Reviews WebVideo / YoungJusticeAbridged

WebVideo A good, but incomplete, series (UPDATED)

I just loved this series while it was still being made. The characters are pretty engaging, and while some seem like they're In Name Only compared to their canon selves, the characterization is strong enough and they're likable enough for them to be able to stand on their own. The plots largely interwoven nicely between Young Justice and the DC Animated Universe, and manages to almost seamlessly merge the two into an amazing narrative despite the shifts in artstyle and tone one would normally expect.

That said, I do have a few problems with the series.

• 1. The Title is an Artifact Title. For a series called "Young Justice", the Team only holds the focus about 40 percent of the time. As a result of merging the DCAU with the show, it makes the Team feel like secondary characters in their own narrative. After the first few episodes, most of the time the episode will have an A plot and a B plot. The A plot will typically focus on the Justice League, specifically Batman and Damian, or Roy Harper. The B plot will focus on the Team. And even then the Justice League as a whole will be the focus of the movies. So it feels disingenuous to name the series Young Justice Abridged when they aren't the main focus. A more accurate name would have been "DC Abridged" or "J.L.Abridged", since technically the Team is a division of the League.

• 2. The audio balancing isn't that good. Numerous characters can be hard to actually understand because their audio is so much lower than the others, and it can be distracting having to strain your ears to even hear anything.

• 3. The voices of the Team. The only ones I can say are consistently good are Sasha and M'gann's, but the others all have very noticeable issues. Tim sounds much younger than he's supposed to, Kaldur has a very noticeable lisp only in some scenes, Artemis' voice sounds stilted at times, and Wally's voice changes so often it gets distracting. It's not like they can't make them sound better, as Kaldur's scenes with Black Manta and whenver Artemis turns Angry Brit are amazing, but it can be a bit distracting.

• 4. It's unfinished. While yes, there was issues going on and it was cancelled the year Covid-19 screwed everyone up, it still doesn't change the fact that because of the abrupt ending, a lot of plots are unresolved and there's no satisfying conclusion. And while scripts were released for the Patreon, not everyone has access to that, so for most people it's still unresolved.

So as much as I enjoy this series, the first issue makes the series seem a bit misleading, since people would walk in expecting an abridge for YJ, not the entire DCAU. The second and third issues can be deal-breakers for people since they want to hear the series properly, and the last one can be a bigger deal-breaker since they may not want to see a series that's incomplete. This series was a pretty damn good one, it's just a shame it had to end prematurely.

WebVideo 4-5/10.

So Okay Its Average pretty much sums it up. I guess on its own merits the case might be made that it has some value. I can't think of any, but I'm unprepared to dismiss any possibility in a world where diet water is a thing.

I've seen a few abridged serieseseses in my time, and compared to others, it's just not that great. Nothing about it is particularly BAD (well, nothing other than Superboy and Kaldur's personalities), but very little in it is notably good, or especially entertaining.

I will note that for as little personality as Kaldur and Superboy have in the original series, this abridgement manages to go one better. They went from bland to bad. Kaldur appears to be a stereotypical "gangsta", Superboy is sexist and, for reasons I could not begin to fathom, Russian.

To recap, 4-5/10. Recommend if you're a fan of things like Plan 9 From Outer Space and/or if you've got nothing better to do with your time. Otherwise avoid it.