‘Swamp Thing’ is a name that’s almost as well known as your average Batman or Human Torch, but makes surprisingly few cultural or comic appearances for his notoriety. What you might not know is that Swamp Thing isn’t just some movie monster anti-hero concocted for terror - he’s a legitimate DC Comics hero, and was a comic book star for many years before ever becoming a movie, a TV show, a thankfully short-lived cartoon and a line of action figures. He’s hung out with Batman, and he’s probably one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet. When you’re made of trees, you pretty much have to be.

After hearing that Swamp Thing’s 1990 live-action show would finally be coming to DVD, I had high hopes for something outright bizarre and hypnotic, and I wasn’t even remotely disappointed. I have been assaulted on all fronts with bizarre. The cartoon show’s opening theme alone left a disfiguring scar across my psyche.

Shout! Factory, purveyors of many great TV shows on DVD, have released the first two seasons in a handsomely packaged 4-DVD set. That’s 22 half-hour format episodes, running at about nine hours total, with additional interview material with Dick Durock, the actor who portrays Swamp Thing, and Len Wein, the original comic author. Both are two well-chosen and relevant personalities to interview, as opposed to say, the little blonde kid who ties up the screen for 95% of every episode… but we’ll get to that. Dick Durock also happens to be the same actor who portrayed Swampy in the two cinematic releases that preceded this, because if you’re going to get a guy to reprise a role, make sure it’s the guy under 3 inches of rubber mask that barely speaks. Regardless, he makes a good, stoic Swamp Thing.

The entire show dives right into post-movie continuity, and doesn’t bother to explain that this ‘Swamp Thing’ is actually Dr. Alec Holland, a good-natured scientist who fled into the swamp near his lab when an experiment blew up in his face. Because exploding experiments will always, always give you superpowers, the mysterious swamp matter somehow merged with the good Doctor, and while disfigured and green and slimy, he was still alive and could now communicate fluently, and often control, the natural elements around him. Other explanations of Swamp Thing are far more complicated, but this is the simple (?) reality that this series is predicated upon. There, I’ve just done all of the work for you.

Here are a few important things that I learned from watching the Swamp Thing TV series.

1) It’s perfectly safe to just wander aimlessly for walks in the swamp. Kids do it, elderly women do it, and honestly, you’re living near a swamp. There’s nothing else to do, and nothing there could possibly ever hurt you. This is evidenced by people doing JUST THAT in every episode, repeatedly. Alligators are just a rural myth.

2) When you see an 8-foot tall, shambling mass of wet weeds and muck and eyes in the shape of a terrifying human, treat him like you would treat some jerk in a mildly offensive t-shirt. Do not ever express fear or disbelief. Suitable substitutions for any kind of caution might be ‘immediate kinship’, ‘acting like you just found that pack of hot dogs that you thought you ate in the back of the fridge (and subsequently discovering that they’re still edible)’, or ‘indifference’. Swamp people seem to remain unfazed in all possible circumstances.

3) Don’t combine falcons and science, because you’ll end up with a whiny bird-man with one giant bear arm that doesn’t get wet when he swims, who also can’t perform CPR properly, but what do you expect? He’s a bird man.

4) If you find a small heap of junk in the swamp, it’s safe to think, immediately, that something is hidden in there, so dig around! And if you DO find something in the swamp that you lost there 20 years ago, just kinda look at it and smile and leave it there, because it’s just a clumsy metaphor.

The list goes on, and that’s only culled from the first three episodes. Between the sheer emotionless of ‘Jim’, Swamp Thing’s schoolboy friend (who never seems to go to school), the pure evil and pure hair of Dr. Anton Arcane, and the whole ‘Another Fine Mess You’re Gotten Us Into’ mentality, taken way, way too seriously, I actually couldn’t wait to take my lunch break so I could come home and watch another episode. It might present itself as a situation where you need to suspend your disbelief for maximum enjoyment, but it becomes pretty clear that you’ll need to suspend it from a gallows to even swallow one second of the totally out-there series, and in this way, it is glorious. Will Dr. Arcane bring another working girl back to his cave, or will he force his way upon her in a circus trailer this time? Will the episode end without really resolving anything? Will the overly-articulate and world-weary blonde kid ever show an emotion besides ‘whatever’? I bet that you know the beautiful answers.

I count it as a star among my B-movie style DVDs, a great evening’s entertainment among trusted friends, and absolutely worth a purchase. Fans of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, or anyone who likes to play MST3K will have a field day. Plus, I’d like to remind you, he hangs out with Batman.

I’m in love.

Let me preface this all by saying the following : this is a great DVD. It’s hilarious in its own way, and I’m very happy to have it in my collection.

So, you know those guys who go around the world eating elephant brains just because it’s considered a local delicacy for one tribe of forgotten peoples in the middle of nowhere? You know those guys who intentionally get themselves bitten by animals and shot with projectiles so they get on the internet and television? They ain’t got nothin’ on me, because I watched the third season of Captain N.

This week, the missing third season of Captain N was released by Shout Factory. What I (and other casual DVD collectors) had not realized was that the previously released ‘Captain N : The Complete Series’ was not, in fact, complete at all - and I’m nothing if not a completist. See, the first two seasons of Captain N are considered to be a relatively good cartoon show. They existed in a 22-or-so minute format, and the animation was pretty well done - and then, the third season happened. And boy, did it happen.

Captain N became a 11-or-so minute show, and the original animation studio was dropped, or all got the floppyhands, or SOMETHING - because nothing was the same. Movements became jerky and uneven, no character looked the same from scene to scene, and worst of all, the dynamic Mother Brain - chief archnemesis for the whole show, became a poor outline of her previous appearance. Just check out these comparison shots.

[left to right : Mother Brain from the original Metroid
video game, Mother Brain from the first seasons of Captain N,
and the regrettable Mother Brain from season 3]

What were once semi-relevant, interesting plotlines became hollow explorations into lame sports games and yes, even Tetris. You can never, ever, ever make a convincing nemesis out of a Tetris block, nor can you make an acceptable villain out of a scoreboard in Basketball World (or, as they call it, Hoopland) - and yet, AND YET, ‘Clock Man’ emerges to terrorize the N Team. In the stand-out most horrendously agonizing cartoon episode I’ve ever seen, a little boy named Hoopless makes a robot so that he might score a shot through a magic basketball hoop on Hoop-De-Doo-Dah Day. Apparently, living in Hoopland means that you need to throw the word ‘hoop’ randomly into every other sentence, and most of your indigenous animals are shaped like hoops and shoot hoops out of their mouths. I wish I was kidding. I wish so very much.

What I find most tangentially interesting is the fact that Mother Brain was voiced by none other than notable singer Levi Stubbs - member of the Four Tops and The Coasters, the latter of which was managed by Ian Levine, who I’d written about here once before. Everything is interconnected. So, in addition to be a colossal collector, Ian Levine was also in league with Mother Brain.

There are seven Captain N episodes contained in this 2-disc set, while ‘The Complete Series’ set has 26. Omitted form both is episode number 27, which was only a much-dreaded clip show anyhow.

But that’s not all! This set also includes 13 episodes of ‘The New Super Mario World’, the final of a trio of shows to feature the ‘Super Mario’ name. The Mario cartoon world had previously seen a total of 65 episodes, most released on DVD at this point. Of course, nothing will ever beat the original Super Mario Brothers Super Show, which featured live-action Lou Albano segments and voiceovers, but ‘Super Mario World’ is a fitting death knell to the Super Mario cartoon legacy.

Happening sometime after the release of Super Mario World for the SNES, this cartoon incorporated many elements from the video game - all of King Koopa’s horribly obnoxious children, the horribly obnoxious Yoshi, and other various horribly obnoxious bad guys. Of course, it also added a great deal of unrelated, nearly irrelevant elements - such as cavemen, everywhere, making you long for the days of Super Mario 3’s various mushroom kings and FryGuys and TriClydes. It feels kinda like wishing to return to the good ol’ days of the Great Depression.

Interestingly, the presence of cavemen in the show created some very Luddite narratives - the introduction of TV hypnotized the cavepeople, fast food was evil, cars caused traffic jams and chaos, and the phone made people talk too much. Maybe the message was that technology removes us from our roots and ourselves, or maybe just that stupid people can’t handle complex things. Or maybe they were just really, really easy episodes to write.

The DVD includes a brief storyboarding of the title sequence, and some original Yoshi sketches, but nothing else. Since episodes of Super Mario and Captain N aired back to back in their original format, they are presented as such within the DVD, but you do get the option of watching just the Mario or just the Captain N episodes. Their arrangement on the disc differs slightly from the original pairings and airdates, but you’ll be internally bleeding far too much to care.

It’s a great DVD set. The cartoons are so bizarre and awkward that it’s pretty amazing to watch. It completes the Captain N collection, it’s an important addition to the Super Mario collection, and seriously, if you’re watching these shows today, it’s not because they’re really, really good. It’s for pure nostalgia, and to laugh at yourself, and appreciate them for what they are. There’s a whole lot to be appreciated in the 4 hours of cartoons presented here.

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