I enjoyed all the responses to my prompt last week: Which fictional teacher character from TV do you wish you had as a teacher? The characters who were brought up are all from shows I have seen.
Simon DelMonte picked Mr. Bergstrom from “Lisa’s Substitute.”
El Santo brought up Mr. Van Driessen from Beavis and Butt-Head.
Stars (they come & go) picked Ms. Teagues and her colleagues from Abbott Elementary.
A few Abbott stans have apparently been accusing English Teacher of being an Abbott ripoff or a whitewashed Abbott. It’s neither of those things. For starters, English Teacher avoids the mockumentary format, my least favorite thing about Quinta Brunson’s show. Secondly, Brian Jordan Alvarez’s show is about the struggles of zoomers and millennials to connect with each other—as well as the rare occasions when they do connect—in Austin, a progressive city surrounded by a conservative state. It’s also about a gay teacher’s exhaustion from either trying to stick to his principles or being constantly asked to be a spokesperson for gay folks, a role he doesn’t want. In an excellent Slate piece on English Teacher‘s really funny depiction of culture wars, Joshua Rivera wrote that “what makes the show feel so fresh is Evan’s exhaustion. While he is unquestionably an idealist, working in his chosen career because he believes it’s important for gay Latino men like himself to help educate the next generation, he’s visibly tired of the representational goals of modern identity politics, weary at the notion of being an avatar for all marginalized groups.” English Teacher‘s themes are completely different from Abbott‘s focus on inner-city Philly teachers who are trying to do more with less.
This is like if it were the first week of ER‘s mammoth success on NBC in 1994, and a bunch of St. Elsewhere fans went over to America Online and posted that ER is ripping off St. Elsewhere. (That would have been funny to see because Michael Crichton’s ER pilot teleplay was actually a slightly updated version of an unproduced screenplay Crichton wrote eight years before St. Elsewhere began.) I can’t say “dumb” anymore because it’s ableist, so I’ll say that accusing English Teacher of biting Abbott‘s style is really fucking dense.
Justin, the co-host of The Iron Age of Comics (a podcast you should check out if you read any comic books before the ’00s), chose Professor Pynchon, Malcolm McDowell’s character from Pearl, a short-lived ’90s sitcom that starred Rhea Perlman as a blue-collar widow who goes back to school and becomes frenemies with Pynchon, her snooty humanities professor. Pearl was the first season of Boy Meets World in reverse: The most outspoken student in the class is the wiser one, and the cultured and refined teacher is the fool. McDowell said in interviews that he based the prickliness of this cultured and refined teacher on his favorite director he worked with: Lindsay Anderson, who directed him in the Mick Travis trilogy.
The Pearl episode I posted in the thread last week in response to Justin’s mention of Pearl was an episode I knew nothing about and never saw before, so when I played it on YouTube and got to the part where Pearl met Aston Martin, Pynchon’s dean, for the first time at a dinner party, my jaw actually dropped with joy when Danny DeVito stepped out as the dean. The dinner party episode ends with a kitchen argument between Dean Martin and Pynchon escalating into a food fight in which Pearl and the dean team up to drench Pynchon in food. The two DeVitos are clearly fighting the urge to corpse while they decorate McDowell’s face with pies.
Dollymix picked the beloved Mrs. Coach.
Enchanting Wizard of Rhythm went with Jessica Day, who worked as a middle-school teacher on New Girl and, in an amusing Easter egg about the show that gave us Mrs. Coach in the “Fancyman Part 1” episode, taught her students that one way to practice abstinence was to “watch Friday Night Lights.”
KingKat picked Head of the Class‘s rat-tailed Mr. Moore, whose strangest characteristic was wearing a black trench coat in 90-degree Manhattan weather while trying to get to class.
Finally, Pizzamouse went with Mr. Feeny, a great pick.
One of the Boy Meets World episodes I remember watching when they first aired was the one with a dramatic A-story about Mr. Feeny wanting to retire from teaching after Cory, Shawn, and Topanga’s thuggish classmates (one of whom was played by Ham from The Sandlot) vandalized his house as retaliation for making the final exam schedule more strenuous. The actions of those classmates made me kind of mad. Though I had a couple of teachers I didn’t like when I was Cory, Shawn, and Topanga’s age, I would have never trashed the house of a teacher I disliked. That’s MAGAtty behavior. The episode should have ended with K.I.T.T., William Daniels’s character on Knight Rider, running over each and every vandal like it was Christine.
Welcome to the weekly TV thread.
Saturday is Batman Day, which was established by DC Comics in 2014 and will be celebrated by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce this year via a September 26 ceremony that will unveil Batman’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, so the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Shirley Walker’s “Batman Confrontation with Clayface/Clayface Dies” from her score to the 1992 Batman: The Animated Series episode “Feat of Clay: Part II.” For those who can’t tell apart Batgirl from Batwoman, that episode was the conclusion of the body horror-heavy origin story of the shape-shifting crook known as Clayface.
There are better BTAS episodes than “Feat of Clay: Part II.” Dong Yang Animation’s “Perchance to Dream,” the late Kevin Conroy’s personal favorite BTAS episode, is a great, Twilight Zone-style installment in which Bruce Wayne wakes up to find out that his murdered parents are alive and someone else has taken up the mantle of Batman. Spectrum Animation’s “Heart of Ice” gives Mr. Freeze a more compelling motive for his ice-themed crimes than “Batsy spilled chemicals on me”—the revamp was so effective that it influenced many subsequent versions of Freeze—and contains superb voice work by Mark Hamill, who played the real villain of the piece (but Hamill wasn’t in his usual role as the Joker), and the late Michael Ansara as Freeze. But “Feat of Clay: Part II” is the most stunningly animated episode out of all of them, thanks to Tokyo Movie Shinsha. “Batman Confrontation with Clayface/Clayface Dies” is from my favorite sequence of animation in “Feat of Clay: Part II.”
Prior to BTAS, I only knew TMS as the studio behind Mighty Orbots and Galaxy High School. (I didn’t get into TMS’s signature franchise, Lupin the Third, until about 28 years after BTAS.) Episodes like “Feat of Clay: Part II” and “Two-Face: Part I” were where I first took notice of the craftsmanship of TMS.
“The second part [of ‘Feat of Clay’] had maybe six retakes on the whole show, which is incredible,” said BTAS co-creator Bruce Timm to Cinefantastique magazine in 1993. “The first time we saw it in the editing room, we couldn’t believe how beautiful it was. It has all those transformation effects that only TMS could do. It was after these two episodes that we decided that any two-parters we did would have to be done at the same studio.”
In that same Cinefantastique interview, Timm said he believed that TMS’s disappointment from having been ordered by Warner Bros. to redo its work on BTAS‘s opening title sequence spurred the studio to bring its A-game for “Feat of Clay: Part II.”
“I think when we shipped them ‘Clayface,’ they said to themselves: ‘They think they know everything, but we’ll show them how to do this show. We’ll change Batman’s colors. We’ll do special color key treatments on the villains when they’re walking over the green vat. We’ll blow them away,’ ” recalled Timm to Cinefantastique. “If that’s their revenge, thank you for proving us wrong. I was so happy with that episode.”
The late Walker, BTAS‘s supervising composer, also brought her A-game to “Feat of Clay: Part II.”
“It was demanding story-wise,” said Walker to Cinefantastique in 1993. “There was so much going on. I was so proud of it that I submitted it for Emmy consideration, and that’s the one that I got a nomination for.”
In the Outstanding Music Direction and Composition category at the 1993 Daytime Emmys, Walker was beaten by Steven Bramson, who won for his score to “The Horror of Slumber Party Mountain,” a Tiny Toon Adventures episode written by BTAS co-creator Paul Dini. Walker’s “Feat of Clay: Part II” score may not have won an Emmy, but her music for the climax, in which Batman defeats Clayface by using psychology instead of Bat-gadgets or his fists, remains one of my favorite pieces she wrote for BTAS.
And now here’s today’s prompt: Who played the first TV version of Batman you ever saw? My first Batman was Olan Soule.
Hanna-Barbera’s Super Friends was my Sopranos when I was in kindergarten. KBHK-TV 44 aired Super Friends every weekday at 4pm. LBS Communications, the distributor of Super Friends reruns, mixed and matched each week the first five incarnations of Super Friends, which included the first one with Wendy and Marvin and Challenge of the Superfriends, the incarnation that began Hanna-Barbera’s strange spelling of “Super Friends” as one word. (That new spelling and the World’s Greatest Superfriends opening title sequence‘s resemblance to title designer Richard Alan Greenberg’s then-state-of-the-art opening titles from Richard Donner’s Superman a year later were clearly Hanna-Barbera’s ways of trying to make its franchise look more like Donner’s Superman, which dropped about two months after Challenge of the Superfriends‘s premiere on ABC.)
According to the late Wally Burr, Super Friends‘s voice director, in Bill Finger biographer Marc Tyler Nobleman’s 2011 series of Super Friends oral histories, Soule was a “tall, nerdy-looking guy. Looked like Ichabod Crane, not a bit like Batman. Had a lot of false teeth that would click so we’d have to redo takes.”
I watch clips of Super Friends now—the one above looks like it has been given the same kind of remastering the Bond flicks received in the ’00s—and wow, the show does not hold up well. The dialogue is 98% exposition. The other 2% is different variations on “Must… reach… my utility belt.” Hanna-Barbera took the Adam West version of Batman and got rid of the things that made that version fun to watch in live action, whether it was the pompous, Jordan Schlansky-esque lines like the one about how music is “the universal language—one of our best hopes for the eventual realization of the brotherhood of man” or the deadpan humor of Batman repeatedly kicking in the head the most fake-looking shark in movie history. On Super Friends, he was just Superman in a pointy-eared cowl.
But whenever I hear Soule’s voice as Batman, I feel like I’m in kindergarten again.
If you say, “Ethan Hawke,” you are too short to ride this ride.