Fucking Day: Justice League of America

As I write these words in your Earth-past, Superman has yet to debut, but I’m certain my favorite superhero, Green Lantern Guy Gardner, is your new, breakout comic character. America loves its preposterous blowhards, and the future looks bright, in a green way.

It wasn’t always this way. Regular people who haven’t seen another Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, laserblast a problematically garbed old woman might think the 2011 Green Lantern film was the nadir of the franchise’s live-action adventures. But you possess Hot Dog Awareness, and sense another dangerous artifact traveling to the present on this, your Nerdi—F-F-Fucking Day??

Yes, there was a Justice League TV movie with some deep, ’90s thoughts about what women want. You guys remember the ’90s, right? When we were so emotionally aware? We didn’t even have the word woke yet, so people didn’t know they were unhappy. Ignorance is bliss, and no one was more ignorant than people so privileged they can fly.

Is it fair to judge the past by the standards of the present? No, as I have increasingly had to explain in recent years to fans of my early comedic essays, you Dutch-Canadian broads need a less-touchy sense of humor. But this show mangled my most beloved superhero friends from my favorite DC comic, so my scorn is righteous.

Who is the Justice League?

I don’t really have to explain the Justice League (DC’s premier superheroes) to you (dorkwads) in this, the year 2025 A.D. (Anno Directus-Snyder). But in the ’80s they were less a pantheon of Objectivist pricks and more a sitcom family of also-rans: a vision so strong that it’s become the in-universe view of the Justice League International as semi-competent clowns beloved by all, but most especially me. Behold, the apex of my nerd-passion:

The League’s American component is featured here, in 1997’s Justice League of America, a CBS pilot on the heels of Lois & Clark that showcases a bunch of super-roommates in the city of New Metro, U.S.A., British Columbia. A pioneer of the mockumentary format, JLA is also an example of why not to do that. We meet each of these heroes burning down their private lives to hide their heroic egos from loved ones, but also recording confessionals full of personal details. These interstitials add nothing. What is their conceit? Fie upon such popinjay behaviours!

JLA isn’t painful viewing, it just flaunts its directionlessness like an exhibitionist slacker, a sit-com devoid of situation or comedy. There are some setpieces printed in the general 3D mold of a joke, but the superheroics aren’t action so much as expensive wastes of time in which things start one way and end another. The Atom is the soul of this team, but only because he has no confidence and shrinks from any challenge. Even when it costs just as much to be great as to suck, the pilot three-legged races off the track towards mediocrity; the main character struggles with her powers until she doesn’t, and I guess that’s an arc.

Making superheroes on a TV sitcom budget was always a doomed proposition. You really want Leaguers with small-scale powers that don’t cause much damage: your Blue Beetles and your Boosters Gold, both of whom were on this team in the comics. I can respect the big swing, but is it too much to ask that the zero-dollar crux, its heart, be there?

Yes! This drifty show is the worst thing the Justice League endured in the '90s, and I own the issues written by the pedophile, wherein Power Girl's grandfather knocks her up, so they replace her with a 13th-stringer Born Sexy Civet Furry.

Technically our protagonist in this 80-minute production of the first act of Shy Frozen. To her credit, Kim Oja nailed this meek character, or if we’re using the script’s preferred terms, “plot device.” You already guessed Ice’s powers, so let’s do what Guy never could in the comics, and move on from her.

Ice’s on-again, off-again boyfr—why am I telling you this? Of course we, as a planet, all know and love Guy Gardner. The world finally realizes he’s the greatest of the Green Lanterns in 2025: the best year America’s ever had, no changes.

This is not that Guy. I'm going to assume you have culture and know everything about GL lore, so this joke makes perfect sense: the part of ladies' man Hal Jordan (Guy Gardner), is played here by Kyle Rayner, software salesman. His ring has the power to create anything he imagines, so long as it’s cheaply animated. He flies around by helicopter blade, because flight harnesses cost money.

Ray, a particle physicist who teaches high school biology, got his powers on an archeological hike, and is stymied by TV electrical engineering. Go away, Atom, 100% of nobody wants you here. There are 52 Earths in the DC Multiverse, and the consistency of their Ray Palmers is his utter dweebiness. What makes this one different is he’s a simmering Nice Guy. Why won’t you snooty females take a chance on a guy who gets smaller while chastising himself for being so sexless?

Zach Snyder’s Justice League took the weird step of making comics’ square-ass Barry into No-Confidence Peter Parker, though not as weird as TV making him horndog after his adoptive sister. This (scarlet) streak of mischaracterization began here with Barry in the Joey Tribbiani role of Super-Friends. Barry’s a preview of Millennial ennui. He’s doing everything he can to get a job and maintain a home, and Gen X sneers at him for it.

Struggling actress B.B. Da Costa can shoot fire, for all those emergencies requiring raging flame to calm down panicked civilians. Still, she’s the only one averting Weatherman attacks, boldly thwarting a climate engineer by burning—you guys—SO MANY greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Michelle Hurd gives this role a lot more than it gives her, plus she donates some good chemistry with Matthew Settle’s Guy Gardner. She’s married to Garrett Dillahunt, who I’m realizing now, would have made Hollywood’s best choice to play Guy; it’s every role he’s known for compiled into one character, and this show still wouldn’t have been the dumbest thing TV asked him to do.

Playing the guise of Charlie to these Angels, it’s David Ogden Stiers, stuck in the shadows of his submerged spaceship. Martian Manhunter is Overpowered Superman with telepathy, intangibility, invisibility, and a weakness to fire, but this show does away with all those low-cost VFX opportunities. Instead, it invents a short time limit on how long he can shapeshift as a human. This would be a smart nerfing in the comics, but on TV, just ensures its biggest star gets minimal stage and maximum makeup. This show loves to steer against the skid.

Additionally—let us be honest here in the noble halls of Hot Dog, where self-deceit is the original sin of a thousand maniacs—Stiers has the normal physique of the Boomers at 55 years old. Why make him plod around in a leotard? Let the most powerful Leaguer walk among us as unassuming human Detective John Jones. It’d be a great opportunity for Alan Alda to guest-star as a supervillain named The Chicken Choker.

New Metro doesn’t respond to terrorists, so his plan to extort 20 million dollars runs afoul of his attacks repeatedly draining city coffers in damages. It’s an ill-considered strategy, which makes him the perfect enemy for these lackadaisicals more concerned about their TV than crime. No superhero chooses their nemesis; the universe furnishes a perfect match to bedevil your values: a Joker to a Batman, a Diebel to a Seanbaby, an empty glass of whiskey to a Brockway. Thus, Gas Station Bootleg Justice League meets its low-rent Weather Wizard.

Hey, it’s George Clooney’s cousin! Tori’s boss at the meteorological institute is deeply concerned about these weather attacks preventing his ability to raise money to predict the weather. Feels a bit like fretting over ticket sales on the Titanic’s return trip, but I majored in Storytelling, not Weather Crime.

Ho-ho, not in this show! Our God is not so cruel.

A meteorologist, he is an utter nag. Also, this is what Barry Allen is supposed to actually look like.

Can you believe this needy harpy wants a date to last longer than two minutes?

Sexual Harassment Snapper Carr here lovebombs Fire’s civilian identity.

Was actually safer from the hurricane before Atom chased it out from under the porch.

Let's Watch!

“Tori, tell us what happened” splutters a cartoon duck from off-screen. And so begins the first of many confessionals that contribute nothing to this framework.

Shy, self-effacing Tori works at the privately held Eno Meteorological Institute. She has a real will-they/will-she-cry-after vibe with Dr. Eno (Miguel Ferrer, dressed here like every boss who keeps his suspenders on in a porno), but the facility is running on fumes. I mean…I guess technically all weather stations run on fumes, but this one desperately needs government money.

Also, Arliss makes the first of nine attempts to badger these two for time with Eno. Sure, we all need that—Miguel Ferrer is a Clooney—but take a number, milquetoast.

We meet the other Leaguers, and it is sad. None of them can have a life because the world needs saving! This show depicts its characters in this order: Broke, love life DOA, and job’s a joke. And Atom was there too, playing the role of stuck in second gear.

At a restaurant for the elderly, Ice’s canonical true love, Guy Gardner, is singing opera. BAD START, MOVIE. His girlfriend Cheryl—VERY BAD START—is miffed he had run out on their opera date last week, so his solution is—haha, no way. He learns the aria and serenades her in a public restaurant?

I can accept a magic ring, but not a woman who enjoys being cornered in public and forced to pretend to enjoy her boyfriend’s grandstanding. I have dated three—three!—opera singers, and none of them liked opera this much. No man is this bad at romance; even Don Diebel suggests leaving the target an avenue of escape as a pre-emptive legal defense. This is the dumbest date Guy has ever planned, and in the comics he took Ice to a porno theater.

Suddenly, what is technically a supervillain called The Weatherman brings a hurricane to New Metro. The Atom literally saves the cat to make us like him, and we still don’t like him. Stakes are set in the A-plot, which the show then ignores to focus on plots J through L. The other Leaguers are upset when that loser Barry moves into their apartment to provide instant housekeeping and gourmet cooking. Fire gets stalked by a college senior who directs fruit juice commercials. Tori gets ice powers in a lab accident. Atom…exists. None of this matters, even to the characters.

Compounding the pointlessness, the confessionals pad the…plot? Is this plot?—with improvised warm-up to help these actors flesh out their characters. Superheroes aren’t supposed to make people feel ennui, CBS.

…Well, maybe Swamp Thing is. Regardless.

Tori saves a skater from drowning in knee-deep water by uh...freezing him in the lake but more importantly, the League finally gets its TV fixed. Our heroes can focus at last on chloroforming and kidnapping a woman.

Let me skip waaay ahead to The Weatherman’s next attack, but only so you can see Cheryl eat an entire wheelbarrow of shit.

I’m going to grant her not recognizing her boyfriend, because her skull is still bouncing off concrete, and frankly I’m envious of her newfound ability to tune out this movie. They say not to go to sleep with a concussion, but what if I told you it would get you through 12 straight minutes of the League infiltrating a low-security weather monitoring facility the one night of the year it's full of people? That's an in-the-cut given in most superhero films but here it’s 6.66% of this movie! Coincidence? Or something more mathematical?

I put it to you that it's indeed the work of the Great Usurper. Here's what's technically Guy Gardner, looking for love and weather plots in all the wrong places. He's perfectly staged to meet the canonical love of his life! It's what fans (me) have universally (meeeee!) clamored for! Guy and Ice meet cute here! We! Go!

Palmer, you shrinky-dink sonofabitch, get out of there. How dare you disrupt the natural order with your dickless limbo?

Betrayal! Ray sees Tori and falls immediately in love, even though Guy Gardner is single RIGHT THERE and this is blasphemy.

This is cuckoldry of the lowest form. It will not serve! It will not stand! It will—oh, hey Flash, what's up?

The one time this movie’s hilarious, it’s unintentional: a speedster in crimson spandex holding perfectly still to creep in not one but two sparse bushes.

Back to the cosmic overwrite: who has the superpower to alter the universe at a quantum level? The Atom has rewritten this world in his image using the power of love. Behold, the movie enters its Simp Stage. It’s easier to change the universe than change yourself, Nice Guy.

First, Tori comes to the house and crushes Ray’s dreams by liking her boss. The midpoint between an Atom and a George Clooney is apparently a Miguel Ferrer. In Atom’s paradise, this is treated as more important than learning Eno is The Weatherman.

You still think Atom-Flashpoint is just a theory? Thus far we've been subjected to so many confessionals of Atom bemoaning his Nice Guy status, a thing that should only be done for money. Now in his Black Mercy perfect Simperverse, Ice joins him in the booth, and just...wow, rips the balls off a man right in front of a nation and his mother. Just a never-ending barrage of "Oh, that's so sweet!" to his unrequested and unrequited affections.

I did not come here for this. I wanted to write Nerding things for you, about these awful costumes. Remember Challenge of the Superheroes? Those were glorious days. No jet-skis await you now. Only endless confessional cut-tos. Death will not save you. In this splinter timeline, Cheap Trick’s big hit was “I Want You to Not Want Me.” Do you think I enjoy making jokes of that caliber? All information sets in the Atompoint are naturally delimited to quips a Nice Guy would seethe at a woman for not pretending to laugh at. I hate it here. In this universe a Planck length is anchored to one shameable dick kink.

We see its effects on the mundane level: Cheryl, who had previously wished her boyfriend were a “nice guy” like Green Lantern, is immediately forced to watch a Brazilian model/actress drape herself over him in a victory for all men over the slags they love! Martin gives B.B. tickets to whatever was 1997 Vancouver's version of Hamilton, plus artisanal earrings he's been saving for The One. I think Cheryl and Martin are a codependent match, but he ends up dating a 16-year-old because younger women are less resistant to his misbehavior. The show thinks this is a good thing! This is now a world of existential horror.

My God, gentlemen, these women are begging you in the kindest terms possible to have some dignity. Martin, I know it’s 1997, but we were so close as a culture to realizing this behavior is terrifying. Either the screenwriter is working out some stuff or Ray Palmer has become God, which is more likely? This is the exact plot of Final Crisis, if Darkseid wore a fedora instead of a…a…what kind of helmet does Darkseid wear, anyway? I bet I can find out by asking the mods of New Gods Going Their Own Way.

As the cosmic rewrite continues to unfurl, Tori joins the Justice League to forever remain close to Ray, yet out of reach. We’re subjected to numerous confessionals of her stripping away his dignity, telling the entire world how unfuckable he is. At one point she claims to have frozen him in an ice cube to prank a friend as he enlarged in their mouth. We’re clocking unattainable kinks at a rate of one every three seconds.

Only here, in the sea of her disgust can he know peace. At last he can reveal his affections, his very soul without risk of rejection, for rejection is the default state. But not me. I refuse to live in this self-defeating universe where meteorologists are underfunded, private enterprise takes lucrative government handouts to do critical functions, and superstorms provoke theories about criminal weather manipulation! It’s an America where post office leaders slow-roll mail service, and a society that blames its hardest hustlers for not being able to find a job or an affordable apartment. Where hardworking people lament their office’s overwhelming health plans but instead of fixing it, Ice gets a huge status upgrade! I won’t! Show your face, Atom! I want to look you in the eye as I swallow my own tongue to escape you!

GASP—The Atom is John Kassir?!? The Zelda commercial guy? That’s my Hot Dog arch-foe? Lydia gets lasagna maniac Nathen Mazri, Dennard gets Confederate revisionist Lochlainn Cousinfucker, but I get the Cryptkeeper? No, absolutely not. I refuse this normal man living his dreams. I demand someone maladjusted and unsuccessful. Kassir was even married to Julie Benz, who, I am now learning, is not Julie Bowen, but still—you can’t make me fight a winner! I will beat you! I will find a way, Kassir! I swear thiiiiisss to youuuuu--*

Brendan was originally funny, but it got retconned away in the last Crisis.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Thomas, who one time punched a statue so hard it gained sentience just long enough to register the pain and die.

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