Okay, I’m just gonna come out and say it.“My Adventures with Superman” is my favorite modern-day incarnation of Superman and friends. They actually managed to modernize the setting and added a few tweaks to the characters (Lois is a short-haired tomboy, Clark is goofier and clutzier) while maintaining the core elements of why people love these characters (Lois being a fast-paced city girl who is always on the move, Clark being a goodie two-shoes Boy Scout from the country). They didn’t do the typical thing where modern is synonymous with darkness or deconstruction.
More of this please.
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I just realized something about My Adventures with Superman.
This is the first (I say first because I have no idea if it will still be the only by the time Gunn's version comes around) iteration of a Superman story that breaks one of the few major behind-the-scenes writing rules about introducing a new Superman story:
It doesn't start the show with either Krypton exploding or the Spaceship crashing.
All other reintroductions to a "new" or "different" version of Superman in the comics, the movies, or the TV shows, all start the story with either one of the two things. So much that you can argue it's as much as a trope as audiences seeing Uncle Ben die everytime Spiderman get revamped, or every Batman movie having to show us the damned blood-covered pearls in Crime Alley.
Just 8 simple words that explain it all
"Doomed Planet. Desperate Scientists. Last Hope. Kindly Couple."
So much so that comics even lampshade it when introducing evil Superman parallels like Ultraman.
"Doomed Planet. Desperate Scientists. Last Hope. Duplicitous Bastards."
But My Adventures with Superman very noticeably don't do that, and that's very much by design because this version of Clark is meant to know nothing and so the showrunners and writers made it so that the audience is in the dark as much as Clark is.
And it works to a wonderful degree because this means the audience spends all of Episode 1 getting to know Clark Kent: Junior Reporter first. We learn the overgrown corn-fed dork who can fly and break sinks before we get a syllable of Kryptonese. We learn about Krypton's fate in Episode 2 as Clark learns about it, but this decision also goes on to do something spectacular.
It also goes to prime the audience that this story of Krypton is going to be different from the version of Krypton and Jor-El and Lara-Lor-Van most people know, and that becomes more and more prominent as the show goes on.
And the Krypton we see hints of is fucking scary!
The show is going wholesale in subconsciously putting us in Clark's shoes because it plays with our familiarity and curiosity of what Krypton is like until we get to Episode 8: Zero Day and we see what the visions and codenames of Nemesis Omega and Zero Day mean. And it invokes the feeling of more dread and terror than hope of seeing any more Kryptonians, and that's without introducing us to the known Evil Kryptonians in the lore. (Zod, Ursa, Faora, Jax-Ur, etc.)
Starting with us not seeing Krypton exploding or the rocket ship that Moses'd him to Earth also later leaves the ambiguity of whether Clark truly has the title of Last Son of Krypton in the last episode climax and end-credit scene. It throws a lot of what we expect into flux while still staying true to the roots of the character at the same time, because it never confirms or denies anything. We're just left to speculate and flounder as Clark is.
That's just a wonderful example of how a story choice can have such a knock-on snowball effect that can pay off in establishing an atmosphere.
And it's all because they refrained from using a proven tried-and-true intro rule to do something new, like they do for a lot of the series.
And I just think that's neat.
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