Chris: Greetings programs and welcome to another edition of Whatever We’re Calling This Now That We’re Not Watching Lois & Clark Anymore With Chris and Ronnie. As you no doubt remember, we’ve moved on from covering the just mentioned middling-to-bad mid 90’s Superman network romcom to Nightman, the only one hour superhero drama conceived, produced, and financed entirely by the runners up in a 1997 Marin County middle school AV Club talent contest. Our first episode of the day is called “Chrome” and hold onto your hats folks, because we’ve got a mythology episode. Turns out that karate loving, sleeves hating, jazz guy Johnny Domino wasn’t the only person to be struck by that magic bolt of lightning back whenever it was that he was struck by that magic bolt of lighting. Turns out that a whole bunch of folks all over the world were also struck by that very same bolt of lightning at that very same time and imbued with super powers all their own. Turns out that’s a thing that can happen. I was surprised too. But that one scientist guy from the first episode (played by Patrtick Macnee? How did I miss that?) pops back up to inform Nightman that not only are there an unknown number of superdudes running around, one of them is evil and has dedicated himself to hunting and killing all of his supersiblings.
His name is Joran (oof), and he’s discovered (somehow) that when one member of the Lightning League (what I’ve decided to call the people given powers by the lightning) kills the other, they gain the dead Leaguers powers. You know, like in Highlander. Joran (that’s really the best name they could come up with?) is played by an Irish actor named Shane Brolly and he’s like the homo erectus version of Daniel Bruhl’s Baron Zemo. He’s supposed to be one of those menacing villains who defeats the hero without breaking a sweat in their first encounter, triggering a crisis in confidence in the previously unflappable hero. You know, like in Rocky III. But unlike in Rocky III, Nightman has a plucky black sidekick to help him regain his mojo and strategize a dynamic new strategy to defeat his opponent. Oh wait, that’s also Rocky III, isn’t it? Okay, how about this? Instead of facing off against an astonishingly racist caricature of a Scary Black Man (remember how in 30 seconds of screen time Clubber Lang questions Rocky’s sexual potency, low-key threatens to rape Adrian, and kinda-sorta kills Mickey? Jesus), Nightman instead does battle with a smug, sexually ambiguous, eurotrash fancy boy? That’s different, right?
Better costume, honestly.
Joran (Repetition isn’t making it better) is one of those villains who’s presented as a terrifying new, brain meltingly difficult opponent that puts everyone on edge in the same manner as Venom did in his first appearances in Spider-Man. But instead he comes off like The Vanisher (first appearance, X-Men 02, November 1963), an “unstoppable” villain who’s dispatched with comical ease (The Vanisher is a teleporter whose lethal danger is demonstrated when he steals top secret military plans from the Pentagon despite the fact that said plans are safely stowed in a briefcase kept on a small table surrounded by army men with guns. Just one of the countless near nuclear catastrophes that could have been avoided by a locked file cabinet.). It would be insane to expect any kind of epic “dramatic showdown” from the seventh episode of a 90’s superhero show, but “Chrome” still manages to clothesline itself on the low-ass bar of cheapo syndicated TV. Juran (still a no from me) telekinetically hucks a bell at Nightman, who steps out of its way, and that’s about it. And he wasn’t there anyway because it was just the Nightman hologram, so who gives a fuck? Also am I crazy or does Nightman’s hologram accidentally trip a landmine? What do the makers of Nightman think a hologram actually is? Anyway, it’s all wrapped up in a classic TV “To Be Continued” when the villain escapes by forcing the hero to choose between killing the bad guy or saving an innocent life. So the villain is foiled, but the hero’s noble bloodlust goes unsated, and we the audience are forced to contemplate the inevitable rematch. I guess sometimes nobody gets what they want.
Ronnie: “Chrome” is a real humdinger of an episode for multiple reasons. For one, it broaches the larger Night Man mythos in a way we’ve not seen before. Previously our assumption was that Johnny was the sole beneficiary of the lightning strike to the cable car, perhaps because of his unique jazzman DNA structure. No, others received powers as well. I’m not well versed in the Malibu Comics Ultraverse yet but from the Ultraforce cartoon that I binged with a friend the other streetcar lightning recipients became a superteam called The Strangers. They included black speedster Zip Zap, Genis-Vell (and others) ripoff Atom Bob, Grenade (who despite his design is not the gay member of the team) and sex toy gone sentient Electrocute. What does this have to do with Night Man? Nothing, because I’m almost certain the license for the TV show was for the title character alone and every other Malibu character was tied up in other licensing deals. I bring all this up to mount an explanation for why Joran/Chrome exists. I imagine if they had access to the whole Malibu roster the show would pick a character from the comics. Instead they were faced with the worst situation possible: having to use their imagination.
I suppose I should talk about the actual episode instead of flaunting my knowledge of flamed out 90s comic book companies that were later subsumed and squandered by one of the Big Two. We open on a scientific demonstration of a woman being able to astral project. It’s described as “the ability to virtually be in two places at the same time” which to me is just describing Night Man’s garage opener jazz hologram, but that’s me. Things go awry when Joran kills her using his ability of glowing eyes. “How many more will he kill before we can stop him?” intones Patrick Macnee. How much time you got to fill? Don’t worry, there’s also a subplot about a reporter twigging to there being a crimefighter in town. She even puts a bounty on information about Night Man. This reporter is played by Alexandra Hedison, aka Mrs. Jodie Foster, so that’s neat. Didn’t we already have a reporter character? Whatever happened to her? Oh well, it’s Mrs. Jodie Foster’s time to shine.
This is not the most compromising position Raleigh’s found Johnny in, let me tell you that much.
Joran meets up with her and finds out the common denominator for all Bay City strange goings on is Johnny Domino, so he requests a meeting with him via the reporter, which is how you press the flesh with a jazz musician in this town. You need an intermediary. Joran thinks killing other people with abilities allows him to absorb their powers, which I will note is the premise of Sylar from Heroes. Do I believe Tim Kring, the creator of Crossing Jordan, stole from syndicated TV for his show Heroes? Oh, 100%. Joran is a trial run for Sylar. Instead of Quinto’s mesmerizing eyebrows imagine a dodgy Eurotrash accent and rape eyes. Frank, ever the proud father, dishes to this strange man about his son. “Johnny loves his music. But I tell you, had he become a cop, that kid would’ve gone all the way.” All the way to what? Police chief? RoboCop?
To be fair, Joran almost immediately figures out Domino = Night Man, although Mrs. Foster isn’t convinced. I like how in their first confrontation Chrome ties Johnny up with a fire hose and then telepathically controls the Prowler. This is really the point at which Night Man comes into itself. Imagine sitting on your couch or in your chair and you’re watching a man trapped by a fire hose with a car bearing down on him. And that’s a commercial break. Raleigh fumes: “what kind of monster makes a guy’s own car turn against him?”. Johnny’s advantage over Joran is that since everything the latter does is evil, Johnny can predict his every move. I’m not sure that’s how it works, but okay. Meanwhile, Chrome tries to engineer a camera crew filmed lampooning as well as frames the Night Man for a robbery. Fortunately, our himbo hero knows his foe’s weakness, which leads to a conclusion so insane I hardly believe it happened. And I’ve seen this episode multiple times, over multiple decades.
Chris: Remember when Elaine threw Joe Mayo’s fur coat out the window because she thought it was Puddy’s and then Joe wanted to Elaine to replace the coat, not because she was the one who threw it out the window, but because the person in charge keeping track of the coats should therefore be on the hook for any that went missing on said persons watch? And remember how Elaine thought that Joe was way out of pocket for insisting that she replace the missing coat because it was ridiculous to think that her agreeing to gather and throw all the coats onto a bed in another room somehow made her liable for what happened to them afterwards? You know how Elaine insisted to Jerry and George that whoever it was that threw the coat out the window was the party at fault and should be made to replace the coat? And that when Jerry pointed out that she was the person who threw the coat out the window Elaine pointed out that Joe Mayo didn’t know that and had no way of proving it so she didn’t think she should be held responsible even though she was? That she was being scapegoated for a crime that she was in fact guilty of? Remember how baffled Jerry looked by Elaine’s insane tortured logic? That’s how I felt when Nightman finally cracked the manner in which he would defeat his nemesis.
Nightman’s whole deal is that he can sense evil thoughts and intentions or whatever. And it’s an unconscious, reflexive thing more in line with Spidey’s spider-sense than, say, Superman’s x-ray vision. It’s not something he turns on and off, is what I’m saying, so much as it’s something that’s always active, but not always engaged. So, when Nightman realizes that he can use his ability to sense evil or whatever to sense what Chrome is going to do next, he’s basically discovering that the power he’s had since the beginning of the show can be used to do exactly what it’s been doing the whole time. It’s like if Spider-Man spent an entire issue fretting over how he was gonna stop some bad guy and then MJ was like “yeah, but this is just a guy with a pistol. Don’t you dodge gunfire from automatic weapons every day?” And then Spidey went “oh yeah! Right!” And proceeded to punch the guy out. That’s not really a satisfying conclusion to a story. And to make matters worse, the big climactic fight turns out to be between Chrome’s astral projection and Nightman’s scam-to-get-out-of-work hologram. So what actually happens is a hologram manages to outsmart a ghost? Is that right? But then, and I know I brought this up earlier but I think it bears repeating, the hologram also trips a landmine? Am I remembering this correctly? A weightless massless light construct accidentally depresses the trigger of a mine and detonates it? So a problem is solved due to the discovery of facts that the protagonist was already aware of, leading to a physical confrontation between two non-corporial projections that incurs significant property damage due to explosions triggered by one of the phantoms. That can’t possibly be right.
I’m glad you brought up the Heroes connection, because I noticed it too but kind of thought it would be gouache to mention both how Night Man ripped off Highlander and was then in turn ripped off by Heroes. That’s an embarrassment of trash right there, and I would have been remiss to take more than my share. Unrelated, but you just know that there are gonna be people that complain that this Highlander reboot somehow tarnishes the legacy of the original, and that’s just gonna be fucking nuts. Because all those movies suck. I’m not saying the first one isn’t fun to watch, or that there isn’t something compelling about the core concept, but come on. We’re talking about a film where a large portion of the story takes place in Scotland and whose main character is himself Scottish and is played by Christopher Lambert, a Frenchman raised in Switzerland with an impenetrable accent and a voice that sounds like he gargles shards of glass before every take. Then they have the audacity to cast Sean Connery and make him play a Spaniard who lived most of his life in Egypt and Japan. But you know what he sounds like? He sounds like Sean fucking Connery. Because Sean Connery doesn’t fuck around with accents. His Irish-American Chicago street cop sounds like his suave British secret agent sounds like his Russian submarine commander sounds like his Baltimore Industrial Magnate sounds like his Robin Hood. What the fuck, movie?
Just had to get that off my chest.
They call this photograph editing “Lenoing”.
Anyway, this is probably my favorite Night Man episode to date. After a half a dozen episodes it’s settling into its identity as a terrible superhero show instead of the previous half hearted feints in the direction of being a terrible science fiction show, a terrible horror show, or a terrible noir/crime show. It’s blindingly obvious that no one behind the scenes had any idea what they were doing or where they were going and the show’s panicky attempts to impose some kind of coherent mythology onto this madness were delightful. We covered the return of Macnee, introduction of a super genius nemesis and the suggestion that somehow the same bolt of lightning managed to simultaneously strike numerous people all over the world. As well as the half assed crisis and climax. You also mentioned the delightful decision to introduce a plucky blond reporter lady in one episode, only to replace her with a new, different plucky blond reporter lady to serve the exact same function a couple episodes later. The only other thing I wanted to draw attention to was Nightman’s team’s attempt to draw Chrome out by appealing to his vanity via a clearly doctored image of what is supposed to be Chrome but looks more like mid-80s McDonald’s celebrity spokesmonter Mac Tonight. I honestly don’t remember what this was supposed to do or why it was supposed to do it, but I liked the phrase “celebrity spokesmonter” and wanted to wedge it in. Can you remind me what that was all about?
Ronnie: This is also my favorite so far for many of the reasons you elucidated. As for why the Night Man team effects such a vicious lampooning on Chrome, it’s simple: Chrome is vain. “Joran’s fatal weakness, his Achilles’ heel, is his vanity.” The object is to get the television network to run the picture and bait Chrome into a duel “at the old world’s fairground at midnight”. Then it’s trickery via hologrammatic Night Man. So all that is to say that the vandalized photo is completely irrelevant to the plot at hand and you could easily cut it out without losing anything. Except for the hilarity of Joran looking like Flabber from Big Bad Beetleborgs, that is. Chrome lives to bedevil Night Man another day when Johnny has to choose between saving Patrick Macnee or apprehending the villain. He chooses the boring choice. Patrick Macnee is an old man; why NOT gamble with his life?
He’s got Bette Davis eyes…provided Bette Davis’ eyes were all shiny and shit.
Jennifer Parks reminds me of Rene Russo in Nightcrawler: she’ll do anything for a story and her ethical scruples are a moving target at best. Lou Bloom vs. The Night Man, who you got? I feel like Bloom is hungrier even if Night Man’s got the physical advantage. Parks would actually do for a solid supporting character but she only appears in one other episode of the series, spoiler alert. Giving Night Man a varied cast of supporting roles, like on Lois & Clark, would both make too much sense and also the finger thing means the money. Nonetheless, she has a good send-off in this episode when she and Johnny are dining and she muses “either you can’t keep a promise or you can’t be two places at the same time”. Night Man promised he’d do a fly by for her camera crew, and it’s about time that happens. Just as Johnny is about to leave, oh, look, it’s Night Man from a distance. This actually isn’t a use of the hologram, which is weird because this is the exact scenario the hologram was created for, but instead Raleigh wearing the suit. Very Silver Age Superman this storyline, from concept to resolution. I liked it.
Look, Night Man is never going to be The Shield in terms of entertainment I enjoy without reservation and without irony. So this C+ episode of Night Man might be the highest we get, and that’s fine because it’s not about being good, it’s about being insane. “Chrome” introduces plenty of absurd elements that hopefully are revisited in future episodes. I can at least spoil that later on in Season 1 Chrome/Joran returns in the creatively titled episode “Chrome II”. Something to look forward to amidst the gaffes and bad puns.
Odds & Ends
-According to IMDB, Chrome is also the name of a San Francisco rock group that formed in 1976. Good looking out, IMDB. To be fair, it keeps with the title naming conventions’ relationship to music.
-The incidental jazz music sounds like Hell’s soundtrack if I’m being honest. That means what you think it means: BIG TIME OPERATOR RETURNS!
-The cable car accident happened on October 22nd.
-Frank and Charlie discuss the rise of swing in the 90s. If nothing else (lol) dates this show it’s that.
-”He’s got all the moves of a jungle predator” is an exceedingly weird way to speak of anyone, least of all your son.
-“If you’re not with me, you’re against me” – Jennifer Parks created the Cheney Doctrine!
-Joran calls himself “Mr. Chrome”, which is a mistake.
1X08 “TAKIN’ IT TO THE STREETS”
Chris: So the first, and most sensible in my opinion, impulse one has after watching “Takin’ It to the Streets” is to remove the DVD from the player, break it into a half dozen pieces, mail each piece to a different continent, then burn your house down with everything you ever loved inside, change your name, start life all over again and never speak of what you saw to anyone for the rest of your life. If that’s not a viable option for some reason, your second best option is almost certainly suicide. Honorable or otherwise. If you’re one of those miserable bastards that can’t even get killing yourself right, then your only remaining option is to slink into the always open arms of the home away from home for bitter babbling cranks everywhere, the internet. And holy shit, internet, do I have a yarn for you. Because in “Takin’ it to the Streets” Night Man takes on inner city violence. Before we jump into the episode proper, let’s take a quick look at that episode title. You know what’s never a good sign? A title using street style abbreviation and/or punctuation to denote some kind of authenticity. Oh sure, occasionally things work out like in 1984’s Breakin’ and it’s better known sequel Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, released later that same year (Little known fact, the success of the Breakin’ cycle was what gave French filmmaker Claude Berri the inspiration and confidence to film his now classic diptych, 1986’s Jean de Florette and Mannon of the Spring, or as it was titled in America: Jean de Florette 2: Electric Boogaloo). But mostly it’s an embarrassing disaster like Mo’ Money from 1992, or 2003’s Biker Boyz. Is it any surprise that “Takin’ it to the Streets” falls squarely into the latter category?
That’s a rhetorical question. The answer is no.
So, Night Man has decided to tackle the problems of gangs, black on black crime and its inexorable pull on young black athletes. Oh, and point shaving. In forty-four minutes. Yeah. So Night Man has that one black buddy/accomplice Raleigh who’s the brains behind Night Man’s whole supersuit. At the top of “Takin it to the Streets” we learn that Raleigh has a bea-u-tee-full new girlfriend who is also one of those tough as nails inner city high school teachers who all the kids dig because she’s a sexy lady who isn’t afraid to get down on their level and have a real bull session when the situation calls for it. When she brings Raleigh in to talk to her class about whatever AV gobbledygook he does and one of her students, without raising his hand mind you, “so you’re the guy who gave us Milli Vanilli” (let it never be said that the writing staff of Night Man didn’t have their fingers on the pulse of young black in culture in 1997) she fires right back that they all better sit back and shut up because since all the budget cuts this is their only chance to learn about faking earthquakes through the use of sonics and manufacturing hard light holograms of white Jazz Guys.
Blew Chips
Later that day, or maybe it was before, honestly who cares, Raleigh and his girlfriend are on a date along with Night Man and Night Man’s dad (“Wanna go on a date with me, a buddy of mine, and my buddy’s elderly father?” “Do I?”) when some of the girlfriends students roll up. They’re about to really get into some good natured jive slinging when Night Man’s evil-sense draws his attention to a town car over-flowing with armed men speeding right towards them and is barely able to raise an alarm before the bullets start flying. There’s a promising moment in the immediate aftermath of the attack when the girlfriend asks Night Man how he knew the car was gonna start shooting and Night Man goes “Well..” and trails off before something else pops up to derail the conversation and I was screaming “FINISH THE THOUGHT, NIGHT MAN!” But they never get back to that and instead the plot follows one of her students, basketball-prodigy-and-otherwise-slow-on-the-uptake all-star K-Train and his dalliance with a local crime lord who runs book and a protection racket out of what appears to be an exercise gymnasium/whore house. What follows is a plot that’s incomprehensible even by Night Man standards that involves murder, rigging high school basketball games, the use of the phrase capping on several occasions, a plan to unite the Bay City underworld under one banner at a meet-and-greet held in his gym’s cafeteria and one scene where the crime lord yells “Whitey made a fool out of you” at K-Train.
Ronnie: I think Night Man deserves credit for exiting its comfort zone and broaching sensitive topics. It botches the broach but isn’t the effort worth anything? Well, not really. “Takin’ It To The Streets” is about a guy named Artemis pressuring star athlete Kelvin “K-Train” Barnett into performing poorly in a game to benefit his gambling outfit. This is done in the most erotic “take a dive” scene I’ve ever seen; to wit, it takes place in a hot tub with babes. Is this Night Man or Red Shoe Diaries and is there really a difference? Cut to a depressing high school gymnasium and K-Train is throwing the game. Johnny gives him a pep talk, jazzman to black man, to dissuade him from his illegal activity.
I don’t think Night Man can’t address real issues that affect real people because any art can try to do anything. Go big! Swing for the fences. I don’t think Night Man succeeds at having anything of merit to say about the epidemic of teen sports phenoms being seduced into the luxurious world of point shaving. I doubt anyone on the writing staff has spoken to a black youth, much less had enough insight into the crushing poverty that motivates such mercenary moves. Percentage of writers who call them “the blacks”? Over 50%, definitely. Whoever had the temerity to write the line of dialogue “whitey made a fool out of you”, that’s who uses “the blacks”. While not as offensive as it could be, “Takin’ it to the Streets” is nonetheless pretty paternalistic in its portrayal of Kelvin needing the moral guidance of the resident jazz musician.
See, according to the comics Night Man should look like this all the time. He doesn’t have to sleep ever and he’s hypersensitive to light, hence always wearing sunglasses. Maybe they were going to go that route until they realized Matt McColm looks like an even bigger douchebag with sunglasses than without.
What really sinks it is the sinister and/or homoerotic villain, Artemis Burton. I don’t know actor Evan Lionel from Adam but he fucking stinks. He delivers a performance so campy it’s impossible to take anything seriously. Well, why take Night Man seriously? That’s a good and fair point. All I know is that a high school basketball rigging operation eventually segues into Artemis sitting on a throne, saying “to the dawn of a new era” and initiating a cage fight between Raleigh, Frank, Levin and some guy with dreadlocks among other hoodlums. Shit looks like a Street Fighter level. Actually, those look better than this green screened mess. Raleigh holds his own but Night Man is there with the assist. Johnny also kills the bad guy, quipping “now it’s your turn in the pit” after lasering him into falling a great height. We should’ve kept a tally of the character’s kill count. By now I think it’s already in the double digits if you count henchmen, and you know that we do.
You know, we fought a war so there’d be no thrones in this country.
Chris: So here’s what I’m wondering, it’s obvious that no one who worked behind the scenes on Night Man in any capacity was black or had ever interacted with a black person in their life. We know this because a quick scan of our friend mr internet reveals no reports of any kind from when the episode would have been being filmed of a desperate, sweaty, freaked out individual running out into traffic and banging on windshields while screaming incoherently ala Kevin McCarthy at the end of the 1956’s Invasion of theBody Snatchers or Martin Lawrence in the spring of 1996 at the end of post production of A Thin Line Between Love and Hate. But what we don’t know, is if anyone was familiar with another old friend, 1988’s syndicated Superboy and its eighth episode of the first season “The Fixer”. Loyal reader will remember that we covered that episode back in the Bad Old Lois & Clark days and it too covered the scourge of gambling’s involvement with amateur basketball. I think it may also have involved a homoerotic hot-tub seduction scene as well, come to think of it! If I was Superboy writer Alden Schwimmer the only thing keeping me from suing the producers of Night Man for plagiarism is the fact that I would then have to stand up in a court of law in front of God and everyone and acknowledge under oath that I wrote for Superboy. I’m not sure there’s enough money in the world, I’m being honest. But that’s the only reason. Well, that and I’m dead.
It would be extremely difficult to say that Night Man is getting better in any conventional sense; it’s still laughably incompetent, but it does seem like it’s hitting some kind of bizarre, atonal stride. The last two episodes have been just as terrible as the first half dozen, but they’re making more of an impression, too. It doesn’t take as much work to remember what happened. Maybe the plots are settling down a little, becoming more conventional. Other episodes ripped off movies and aped the styles of other shows, but the actual ways they unfolded were incoherent. If you mix terrible plotting with wretched acting, tin-eared dialogue and amateur special effects the result is a formless mess that’s almost impossible to retain because it’s really hard to get a grip on something so profoundly chaotic. It becomes too much work for your mind because it can’t rely on any of the foundational elements of storytelling to ground anything. It’s like, imagine you had to walk somewhere you’d never been, but the ground is like that part of Last Crusade where Indy has to leap from letter to letter to spell out Jehovah because all the other letters would collapse underneath him and he’d fall to his death. It’s hard to take in the sites and enjoy the atmosphere if you’re spending all your time focusing on the elements of walking you usually take for granted, is what I’m saying. It feels like the Night Man ground has stabilized a little, and that makes it easier to take in the sights.
Who designed this gym, Joel Schumacher?
Ronnie: You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, yeah? Night Man took the shot that it had something to say about the travails of urban youth and it turned out it didn’t have anything to say. Look, you know, at least they’re trying. What show in the superhero genre other than Superboy dared to broach the subject of point shaving in school sports? I thought so. So yeah, this isn’t very good and is very potentially offensive. At least it makes you feel something, and that’s what I believe separates Night Man from its fellow travelers. Another show would do an unmemorable episode with this, whereas Night Man conjured up a memorably bad one. Again, it’s a something and not nothing situation. This kind of reminds me of the well-intentioned liberalism of Marvel Comics where they’d try to increase diversity but do so only with stereotypes and caricatures. You know, like how the next X-Men team came from all sorts of different countries and backgrounds and mostly that resulted in characters peppering their dialogue with the couple foreign words or phrases Chris Claremont remembered. That’s why I think I reacted to this with amusement rather than Chris’ belief that one can only be pure if they burn down their house after watching this. because it reminded me of heart-in-right-place, head-in-bucket storytelling you’d see from nominally liberal people who’d never, you know, met a black person before. At the very least I can say there’s nothing malicious behind “Takin’ It To The Streets”.
Odds & Ends:
-IMDB pops up again, this time to tell us that “Takin it to the Streets” is also the name of a Doobie Brothers song from 1976, proving once again that IMDB is bottomless well of useful context and that the writers of Night Man really had a firm grip on the music that was speaking the urban black youth of 1997.
-Bay City’s gangs seem to have taken a page from Walter Hill’s 1979 classic The Warriors and adopted festive, eye-catching theme costumes so as to help each crew stand out. My favorites were the proto-Matrix styled cyber punks and KISS-esque Kitty Cat Men.
-”You’re tuned to the frequency of evil” goes hard and should’ve been sampled in industrial songs and I will die on that hill.
-I love how Night Man’s power use is denoted by a closeup of his forehead. Matt McColm is not an actor who can pull off “thoughtful” so that makes it even funnier.
NEXT TIME: Johnny befriends a KGB assassin because she’s a pretty girl; the son of J. Edgar Hoover brings back famous criminals from the dead. Yes, really.
Night Man Nights: “Chrome”/”Takin’ It To The Streets”
1X07 “CHROME”
Chris: Greetings programs and welcome to another edition of Whatever We’re Calling This Now That We’re Not Watching Lois & Clark Anymore With Chris and Ronnie. As you no doubt remember, we’ve moved on from covering the just mentioned middling-to-bad mid 90’s Superman network romcom to Nightman, the only one hour superhero drama conceived, produced, and financed entirely by the runners up in a 1997 Marin County middle school AV Club talent contest. Our first episode of the day is called “Chrome” and hold onto your hats folks, because we’ve got a mythology episode. Turns out that karate loving, sleeves hating, jazz guy Johnny Domino wasn’t the only person to be struck by that magic bolt of lightning back whenever it was that he was struck by that magic bolt of lighting. Turns out that a whole bunch of folks all over the world were also struck by that very same bolt of lightning at that very same time and imbued with super powers all their own. Turns out that’s a thing that can happen. I was surprised too. But that one scientist guy from the first episode (played by Patrtick Macnee? How did I miss that?) pops back up to inform Nightman that not only are there an unknown number of superdudes running around, one of them is evil and has dedicated himself to hunting and killing all of his supersiblings.
His name is Joran (oof), and he’s discovered (somehow) that when one member of the Lightning League (what I’ve decided to call the people given powers by the lightning) kills the other, they gain the dead Leaguers powers. You know, like in Highlander. Joran (that’s really the best name they could come up with?) is played by an Irish actor named Shane Brolly and he’s like the homo erectus version of Daniel Bruhl’s Baron Zemo. He’s supposed to be one of those menacing villains who defeats the hero without breaking a sweat in their first encounter, triggering a crisis in confidence in the previously unflappable hero. You know, like in Rocky III. But unlike in Rocky III, Nightman has a plucky black sidekick to help him regain his mojo and strategize a dynamic new strategy to defeat his opponent. Oh wait, that’s also Rocky III, isn’t it? Okay, how about this? Instead of facing off against an astonishingly racist caricature of a Scary Black Man (remember how in 30 seconds of screen time Clubber Lang questions Rocky’s sexual potency, low-key threatens to rape Adrian, and kinda-sorta kills Mickey? Jesus), Nightman instead does battle with a smug, sexually ambiguous, eurotrash fancy boy? That’s different, right?
Better costume, honestly.
Joran (Repetition isn’t making it better) is one of those villains who’s presented as a terrifying new, brain meltingly difficult opponent that puts everyone on edge in the same manner as Venom did in his first appearances in Spider-Man. But instead he comes off like The Vanisher (first appearance, X-Men 02, November 1963), an “unstoppable” villain who’s dispatched with comical ease (The Vanisher is a teleporter whose lethal danger is demonstrated when he steals top secret military plans from the Pentagon despite the fact that said plans are safely stowed in a briefcase kept on a small table surrounded by army men with guns. Just one of the countless near nuclear catastrophes that could have been avoided by a locked file cabinet.). It would be insane to expect any kind of epic “dramatic showdown” from the seventh episode of a 90’s superhero show, but “Chrome” still manages to clothesline itself on the low-ass bar of cheapo syndicated TV. Juran (still a no from me) telekinetically hucks a bell at Nightman, who steps out of its way, and that’s about it. And he wasn’t there anyway because it was just the Nightman hologram, so who gives a fuck? Also am I crazy or does Nightman’s hologram accidentally trip a landmine? What do the makers of Nightman think a hologram actually is? Anyway, it’s all wrapped up in a classic TV “To Be Continued” when the villain escapes by forcing the hero to choose between killing the bad guy or saving an innocent life. So the villain is foiled, but the hero’s noble bloodlust goes unsated, and we the audience are forced to contemplate the inevitable rematch. I guess sometimes nobody gets what they want.
Ronnie: “Chrome” is a real humdinger of an episode for multiple reasons. For one, it broaches the larger Night Man mythos in a way we’ve not seen before. Previously our assumption was that Johnny was the sole beneficiary of the lightning strike to the cable car, perhaps because of his unique jazzman DNA structure. No, others received powers as well. I’m not well versed in the Malibu Comics Ultraverse yet but from the Ultraforce cartoon that I binged with a friend the other streetcar lightning recipients became a superteam called The Strangers. They included black speedster Zip Zap, Genis-Vell (and others) ripoff Atom Bob, Grenade (who despite his design is not the gay member of the team) and sex toy gone sentient Electrocute. What does this have to do with Night Man? Nothing, because I’m almost certain the license for the TV show was for the title character alone and every other Malibu character was tied up in other licensing deals. I bring all this up to mount an explanation for why Joran/Chrome exists. I imagine if they had access to the whole Malibu roster the show would pick a character from the comics. Instead they were faced with the worst situation possible: having to use their imagination.
I suppose I should talk about the actual episode instead of flaunting my knowledge of flamed out 90s comic book companies that were later subsumed and squandered by one of the Big Two. We open on a scientific demonstration of a woman being able to astral project. It’s described as “the ability to virtually be in two places at the same time” which to me is just describing Night Man’s garage opener jazz hologram, but that’s me. Things go awry when Joran kills her using his ability of glowing eyes. “How many more will he kill before we can stop him?” intones Patrick Macnee. How much time you got to fill? Don’t worry, there’s also a subplot about a reporter twigging to there being a crimefighter in town. She even puts a bounty on information about Night Man. This reporter is played by Alexandra Hedison, aka Mrs. Jodie Foster, so that’s neat. Didn’t we already have a reporter character? Whatever happened to her? Oh well, it’s Mrs. Jodie Foster’s time to shine.
This is not the most compromising position Raleigh’s found Johnny in, let me tell you that much.
Joran meets up with her and finds out the common denominator for all Bay City strange goings on is Johnny Domino, so he requests a meeting with him via the reporter, which is how you press the flesh with a jazz musician in this town. You need an intermediary. Joran thinks killing other people with abilities allows him to absorb their powers, which I will note is the premise of Sylar from Heroes. Do I believe Tim Kring, the creator of Crossing Jordan, stole from syndicated TV for his show Heroes? Oh, 100%. Joran is a trial run for Sylar. Instead of Quinto’s mesmerizing eyebrows imagine a dodgy Eurotrash accent and rape eyes. Frank, ever the proud father, dishes to this strange man about his son. “Johnny loves his music. But I tell you, had he become a cop, that kid would’ve gone all the way.” All the way to what? Police chief? RoboCop?
To be fair, Joran almost immediately figures out Domino = Night Man, although Mrs. Foster isn’t convinced. I like how in their first confrontation Chrome ties Johnny up with a fire hose and then telepathically controls the Prowler. This is really the point at which Night Man comes into itself. Imagine sitting on your couch or in your chair and you’re watching a man trapped by a fire hose with a car bearing down on him. And that’s a commercial break. Raleigh fumes: “what kind of monster makes a guy’s own car turn against him?”. Johnny’s advantage over Joran is that since everything the latter does is evil, Johnny can predict his every move. I’m not sure that’s how it works, but okay. Meanwhile, Chrome tries to engineer a camera crew filmed lampooning as well as frames the Night Man for a robbery. Fortunately, our himbo hero knows his foe’s weakness, which leads to a conclusion so insane I hardly believe it happened. And I’ve seen this episode multiple times, over multiple decades.
Chris: Remember when Elaine threw Joe Mayo’s fur coat out the window because she thought it was Puddy’s and then Joe wanted to Elaine to replace the coat, not because she was the one who threw it out the window, but because the person in charge keeping track of the coats should therefore be on the hook for any that went missing on said persons watch? And remember how Elaine thought that Joe was way out of pocket for insisting that she replace the missing coat because it was ridiculous to think that her agreeing to gather and throw all the coats onto a bed in another room somehow made her liable for what happened to them afterwards? You know how Elaine insisted to Jerry and George that whoever it was that threw the coat out the window was the party at fault and should be made to replace the coat? And that when Jerry pointed out that she was the person who threw the coat out the window Elaine pointed out that Joe Mayo didn’t know that and had no way of proving it so she didn’t think she should be held responsible even though she was? That she was being scapegoated for a crime that she was in fact guilty of? Remember how baffled Jerry looked by Elaine’s insane tortured logic? That’s how I felt when Nightman finally cracked the manner in which he would defeat his nemesis.
Nightman’s whole deal is that he can sense evil thoughts and intentions or whatever. And it’s an unconscious, reflexive thing more in line with Spidey’s spider-sense than, say, Superman’s x-ray vision. It’s not something he turns on and off, is what I’m saying, so much as it’s something that’s always active, but not always engaged. So, when Nightman realizes that he can use his ability to sense evil or whatever to sense what Chrome is going to do next, he’s basically discovering that the power he’s had since the beginning of the show can be used to do exactly what it’s been doing the whole time. It’s like if Spider-Man spent an entire issue fretting over how he was gonna stop some bad guy and then MJ was like “yeah, but this is just a guy with a pistol. Don’t you dodge gunfire from automatic weapons every day?” And then Spidey went “oh yeah! Right!” And proceeded to punch the guy out. That’s not really a satisfying conclusion to a story. And to make matters worse, the big climactic fight turns out to be between Chrome’s astral projection and Nightman’s scam-to-get-out-of-work hologram. So what actually happens is a hologram manages to outsmart a ghost? Is that right? But then, and I know I brought this up earlier but I think it bears repeating, the hologram also trips a landmine? Am I remembering this correctly? A weightless massless light construct accidentally depresses the trigger of a mine and detonates it? So a problem is solved due to the discovery of facts that the protagonist was already aware of, leading to a physical confrontation between two non-corporial projections that incurs significant property damage due to explosions triggered by one of the phantoms. That can’t possibly be right.
I’m glad you brought up the Heroes connection, because I noticed it too but kind of thought it would be gouache to mention both how Night Man ripped off Highlander and was then in turn ripped off by Heroes. That’s an embarrassment of trash right there, and I would have been remiss to take more than my share. Unrelated, but you just know that there are gonna be people that complain that this Highlander reboot somehow tarnishes the legacy of the original, and that’s just gonna be fucking nuts. Because all those movies suck. I’m not saying the first one isn’t fun to watch, or that there isn’t something compelling about the core concept, but come on. We’re talking about a film where a large portion of the story takes place in Scotland and whose main character is himself Scottish and is played by Christopher Lambert, a Frenchman raised in Switzerland with an impenetrable accent and a voice that sounds like he gargles shards of glass before every take. Then they have the audacity to cast Sean Connery and make him play a Spaniard who lived most of his life in Egypt and Japan. But you know what he sounds like? He sounds like Sean fucking Connery. Because Sean Connery doesn’t fuck around with accents. His Irish-American Chicago street cop sounds like his suave British secret agent sounds like his Russian submarine commander sounds like his Baltimore Industrial Magnate sounds like his Robin Hood. What the fuck, movie?
Just had to get that off my chest.
They call this photograph editing “Lenoing”.
Anyway, this is probably my favorite Night Man episode to date. After a half a dozen episodes it’s settling into its identity as a terrible superhero show instead of the previous half hearted feints in the direction of being a terrible science fiction show, a terrible horror show, or a terrible noir/crime show. It’s blindingly obvious that no one behind the scenes had any idea what they were doing or where they were going and the show’s panicky attempts to impose some kind of coherent mythology onto this madness were delightful. We covered the return of Macnee, introduction of a super genius nemesis and the suggestion that somehow the same bolt of lightning managed to simultaneously strike numerous people all over the world. As well as the half assed crisis and climax. You also mentioned the delightful decision to introduce a plucky blond reporter lady in one episode, only to replace her with a new, different plucky blond reporter lady to serve the exact same function a couple episodes later. The only other thing I wanted to draw attention to was Nightman’s team’s attempt to draw Chrome out by appealing to his vanity via a clearly doctored image of what is supposed to be Chrome but looks more like mid-80s McDonald’s celebrity spokesmonter Mac Tonight. I honestly don’t remember what this was supposed to do or why it was supposed to do it, but I liked the phrase “celebrity spokesmonter” and wanted to wedge it in. Can you remind me what that was all about?
Ronnie: This is also my favorite so far for many of the reasons you elucidated. As for why the Night Man team effects such a vicious lampooning on Chrome, it’s simple: Chrome is vain. “Joran’s fatal weakness, his Achilles’ heel, is his vanity.” The object is to get the television network to run the picture and bait Chrome into a duel “at the old world’s fairground at midnight”. Then it’s trickery via hologrammatic Night Man. So all that is to say that the vandalized photo is completely irrelevant to the plot at hand and you could easily cut it out without losing anything. Except for the hilarity of Joran looking like Flabber from Big Bad Beetleborgs, that is. Chrome lives to bedevil Night Man another day when Johnny has to choose between saving Patrick Macnee or apprehending the villain. He chooses the boring choice. Patrick Macnee is an old man; why NOT gamble with his life?
He’s got Bette Davis eyes…provided Bette Davis’ eyes were all shiny and shit.
Jennifer Parks reminds me of Rene Russo in Nightcrawler: she’ll do anything for a story and her ethical scruples are a moving target at best. Lou Bloom vs. The Night Man, who you got? I feel like Bloom is hungrier even if Night Man’s got the physical advantage. Parks would actually do for a solid supporting character but she only appears in one other episode of the series, spoiler alert. Giving Night Man a varied cast of supporting roles, like on Lois & Clark, would both make too much sense and also the finger thing means the money. Nonetheless, she has a good send-off in this episode when she and Johnny are dining and she muses “either you can’t keep a promise or you can’t be two places at the same time”. Night Man promised he’d do a fly by for her camera crew, and it’s about time that happens. Just as Johnny is about to leave, oh, look, it’s Night Man from a distance. This actually isn’t a use of the hologram, which is weird because this is the exact scenario the hologram was created for, but instead Raleigh wearing the suit. Very Silver Age Superman this storyline, from concept to resolution. I liked it.
Look, Night Man is never going to be The Shield in terms of entertainment I enjoy without reservation and without irony. So this C+ episode of Night Man might be the highest we get, and that’s fine because it’s not about being good, it’s about being insane. “Chrome” introduces plenty of absurd elements that hopefully are revisited in future episodes. I can at least spoil that later on in Season 1 Chrome/Joran returns in the creatively titled episode “Chrome II”. Something to look forward to amidst the gaffes and bad puns.
Odds & Ends
-According to IMDB, Chrome is also the name of a San Francisco rock group that formed in 1976. Good looking out, IMDB. To be fair, it keeps with the title naming conventions’ relationship to music.
-The incidental jazz music sounds like Hell’s soundtrack if I’m being honest. That means what you think it means: BIG TIME OPERATOR RETURNS!
-The cable car accident happened on October 22nd.
-Frank and Charlie discuss the rise of swing in the 90s. If nothing else (lol) dates this show it’s that.
-”He’s got all the moves of a jungle predator” is an exceedingly weird way to speak of anyone, least of all your son.
-“If you’re not with me, you’re against me” – Jennifer Parks created the Cheney Doctrine!
-Joran calls himself “Mr. Chrome”, which is a mistake.
1X08 “TAKIN’ IT TO THE STREETS”
Chris: So the first, and most sensible in my opinion, impulse one has after watching “Takin’ It to the Streets” is to remove the DVD from the player, break it into a half dozen pieces, mail each piece to a different continent, then burn your house down with everything you ever loved inside, change your name, start life all over again and never speak of what you saw to anyone for the rest of your life. If that’s not a viable option for some reason, your second best option is almost certainly suicide. Honorable or otherwise. If you’re one of those miserable bastards that can’t even get killing yourself right, then your only remaining option is to slink into the always open arms of the home away from home for bitter babbling cranks everywhere, the internet. And holy shit, internet, do I have a yarn for you. Because in “Takin’ it to the Streets” Night Man takes on inner city violence. Before we jump into the episode proper, let’s take a quick look at that episode title. You know what’s never a good sign? A title using street style abbreviation and/or punctuation to denote some kind of authenticity. Oh sure, occasionally things work out like in 1984’s Breakin’ and it’s better known sequel Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, released later that same year (Little known fact, the success of the Breakin’ cycle was what gave French filmmaker Claude Berri the inspiration and confidence to film his now classic diptych, 1986’s Jean de Florette and Mannon of the Spring, or as it was titled in America: Jean de Florette 2: Electric Boogaloo). But mostly it’s an embarrassing disaster like Mo’ Money from 1992, or 2003’s Biker Boyz. Is it any surprise that “Takin’ it to the Streets” falls squarely into the latter category?
That’s a rhetorical question. The answer is no.
So, Night Man has decided to tackle the problems of gangs, black on black crime and its inexorable pull on young black athletes. Oh, and point shaving. In forty-four minutes. Yeah. So Night Man has that one black buddy/accomplice Raleigh who’s the brains behind Night Man’s whole supersuit. At the top of “Takin it to the Streets” we learn that Raleigh has a bea-u-tee-full new girlfriend who is also one of those tough as nails inner city high school teachers who all the kids dig because she’s a sexy lady who isn’t afraid to get down on their level and have a real bull session when the situation calls for it. When she brings Raleigh in to talk to her class about whatever AV gobbledygook he does and one of her students, without raising his hand mind you, “so you’re the guy who gave us Milli Vanilli” (let it never be said that the writing staff of Night Man didn’t have their fingers on the pulse of young black in culture in 1997) she fires right back that they all better sit back and shut up because since all the budget cuts this is their only chance to learn about faking earthquakes through the use of sonics and manufacturing hard light holograms of white Jazz Guys.
Blew Chips
Later that day, or maybe it was before, honestly who cares, Raleigh and his girlfriend are on a date along with Night Man and Night Man’s dad (“Wanna go on a date with me, a buddy of mine, and my buddy’s elderly father?” “Do I?”) when some of the girlfriends students roll up. They’re about to really get into some good natured jive slinging when Night Man’s evil-sense draws his attention to a town car over-flowing with armed men speeding right towards them and is barely able to raise an alarm before the bullets start flying. There’s a promising moment in the immediate aftermath of the attack when the girlfriend asks Night Man how he knew the car was gonna start shooting and Night Man goes “Well..” and trails off before something else pops up to derail the conversation and I was screaming “FINISH THE THOUGHT, NIGHT MAN!” But they never get back to that and instead the plot follows one of her students, basketball-prodigy-and-otherwise-slow-on-the-uptake all-star K-Train and his dalliance with a local crime lord who runs book and a protection racket out of what appears to be an exercise gymnasium/whore house. What follows is a plot that’s incomprehensible even by Night Man standards that involves murder, rigging high school basketball games, the use of the phrase capping on several occasions, a plan to unite the Bay City underworld under one banner at a meet-and-greet held in his gym’s cafeteria and one scene where the crime lord yells “Whitey made a fool out of you” at K-Train.
Ronnie: I think Night Man deserves credit for exiting its comfort zone and broaching sensitive topics. It botches the broach but isn’t the effort worth anything? Well, not really. “Takin’ It To The Streets” is about a guy named Artemis pressuring star athlete Kelvin “K-Train” Barnett into performing poorly in a game to benefit his gambling outfit. This is done in the most erotic “take a dive” scene I’ve ever seen; to wit, it takes place in a hot tub with babes. Is this Night Man or Red Shoe Diaries and is there really a difference? Cut to a depressing high school gymnasium and K-Train is throwing the game. Johnny gives him a pep talk, jazzman to black man, to dissuade him from his illegal activity.
I don’t think Night Man can’t address real issues that affect real people because any art can try to do anything. Go big! Swing for the fences. I don’t think Night Man succeeds at having anything of merit to say about the epidemic of teen sports phenoms being seduced into the luxurious world of point shaving. I doubt anyone on the writing staff has spoken to a black youth, much less had enough insight into the crushing poverty that motivates such mercenary moves. Percentage of writers who call them “the blacks”? Over 50%, definitely. Whoever had the temerity to write the line of dialogue “whitey made a fool out of you”, that’s who uses “the blacks”. While not as offensive as it could be, “Takin’ it to the Streets” is nonetheless pretty paternalistic in its portrayal of Kelvin needing the moral guidance of the resident jazz musician.
See, according to the comics Night Man should look like this all the time. He doesn’t have to sleep ever and he’s hypersensitive to light, hence always wearing sunglasses. Maybe they were going to go that route until they realized Matt McColm looks like an even bigger douchebag with sunglasses than without.
What really sinks it is the sinister and/or homoerotic villain, Artemis Burton. I don’t know actor Evan Lionel from Adam but he fucking stinks. He delivers a performance so campy it’s impossible to take anything seriously. Well, why take Night Man seriously? That’s a good and fair point. All I know is that a high school basketball rigging operation eventually segues into Artemis sitting on a throne, saying “to the dawn of a new era” and initiating a cage fight between Raleigh, Frank, Levin and some guy with dreadlocks among other hoodlums. Shit looks like a Street Fighter level. Actually, those look better than this green screened mess. Raleigh holds his own but Night Man is there with the assist. Johnny also kills the bad guy, quipping “now it’s your turn in the pit” after lasering him into falling a great height. We should’ve kept a tally of the character’s kill count. By now I think it’s already in the double digits if you count henchmen, and you know that we do.
You know, we fought a war so there’d be no thrones in this country.
Chris: So here’s what I’m wondering, it’s obvious that no one who worked behind the scenes on Night Man in any capacity was black or had ever interacted with a black person in their life. We know this because a quick scan of our friend mr internet reveals no reports of any kind from when the episode would have been being filmed of a desperate, sweaty, freaked out individual running out into traffic and banging on windshields while screaming incoherently ala Kevin McCarthy at the end of the 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Martin Lawrence in the spring of 1996 at the end of post production of A Thin Line Between Love and Hate. But what we don’t know, is if anyone was familiar with another old friend, 1988’s syndicated Superboy and its eighth episode of the first season “The Fixer”. Loyal reader will remember that we covered that episode back in the Bad Old Lois & Clark days and it too covered the scourge of gambling’s involvement with amateur basketball. I think it may also have involved a homoerotic hot-tub seduction scene as well, come to think of it! If I was Superboy writer Alden Schwimmer the only thing keeping me from suing the producers of Night Man for plagiarism is the fact that I would then have to stand up in a court of law in front of God and everyone and acknowledge under oath that I wrote for Superboy. I’m not sure there’s enough money in the world, I’m being honest. But that’s the only reason. Well, that and I’m dead.
It would be extremely difficult to say that Night Man is getting better in any conventional sense; it’s still laughably incompetent, but it does seem like it’s hitting some kind of bizarre, atonal stride. The last two episodes have been just as terrible as the first half dozen, but they’re making more of an impression, too. It doesn’t take as much work to remember what happened. Maybe the plots are settling down a little, becoming more conventional. Other episodes ripped off movies and aped the styles of other shows, but the actual ways they unfolded were incoherent. If you mix terrible plotting with wretched acting, tin-eared dialogue and amateur special effects the result is a formless mess that’s almost impossible to retain because it’s really hard to get a grip on something so profoundly chaotic. It becomes too much work for your mind because it can’t rely on any of the foundational elements of storytelling to ground anything. It’s like, imagine you had to walk somewhere you’d never been, but the ground is like that part of Last Crusade where Indy has to leap from letter to letter to spell out Jehovah because all the other letters would collapse underneath him and he’d fall to his death. It’s hard to take in the sites and enjoy the atmosphere if you’re spending all your time focusing on the elements of walking you usually take for granted, is what I’m saying. It feels like the Night Man ground has stabilized a little, and that makes it easier to take in the sights.
Who designed this gym, Joel Schumacher?
Ronnie: You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, yeah? Night Man took the shot that it had something to say about the travails of urban youth and it turned out it didn’t have anything to say. Look, you know, at least they’re trying. What show in the superhero genre other than Superboy dared to broach the subject of point shaving in school sports? I thought so. So yeah, this isn’t very good and is very potentially offensive. At least it makes you feel something, and that’s what I believe separates Night Man from its fellow travelers. Another show would do an unmemorable episode with this, whereas Night Man conjured up a memorably bad one. Again, it’s a something and not nothing situation. This kind of reminds me of the well-intentioned liberalism of Marvel Comics where they’d try to increase diversity but do so only with stereotypes and caricatures. You know, like how the next X-Men team came from all sorts of different countries and backgrounds and mostly that resulted in characters peppering their dialogue with the couple foreign words or phrases Chris Claremont remembered. That’s why I think I reacted to this with amusement rather than Chris’ belief that one can only be pure if they burn down their house after watching this. because it reminded me of heart-in-right-place, head-in-bucket storytelling you’d see from nominally liberal people who’d never, you know, met a black person before. At the very least I can say there’s nothing malicious behind “Takin’ It To The Streets”.
Odds & Ends:
-IMDB pops up again, this time to tell us that “Takin it to the Streets” is also the name of a Doobie Brothers song from 1976, proving once again that IMDB is bottomless well of useful context and that the writers of Night Man really had a firm grip on the music that was speaking the urban black youth of 1997.
-Bay City’s gangs seem to have taken a page from Walter Hill’s 1979 classic The Warriors and adopted festive, eye-catching theme costumes so as to help each crew stand out. My favorites were the proto-Matrix styled cyber punks and KISS-esque Kitty Cat Men.
-”You’re tuned to the frequency of evil” goes hard and should’ve been sampled in industrial songs and I will die on that hill.
-I love how Night Man’s power use is denoted by a closeup of his forehead. Matt McColm is not an actor who can pull off “thoughtful” so that makes it even funnier.
NEXT TIME: Johnny befriends a KGB assassin because she’s a pretty girl; the son of J. Edgar Hoover brings back famous criminals from the dead. Yes, really.
Ronnie Gardocki