It's been 10 years since the release of the 'Dredd' movie and with no sequel and no news on the purported Mega City One TV series we're left with just the two official screen adventures of everyone's favourite fascist, future cop, the Stallone movie which looked right but did everything else wrong and the aforementioned Karl Urban movie which got most everything right except sharing a name with that previous pile of crap and releasing in the wake of The Raid, but we do have a couple of unofficial releases that we're going to explore beginning with the the Adi Shankar cartoon series, "Judge Dredd: Superfiend'.
JD:S is a six episode series made in the hyper-frenetic 90s MTV style of animation. I wasn't really watching cartoons then so the only visual reference I have for you would be 'Ren and Stimpy'. The story loosely follows the established Judge Death backstory of Sydney De'Ath, the son of a homicidal dentist who grows up to become a Judge before deciding that as all crime is committed by the living then life itself must be a crime, gets himself all corpsey looking and goes on a rampage but that's pretty much the end of the similarities. Here Deadworld and Dredd's world are one and the same, Rico has only just escaped from Titan and is trying to bond with his daughter, Vienna, and the Angel Gang are selling Stookie in a Cursed Earth disco crater.
The story just about holds up and has some fun moments and dialogue - "Dredd to control. I'm up to my ankles in entrails here, what do you want?" - but the frenetic nature and lack of any sort of depth soon wear away at you but you can entertain yourself by easter egg hunting - my favourite was the brief appearance of Fergee.
If you'd prefer to watch the six episodes separately you can do so here or you can watch them edited into a handy continuous story, without all those pesky credit sequences, in the player below.
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