Velma level character in this and also is absolutely nothing like her original counterpart in any way shape or form now before I continue talking about Starfire I do have to bring up the obvious here and I have to say this before people start acting like idiots in the comments section I don't care about race swaps I really don't I liked the boys and that show race swapped Stan Edgar and gender swapped Stormfront and I still thought it was great and I loved the actor's performance for Stan Edgar I thought it was awesome I also enjoyed 2022 is the Batman and that race swapped several major characters and I was perfectly okay with it I didn't care the problem with Starfire is not her skin color the problem with Starfire is that she's a shitty character even if you don't compare her to her show counterpart or comic book counterpart she's still just a poorly written character plain and simple now listen I get that adaptations can change characters over time and make them very different I'm perfectly fine with characters that have been around for decades changing or having different interpretations when brought under different writers part of what makes these comic book characters so awesome is that different writers can have different interpretations of them and do a lot of different things and different stories with them I'm not one of those people who think a character has to act a certain way at all times and can never deviate from that or else it's just terrible because that's kind of restrictive I want writers to be free to express their interpretation of a character and put their own unique spin on it so we aren't just getting the same thing over and over and over again however here's the important thing it has to be good and at the bare minimum the character you're adapting has to have some resemblance to the other versions at least a little bit but these characters don't have any at all I mean look at this can you look at this and tell me that this is Starfire she looks like a [Music] [Applause] [Music] stripper [Applause] [Music] you can literally go on Google right now type in Black Starfire cosplay and find images that look way better than whatever this is and this isn't a shot at the actor I think the actor's fine it's just the script is so horrible that there's no way she could have made it any better okay so let me just tell you how dumb this is right so stripper fire is from planet tamaran and she came here to kill Raven but she got into a car crash working under a mob boss and lost all of her memories now to get started this is already lazy writing right off the bat because if she had her memories from the get-go she would have just murdered Raven right then and there instead of you know hanging out with her but the writers can't have that so they need her to get into a random car crash and just miraculously forget everything she also apparently had a guy tied up in her hotel room that she was torturing for some reason and this is the start of Starfire's psychotic criminal Rampage because she is is a psychopath she commits so many felonies in this show that she could make the Joker blush she breaks into the scene of Raven's mother's murder I call her Raven's mother because I forgotten her real name and when she gets caught snooping around this crime scene she decides to start beating the [ __ ] out of all the police officers in the room and then she just gets away with it and nobody cares she could have just jumped out of a window using her super strength and left but instead she decides to just beat the [ __ ] out of every single one of them because there's no other solution to this problem or God forbid if she still had her original superpowers and could fly but no we don't have the budget for that but the worst part about this is later on Jason Todd shows up as a character and he fights a bunch of police officers as well but when he does it the show treats it as a villainous act Robin's like no Batman wouldn't want you to beat up cops and Jason's like [ __ ] you and then leaves so when Jason beats up cops it's suddenly Big Bad Evil but when Starfire beats up cops it's just quirk and funny this is textbook narrative at gaslighting the show is trying to make you think Starfire is like a badass cool hero when in reality she's a lunatic it also villainized other characters for doing the exact same thing Starfire does for instance Starfire murders a bunch of people throughout this show but the no kill rule becomes important in later seasons of course it does my thing with the no kill rule in these superhero shows is either make it a big deal or don't if you're going to have superheroes running around just murdering people left and right and not caring then don't bring the no kill rule into it later because it just looks stupid oh no we can't kill people oh hold on I just have to murder all these people real quick but out of all the things stripper fire does throughout the show there's one thing that made me realize just how bad it was there's a scene where Raven and stripper fire are inside a diner right and they're just kind of chilling but then a bunch of evil biker dudes show up and they're like oh man we're Super Evil oh yeah get out of here ladies that kind of thing so right now Starfire is on the run for kidnapping and murder and Raven is on the run from a satanic cult that wants to kidnap her so the smart play would be to just leave and not cause unnecessary drama or get attention but stripper fire can't do that cuz she's got to prove how much of a boss she is so she decides to get up beat the living [ __ ] out of a bunch of people then she takes a fork and just stabs a guy with it for no reason she could have just knocked them out if she felt fighting was absolutely necessary but she doesn't stop there no she has to brutalize them because she's a lunatic and then everyone's like wow so awesome and she gets free food and then Raven calls her a badass at the end of it are we in Bizzarro's world what the hell was that it's such a baffling scene and it really puts the writer's mindset into perspective good god oh and the worst part the worst part is even after all the insane [ __ ] that Starfire does she still has the G to go up to Robin and say that he has emotional problems now don't get me wrong Robin is a total sociopath but Starfire of all people no no no sorry not Starfire stripper fire because that's who this is in fact I shouldn't be calling any of these characters by their superhero names because none of these characters are superheroes in fact Robin isn't Robin Beast Boy isn't Beast Boy Raven isn't Raven and for God's sake stripper fire is not Starfire none of these characters are the Teen Titans they don't act like the Teen Titans they don't look like the Teen Titans they don't talk like the Teen Titans they just aren't the Teen Titans and you can barely tell that they're supposed to be so my biggest question for this adaptation is if you're going to change these characters so much that they're entirely unrecognizable why change them at all why not just make new characters and I know the answer to that it's brand recognition this show wouldn't have gotten any steam at all if it wasn't a Teen Titans show because they're big names that draw attention so instead of creating something original and actually working to draw people in they decide to steal other people's characters and run them into the ground this is a massive Trend in Hollywood nowadays taking other people's characters using them as puppets to draw attention and then ruining them that's what I mean when I say this show is Velma level it takes the Norville approach to making an adaptation that's to say making it nothing like the original character at all these characters are just skin suits used for brand recognition they aren't the Char characters and while we're on the subject of characters there's an elephant in the room that I've kind of been ignoring you may have been thinking this to yourself the entire time and it's finally time that I address it where the [ __ ] is cyborg well I'll tell you where cyborg is he's in a better Show Gotcha Doom Patrol despite being super weird is actually a very fun show and I enjoyed it a lot which is why it's kind of baffling that it exists in the Titans universe it's like a beautiful Forest next to a landfill so there is one episode of Titans that I enjoy and it's the episode where the Doom Patrol show up because the Doom Patrol are actually fun and interesting characters I love robot man because he's hilarious and every scene he's in is incredible did you see who made the hole I was busy not getting swallowed by it where's the hole now it's swallowed itself did you see anything useful yes damn it the donkey what's the donkey got to do that's what I'm trying to figure out [ __ ] case in point go watch Doom Patrol cyborg is actually somewhat decent there anyway what were we talking about all right Titans GH so as I was saying these characters suck individually but as a team they suck even more I mentioned earlier that Beast Boy's power to only turn into a tiger was kind of a hindrance and I'm about to explain why that's the case another big problem with this Show's writing is the power levels they are entirely imbalanced you've probably heard before that when it comes to villains or problems that the heroes have to face in a story you need to find a balance in between difficult and easy if you make it too hard you have to write a bunch of contrived ways for the characters to get out of certain situations and if you make it too easy there's no tension now this becomes an even bigger issue in superhero teamup stories because you have a bunch of people at varying power levels all having to fight the same threat and that can become a little obnoxious to write around sometimes and that issue is incredibly pronounced in Titans mostly due to Raven Raven's powers are nonsensical she can do just whatever she wants in whatever scene because the writers pull new powers out of their ass and it's mostly just horror tropes and jump scares she has no solidly defined power set and because of that she just pulls out random [ __ ] like her Purge powers during combat and can easily defeat every single enemy in the show it causes a majority of the fights scenes that involve Raven to lose all tension because either a she's going to stomp everything immediately or B she has to not use her powers and be an idiot just so the others can keep up Robin is a dude with a stick and Beast Boy can turn into a tiger who's just going to get shot so they're kind of useless for the most part they're only really useful so long as they're fighting like basic human Level Threats or else they just get overwhelmed and the [ __ ] gets kicked out of them which is really bad since the main villain is a super powerful demon who's going to destroy the entire planet I get that the show in comics did this a lot but in those characters like Robin typically had insanely overpowered gadgets or were just insanely strong for no reason and Beast Boy once again can just turn into a [ __ ] T-Rex like at any time he wants but in this those two were so useless that all the fights have to be scaled down just so that they can do stuff now Starfire's ability to just burn away everybody instantly and also have a fire Shield that blocks bullets is kind of but she also can't use her powers during nighttime so that's kind of okay as a limitation but it really feels like it was just used once or twice and then forgotten about so when the character's powers are so wildly imbalanced it causes a lot of issues because the fight scenes either have to be complete one-sided Stomps or utterly contrived and this show doesn't even get to have a cool Final Battle because everybody's useless except Raven so they pretty much just get ragd dolled and played around with like toys and can do absolutely nothing and as for the way the characters act they're just idiots plain and simple they make so many stupid brain dead decisions throughout the story that it leaves you scratching your head now it gets a lot worse in the later seasons and when I cover those you'll truly see how few brain cells these characters have but even in season one it's bad one scene that illustrates this point very well is during the Midway Point through the series they want to infiltrate a compound to find Raven's so Robin using his brain for once is like hey why don't we scope out the compound learn the guard rotations learn everything about it so we can sneak in and save Raven's mom it's a good idea in fact it's such a good idea that even stripper fire can't argue against him because that's what she usually does but Raven throws a hissy fit because she wants to see her mom right now and wants to go immediately even though they have no idea what to expect she doesn't really have a reason not to stake the place out other than oh they might move her which how does she know that it's really stupid and all the other characters are like hey Raven that's stupid and then Raven storms out but Beast Boy being a simp wants to follow her and he steals Robin's phone gets an Uber and they drive to the secret compound in an Uber and bro daylight granted it does become night by the time they get there so they can easily sneak in and nope they both get captured immediately before they've even gotten inside and all of this was just a setup for everyone to get kidnapped and placed inside a weird Science Center for a creepy psychological horror segment this whole story is an idiot plot through and through all the major plot beats happen because somebody [ __ ] up doing something incredibly stupid I get that Raven and Beast Boy are teenagers but being a teenager does not mean you lack brain cells anyone with common sense knows that you should probably not rush into a heavily armed super base when you don't even understand how your powers work and the other guy can turn into a tiger who's gonna just get shot by the dozens and dozens and dozens of armed guards patrolling That Base 24/7 this story needs its characters to be brain dead stupid in order for it to work because otherwise the plot would have been dismantled like 2 seconds in but of course they escape they save Raven's mom but Raven's mom is actually evil oh my God Raven gets tricked into summoning Trigon cuz she's a dumbass and then trigon's like I'm going to destroy the world or some [ __ ] and then the episode ends before they even fight the guy that's right the main villain of season 1 doesn't even get defeated in season 1 he get defeated in the first episode of season 2 and then after fighting Trigon the demon that's going to destroy all of reality then they go fight Deathstroke seriously ah yes we defeated an evil demon who is going to destroy the entire planet as like our first villain but oh no an Assassin's going to bring us down if you asked these writers what Stakes are they would probably talk about their favorite restaurants to end things off this show is awful it is so bad but it gets much much worse with the later seasons and I'll cover all of that eventually good Lord it gets worse but I didn't even scratch the surface if you want to see more of my thoughts then luckily for you I will upload them on patreon so if you are a patreon supporter you will be able to see some unedited thoughts on the show covering more of the story and I'd also like to give a big thanks to Tony Louie my one patreon supporter at the time of making this video you're a real one Tony however if more people join I will list them right here when the video goes live so that's all for now this has been Dave and remember [ __ ] that man

Channel: Guardian HQ

Views: 141,992

Keywords: Teen titans, Titans, live action, review, critique, Analysis, DC, superheros

Id: Ji81Tgpe_Zk

Length: 27min 47sec (1667 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 08 2024