hollywood league

I have been watching "Justice League" and "Justice League Unlimited" via DVD. I don't feel that I have anything substantial to add to the reviews already on the Web--the show has incredible action, often-gorgeous animation, amusing wink-wink-nudge-nudge jokes, enthusiastic voice actors, blah, blah.

The part of the show that continually amazed me was the wealth of guest voices. Time after time I would hear a voice that was eerily familiar. Who needs six degrees of Kevin Bacon when so many people can all be connected to this show? Some of the ones that jumped out at me:

• Carl Lumbly of "Alias" is J'onn J'onzz
• Michael Rosenbaum of "Smallville" is the Flash
• Robert Picardo of "Star Trek: Voyager" is Amazo
• Rene Auberjonois of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" is Kanjar-Ro
• Michael Dorn of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" is Kalibak
• Most of the Firefly cast
• Amy Acker of "Angel" is Huntress
  
• Oded Fehr from the Mummy movies is Dr. Fate
• Dennis Haysbert of "24" is Kilowog
• Powers Booth, current vice-president on "24" is Gorilla Grodd
• Julie Bowen of "Lost" (Jack's former wife) is Aresia
• Lisa Edelstein of "House" is Mercy Graves
• Kurtwood Smith of "That 70's Show" is a prosecutor
• Neil Patrick Harris of "How I Met Your Mother" is Ray Thompson
• John Rhys-Davies of the LOTR movies is Hades
• Ron Perlman of Hellboy is Orion
• J.K. Simmons of the Spider-Man movies is General Wade Eiling
  
• Mark Hamill of some movie series or other is Solomon Grundy and the Joker
  
• Enrico Colantoni of "Veronica Mars" is Gordon Godfrey
• Brad Garrett of "Everybody Loves Raymond" is Lobo
• And of course, Ed Asner!
  

Bonus musings: No commercials, fine quality, commentaries, episodes scheduled whenever I wish...I'm starting to wonder if I should just give up watching TV shows live, wait for reviews or the Internet-stream version to determine if a show is worthy of my time, and buy it. With that strategy, I'm only paying for what I want to watch, and I can watch those shows for years to come. But this strategy also would have less variety, novelty, and surprise, not to mention no sports or TV news (as if I regularly watched TV news). Then there's the social component. Unplugging myself would make it harder to participate in snarky conversations with those who remain plugged in.