Television Oddities: Justice League of America (1997)

 

Television Oddities title card

Today, dear readers, I want to take you back. Back to a time when superhero media was no where as prevalent as it is today. Back to the ramshackle days of the mid-to-late 1990s, when superheroes weren't blowing up international box offices and were still largely the denizens of comic book shops, toy boxes, video game consoles and Saturday morning TV. With maybe the occasional evening drama or big budget movie to serve as an exception to the rule.

It was into this environment that this pilot was made. After the ambitious but ultimately doomed 1990 series The Flash, and 1993's rousing success of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, DC Comics was still interested in continuing to showcase their characters on TV. That's when a pilot for CBS was greenlit for one of DC Comics' premiere teams, The Justice League of America.

Group shot of the cast of Justice League of America.

Now, this is kind of an infamous pilot in some circles. And it's been talked about a lot. But many of the videos and blog posts I've encountered about it seem to mostly be the same thing. They all just kind of seem like comic book fanboys kvetching about how the pilot, and particularly the cast, don't match perfectly with their platonic ideal of what a Justice League of America television show should be. I'm hoping to take a different tack and cover both why it didn't work from a comics fan perspective and why it just doesn't pass muster as a pilot.

Part of me wants to give you a “quick-and-dirty” run down of the history of the Justice League, but that would be a bit much. So, I've decided to save all that for a different post and focus on the one version of the Justice League that this pilot is ostensibly based on.

In 1987, DC Comics wanted to relaunch the Justice League of America. This came right after a big event story titled Crisis on Infinite Earths, which changed the DC Universe to a large degree. And which they were now using as an excuse to try to clean up and revamp their big name characters. Origin stories were retold in different ways. Wonder Woman was relaunched completely. The Flash was a different person. A lot going on. Now, DC wanted to relaunch the JLA with all the big name characters. The last version didn't have any of them (I'll explain that some other time) and it didn't work out well. There was just one problem and it was that all the big name characters were being relaunched too. The editors of those comic books told the editor of Justice League to kindly keep their hands off. So, writers Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and artist Kevin Maguire reaching for whoever was available. They ended up with a cast of lesser lights, newbies and characters who were being tried for a revival. The cast changed but a general line-up would be something like Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern (the Guy Gardner one), Captain Atom, Rocket Red, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Fire and Ice. They had a couple of tricks up there sleeves, though. One is that they maintained the sense of scope for their team even without Superman in their ranks by making the team official. The Justice League was rechristened the Justice League International and was now officially sanctioned by the United Nations. So, now they had to deal with global politics too. The other was the philosophy for the JLI. The idea was that the League would be a place where superheroes could act like people complete with flaws, foibles and rough edges. Some became fast friends, others grated on each others' nerves. And a lot of these interactions would be leveraged towards humor. Giffen, DeMatteis and Maguire essentially created possibly the first superhero workplace comedy.

The comic that introduced the Justice League International.

It was wildly popular. Popular enough for Justice League International to be spun into two series Justice League America and Justice League Europe. Plus a quarterly book they would share.

This was the Justice League I largely grew up with. It's also the Justice League that this pilot is supposedly based on.

Supposedly . . .

We start out with Tori Olafsdotter aka Ice giving a documentary-style confessional to a camera about her lack of confidence and how she never expected to end up a superhero.

In comics, Ice is Tora Olafsdotter and she hails from a race of Nordic “Ice Gods”. Here, she's a meteorologist with self-esteem issues who works for Dr. Eno at the Eno Institute. They are tracking a shurricane headed to New Metro City. A storm that has been predicted by a cryptic individual known as The Weatherman.

Ah, New Metro City. Of all the fake cities associated with DC superheroes, this one seems the fakest. Somehow the city is near a desert and a waterfront and has some sort of film/TV industry going on and yet has no truly noteworthy character. It's not gloomy like Gotham, awe-inspiring like Metropolis or bustling like Central City. It just kind of is.

Then we get another confessional featuring Barry Allen aka The Flash. The Barry Allen we know from the comics and recent TV shows is a forensic scientist. This one is unemployed. And he's seemingly going out of his way to communicate that he is basically “Joe Shmoe”. He talks about how he likes to go bowling and watch football on the tube and all that. And then we're treated to a scene of Barry's landlord evicting him from his apartment, including throwing his stuff out of a second-story window. Right before Barry has to race off and deal with the rogue hurricane.

Next the camera trains itself on Guy Gardner, aka Green Lantern. There have been a number of different Green Lanterns in the comics. This version seems to be three different ones squished together into one character. For a more accurate take on the Guy Gardner version, watch 2025's Superman movie. Anyway, he laments that Barry gets to have such an uncomplicated life while his is so complex. We then see him on a date trying to make up with his girlfriend Cheryl, who apparently is angry because he keeps disappearing to save the city. And then he disappears to save the city.

I feel like this will go a long time if I keep doing this as a blow-by-blow.

To keep things short, we are introduced to two more heroes via on-camera confessional. One is B.B. DaCosta aka Fire. In comics, Beatriz DaCosta, a Brazilian supermodel and secret agent with fire powers. Here, she's a struggling actress. The other is Ray Palmer aka The Atom. Here he's a science teacher who can shrink down in size. In the comics . . . actually, Ray's pretty much spot on. Except he's a college professor instead of a science teacher.

The Justice League right before they run off to the final battle. 

The confessionals continue throughout the pilot. The plot becomes about finding and stopping the Weatherman, who is manipulating the weather while dealing with their own personal struggles. Barry keeps looking for a job. Guy keeps trying to get back together with Cheryl. B.B. Doesn't struggle so much with pursuing acting as being pursued by a guy she meets at an audition who's way too young for her. Ray deals with his growing attraction to Tori while Tori deals with her confidence issues. This is also an origin story for Tori as she gains ice powers from being zapped by the Weatherman's machine.

To aid Tori in her quest to control her powers, she's brought to the Justice League's mysterious, shadowy leader/mentor, The Martian Manhunter. He's played by David Ogden Stiers, of M*A*S*H fame. He's got an amazing voice for the role, but he's more than a little, shall we say, paunchy. The pilot uses Martian Manhunter very sparingly anyway. The two times he leaves the League's secret underwater headquarters, it's shape-shifted into someone else.

David Ogden Stiers as The Martian Manhunter

As for the Weatherman . . . I'm just going to spoil it up front. The Weatherman is Tori's boss Dr. Eno, played by Miguel Ferrer. They tried to do a fake-out thing where one of Tori's co-workers is hinted to be the Weatherman. But anyone watching should have figured it out. Because there are only two actors in the whole cast that seem capable of projecting enough gravitas to be a supervillain. One is David Ogden Stiers, who is already playing Martian Manhunter. The other is Miguel Ferrer.

So, I'm going to say something that would be considered blasphemy in some comic book circles: the problem with this pilot was not the lack of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Adding them to this specific pilot would not have improved anything (imagine Barry complaining about not having a job while billionaire Bruce Wayne is right there). And under normal circumstances and with proper characterization, the characters they did have are good characters. After all, Justice League International was able to succeed using a group of characters who are even lower tier than this (Note for the uninitiated: The Flash and the Atom are generally considered to be bigger characters than, say, Blue Beetle or Booster Gold). And most regular people and network executives would not be comparing it to a comic book.

The problem is that it's just a bad pilot.

I mean, the costumes are a problem and the special effects are a problem. But a further problem is that it's just so generic. The city they're in is generic. The villain is generic.  The characters feel like the generic character types you'd pick if you were doing “Five young people getting by in the big city”. There's the guy with relationship problems, the guy who has trouble holding down a job, the struggling actress and two varaiations of the nerd with self-confidence issues. They're clearly trying to run with the same “What if superheroes were human beings with feelings” approach as the comic book and seem to have circled around again to “What if superheroes' personal lives were kind of boring and mundane”. The scope has gone downright local and domestic. And they're relying on trends of 1990s television to make it work. Instead of a workplace comedy like the original JLI, they went with a friend group dynamic like the NBC show Friends. And while the confessional bits may remind modern people of The Office, back then it would have been considered evocative of the MTV reality show The Real World.

The final line-up sans Martian Manhunter and including Ice.

But for some reason I still find it kind of charming. Because it reminds me of a time earlier in my life when depicting the Justice League didn't have quite so many rules attached to it.

Anyway, this pilot never aired in the United States. But I believe it did air in some places overseas. And bootlegs of it did start popping up on the comic con circuit shortly thereafter. If you're morbidly curious, I found it online at Dailymotion.