Teen Titans Go! (2013– )
9/10
Some 'enthusiasts' of the earlier show miss the point entirely
29 December 2015
Let's get one thing straight from the beginning: Teen Titans GO! is not a reboot of the older and more mature TV show of the early 2000's. Instead, TTG is a very entertaining mixture of usual superhero romp (with the gratuitous violence) and self-deprecating humor, with characters that represent several human foibles, especially when it comes to how Robin is portrayed: as the power-mad leader of the Titans who is capricious, eccentric, jealous, paranoid and spoiled rotten. Most of the humor is the type of pie-in-the-face you find in cartoons like Spongebob, but there are also plenty of jokes for us adults, especially for those of us who grew up in the 80s. I also perceive a libertarian streak in some of the writing; for instance the episode "Nose Mouth" clearly shows the dangers of abusing a great power (Raven's black magic) to fix apparent minor personality flaws in some of the team members, with things getting out of hand the moment Raven started to see problems to 'fix' around her which turns her into an evil entity quite rapidly. That has to be one of the best analogies about government abuse of power I have seen on a TV show.

Now I haven't seen the original show except in passing. I did read some of the comments from what I gather are very serious fans of the original talking trash about Teen Titans GO! These fans are taking things a little too seriously. Teen Titans GO! is obviously a comedy show which lampoons the original TT in particular and superheroes in general. In my view, if there was a bunch of superheroes that screamed for lampooning, it was the Teen Titans; the original characters themselves are quite ridiculous, especially the non-human Starfire and Raven which were invented back in the 80s as sensual überfrauen. In fact I think the new characters are much more attractive and endearing that the original characters precisely because of how each lampoons the older and ostensibly more serious characters. There is an obvious sexual innuendo in the way the original characters in Teen Titans were drawn and portrayed, and in Teen Titans GO! they simply make it obvious in order to make fun of this sensuality (for instance, watch episode "Legs" and "Mr. Butt".)

I do recommend the show and recommend you buy the DVDs. The comedy is very entertaining and funny - not always, but most of the time. The inside jokes are hilarious. The writers have much more creative freedom, thus the jokes and situations tend to push the envelope at many times.
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