Static Thoughts - Superman: Fun and Games

So, Supergirl has resumed airing with a brand new episode that featured one of the more off-beat Superman villains: The Toy Man.  The episode was a solid entry and an interesting reworking of the Toy Man’s character, drawing from his original identity as an older toymaker criminal while also making him the deranged father of series supporting character Winslow Schott Jr.  It’s overall a very solid handling of an actually pretty troublesome character within the realms of Superman villains.  Most of Superman’s foes that are interesting enough to come back more than once are defined by their power and ability to go head-to-head with someone as strong as Superman but Toy Man has always been an outsider in this realm.

 He doesn’t have any powers or even a robo-suit like Lex Luthor, just his crazy toy based inventions.  Even the idea of him using toys as weapons is a little odd, something that sounds cut more from the realms of Batman or the Flash, to the point that Batman the animated series concocted their own toy collector villain.  Supergirl mostly handled these elements well by slotting Toy Man’s creepiness into a familial center, tying into the show’s overall themes of family conflict but there is one show that did the character even better: Superman the animated series. 

The Superman animated series is an absolute gem of animation and probably the best adaptation of Superman and his universe ever achieved.  The voice cast was stellar, Tim Daly IS Superman in a way that only Christopher Reeve has ever managed to achieve, Clancy Brown is the most threatening and unique vision of Luthor, and Dana Delany infuses Lois Lane with a genuine charisma and personality that the films and shows have never come close to replicating. 

The show also did a great job stripping down and simplifying whole swaths of continuity that tend to send new comic readers scurrying for the exit.  Characters like Brainiac, Metallo, and Bizarro with origins steeped in convoluted back-story and false origins are turned into the simplest, purest iteration of their identity.  It’s basically everything the John Byrne Superman comic endeavored to be in 1986 after Crisis On Infinite Earths only with the added benefit of great actors, tighter writing due to the format, and the art direction of Bruce Timm. 

The show’s fourth episode and first legitimate episode after the 3-part origin story featured Toy Man, even though he was technically the show’s 4^th villain as Luthor, Brainiac, and Metallo had all been established in the origin story.  The plot for Toy Man’s debut is pretty simple, which is fitting for the overall aesthetic of the show and this character in particular.  Superman TAS was always keenly aware that its characters were fine existing as boiler plate descriptions while the details of performance and visual elevated the material, like how Brainiac is just an evil computer, Bizarro is just a failed Superman clone.  In the case of Toy Man he’s just a guy who commits crimes using toys as weapons, the detail that informs him is his targets.  In particular, Toy Man is targeting a local mob boss named Bruno Manheim, head of Metropolis’ super-crime syndicate Intergang. 

That’s actually a pretty slick twist for the character, giving him a more direct and unique motive than just “crime” and helping to set him apart from most of Superman’s other foes by the fact he doesn’t have any connection to Superman.  Everyone else in the rogues gallery is either created by Superman like Live Wire, tied to Superman’s origins like Jax-Ur and Mala, or obsessed with him like Mr. Myxztplk, but Toy Man wants nothing to do with him.  If anything, they’re kind of united in both fighting Manheim. 

Cutting Superman out of the loop in Toy Man’s story is actually one of the sly acts of genius in this episode’s plotting.  

The fundamental problem with Toy Man has always been how much he doesn’t feel like a Superman villain.  His toys as weapons motif is a bit too deranged and perverse to fit with Superman’s more sci-fi aesthetic and the fact that he eventually became a child murderer in the comics really didn’t help.  Superman TAS picks up on that and, while not going as far as the comics did, makes the curious decision to double down on the creepiness, essentially telling a non-Superman story that happens to have Superman in it.  

It’s a freaky revenge tale about a guy who makes killer bouncy balls and teddy bears looking for payback against the mob boss that ruined his life, it’s more at home in the realms of Magnum Force or Deathwish.  Superman is essentially playing the role of ‘the law’ in the story, the lone force for legality who can actually stop Toy Man’s deadly quest.

This is actually a really great subversion of classic assumptions that I wish more writers would indulge in.  The risk with superheroes is that we tend to put them into neat little boxes of definition and refuse to accept any break to those rigid standards.  This is what happens to Batman a lot, he’s slotted into the role of gritty urban crime fighter and people act like he should never break that particular identity despite the fact he’s spent decades fighting aliens, working as a globetrotting spy, or as a sort of global Zen warrior strategist amid the JLA. 

In the case of Superman, he so often falls into a role defined by his powers and alien origins that we forget how great his stories can be beyond that.  Every threat he faces can’t just be a normal villain it has to be a threat to the world or someone powered specifically by something from his origins.  That’s part of why something like Superman: Red Son or Master Men works so well, it’s not really a Superman story so much as a story with Superman in it and that’s the case here as well. 

It’s Bud Cort as the voice of the Toy Man and he does a phenomenal job.  Superman TAS always had a talent for roping in great voice talent like Ron Perlman as the Kryptonian Criminal Jax-Ur, Malcolm McDowell as a fantastic Metallo, Michael Dorn’s embodiment of Steel, but even though Cort isn’t as well known he holds his own amazingly.  He manages a truly unnerving and creepy performance that fits well with the overall motif of perversion and sort of wrongful affectation. 

Toy Man’s whole deal in the episode is that he uses toys for his revenge scheme because Manheim robbed him of a childhood, so now he’s getting his back.  It’s a very weird idea but it works thanks mainly to Cort’s inflections and mannerisms.  Toy Man’s childlike affects and world always come off just a bit too forced, a bit too unnatural, giving the sense he’s hiding a deeper mania just bellow the surface. 

Toy Man only appeared on two episodes of Superman TAS, this one and a later episode called ‘Obsession’ that doubled down on how incredibly creepy and mismatched his identity was.  It’s a bit like his origin episode in that they’re both far more focused on telling the villain’s story, which is, again, part of why people tend to equate Toy Man with a Batman villain.  Most of the time in Batman stories it’s the villain driving the plot and who gets the most focus from the story, mainly because at a baseline Batman is sort of a boring character. 

‘Fun and Games’ follows that same format and, essentially, slots Superman into the role of Batman, this unstoppable and unbending force for righteousness with the tension coming from the villain trying to achieve his goal around him.  It’s an episode that takes from both Superman and Batman stories and gives us the best of both worlds, how can you not love that. 


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