Superman: The Animated Series, Season 1 Ep. 2: The Last Son of Krypton, Part II (B)

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EDIT: Dana Delany retweeted my link to this blog post, which, uh... I didn't see coming. She has a lot more Twitter followers than I do, so I'd imagine there will be some people reading who are new to what I'm doing here. For those who are: this is actually a series of posts, and I try to do a new post about this show every day. Every two days at most. I hope you'll stick around! If you want, you can subscribe via email (top right column) or follow me on Twitter so that you don't miss any updates, because this won't be the last time I talk about Superman or Lois or Lex. Feel free to comment as well; I like to know people actually read what I wrote.


We cut to Metropolis. Appropriately, the very first thing we see in Metropolis is a Daily Planet delivery truck. On a nearby TV, there's a news story about the mysterious "angel" of Metropolis, and an interview with a little girl who fell from such a high story of a building that it makes me unsure of how great I feel about Metropolis's building codes. At any rate, according to the girl, she was saved by a blue angel with red wings.

We pull out from the television, now in the offices of The Daily Planet. Some of the staff are watching the news on a huge screen. "If it wasn't an angel that saved her, what was it?" the TV reporter asks, closing the piece.

A woman in a purple blazer and a skirt points at the TV with a ruler. "Friendly pigeons," she says.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet LOIS LANE.

Let me make one thing very, very clear: I absolutely love Lois Lane, and it's mainly because of this show. I LOVE this show's Lois. She's essentially been dropped in from a Howard Hawks movie (specifically, this Howard Hawks movie, except Lois, unlike Hildy, would never want to quit being a reporter), and it's just fantastic. (When I looked up the Delany interview I mention in a moment, it turns out she thought the exact same thing, so it's good that her performance really managed to convey that.) It is by far the best take I have ever seen. She's got that tough, competitive element to her that I think a lot of the portrayals of Lois either forget about or don't get quite right, although I'll admit I don't really remember much about Lois in the Christopher Reeve movies.

The tough, competitive element is definitely in the original conception of Lois. In Superman #3 (in a story which was reprinted in Action Comics #6), she tricks Clark into following a false lead so that she can cover a story that her editor thinks is... well, you'll see:

Which only serves to immediately make Lois scheme out loud:

At the same time, the show's portrayal of Lois also has her feminine side, if you want to call it that, which we'll see in a moment.

"Whatsamatter, Lois? Don'tcha believe in angels?" one of the men asks.

"It's TV, boys," she says. "Just a trumped-up story to boost ratings."

"And maybe sell some papers?" asks a man whose eyes look like inverted commas, showing her the Daily Planet's front page.

Cut to: Perry White's office. Lois barges right the heck in.

Perry looks mildly startled, but not very surprised, which is excellent.

Interview: John Cheese

Pretty much all the readers of this blog come from Pointless Waste of Time, the forums at Cracked.com, so no doubt John Cheese needs no introduction. However, since he insisted on drawing up a legal document before this interview began, I am now contractually obligated to write one.

Mack Leighty was born, like so many great men before him, in a log cabin that he built with his own hands. Then, like Jesus (and Shakespeare!), his childhood years are lost in a fog of mystery, until we finally catch up with him joining his best friend David Wong to write for Wong's website Pointless Waste of Time, writing articles as John Cheese (also like Shakespeare!). This incarnation of John Cheese was a little different than the John Cheese his newer readers might know and fear today. John then started the website Juvenile Comedy after an argument with Wong over whether or not to spend the ridiculous amount of money they'd accumulated on illegal mongooses or a nice set of Wedgwood china.

They had completely forgotten about the Xbox 360.

John Cheese later became a regular article writer, and then a columnist, at Cracked, while also gaining a permanent layout job behind the scenes and offering his services to the Editorial team as a contract killer.

 

He usually does all three jobs without pants. (Again, like Shakespeare. The parallels are downright spooky.)

I had the contractually-obligated pleasure of sitting down and talking with John a few days ago, and managed to get a fairly professional interview. We discussed his early work; his opinion on the old media vs. new media issue; his friendship with David Wong, the man who made the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted Criminals list famous once he was added to it; John's upcoming marriage; giving him one good reason not to kill me where I stood; why he was holding a knife; me not being a hired assassin, really, John, I swear, I've never even heard of the League of Squancho; and which was the quickest way to get to the hospital.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  * 

I arrived at the restaurant ten minutes early, eager to begin.

As I waited for John to show up, I looked over my notes once more, steeling myself for the most important and so far only interview for a blog that I need to pay more attention to.

He entered the restaurant and I tried to catch his eye, but the hostess had begun talking to him and so his attention was routed to her. Their exchange lasted an unusually long amount of time, and when it was over her eyes were different colors and he had somehow exchanged his necktie for a bow tie that closer inspection would prove to be made of construction paper.

He sat down, de-napkined his silverware, and spent a moment glaring at it. When he had finished, he looked up at me expectantly.

I started with the most important question.

"Did you manage to see where the restrooms are?"

He pointed me in a direction that was somewhat correct, and when I returned from my adventure, I discovered that John had already ordered for both of us, and that he'd already eaten the food he had ordered for me.

I sat back down at the table and cleared my throat. John settled himself into an attentive pose.

Suddenly I realized that somewhere on the way back to my chair I had become extremely tense. I clutched my legal pad like a life preserver and felt my panic-freeze sweat soften its edges. I looked up to this man. Not, like, in a Martin Luther King, Jr. way, where you idolize him for a world-changing achievement--

(his mustache)

--but more in the way where I thought he was cool and wanted him to think I'm cool, too.

I decided to launch into my first question before I could think about all the ways I might end up disappointing him.

Nimby: How do you think your writing style has changed over the years?

John Cheese: When I first started out on the net back in 1997, all of my writing was based on the surreal. I used to set up innocent sounding, fictional situations and then make them progressively more corrupt and bizarre as the article went along. Since it was all character based, I could take an article like that anywhere I wanted. There was no research. No facts. Just silliness.

Not long before I came to Cracked, there was a transitional phase where I mixed reality with surreality. For instance, I'd write about finding a new girlfriend, but during the course of the article, I'd have it break down into a ninja type of fight, complete with back flips and ridiculousness.

Now, I've stripped out the fiction completely. There is no character. And it turns out that the reality-based articles that have a personal touch pull an absolutely insane amount of traffic. People want to read something they can relate to--and though my old fiction pieces had value on a comedy level, they never had the support and following like my Cracked pieces.

An Excerpt from James Cameron's Spider-Man Script Treatment

(Note: These are all real.)

An arm, wearing red spandex and a red glove, drops down from the roof of the newsstand. The news-guy whirls as the arm slaps two bucks on the counter and grabs a Newsweek. The owner rushes out the door... looks on top of his kiosk. There's nothing there. He looks up, all around... nothing. He grins and holds his fist in the air. 

OWNER

ALRIIIIIGHT!

CUT TO THE FIGURE, atop the WTC. Still hanging. He pulls the Newsweek out of his belt and stares at the cover in the moonlight.

SPIDERMAN (V.O.)

How can I expect them to get it.

I don't even get it.

I do wish they'd at least get my

name right.  It's Spider Man...

not The Spider Man. Jeez. Boneheads.

I need a better publicist.

He rips the magazine easily in half, then in quarters, then in eights... somewhere in here we realize that this takes more strength in the hands than you or I have. He releases the stamp-sized shreds. Camera drifts with them as they flutter down over the city like confetti.

SPIDERMAN

Wouldn't they have kittens if they

knew Spiderman wasn't even a man.

Just a kid named...

yeah they would have kittens, that would be groovy and the bee's knees and the cat's pajamas

PETER!

CLOSE UP on an elderly lady yelling. "Peter... you're going to be late!" It's morning and she's calling up the stairs to...

PETER PARKER. Age 17. Peter is in the bathroom, popping a zit in the mirror. He puts on his glasses and checks his look in the mirror. Still the same. Nerdy. He doesn't care. Screw 'em.

James, where's the real Peter Parker? Is this like a movie about the Clone Saga or something?

He grabs a big stack of books and heads downstairs. Over breakfast we meet his aunt MAY and Uncle BENJAMIN. Nice people but way too old to be the kind of role-model parents a kid needs. Still, he loves them even if he forgets to actually mention it 99% of the time like any kid. Aunt May is thin and fusses over Peter too much. He indulges her. When he has time, which he doesn't this morning.

I agree, James, I've read a couple of the comics and in no way are Uncle Ben and Aunt May ever good role models because they are just too OLD to understand KIDS. Well, except you, you seem to be doing a great job.

Peter's parents were killed in a plane crash when he was six. He woke up one day without a family. Somehow he always felt guilty that they went away. As if he had done something wrong. His 17 year old mind tells him it was just fate, just a random accident... but deep in his subconscious that scared 6 year old still cries, begging for them to come home... he won't cause trouble anymore... he'll go to bed when they tell him.

ugh.

[...]

Peter is a bright kid. He doesn't have many friends. He is ostracized for his interest in science. Our MTV culture frowns on people who think too much. Intellectual curiosity is decidedly un-hip. Who cares about where the universe came from or how the Greeks hammered Troy? Did you hear the new Pearl Jam album?

Peter is defiant. He thinks they are the real losers. They'll be flipping burgers while he's discovering the cure to cancer.
We'll see who wins in the long run.

He wears his isolation like a badge... with an air of superiority.

James, I want this Peter Parker to get punched in the face. Is that what you're doing here, like a... parody or something? Something that's bad?

[...]

He has the 17 year-old's sense that he knows everything about the world, and can see so clearly all the things that are wrong with it. In fact he is very insulated and knows almost nothing about human nature in all its complexity. He doesn't even understand himself very well. Because his life of the mind is his badge of superiority, he frowns on the pursuits of the body.

Sports? Forget it. Bunch of jock boneheads crashing into each other. Like stag elk in rut. Senseless violence. Girls? Good in theory, but how do you talk to them? Dancing? No way. He tried it once. Not a pretty sight.

Peter is a virgin. And apt to remain that way for a while. He's your basic sexually pent-up adolescent.

Thank you for clearing that up James, it really helps me understand the character better.

Later in the treatment:

At the same time, in some neighborhoods, he is a local legend. Crime is down, and the friendly neighborhood Spider Man is a welcome sight. And everybody wants to claim him.

Black kids think he's black. White kids white. Hispanic etc.

"Spidey man ain't no white dude. He too down. What I'm sayin. You see his moves? He definitely a brother."
"No way, home. My brother knows a guy that talked to him once, man."
Italians say he's Italian.
Gays think he's gay.

Fixing Bad Commercials: Etrade's Talking Babies

or: Why I Should Be In Charge of Advertising for Everything Ever, Part One

Talking babies (and talking animals) are used when the commercial has no actual joke. It is literally the laziest thing you can do. I talked earlier about the terrible trend of faux-nostalgia in car commercials, but this is way worse because those car commercials, while stupid and counter-productive like a video game boss with his weak spot on his front, at least had some effort put into them and some pretty neat (but wasted) concepts. This is just pablum.

 This picture is in case you didn't get the joke because I want you to know how clever I am

And there are people who think this is a brilliant ad campaign to run with, apparently. I'd hate to see the ones they rejected. The current title holder for "Most Popular Series of Talking Baby Commercials" is the series of ETRADE talking baby commercials, which are just terribly unfunny. Let me take you through a tour of them.

The First Commercial

 

Did you get the joke? No? That's because there isn't one!

That commercial aired during the Superbowl, which, I mean, is essentially the Cannes Film Festival of commercials. They thought it was worth paying however many millions of dollars for the thirty-second time slot. And then at the end the baby spits up! Get it? That's the only thing in there they could think of as a joke! Isn't that funny! Because it makes me want to die a little bit!

How to fix it:

You can't.


Anyway, you'll notice that these commercials have a secondary gimmick: the baby is on a (poor simulation of a) webcam for some reason. Now, in the first commercial it's because he clicks a mouse (which you can't see on the camera, so, uh, great work with the visual storytelling, guys) to show you how easy it is to invest in some financially stable group like Enron or Bear Stearns, but it makes less and less sense as time goes on, like in our next entry:

The Golf Commercial

The only thing this is doing is making me hate babies and keyboards

This, by the way, is another Superbowl commercial. For a different year.

So here, they're in a golf locker room, except they really just stand there like they're in front of a greenscreen, even if they aren't (but they totally are) It looks like they also totally added in that keyboard later, which is just lazy. Anyway, you'll notice that for this to make sense they've also added desks of computers, like you'd see at a library.

Except, well, I don't think that many golf locker rooms have those (even the fancy ones I've been in just have TVs and billiards; computers are too unrefined to be allowed in, I'll bet)

 

America's country clubs needed something new to discriminate against, and it was just a matter of changing a couple letters

and even if golf places do have computers, the computer in the commercial doesn't have a webcam. So, the baby, see, I guess he just... uh... brought a... connect... I don't get exactly what the logic is here. It's like they took a joke from the cutting room floor that was meant for a completely different product and then clumsily reshot it, like a drunk farrier.


The worst thing about the commercial, though, is the alleged punchline: "shankopotamus." I don't know if you noticed through all of the hysterical laughter, but that's not actually one of those pun-insult-type-things. It sounds nothing like "hippopotamus." They lamely try trick you into thinking it makes sense by naming the guy Frank. Which, as you will notice, already could work as the pun-insult-thing setup. So... why not just be satisfied with that? Why go out of your way to randomly slander an incredibly dangerous water creature?

 

Hippos don't hire lawyers.

 

Learn how to fix this commercial right after the jump.

Why I Should Be in Charge of Comics, part one: Spider-Man and How to Tell Stories

or: The Problems of Marvel

Marvel’s main problem is a misunderstanding of how stories work and progress, how to create characters, and how to write.

Let me take you through this using, of course, Spider-Man, the most poorly-treated flagship character in comics history. Bad decisions (some later reversed) over the years had him:

1) revealed as a clone (reversed due to not only fan rage but the inherent stupidity of the idea: it turned out the guy who was the clone who was actually the real Peter was actually a clone)

2) be such a strung-out weirdo over feeling guilty for his Aunt’s soon-death that he bullied his wife into selling their marriage to the Marvel Universe devil (not reversed: the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel basically hates marriage)

3) Do you really want more examples after those two?