THE STRANGE FEVER DREAMS OF A MEDIA CONGLOMERATE: To whom, exactly, is the new Teen Titans cartoon supposed to appeal to? It's a strange graft of Powerpuff Girls upon Bruce Timm-style DC superhero cartoons that utilizes none of the Wolfman/Perez Titans mythos except for the characters' names. The vast Time Warner/AOL hivemind must've decided to split the difference when they thought this thing up. "Let's create another cartoon for the aging fanboy audience before they all get thrown out of the house." "Let's create another Powerpuff Girls mass-merchandising phenomenon." "Those fanboys won't have money for deluxe action figures much longer." "It can't be hard to synthesize Japanese anime style in a purely American context--our McCracken underling did it, surely his works can be replicated for the coveted 9-to-13 demographic." "I'm seeing lifesize anatomically-correct Starfire dolls." And so, Teen Titans was born fully-grown from the brow of the Mental Organism Designed Only For Merchandising--and yes, I do picture AOL higher-ups wearing AIM helmets.

I mean, I'm watching it and thinking, "Where's the rest of the Fearsome Five? Where's Neutron? Where's Mammoth's sister? Where's Psimon? Where's--Dr.Light?" (Yes, that's six--Dr. Light experienced a Big Ten-like loss of counting ability.) And why couldn't Jinx be Indian? And a hundred other geekish questions, all essentially asking: why use the character's names but no other part of the source material? It has to be an attempt at audience-doubling by getting the fanboys and actual adolescents to watch, instead of one (as Justice League does by playing it pretty straight to the source) or the other (kids who are possibly graduating from Powerpuff Girls.) That's all I can think of.