When Obsessions Collide

It is not an exaggeration to say that I have loved Superman all my life. In fact, Superman seems to go beyond my cognitive memory. He was always there and I have no recollection of learning about him, no more than most of us remember learning about a table or chair, but as a child, Superman was just as real to me as that table and chair.

Every Superman fan has a first Superman and George Reeves was mine. Yes, I’m an old fart. I was a kid in the 1960s and a teen in the early 1970s, but the Adventures of Superman debuted before I was born so I was thankful reruns existed even in the Stone Age of my childhood. I was glued to my TV set listening to the long harp glissando intro as the camera zoomed past unnamed planets and a comet exploded spelling out the title of the show.

Like the other kids in the neighborhood I wore a towel around my neck and “flew” across the front yard with my arms outstretched. Sometimes I’d stumble over one of my mom’s rose bushes as a reminder that not only was I not flying, but I wasn’t invulnerable either.

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One of Many Reasons the CW Network Can’t Make the Grade

body swapping

Smallville, which started out well this year, but fumbled badly after mid-season in the ratings, has been sent to the minors. It will be on Friday nights next fall. Apparently CW’s advertising and/or art department, decided they needed a quick emergency poster advertising the night change.  With the cast gone for the summer hiatus, they couldn’t shoot a quick promo, so it’s understandable they had to use old promo photos. The problem is, they used real old promo photos — with a twist.

The above promo poster is composed of separate photos that are photo-shopped together, but for reasons unknown the photos they chose are nearly three years old.  That means Erica Durance (Lois) has blonde hair again instead of her natural brunette hair (right-hand inset), which she sported this year. More bizarre still, the ad/art person put Erica’s head on Kristin Kreuk’s (Lana) body  (left-hand inset) .

It just seems symptomatic of what’s wrong with Smallville’s promotional photos in general and their lack of creativity and care. Smallville’s photo shoots look like they’re promoting a show about a gritty law firm. There is nothing in their static approach that gives an inkling of what the show is about. While it’s true it would be hard to promote the image of a young Superman and his budding romance with Lois Lane without the costume, there are creative ways around that.

Lois & Clark The New Adventures of Superman ran a series of what were dubbed the “tattoo” promo pictures. They were used before the series debuted to make it clear that the series was not going to be just another superhero show.

The Superman emblem was prominent and the romantic connection was obvious. There is nothing that hints at this type of intimacy in the Smallville promos even though Clark and Lois became flirtatious this season.

Since it’s a good bet that will continue, or even deepen next season, they seriously need a promo shoot to convey that.

Unfortunately it seems the star of the show is not heavily into promoting his show. I won’t try to second guess his reasons, but since the group photos tend to appear piecemeal anyway and then photo-shopped together, there are alternatives.

It’s difficult to convey a romance with only one party in the picture, but here is a photo that launched a million downloads back in the day. Lois Lane wearing nothing but Superman’s cape. It told a simple, but sexy story with one photo and yet showed very little skin. The imagination filled in the details.

Again, it’s possible to be creative and evoke Superman without having to show the costume, which doesn’t exist on Smallville yet anyway. However, it reminds potential viewers what the show is about and that is what Smallville’s current promos sorely lack.

A promo has to grab attention and be memorable if it hopes to fulfill its function. Smallville’s promotions are flat and uninspired. They’re just pretty pictures of pretty people.

Next year is probably Smallville’s last. The exile to Friday night is a big hint that they’re being rotated out of the lineup, but that can work to a show’s advantage. It is always better to officially announce you are ending a series instead of the network announcing that you’ve been canceled. They should advertise next season as the last season and people who haven’t watched it in years may come back just to see how it ends, especially if clever promos are used to let them know what they’re missing.

Technically the midway point for most television shows these days is episode 11, at least assuming a TV series gets a full 22 episode season. If I were to give Smallville a grade for its first 11 episodes, I would give it a solid B mark. Some episodes were weaker and others were stronger, as is the case with any TV show, but averaging them together Smallville did very well and deserved no less than a B for the first half of the season.

However, Lana Lang’s return arc began in episode 11 and so I felt it necessary to include her arc in the mid-season assessment. To say that the inclusion of her arc throws the grading curve for a loop would be an understatement. It was such a radical departure from the progress the season made to that point that a teacher would ask the parent if the promising student was having trouble at home, or perhaps had started dabbling in drugs. Read the rest of this entry »

Smallville will begin its eighth, and hopefully last season, on September 18 and there will be some noticeable changes. I say ‘hopefully’ because in seasons past the show’s momentum would bog down and sometimes even regress when the producers were guaranteed another year.

In the new season some cast members will be returning, some will be missing and still others will merely make guest appearances to tie up dangling plot lines from last year. There will also be new cast members, if only temporarily, and a few of them will have familiar names, at least for comic book fans.

With a new team of show-runners replacing the departed Gough and Millar, there is an opportunity to resuscitate the ailing series and give it an epic sendoff. This doesn’t mean the previous show-runners wouldn’t have given it an equally grand departure, but they had such an entrenched view of their endgame that many plot lines just puttered around aimlessly waiting for the payoff.

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This Thursday, May 1, SMALLVILLE takes a look at what the world would be like if Clark had never come to Earth. In what might be titled ‘It’s a Worrisome Life’, Clark gets the George Bailey treatment via his Kryptonian father Jor-El. It would seem at first glance that his friends are better off. Lana is married rather than in a coma and Chloe is engaged to be married because she actually had a social life in a future where she wasn’t Clark’s hacker handmaiden.

However, not all is as rosy as it seems. Lois, though an intrepid reporter, is in handcuffs and has to be rescued from Lex Luthor’s minions. Oh, and Lex made it to the top, he’s the president of the United States and Brainiac is his right-hand man. If that wasn’t bad enough, Clark’s own cousin Kara was raised by the Luthors. Here’s a director’s cut of the episode.

Most Superman fans know that Jerry Siegel’s wife Joanne was the model for how Lois Lane looked in the early comics, but Lois’s attitude and personality were often mistakenly attributed to a classmate from Siegel and Shuster’s Cleveland high school.

However, Siegel himself set the record straight with a letter to the editor of Time Magazine, a publication that also printed the erroneous classmate story. Siegel stated that a fictional reporter named Torchy Blane, featured in a series of B movies from the 1930s, was his true inspiration

Glenda Farrell was the actress who portrayed Torchy in the bulk of the movies, but an attractive brunette named Lola Lane (above), who obviously inspired Lois’s name, played her in one of the better films.

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Since, as mentioned, I turned off the comment feature due to way too much spam getting through even with filters, I asked you to send me your comments to my e-mail address at guardian@redboots.net and you did. Thanks!

I’m going to post and comment on some of your e-mail. I’m not posting all of the e-mail since many are simply one liners like “I agree” or “I disagree” or “Loved your post” type of comments. Believe me, I love getting them, both positive and negative, but in this column I’ll be addressing comments, questions, critiques, etc. so let’s get started.

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Now that Smallville’s 6th season is over and filming has begun on the new season, it’s clear that somewhere midpoint last year the show made a deadly shift in direction.

The first half of the season averaged nearly 5 million viewers, while the “back 9,” as the remaining episodes are referred to in TV lingo, could barely come close to 4 million. What happened? Read the rest of this entry »

Behind the scenes of the animated movie

Translating the best selling Death of Superman saga into a 70 minute animated movie is a daunting task. Of course in that time frame not everything will be covered, which might upset purists, but unless you have the money to produce a story on a Peter Jackson scale, that’s inevitable.

The other purist constituency who might quibble over details would be fans of the Superman animated series, disappointed that different voice actors are being used and the look of the characters will be different. However, for the rest of us, this should be a very intense and entertaining movie. Read the rest of this entry »

No character on Smallville has had more speculation on who she might really be than Chloe Sullivan. Why? Because she is not a canon character currently in the Superman myth. There had been the “Chloe is Lois” theory, known in shorthand as the “Chlois” theory, but that was put to rest for all but a handful of hopeful die-hards when the real Lois Lane joined the cast. There were also theories that Chloe could be Lucy Lane until Lucy also showed up, or maybe she could be Cat Grant, but Chloe doesn’t pack the gear for that character.

However, there is confirmation that Chloe will be appearing in the comics as early as 2008, so that prompted me to post the Lena Thorul theory before the truth about Chloe Sullivan comes out and makes this, like the other theories, obsolete. Plus I will issue this spoiler warning that a new character is joining the Smallville cast next season, so read no further if you don’t want to be spoiled. Read the rest of this entry »