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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Holding Out for a Hero

Was Lois so shallow that only a super man would do? No, not at all. In fact, on those very rare occasions when Clark Kent temporarily lost himself in the moment and acted and reacted like a normal guy, Lois found him quite appealing.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Era of Her Ways

As established, Lois Lane took crazy chances and a daredevil’s approach to investigating, but there was a method to her madness.

Lois began life in the comics as a lonely hearts columnist giving advice to the lovelorn, but she wanted to be a real reporter.

Unfortunately, considering the temper of the times, news assignments generally weren’t given to female employees of great metropolitan newspapers. This gender bias, though typical for its era, was the biggest contributing factor for sowing the seeds of iconic Lois Lane.

Read the rest of this entry »