#60: Teen Titans GO! To The Movies

Stan Lee cameos as himself. Also, it's time for self-referential animated movies to end.

From what I've seen of this show, I actually enjoy it a great deal.

It's not like the original, or dark as The Judas Contract. It fills a niche, and not one aimed at people who watched the original, although there is something for them too.

The art style and direction is mostly by one Mr. Hipp, who I followed on Tumblr way back when. Man it's a delight to see it on the big screen, peeping at the cameos - Plastic Man (!), Miss Martian, Zatanna (Who we saw a bit of in the DC Super Hero Girls 2.0 short beforehand).

No Booster Gold or Star Sapphire, oddly enough.

The plot is "Everyone else and then some has a movie in development at DC, except the Teen Titans, more specifically, Robin."

As a nod to the real-life Warner Bros. situation, they have The Flash constantly at the lot but never actually filming a movie, perhaps a nod to the "Will they, won't they?" Flash stand-alone film.

No one is really concerned if the other four want a movie, but it doesn't seem like it.

It seems that WAG can only make good movies if they're self-aware (No, Storks was not a good movie), between this and the Lego Movies sans Ninjago.

It's self-referential-ness come from itself. How everyone thinks the new cartoon is a joke, even five or so years later since it started. They play with that and they play it up.

The entire movie can be summed up as "Yeah, you think we're stupid? We sure are! Let's go!"




There were some hilariously dark moments in the movie. A sequence involves getting rid of all the superheroes so the group can finally get a movie, but without the heroes, the world is a hellhole.

So they send Kal-El to earth, not pick on Wonder Woman, and throw pearls around Martha Wayne's neck and shove her and Thomas into an alleyway to be murdered.

It was also a bit of a musical, with Lisa-Frank mixed with a cartoon style I couldn't quite place music video-esque segments for an Inspirational song, and one with Robin that just oozes Batman: The Animated Series at you and it's pretty cool.

My favorite is the Go! Rap, sung by both the characters (I can't find that one on youtube oddly enough) and Lil Yachty, who voices Green Lantern.

It won me over with "The Star, the Fire, the Live, The Wire, the alien princess in her alien attire,"

This movie has plenty of art shifts, but thankfully they keep the stop motion felt stuff at a minimum. I feel like every animated film does that to stand out - You're not standing out.

It uses all these tricks because this is essentially an empty movie, you know what's coming, though slapping it against slightly-fudged but still kind of real goings-on at the DC side of WB grants some hilarity.

Some of the jokes threaten to wear out their welcome in the first half but quickly tighten up.

I saw this for 6$, and that's kind of the right amount for it. If you appreciate meta humor and can do nothing more than hope for the best with DC - By the way, no Aquaman trailer was shown with this, and it bummed me out - know that this isn't for adults who are outside of our minuscule movie-lovers group at all, and have fun.