Joe 90 – The Complete Series

 

Picture: B-     Sound: C+     Extras: C-     Episodes: C

 

 

After the huge success of Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, the most elaborate, commercially and critically successful of all the great Gerry and Sylvia Anderson Super-Marionation shows, the producers decided to scale back the scope of their work a bit with Joe 90, produced in 1969 towards the end of the Spy Craze launched by the James Bond films.  The situation here offers the title character, a nine-year-old boy, who goes on assignments empowered by a mind transference machine that gives him the abilities of those who have their brainwaves fed into the machine.

 

The Brian Impulse Galvanoscope Record And Transfer, or BIG RAT, places Joe (or anyone else) in a globe of curved beams.  Psychedelic colors swirl as the electric impulses get fed to the brain by an electrodes crown.  When finished, the seated subject gains the abilities and skills of another.  This sounds like a concept with possibilities, but somehow, this show and its 30 episodes does not quite click.

 

One problem is that Joe himself is so underdeveloped, that he seems like a model for Haley Joel Osment’s roboboy in Spielberg’s A.I.- Artificial Intelligence, regardless of what you think of the 2001 film.  Also, he is remarkably passive for a boy, even an intellectual one.  Furthermore, the show was made at a time when there was not the youth market of today, so it has aged in an odd way.  The kid seems outright depressed!

 

The biggest mistake the show makes is in the formula it sadly falls into.  The premise is so contrived, yet the teleplays make it worse.  The adults always argue over the ethics of using Joe on missions, but you know he’s going anyhow.  The moment Joe gets fused with his latest mission is done to death so much, that by the third episode, you’d think they would have a way to shorten this and get on with it.  Instead, their fetishizing of this becomes a spoof of itself, dating the show with its strange take on the counterculture in the use of tie-dye colors in an otherwise conformist world.  The biggest mistake Spy story wise is having Joe report to his father and other adults like he was a stranger or orphan boy.  Why does a 9-year-old need an Alexander Waverly (U.N.C.L.E.) or “Mother” (Thorson/King Avengers) figure?  It just further slows down an already troubled half-hour show.  Finally, taking the formula and just throwing it into various genres made matter even worse.

 

Craftsmanship is what saves this show at its best.  This was only the second show to use more realistic human-looking puppets after Captain Scarlet, but the Andersons felt the darkness and grand scale of that show was a peak for which they needed to shift gears afterwards.  Sadly, Joe 90 permanently broke their hits streak in the United States of their Marionation series for which they never recovered.  Fortunately, their live action shows made it.

 

As is always the case with A&E/New Video DVD releases, the full frame, color image is exceptional.  Higher than usual bit-rates are used and the result is impressive.  Color is very consistent, depth is decent, and sharpness is pretty good.  In this case, it is short of the razor-sharp (by DVD standards) images we have seen on other Gerry Anderson DVDs, though there is excessive detail in a majority of the shots.  Still, the label of the BIG RAT machine should be easier to read, for instance, but this is still way above most such DVD transfers just the same.

 

The sound has been remixed a bit for Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo, with results that are a bit clearer than U.F.O. Set One (made a mere few years after) and fuller than that of Supercar and Fireball XL-5, produced earlier (see my reviews elsewhere on this site).  Following the 5.1 remixes for Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet DVDs, it is actually not a surprise this was not in 5.1, since the show does not offer such depth and diversity in its simpler soundtracks.  Barry Gray’s music is unusually repetitious, especially the use of the poor theme, which is also used EVERY TIME Joe goes into the BIG RAT.  It also sounds too much like better music Gray did for the previous shows.

 

Extras are only on Discs One and Four.  Mike Trim’s commentary on The Most Special Agent and Ken Turner’s on the Christmas show The Unorthodox Shepherd offer the only insight into the show on the entire box.  That leaves Disc Four with information about the characters, locations the show was made at, equipment information and a photo gallery.  That is all presented silent in frame text and images.  Fans will be happy, but there had to be something else to add, but that’s it.

 

Now if you think I am being too hard on the show, with a bared-ten-years-old lead, I remind you all of the show that succeeded where this one failed: the original Jonny Quest.  Not that I expect karate from Joe, but that was a far more spontaneous series, fully animated and a classic.  Joe 90 was made four years later, but feels much older.  Fans will be happy with the quality of this box, but others might want to go to other Anderson series first.  DO NOT start with this one if you have never seen the Super-Marionation shows!

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo