CAPTCHA My Heart

We’ve all seen this type of gizmo that displays a picture of letters and numbers that we have to type into a form in order to register for a particular site, or to leave a comment. The gizmo is called CAPTCHA, and it stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

Are they annoying? Sure. Are they hard to read sometimes? No doubt about it, but the truth is, I’ve had to install a captcha device on my blog so that people can comment again and at the same time spare me from having to wade through 200 or more spambot comments each week. It’s not foolproof, of course, because there will always be people who post crude things, or technology will catch up to captcha and find a way to circumvent it, but for now captcha seems to work.

Need I say more? Yes, Allison Mack got her pay hike, but no word on how much, though apparently it’s for a full 22 episodes as usual, at least according to Mike Ausiello (again) from tvguide.com. Translation? They couldn’t turn this teapot into a tempest and so no sooner had they announced her plight, than it was over. It seemed to be mainly a publicity stunt that didn’t pan out. That’s not really a surprise considering the buzz turned to blah for Smallville a long time ago, but what impact does her pay raise have on the rest of the cast and show?

For example, will Lois Lane be in every episode finally, or does bringing Chloe back at a higher price relegate Lois to only half the season again? How about Jimmy Olsen? The cast is still light when it comes to regulars. Lana will be back for only a few episodes and Lex will be gone for good, not to mention Lionel and Martha are already gone.

Hopefully characters who exist in Clark’s future won’t be shortchanged and Smallville will drift towards the Metropolis side and away from the farm. As mentioned previously, introducing Perry White, even if the original actor is unavailable, would be a huge step in the right direction. This is particularly true if they finally launch Clark’s journalism career because he has been running towards his destiny in granny low far too long. He doesn’t have to go into overdrive, but even third gear would be refreshing.

Stick ‘em up!

Chloe Sullivan may not be a returning character in Smallville’s final season next year unless Allison Mack’s price is met, at least according to tvguide.com’s Ausiello. He said, in part, “sources confirm to me exclusively that Allison Mack, arguably Smallville’s most popular heroine, may be the next [referring to Michael Rosenbaum as Lex Luthor] to go.”

Rosenbaum’s departure, however, didn’t seem to be over money, just a desire to move on after playing young Superman’s arch nemesis for seven years, which is pretty much a standard reaction for most actors on hour drama format shows that survive more than four seasons. The hours are grueling and the actors feel they have no social life outside the characters they play. Yet those who become accustomed to the steady income and are fearful of future prospects, tend to cling to an established role. It becomes a monetary security blanket.

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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 »

Lover’s Lane

Before pondering whether or not love changes Lois Lane, the first question should be why, with so many women in the world to choose from, did the most powerful being on Earth fall so incurably in love with Lois Lane? She’s certainly attractive, street smart and can hold her own in a fight, but again with the whole world to choose from, those attributes could easily apply to a lot of other women. So what was it?

To understand Superman’s attraction to Lois Lane, you first have to understand Superman.

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