Plot summary: Mr. Mxyzptlk tricks Bizarro into attacking Superman on his behalf to exploit a loophole in his agreement to leave The Man of Steel alone.
Notes and Trivia
Episode: 46 (S3.E5)
Original Air Date: November 21st 1998
Directed: Shin-Ichi Tsuji (1)
Written: Paul Dini (12) (story & teleplay) and Robert Goodman (7) (teleplay)
Animation: Group T.A.C. Co., LTD. & Jade Animation (1)
Music: Kristopher Carter (13)
Oh look! It’s our good friends at Jade Animation… You probably haven’t noticed but TMS haven’t done any of the Season 3 episodes. That won’t be changing, so to give Koko/Dong Yang a break we get the collaborative effort of newcomers Group TAC and Jade, who animated one of the worst episodes of BTAS.
This is the second and final appearance of Mr. Mxyzptlk in the DCAU. They wanted to bring him back for Justice League/JLU but could never find a story.
Gsptlsnz conjures a copy of Action Comics #80 as evidence for the tribunal.
Recap
Bizarro presides over the planet Clark left him on, having built a bunch of buildings, people and cars out of rocks for him to ‘protect’, including a fake Superman, Lex and Lois. He even sits down to watch a little fake TV. Cute!
Mr. Mxyzptlk disagrees, calling the entire situation pathetic and convincing Bizarro that Superman screwed him over and makes fun of him behind his back 😦
Teleporting him back to Metropolis, Mxyzptlk sets Bizarro on Superman, exploiting a loophole in their agreement from before as he is using a proxy, sitting back and watching them brawl across the city.
Gsptisnz arrives to warn her husband that ‘The Leaders’ won’t be happy about his actions, and sure enough Mxy is teleported before a tribunal and stripped of his powers until he performs one good deed.
Meanwhile Bizarro and Superman have continued beating the piss out of each other, until Maggie Sawyer’s team unleash experimental weaponry on Bizarro that proves effective.
Bizarro demands Mxy help him but obviously that’s not possible, so it falls to Superman to save him from what is framed as a potential kill-shot.
Bizarro accepts that Mxyzptlk tricked him and Superman is his friend after all… which Clark responds to by gently knocking him out with gas!
Learning of Mxy’s situation, Supes sends him along to Bizarro’s planet where he has to help with his superhero antics and is chased by his alien ‘dog’. Superman approves.
Best Performance
Both times Bizarro has appeared I reluctantly awarded this to Tim Daly as he did so much of the talking between his two characters. This time I’m giving it on pure merit as he had to contend with previous winner Gilbert Gottfried. Whether it’s Paul Dini punching up the dialogue or Daly just being more into the material in general, this is a far better turn as Bizarro. For me it’s him fully embracing the delusional ‘hero in his own mind’ thing, constantly talking to ‘citizens’ and commenting on what a good job he’s doing as a hero. It’s just kind of charming in a way Bizarro wasn’t remotely before. Plus all the Superman stuff is solid.
Gottfried isn’t bad this time or anything, I just think he benefits from being the centre of attention and this time he’s more of a chaotic instigator in a Bizarro story. He made a career out of being uniquely annoying, so it feels weird to penalise him for that, but I think they were able to deploy him in a more entertaining way last time and here he truly is just irritating.
Corey Burton doing a generic rabbi voice for the head of the tribunal is… a choice.
Episode Ranking
Even noted Mxyzptlk Stan, Paul Dini, thinks this episode is bad. I would mostly agree but with a few caveats.
Firstly it’s easily my favourite of Bizarro’s three appearances to date, which I’ll elaborate on below. His planet is nicely designed, including his various rock versions of the cast. I really liked the animation style for Mxyzptlk’s fake TV show of Clark and everybody making fun of him too. Though I assume Bruce Timm hates how TAC & Jade animated some of the terrified citizens, particularly the train driver who looks distinctly like he came from Japanese animation. Also the Daily Planet looks completely different in a couple of shots.
I always enjoy a cute transformation, so was into the idea of Clark plummeting out the window and falling all the way down an open manhole cover so that can soar back out in costume. The art team probably had a lot of fun with Zrff and the tribunal too, including Gsptisnz playing lawyer and magicking up evidence of her husband’s obsession with Superman. It’s a pretty brief appearance though… which may be part of the problem…
While I understand the core premise is a team-up, with Mxy using Bizarro to get around his agreement, it feels like it needed to be one thing or the other. Bizarro ends up being the far more interesting side of the equation, with Mxy’s half ending up incredibly rushed and dare I say unfinished? He doesn’t even end up performing his mandated good deed by the end of the episode. I would think that premise would provide sufficient material to construct an entire episode as he continually tries and fails to do good because he can’t overcome his shitty nature, only for some contrived set of circumstances to finally lead to him being nice by accident. Instead he receives those orders over halfway through the episode and then just refuses to engage with it and goes back to watching Superman and Bizarro fight. You could make it an unofficial two-parter, where Mxy sets Bizarro loose, and then once that’s resolved the next episode opens with his sentencing. I know multi-parters are my solution to everything but trying to cram two stories into a single episode is difficult to pull off.
Of course the other thing is the bulk of the episode ends up being Superman and Bizarro wailing on each other which already had diminishing returns in the very first instance of it, so I don’t think the episode magically becomes better if you drop the extra Mxyzptlk stuff. But the initial set-up was fun and there surely must have been a way to take that even further, perhaps with Bizarro actually saving the day by replicating his rock-based scenarios or something.
So yes, I agree it’s not a good episode, but I do think there were plenty of good ideas and fun moments that could have led to something better.
- Obsession
- The Late Mr. Kent
- Brave New Metropolis
- Apokalips… Now!
- World’s Finest
- Livewire
- Double Dose
- Fun and Games
- Warrior Queen
- Knight Time
- Father’s Day
- Little Girl Lost
- The Hand of Fate
- The Last Son of Krypton
- Ghost in the Machine
- Stolen Memories
- Action Figures
- The Prometheon
- Tools of the Trade
- The Main Man
- Mxzypixilated
- Blasts from the Past
- Target
- The Way of All Flesh
- Solar Power
- Where There’s Smoke
- Protoype
- My Girl
- A Little Piece of Home
- Feeding Time
- New Kids in Town
- Little Big Head Man [NEW ENTRY]
- Speed Demons
- Two’s a Crowd
- Identity Crisis
- Heavy Metal
- Monkey Fun
- Bizarro’s World
Rogues Roundup
Bizarro (Tim Daly) (third appearance)
Call me crazy, but Bizarro putting on a little performance for nobody at the start of the episode was by far the most engaging I’ve found the character to date. Not only does the boulder he kicked so that he could ‘save’ ‘someone’ end up crushing some other ‘people’, his original save ends up falling over too. Perfect little bit of comedy that finally endeared me to the big lug. Likewise him smashing new entrances into his ‘home’ each time he enters rather than using any kind of door, and making sure to stress the baldness of his Lex facsimile.
I don’t know if it’s just Dini getting in there with superior ideas for how to use him (it’s basically a better version of what he was doing last time) or the law of averages dictating they’d eventually come up with something, but yeah, those 2 minutes alone are way better than his previous 2 appearances. He’s more generic from there, but I did get a real chuckle out of him saying “Pardon me, citizen” to a caveman mannequin and then smashing it over Superman.
So yeah, I’m moving him up the damn list! Probably closer to where some feel he belonged in the first place.
Mr. Mxyzptlk (Gilbert Gottfried) (second appearance)
Much like I said in the voice acting section about Gilbert Gottfried, I think Mxy benefits from being the star attraction, and he’s just less interesting here. I like the core idea, and I like what they tease, with him having to answer to his elders, but for the most part he’s just yelling stuff while watching other people fight. Robbing him of his massive array of transformations and whacky reality warping powers feels like a misstep.
I won’t lower him, because even if he’s worse it feels wrong to put him below Harley given the strength of his debut episode… but his hold on that spot is definitely weaker. He may end up acting as the gatekeeper into the ‘villains worth talking about’ section of the list. The middle is filled with characters I think are fun but have limited roles and then the bottom are either actively bad or are inoffensive but limited in their roles. Sure, let’s go with that!
- Livewire
- Darkseid
- Toyman
- Lex Luthor
- The Joker
- Queen Maxima
- Metallo
- Parasite
- Karkull
- Brainiac
- Mr. Mxyzptlk (-)
- Harley Quinn
- Granny Goodness
- Kalibak
- Volcana
- The Gotham Rogues
- Lobo
- Luminus
- Project Firestorm
- The Female Furies
- DeSaad
- Detective Bowman
- Bruno Mannheim (and Intergang!)
- Steppenwolf
- The Preserver
- Bizarro (↑)
- Kanto
- Mala & Jax-Ur
- Mercy Graves
- The Prometheon
- De’Cine
- Corey Mills
- Earl Garver
- Titano
- Weather Wizard
The Matt Signal 
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