On DVD: Justice League Unlimited Season 2

Starring Mark Hammill, Michael Rosenbaum

DC Comics has had nearly a 15 year run of solid animated series.  It all started with the original Batman: The Animated Series and continued with the Superman Animated Series, then Batman Beyond, Justice League, and finally Justice League Unlimited.

The Season

Justice League Unlimited died an untimely death at only two seasons, not because the quality of the series fell off but because Cartoon Network never had a grasp on who the actual audience is for this series.  They programmed it, and its original incarnation Justice League, on Saturday nights.  This series was being watched by young adults, not children, and most young adults aren't home on Saturday nights.  I used to try to catch the series on a rerun when I could, and suddenly I heard it was being cancelled.  Had Cartoon network programmed this series in primetime during the week or attached it to the Adult Swim block of programming it would probably still be on today.

I guess by now you get the idea that I like this series, if so, you'd be correct.  Justice League Unlimited was a retooled version of the original series that allowed for as many new heroes as the creators would like to throw at the series which created opportunities for them to tell all kinds of stories.  Often they told your basic, and a little to heavy handed, morality tales aimed at a younger audience but mixed with that was a stronger more interesting, more adult oriented, serialized element to the season featuring Lex Luthor.  An argument could be made that this season is actually about him and the villains more than about the heroes.  In fact there's one episode that only features heroes at the very end.

The thing that sets JLU apart from other animated series is that the characters are actually developed and given complex personalities that would be more common in adult live action series.  The characters have many motivations that affect decisions they make and events that change characters change them forever within the series.  Hawkgirl goes through a good bit of trauma that stays with her from all the way back in early episodes of the original Justice League series.

Now, don't start believing that this series is all drama and character development because it's not.  There's also a ton of gonzo comic book action that harkens back to DC's Action Comics and Justice League of America comics from the 70's and 80's.  In most cases each episode is perfectly balanced with a bit of everything, drama, action, and bits of the serialized story arc that develops throughout the season.  Fortunately, even though the series died an early death, at least all the story arcs found their way to completion, and the final minutes of the final episode were a good capper to the series.  If there's any "justice" in this world the creators of Justice League Unlimited will be bringing us a new series, or even bring JLU back on a good night at a good time!

9/10

The Video

This is a digitally created series so many of the problems that are common with film transfers aren't an issue with animated series such as this.  Often though animated series do have problems with aliasing or "jaggies", jaggy lines or broken ones in the image.  With this box set I didn't notice any jaggies.  There's just a bit of compression grain but other than that the episodes look great.  One thing though, they look so good the animation and cgi don't mix to well.  The cgi doesn't actually look very good and thankfully it doesn't get used too much.

8/10

The Audio

The audio is really basic here as you should expect from an animated series.  Now with that said the dialogue, score, and sound effects are well balanced, distortion free, and crystal clear.

7/10

Packaging and Bonus Features

The entire season is presented on two discs with bonus features on the second disc.  Each episode is only around 22 minutes long with commercials removed so the compression needed to make everything fit on two discs wasn't very aggressive.  Now as for the packaging, the two discs are presented in a thin fold out housed inside a cardboard slipcover.  I like the slim appearance but getting the fold out out of the slip cover without tearing it was a challenge.  Also, when I pulled the plastic off the box one of the disc came flying out of the package because within the foldout the discs overlap to keep the whole package thin.  Overall it just feels a little too low budget.  The artwork is comic book style stuff featuring the main heroes and it does a good job of representing the series.

On disc two there's a series of featurettes where the creators sit together and discuss the main story arcs of the season with scenes from the important episodes cut in or presented picture in picture style as the creators talk.  On occasion as they discuss an episode scenes are shown with early drawings of the scene shown in PiP style for comparison.  There's some really good information within these featurettes covering what the creators hoped to do with the season but there's nearly nothing about the series as a whole.  I'd also like to have heard some discussion of when they were told that the series would be ending and if it had any effect on the final episodes.  Even with that complaint there's more here in the way of bonus features than we get with most animated series releases.

7/10

Easily one of the best animated series on TV over the last few years has came and went but at least now we have it on DVD!

Overall (Not an Average) 8/10

The Season 9/10

The Video 8/10

The Audio 7/10

The Packaging and Bonus Features 7/10

Overall (Not an Average) 8/10

-Stephen Lackey