My TV Reality

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Welcome to another edition of My TV Reality. I appologize for not doing this last week, but if you’re a frequenter of this site, you’ll see it’s because I was something of an honorary member of IP Movies, helping those fine folks with their Oscar coverage(still got the post roundtable show to do). T’was a lot of work, plus midterms, so I guess I really shouldn’t be sorry, should I? I was able to muster up a Simpsons Roundtable with three fine gentelman from the site, so there certainly wasn’t a lack of Lawrence. I have to say though, that even though this section is where I got my start, and where I usually do what I do, I can’t resist tackling other projects for other zones. Our staff here, comes up with all sorts of cool site-wide features, so many that often times, even I must resist doing a few. It may take me from my duties here every once in a while, but if you like what I do, and how I write, you should still be entertained by what I do in any capacity for the site.

And speaking of projects, Matthew Michael has worked his damn ass off to give us Moodspins. He’s been working on it for months (with help I’d imagine), so immediate congrats to him for that. And thanks to him for hiring me. I’ll be in the prose section every other Friday starting this very Friday. This will be where my creativity and writing talents really shine to their max, since fiction and poetry has always been what I feel are my strongest points. This week I’m going to be unveling my Thirty Before Thirty: The Thirty things to do before I turn thirty. See you then, but read this first!!

Other Schtuff
The Online Dating Chronicles returns!

Just to show you that you can’t always give up, after getting stood up a few weeks ago, I thought I was all but done and over with online dating. But lo and behold, a mad dash to write as many e-mails as I could to as many women as possible (and only two men), I got a response!! Her name is Maisy and she is awesome. I met her last week (I’ll go further into it next week), and I instantly liked her. Not sure what’s going to happen now, but things are a lot more interesting than I ever thought they’d be. Wish me luck, I still need it!

News in Haikus

Here’s the special Oscar edition of News in Haikus. After covering the damn show all last night with Mr. Campbell, it’s still contaminating my brain. Might as well filter it out, via poetry

Martin Scorcese
Will your time as victor come?
Your one sad blowfish

Chris Rock was okay
Got to love the Pootie Tang
And rehashed stand-up

Sean Penn is a bitch
A stupid, whiny, dumb bitch
I miss Spicolli

The Column Proper

Finally, here’s my thoughts on the new Superman Animated DVD. I was going to go in depth, covering episode by episode, but a lack of fan participation disinterested me. So this reads more like a straight up review than an overview of the show-

The WB has been doing a bang-up job restoring their 90’s DC cartoons, first with the dark knight Batman, and now with the icon that started an entire genre of comic storytelling, the man of steel himself, Superman. Airing from 1996 until 2000, the show borrowed heavily from John Byrne’s 1986 reinvisionment of the character, while adding in it’s own touches. This isn’t the Superman that flicks planets out of orbit. This isn’t the Lex Luthor that chats away with Ned Beatty and worries about losing his hair. This is a modern portrayal of a classic icon, and for the most part, it works.

There was much controversy throughout the show due to the de-powering of Superman. While still resilient to most attacks, the animated Superman struggles to lift helicopters and can get seriously injured, even without the radioactive glow of Kryptonite. As the shows producers say in one of the four commentaries offered on the DVD, this wasn’t done to make Supes a wimp, but because there had to be some type of tension throughout the twenty-two minutes. It was a well-thought out and well-executed decision, and as a result this Superman is more human than previous versions of the character.

The creators also did a stellar job with tweaking the villains. They completely redid Braniac, a mediocre alien in the comics, who was imagined as a Hal-like emotionless computer, who actually has a hand in bringing Superman’s home planet to its grisly end. Lex Luthor is as he should have always been: A money-grubbing tycoon peeved by Superman’s glory-hogging heroics. It could be so easy for Superman to kill him, but he’s above that, and the way Superman must wrestle with his morals during the show is pulled off flawlessly. Whenever Superman and Lex Luthor are onscreen together, there is an indistinguishable level of tension. The Toy man, a goofy silver-age nuisance is downright creepy on the show, portrayed as a bitter man in a doll’s body. The Parasite, a villain with life-draining powers provides comic-relief for the show, craving cable T.V. more than anything else. He’s a slacker janitor who accidentally gained superpowers, and hasn’t really changed much. The shows most grandiose villain, Darkseid, lord of Apokolips, only gets a cameo in one of the episodes, but would go on to cause unparalleled misery and mischief for the boy in blue.

Three short featurettes and a pop-up trivia version of an episode is what’s there in terms of special features besides the aforementioned commentaries. While informative, the commentaries are filled with too much technical information that would only be of interest to animation aficionados. The only noteworthy aspect of them is the always funny Paul Dini, who manages to get in at least one Mr. Mxyzptlk reference in per episode. And that imp from the fifth dimension doesn’t even appear here!

At twenty dollars for eighteen episodes, Superman provides much action-adventure bang for your buck and makes a usually boring character far more interesting than he has any right to be.