What I'm really watching: Teen Titans Go!

There is a delicate balance when it comes to screentime with young children. Exercise too little control and you’ll watch nothing but shrill fan-made Sonic the Hedgehog YouTube videos; exercise too much and you’ll end up screaming at them while they run around the house destroying things as a Studio Ghibli film plays unwatched in the background. I am speaking from very, very recent experience here.

But sometimes you hit a sweet spot. Sometimes you find a film that services you and your children equally. A film that doesn’t lose its sparkle no matter how many times you watch it. A film that, when the kids have gone to bed, you’ve sat down and watched of your own volition. For my family – and your family too, if I have my way – that film is Teen Titans Go! To the Movies.

An extraordinarily great film, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is both a superhero movie and a savage obliteration of superhero movies as a genre. The story is simple enough. A band of lesser DC heroes – Robin, Cyborg, Raven, Starfire and Beast Boy – find themselves torn apart by their leader’s monomaniacal quest for movie stardom. But Teen Titans Go! is never really about the story. It’s about the tangents, many of which stretch the limits of what a kid’s film can be to its limits.

An example, and possibly the darkest possible example. At one point in the film, the Teen Titans decide to inflate their own reputations by going back in time and undoing the origin stories of all the DC greats. Krypton is saved from destruction, so Superman never reaches Earth. Bruce Wayne’s parents are redirected down a friendlier alley, so their son never becomes a tormented vigilante. When that plan fails, they have to go back in time and fix their mistakes. And, yes, this involves grabbing Martha Wayne, throwing a pearl necklace around her neck and shoving her back into the path of her murderer. Eat your heart out, Joker.

But even this moment – and the moment where the team fatally injures a keytar-playing white tiger voiced by Michael Bolton – is played with infectious, brightly coloured delight. You get the sense that in this film, as well as its parent TV series Teen Titans Go!, the creators can’t believe that someone gave them money to do this. It’s giddy to watch. It might be my favourite film of the last five years.

Better yet, the history of their creation is even better. Before Teen Titans Go!, there was Teen Titans; a relatively serious superhero cartoon characterised by its willingness to explore big themes. When that was junked, it was revived by two men who hadn’t seen much of the original and had little interest in superheroes. So Teen Titans Go! became a show about superheroes goofing off. There are episodes about sandwiches, about the importance of leg day, about how to purchase property and use it as a long-term rental investment.

There’s an episode built around a request from a real-life Make-a-Wish kid. There is an entire mini-series about The Night Begins to Shine, a song that the writers chanced upon on a CD of library music.

Incredibly, the Teen Titans voice cast were rehired for Teen Titans Go!, even though their characters are almost unrecognisable. The best of the bunch is Scott Menville’s Robin, who has transformed from a largely uninteresting hero figure to a control freak permanently on the brink of a stress-related heart attack. If you happen to be the parent of young children, you might relate.

If you’re prepared to disappear down this wormhole, there are a couple of avenues that should be approached with caution. The movie sequel Teen Titans Go! vs Teen Titans, for the most part, struggles to hit the heights of its predecessor. And the live-action TV show Titans, although it features the same characters, is basically an unwatchable mess.

Stick to the good stuff, though, and you’ll never go wrong. Teen Titans Go! is amazing, but what’s also amazing is that DC let this happen. They let a couple of disinterested strangers take a hammer to their carefully assembled mythology, and the results are amazing. Imagine Marvel doing such a thing. Imagine a Disney-funded spin-off where Doctor Strange and Captain Marvel sing a funky song about waffles.

It would never happen. This is the magic of Teen Titans Go!