The Rise of the Blue Beetle!

"The Rise of the Blue Beetle" is the first episode of the animated television series Batman: The Brave and the Bold. The episode introduces Blue Beetle in his first on-screen appearance.

Plot

The episode opens with Batman and Green Arrow fighting Clock King and his two henchmen after breaking out of a clockwork death trap that will lower them into acid. The main plot starts after the theme song airs. Teenage Jaime Reyes has become the second Blue Beetle but is not convinced that he has what it takes to be a superhero, partially because he has a few problems with controlling his powers. Batman decides to take the young superhero under his wing and asks Blue Beetle to help him stop a meteor and he remembers that he tried to rescue a cat from a tree. The mission is stopped, however, when the two superheroes to get sucked into a wormhole which sends both of them to a distant planet that has a war between single-celled aliens called Gibbles and the intergalactic pirate Kanjar Ro, who wants to harvest their bodies for fuel. The aliens believe that Blue Beetle is their savior, mistaking him for the previous one who wore the scarab, who was later killed. They think Batman is Blue Beetle's sidekick, but he is not confident he can save them, although he decides to try when he sees how much hope they have for him. Batman tells the Blue Beetle to give a speech to the aliens to encourage them to fight Kanjor Ro. Kanjor Ro is meanwhile draining energy from the Gibbles to power his ships for raids on the Medra Quadrant. However, the Gibble army attacks and Blue Beetle starts getting the hang of controlling the suit. He saves Batman from Kanjar Ro, then defeats him. However, when they have apparently defeated Ro, he frees his crew and uses the Gamma Gong on Blue Beetle, which he knows he has a weakness for; it eliminates his powers, and was how he killed the last Blue Beetle. Another blow of the Gong strips the armor away; when Ro sees his greatest foe is a child, he realizes he did eliminate the Beetle the last time they fought. He ties Batman and some Gibbles to a satellite for fish-like space monsters to eat, but Batman plugs a cable into the Gibble next to him, charging its power and electrocuting one of the monsters and scaring the other monsters away. Meanwhile, Ro has tied up the Beetle and is trying to use the Gong to find the right frequency to remove the Scarab. As Batman enters and knocks Ro into the Gong, the scarab is removed by the created tones. Ro then attaches it to his spine and uses its power to fight Batman. Meanwhile, Jaime thinks creatively and is able to escape his bonds, and then uses the Gong to strip away the armor and remove the Scarab from Ro. Enraged, he tries to attack them, but the Gibble uses a weapon that utilizes its own power to knock Ro out. Before he and Blue Beetle leave, the Gibbles thank Batman for his part in helping Blue Beetle and themselves to defeat Kanjor Ro. The two return to Earth through the wormhole, and find that it has brought them back to the exact time after they went through the wormhole the first time. This gives them enough time to finish the mission to stop the meteor that got them sent through the wormhole in the first place, and after making sure his partner is ready, Batman and Blue Beetle take on the meteor.

Production

Michael Jelenic, the story editor and co-producer of the show, wrote the scene with Jaime and his friend Paco, commented on Batman and Green Arrow on television because that is the type of thing that he imagined fanboys arguing about. The Clock King segment includes pop culture references while Jaime's room has a The Dark Knight Returns poster.^[1] The episode has easter eggs of characters that didn't appear in the episode.^[1]

Reception

Dan Phillips of IGN said that people would not like The Rise of the Blue Beetle! very much if they have a problem with "wormholes, single-cell organisms and evil intergalactic pirates being mentioned in the same breath as Batman".^[2] Scott Summers of Toonzone liked the plot of the episode while also noting that there are references to older Batman animation.^[3] Rob M. Worley of Mania said that the episode has "laugh-out-loud moments" and praised the action and plot twists.^[4]

References