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Super Buddies

Super Buddies 2013

Since started this site, I’ve expanded my focus quite a bit. For the first half of the first year, I was limiting myself to only theatrically released superhero movies. I quickly included home video releases so I could review the great DC Animation titles and my list of movies to watch is always growing. And while I doubt I’ll ever expand it so much that I end up watching and reviewing Dora the Explorer: Superbabies, I did decide to watch and review this movie. It did help quite a bit that my daughter is already a fan of the Buddies series of movies and I realized that I haven’t really watched a lot of movies with her lately even though I would almost always mention Jena in the early days of this site. Now, this movie has a few things going against it right from the start. It’s a Disney, straight-to-home-video movie, it has talking puppies, and it’s somewhere around tenth in the long running series of Air Bud and later Buddies movies. I’m not going to go out and say that this is a good movie by any means, but when I look at it from the perspective of being aimed towards younger kids, you could do a lot worse than Super Buddies.
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Is “Direct-to-DVD” a Dirty Word?

Are Movies With Theatrical Releases “Better”?

I follow a lot of movie sites, and most of them have a focus on theatrical releases as well as back catalog favorites. But there is an entirely different market out there consisting of movies that skip the theatrical release and go straight to home video through services like Amazon and Redbox. When talking about these home video releases, many people think of things like Asylum films and their low budget mockbusters made to capitalize on the projected success of many of the Hollywood summer blockbusters. But there are plenty of other categories of “direct-to-blu” videos that aren’t so cut and dry. There are a great many DC and Marvel animated films that have come out in the past several years, and while the run time and budget speak to a home video release, the acting and story are often just as strong as any theatrically released animated movie.
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Justice League: Doom

Justice League: Doom 2012

I figured it was time for me to take another trip into the animated DC Universe, this time it’s Justice League: Doom. It still surprises me how many of these things are out there and how many I still have yet to see. This movie is centered around a plot to destroy the entire Justice League using stolen plans initially created by Batman but altered by the Legion of Doom. Of course, this isn’t the LoD from the old Superfriends cartoon, though their base does emerge from a body of water during it’s initial reveal. The members of the LoD are very different, but I’ll get to that in a little bit. The action is up to the usual par, including the level of peril. The first thing I noticed with this movie was also that it included the voicework of Kevin Conroy as Batman and Tim Daly as Superman who really solidified their roles as those two during the 90’s animated series and various other works in the interim.
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