Customer Reviews

Batman Beyond: School Dayz [VHS]

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These three episodes of Batman Beyond show how Terry McGuiness handles life as Batman, a life that not only offers opportunity, but also exacts a price in terms of his relationships with others, at school and at home.

Golem is an episode that illustrates a fantasy most every kid who's ever been bullied dreams of - acquiring possession of a powerful force (in this case a construction robot) with which the bullies can be humiliated. The best part of the episode is in McGuiness' reaction - he battles the robot, and makes clear he'd like to do the same to the bullies under attack. This is best illustrated in his comment to Bruce Wayne about the bully being targeted - "Anyone have a grudge against him?" "The list starts with me and extends around the block twice."

Next up is a drug story in which Terry, upon stumbling across a cache of dangerous (and thus illegal) steroidal drugs, finds himself wrongfully accused by his mother and thus grounded. The episode features a genuinely horrifying scene when Terry meets up with Bruce's old enemy Bane - now little more than a corpse kept (barely) alive by vast machinery.

But my favorite of this set comes at the end, when Terry crosses swords with The Royal Flush Gang - featuring George Lazenby (James Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service). The Gang is a crime family, the Walkers, that dresses up as playing cards and possesses a strict familial code of honor - which causes a meltdown when the youngest, Melanie (Olivia D'Abo) falls in love with Terry. For his part Terry experiences his own meltdown; after breaking up with sometime girlfriend Dana Tan - who throughout the series comes off as rather snooty and not worth concerning oneself with - he meets Melanie and in the process has a falling out with Bruce.

The action and animation shine throughout these three episodes.

This is an excellent video. It relies on realistic (however sometimes ...) depictions of high school life. It shows the lives of those who were picked on in school, the drug problems with teenagers and the ever-wonderful, tragic love story.