This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer. You can find all my work at mjmunoz.com.
Welcome to Red Panda Report. This time I'm going to be talking about Red Panda Adventures, Episode 23, The Hidden Door.
Here's the copy for the episode written by Greg Taylor, who's the writer and director of Red Panda.
When you put on a mask and fight for what's right, secrets are your stock and trade.
They protect you and those around you from those that would seek to end your quest for justice.
But when those secrets are compromised, the shield can become a sword in the hands of a vengeful enemy.
What will happen when that moment comes for our heroes? When the mask slips just a little, and what fury will come crashing through the hidden door?
This episode was originally aired May 19, 2007, and like I said, is written and directed by Greg Taylor, as all the Red Panda episodes are.
And I don't really have much to say about this episode. I just finished listening to it a little bit ago, and it's a great episode.
It's a lot of fun. I was impressed by how much of the beginning of the episode, which is probably the first eight or nine minutes,
and it's only a 23 or 24 minute episode total, is focused on these crooks, these criminals, and what they're doing.
And it was very interesting because it allowed us, it allowed the audience time to just listen and hear what was going on with these crooks.
Now one of them, Jacob something, he's kind of a good guy. He's a guy that Kit knew, or Kit knows, and he recognizes her because she's in the lair and she takes off her mask.
And she wants to wash her hair and take a bath and all this stuff, and she's of course with the Red Panda about that and has some banter, whatever.
But the important part is that it allows, well anyway, before you see Jacob in the lair and knowing who they are and having a gun in him and all this other stuff,
you get to spend some time with him as a character and you realize that he's kind of been pushed into a life of crime, or he feels like he doesn't have any other options left.
So this is why he's choosing a life of crime. You find out in the interaction that he has with Kit that he's actually a locksmith by trade, but his locksmith business went under.
This is during the Great Depression, and that explains that and the idea of a lot of, so people will talk about Batman and they'll kind of mock it.
They'll say, oh, Bruce Wayne just dedicated his money to helping people find jobs or doing prison prevention or criminal justice reform or whatever.
Then you wouldn't need him to dress up in bat costume and bat armor and beat people up with his bat fists and his batarang and all that stuff.
It's this weird, indulgent, rich man, power fantasy type thing. I have kind of thought that's an interesting argument at times, but the more I thought about it and the more time has passed,
I realized, no, that's probably not true. Actually, somebody who is a comics reviewer, Perch by name, he's actually an interesting guy.
He's on his own side, and he's on the side of entertainment. He wants comics to be entertaining.
I recently heard him talking about this, Batman should do this, and he says there's a bunch of citations that you could point to in the comic books where Bruce Wayne is doing all this stuff with the Wayne Foundation or whatever
to help people and to help things be okay. Kind of the primary existence of Batman is to fight these super criminals or super villains and things like that.
I would say that's kind of true of Red Panda. We get to see charitable things done with Red Panda with this Jacob character.
He even talks about finding him work in another city, honest work that he could do somewhere else. They're kind of debating because he knows who Kit is, and therefore he knows who Red Panda really is.
He's one of a few people that we meet in an episode that knows, realizes Red Panda is actually this rich guy who lives in Toronto.
The connection, I don't know that it often comes through Kit, one guy, he just unmasked himself to him. He pulled off his domino mask and he could see him.
He was a guy who was a member of the Club McCall. He was working with Jack Rabbit from episode three or so of Red Panda Adventures.
Anyway, we get this kind of interesting, all of that is to say that Batman gets attacked in this methods thing.
If he would just help poor people, then there wouldn't be criminals. That could be true in some ways, but again, there are things in the comic books that disprove that for Batman.
For Red Panda, we do know that he does give to charitable causes. As his alter ego, he takes money and gives it to good causes.
But then also, as Red Panda and Flying Squirrel, in the body of this episode they talk about how they pulled in like 500,000 dollars that people were willing to pay, criminals were willing to pay to get rid of Red Panda and Flying Squirrel.
If he offered 100,000 as Mad Monkey, which he did, then that means that the others offered 500,000. So it was like around 600,000 dollars to kill them.
They take that and they give it to every charity, every poor house in the town or something, I think is what Kit said. That's really cool. That's a great idea.
But beyond that, there are some people who are bad for other reasons. It's not because they don't have a job, it's not because they're desperate, it's not because of something necessarily bad that happened to them that's easy to fix by just giving them work to do.
However, there are theories and books and things like that written about how young men with nothing to do, with no sense of purpose, will do bad things to a society.
I think it's a great example of that. Something that gives people a sense of self-worth is a livelihood and an obligation and a sense of belonging and a sense of being needed by people, which I think is psychologically why a lot of people will, young men will fall into gang life because they have a sense of purpose, they have a sense of duty, responsibility, they have a sense that they are meaningful to the gang, that if they don't stand up for the gang, if they don't fight for the gang, if they don't do whatever for the gang, then they don't have worth.
It's a sick-twisted, toxic thing, but there's also the good version of that sort of thing where you have the camaraderie with warriors and soldiers and people who serve together for a mutual purpose.
I have an obligation to be here, it just helps for these other people because if our numbers are too small, then we aren't able to accomplish X, Y, or Z.
As long as that's oriented around something that's moral, uplifting, benefits the people in the group and people outside of the group in a way that's moral and legal, that's definitely really good.
Legality is less important because sometimes things that are moral are made illegal and sometimes things that are immoral are made legal. That's a whole different debate we can get into.
Specifically going back to this episode, you get to see this Jacob who is not a terrible person. He is a desperate person and he turns to crime because he wants to support his mother after their business went under.
I think it's sister to you he's helping support. I don't know what her deal is, but whatever. He says she needs help and that's what he's doing this for.
And kids telling him, yeah, that's not right. Even though that's your situation and you're desperate, you shouldn't be doing that. You should be doing the right thing because it's right to do, not because it's easy to do.
And if everybody, if it was easy to do the right thing, then everybody would do it. Nobody would be bad and I wouldn't need to wear this mask. I wouldn't need to be fighting crime. That's not how it would be.
We would be in a much better world, a world operating on a much higher level.
And anyway, all that's really cool and really fun to think about like the social dynamics between these, behind these things.
And it's like kind of fun to deconstruct superhero type things.
But then you get awesome stuff happening like in this episode. What happens is that they are willing to work with Jacob. He's willing to have his mind.
Well, no, there's the other guy. That's where Lenny comes in. So Lenny is the other guy who was working with them, who was kind of like softer.
And I can't remember the name of the real hard guy, the real tough guy. So it was like the guy who's desperate and just barely tiptoeing into being a criminal.
A guy who's like he's been a criminal for a while, but he's like not a horrible person. He's just kind of like misguided. And then there's like a real bad guy.
And he's the one who's trying to lead this party of gangsters and criminals to gangsters, lawmakers, something with the League of the Shadows opening.
Anyway, he's trying to lead these people to go assassinate Red Panda and Flying Squirrel.
And I think he's already figured out who the guy is. So he's like, yeah, this risk guy went off him, you know.
So he's a real a real bad character. He's like a like he's a corrupting negative force.
And that's not good, obviously. So this guy's like a hardened criminal. He's a bad person. He's evil and he needs to be dealt with.
So the way that the deal with him is they hypnotize one of his partners and then he gets hypnotized too.
And he thinks because the Red Panda is a master disguise that the Mad Monkey is there as well.
So the Red Panda as Mad Monkey whips up all these criminals into pulling their money together and then going to the wrong place and calling the cops ahead of time to get them all whisked away.
And that was a really clever plan. Really cool. I love Christopher Mott's performance as Mad Monkey. It's fantastic.
And I something I love like there's like a magic to the fact that I know that both of the guys were there and both of them were doing the voice performances.
But like just thinking about Red Panda impersonating Mad Monkey and then revealing himself to be the Red Panda is lots of fun.
And I love that he like he like really nails the kind of language Mad Monkey would use.
Like he sounds like he's Mad Monkey, obviously, because Greg Taylor is the writer of both of them.
And he knows exactly what voice to use for the Mad Monkey. And then he has Red Panda use that same same exact voice.
I mean, it's a little too perfect, a little inauthentic, but like this is superhero stuff where people got static shoes and gliding membranes and Red Panda and Flying Skrull are immune to their own knockout gas.
But which he uses to knock out all these criminals and get them all arrested. So like Golden Claw gets arrested again.
I couldn't recognize all the other voices, but there were a few characters in there who's you know, we've definitely heard the voice of the actors before, not those exact characters, those gangster criminal characters or whatever.
Golden Claw excluded. But yeah, that was a lot of fun. And I love just like the turn of the line. Someone asked me, what's so funny is like, oh, you wouldn't get the subtleties of this joke, whatever.
And it sounds so much like what Mad Monkey would be saying. And he switches, it switches over to Greg Taylor's voice and he says, like, you know, I'm not the Mad Monkey, I'm the Red Panda.
And this is a gas grenade. And then he ostensibly throws in here the hissing of the gas grenade.
And the cops are coming in and people are yelling as they're falling down because they can't they don't have any immunity. They knock out gas. And it's just like a real fun like, I don't know.
It's funny because like I was waxing all philosophical about crime and criminal justice reform and how do we deal with that in a real sort of sense.
And then I'm laughing because it's so fun and entertaining and like delightful to think of all these criminals going down and getting thrown into jail.
So I don't know. It's funny. It's great superhero adventure. It's a lot of fun. Like you can think about it if you want to and like really be moved by it and pondered or whatever.
But then you can also just enjoy the spectacle of it, which I totally do and totally did. And it was lots of fun.
So anyway, stick around for more weekly Red Panda adventures. And I would love to hear your thoughts on these shows as well.
I am also making a shift with my writing work. I'm definitely pushing myself towards writing and publishing my books very soon. At least one book.
I'll start with one book and then we'll go from there. It's about magical bugs battling monsters.
And instead of a marvelous masked mystery man battling bad guys, it's magical bugs battling monsters.
But anyway, what I'm doing with this is I'm trying to focus more on writing and I'm in the three quarters through writing a short story that I'm submitting to Rockington Press, which does a lot of short story anthologies.
This is a weird West story where I have my magical bugs going to the Old West and have an adventure. It's just one album actually.
And it's like a real Western, which is pretty cool. But then there's this magical bug in it and these magical spider things. Anyway, it's a lot of fun.
So far I'm having a lot of fun writing it and I'm hoping people have fun reading it.
And I'm hoping it'll make it in this book and I'll make some scratch off that and I can invest that more in my writing.
But what I'm getting at is in addition to Red Panda Adventures, you can also hear me talk about stories.
I'm going to be doing that with increasing frequency, talking about middle grade stories, a bunch of them, talking about classics and modern middle grade stories over on Fortress Fiction, which you can find linked here at MJMunos.com.
And specifically I'm going into spending more time talking about the books and having a richer experience. So I'm going to be talking about chapter by chapter, a bunch of books.
I'm starting with Peter Pan and we'll go from there. At the end of the Peter Pan chapter by chapter, I'll do one episode that's talking about that book specifically.
And I'll move on to the next book and I'll let folks know what that is as I'm going on.
And if you want to hear me talk more about specifically superhero type stuff, I'm talking about Japanese superheroes in tokusatsu shows,
which feature transforming or henshin heroes who yell out something in transform like, you know, go go Power Rangers or Kamen Rider with his henshin and also Ultraman.
That's a lot of what I've been talking about lately. And there's even a fun Ultraman, Spiderman crossover done in manga that I'll be talking about as well.
So if you're interested in any of that stuff, check out Fortress Fiction specifically for me talking about books and then henshin inspection where I'll be talking about crazier, more poppy Japanese,
Japanese type superhero stuff with transforming heroes and other things as well. Also talking about Digimon over there.
So I encourage you to check that out. And if you like the work I'm doing, please subscribe, share around and follow, get notifications on so you can see when I put out all my work and help me grow the channel.
I want to reach more people who love stories the way I do, who love the types of stories I do so I can share my love for these stories with them and also share the stories that I'm writing of my own that are inspired by a lot of these things that I like.
So until next time folks, take care, be well and hold high the lamp of justice.
I hope you enjoyed that. Subscribe to keep up with me. Like and share to help me reach more people like you and go to MJMunoz.com to find your next favorite thing.
And don't forget to let your voice be heard. Stories are always better when you're part of the conversation.
Until next time, be well. This is MJ signing out.
This has been a story over everything production.