Damn, Where've I Been?

I seem to remember promising something of such monumental proportions that it could cause your skull to explode just from hearing about it secondhand from a friend who saw it on YouTube. Well, people, brace yourself. It's time.

It's time for Superfriends: Man-Beasts of Xra!

Yeah. You read that right. I'm about to grab you by the ears and completely rock your face in half. Okay, maybe not that much, but you get the general idea. And, as promised, this one is coming in parts as too much of it at one time could give you psoriasis. Or gangrene. Definitely jaundice at the very least.

Tonight's installment starts with a break-in at the New Orleans zoo, as using a zoo in a town that wasn't considered more dangerous than 1916 Germany just wouldn't make any sense. The Superfriends have received word that people, or even worse, mean people have been taking animals from the zoo and using them for...well, god knows what, really. It's the Superfriends. There's every possibility that they needed the animals to teach them the history of butter carving. So shut up, you're distracting me.

Batman and Robin are dispatched to the scene, where Robin runs around in tights while Batman dusts for prints. Batman suddenly cries out, stating that these fingerprints aren't human fingerprints! They must be coming from some sort of man-beast monstrosity. Mind you, the World's Greatest Detective is kinda forgetting that humans, apes, and monkeys are the only creatures that have fingers in the first place. So, how could he determine that they weren't of human origin? Why, the big-ass claw on the end of the fingerprint, silly! 'Cause, I don't know about you, but without that kind of deductive reasoning, I'd have had to wait until the inevitable surprise attack on the Dynamic Duo before I could figure out that the giant gouges in the iron freakin' bars weren't made by man hands. But thankfully for Robin and the 1970s TV-watching populace, a man with the head of a panther, the tail of a panther, and the black skin of a--wait, black skin? Oh, that's right. The animation budget wasn't going to allow for people to draw fur! And PETA definitely wasn't going to allow that sort of thing to happen. Not without throwing paint on the panther...

So, Batman and Boy Wondermous escape and run to tell the Superfriends what they found. I'd try and give you some of the dialogue, but every time I attempt to remember some of it, I wake up in a puddle of blood, and I can't be sure it's mine. Suffice to say that Superman decides that the Caped Crusader needs some watching or he's going to screw up a major plot hole and have the whole thing start to make sense. And we can't have that now, can we?

After breaking and entering into a lovely antebellum mansion in NOLA, Superman and Batman come across more man-beasts! attempting to do...well, something. They never really explain that. Probably ran out of blotter paper at that point. Superman draws the ire of a man-lion hybrid thingy and gives Batman enough time to pull out a freeze capsule off his utility belt that he uses to turn the man-lion blue, thereby informing the whole world that he's frozen solid. Robin, being the 12 year old mental giant that he is, walks up to the frozen entree and pounds on it with his fist, causing the hollow clang-clang sound of something that's frozen and made of metal, apparently.

This would be enough to make normal men run screaming from the room, but not I! I had a vested interest in seeing just how much dumber this could get without turning New Orleans into a city over a vast, subterranean network of caves and tunnels that would defy everything that's known about the Pearl of Louisiana and, well, physics. To my delight, I found that it couldn't get any dumber without turning New Orleans into a city over a vast, subterranean network of caves and tunnels that would defy everything that's known about the Pearl of Louisiana and, well, physics. That's why they turned it into a city over a...you know what? I'm sure you get the gist.

And then...it got dumber than that. As Superman and Batman, with Robin in tow, went into the caverns, they were faced with five animals in cages: a lion, a tiger, a panther, a something, and a something else. I can't remember the last two because my eye starts twitching and blood starts to spurt out of my nose. Superman backs away from the animals with the justification, "I don't wish to harm these creatures." Superman, the man who got so angry at a man that he punched him through a planet. Superman, the man who got so angry that he caused an entire dimension to cease to exist. Yes, this Superman, who apparently had to go to sensitivity training before they'd let him around Diana Troy, had to instead cause the animals to end up leaping back into their cages, whereupon Batman shut the cage doors and moved on. It should be noted that this is the same Batman who punched a man so hard it made his head explode. The same Batman who hurled, and connected with, a car battery to a mugger's torso in a junkyard. Pansies.

The three finally stumble, through no fault of the writers, into the lair of the evil Dr. Xra! The mad genius who masterminded the theft of so many animals from the zoo for demented experiments! The...woman with blue hair to show just how evil she could be. Score two for diversity right there, kids. Xra looks up and sees the Superfriends in her lair, and she has the nerve to act shocked and alarmed at the intrusion. Nevermind that you could have heard the three of them shouting at each other at the top of their lungs to be quiet throughout the vast, connecting caves and tunnels, even if you were deaf.

Xra jumps to the immediate conclusion that she must finish her plans, and that not even Superman would be allowed to stop her. I'll do you the favor of translating that line for you: Superman is going to end up stopping her plans, foiling her getaway and in a bold move, carrying her, her henchman, and her boat to the police station, where the police will presumably throw the evil overlords into jail and their evil speedboat into the impound. Damn you, impound. Damn you.

Tune in tomorrow...or whenever I get the chance to write it for the second in our Superfriends saga. It'll make you think you've got a shot with a hot woman in a see-through vehicle...