Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Teen Titans Go! vs. Teen Titans’ on Hulu, a Zillion-Jokes-a-Second Battle Royale for DC Nerds

Now streaming on Hulu, Teen Titans Go! vs. Teen Titans pits the ’03 animated, tonally serious Teen Titans against the ’13 animated, tonally snarky Teen Titans, which is roughly equivalent to deathmatching the Muppets against the Muppet Babies, or, I dunno, Yoda against Baby Yoda. (I said “roughly,” so don’t pick apart my comparisons, dweeberts.) Let it be known that this movie is mostly a TTG! effort, possibly because the series remains a relevant occupier of Cartoon Network programming grids, and 2018’s theatrical effort Teen Titans Go! to the Movies proved that the self-aware, high-speed joke machine is capable of making the jump from 11-minute chunks to feature-length extravaganzas. But now that the snarky thing that’s spoofing the serious thing is wormholing directly into the world of the serious thing, is there a chance that self-parodying the self-parody could irreparably rip a hole in the space-time continuum — or even worse, cease being funny?

TEEN TITANS GO! VS. TEEN TITANS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The Gentleman Ghost (voice of “Weird Al” Yankovic!) sticks up a bank, and the Teen Titans — Robin (Scott Menville), Beast Boy (Greg Cipes), Raven (Tara Strong), Cyborg (Khary Payton) and Starfire (Hynden Walch) — arrive to stop him. There’s some fighting, and many jokes, and here’s where I stop to tell you that Raven is a brooding and powerful sorceress-type with a crystal in her forehead, and in that crystal lurks the part of her that’s half-demon, and from that crystal the demon is getting all escapey. Yes, she has a literal inner demon, and by “literal” I mean the definition of the word that means “literal,” not “figurative.” A real demon, all pitch-black and red-eyed and Cthulhu-tentacled, and it ain’t something you can just drop off at the local Humane Society.

Raven’s dad, Trigon (Kevin Michael Richardson), who’s the demon that makes her half-demon, says he’ll remove the demon, but she thinks giving a demon to another demon probably isn’t a wise idea. Next thing you know, the Titans are snatched by the Master of Games (Rhys Darby), a dude with a very large forehead who travels among dimensions pitting superheroes of all timelines against each other, to see which ones are the greatest of all the universes. He tosses the wiseacre Thirteen Titans (see what I did there) in a battle arena with the pokerfaced Ought-Three Titans and tells them to have at it.

So they have at it, as the title promises. The end. JK! Merely fulfilling what we expect wouldn’t be very Teen Titans Go!, so this sidetrip between/among universes takes full advantage of its multi-dimensional premise and renders the adventure all higgledy-piggledy. NO SPOILAGE!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I’ll probably evoke the cyber-anger of many angry pants-wetting DC fanboys and fangirls, but Teen Titans Go! vs. Teen Titans is a similar trip on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but not as good.

Performance Worth Watching: “Hey, is that Weird Al’s voice? Well I’ll be. That IS Weird Al’s voice!”

Memorable Dialogue: “You better surrender, because we can be annoying ALL day,” Robin tells the Gentleman Ghost, and possibly unintentionally explaining Teen Titans Go!‘s relationship with its audience

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Not to give away the best jokes, but TTG!vsTT has so many of them, pointing out three that made me giggle like a dip won’t hurt: One, every time Ought-Three Robin formulates a plan, the video format shifts to widescreen. Two, there’s a recurring steampunk gag. And three, the spoofy ’90s-style Salt-n-Pepa hip-hop musical interlude is clearly the best of its kind since Weird Al’s Dare to be Stupid in Transformers: The Movie became a legendary cult-cinema non sequitir.

The conclusion I’ve come to after this movie, and half-watching a bunch of episodes while my kid giggled at them, is that the TTG formula demands good writing, or else it won’t work. Jokes and timing need to be polished or else the whole shebang would crumble like a Chips Ahoy (classic, not chewy) under a walrus’ gut. Being more of a Marvel person than a DC person, I’m sure I missed a bunch of inside jokes, but that’s fine, because there were about 400 other ones to choose from. Was it as good as Teen Titans Go! to the Movies? I dunno, I was too busy chortling to care.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you’re on its self-referential hyperspeed-comedy wavelength, Teen Titans Go! vs. Teen Titans is so entertaining, it’s stupid.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

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