RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Media Superman/Doomsday

esplain!

Right after he died people tried to resuscitate him, that helped a little.

The Eradicator brought him to the fortress and put him in the Matrix (not that Matrix...) where he absorbed sunlight, and plenty of it. Bigger help there.

Jonathan Kent, near death, fought through heaven and hell to bring Clark's soul back. What a guy.

I tried to watch this today.....got to the point where they said something about the bird flu and couldn't take it anymore. I'm glad I didn't pay for this.

It was mostly that. Conveniently complex Kryptonian technology did the trick.

If you think about it, who says Kryptonians didn't die and come back all the time? It WAS established in the World of Krypton mini (kick-ass Mignola artwork, btw) that they had insanely long lifespans, thanks to their advancements in technology. I'm talking thousands of years.

So the robots at the fortress see that their master is being put inside a fucking wooden box and they go "what the FUCK?!", so they go pick him up and put him in the rescusitation Matrix where he belongs. Really, if Superman had kept Lois up to date with Kryptonian mortuary customs, all this fuss could have been avoided. "It's all right, guys..." Lois would have said to the people standing around Superman's dead body in Metropolis, "...he just needs a sun bath, that's all."

And then there's the Eradicator, whose sole mission was preserving Kryptonian life at all costs. He/it often used extreme measures to achieve that.

so...

can supey just use this matrix thing any time?

and was the eradicator/ matrix thing part of the story originally, or was that just something added or clarified recently (i remember seeing that, i believe, in some of the crisis storylines, but never remember even hearing about it 5-15 years ago).





and wuzzis all about

thats how i feel -- i honestly don't care how similar the movie is to the comics. i don't really feel its all that important that it be a literal translation. as long as the basic gist is there (super guy, mean guy, fight, some death, some sad, some return!) its fine.

but the quality of how its told is key, of course. having not seen it, i can still hope/pretend that its not as terrible as every single person says who has seen it.

The Matrix came down with the fortress near the end of Reign of the Supermen. The Eradicator used up all its juice to power himself up and everything crumbled. Oh, and then the whole Byrne/Jurgens continuity also crumbled in recent issues.



It was all part of the story from the beginning: the chain of events leading up to the resurrection was carefully set up since Funeral for a Friend. The Eradicator goes back several years before this storyline, too, though it was originally a Kryptonian artifact that later acheived sentience. The seeds for the Cyborg and the creation of Superboy were also planted years earlier (not with Superman's death in mind, obviously).



That's Adventures of Superman #500, the double-sized issue between the relative tranquility of Funeral for a Friend and the craziness of Reign of the Supermen:



At the end of Funeral for a Friend, Pa Kent has a heart attack. In this issue he's in a coma and has a near death experience in which he basically helps Superman's soul come back from a fake Kryptonian funeral procession that's taking him to Hell. When he wakes up, the first thing Pa says is "He's back". Then Superman's body disappears, and the four Supermen happen to make their first appareances.

Later it's revealed that the body disappeared because the Eradicator took it to the Fortress, so he didn't simply get up and walk out of his grave after Pa's experience. The whole thing was most likely just a dream, or at least that's the way I've always seen it.

That's the rational way to look at it, of course. But how would you feel if they decided to adapt DKR, and changed every single aspect of it? The basic idea is there -an older The Bat-Man comes out of retirement and kicks some ass- but the whole exectution and the context are completely different. It seems like a huge wasted opportunity to me.

If they would have gone one more round after that, I would agree more with you. Still, i admit I thought he was taking Doomsday into space for good when it was happening. From there, rather than fucking him up upon re-entry, he could simply have tossed his ass into the sun.

assuming the quality was there (of course a leap of faith) i'd be fine with it. i'd even be fine with a few quasi-major element or plot changes. i.e; eliminating two-face / harvey from the story. or making the mutant leader kgbeast, or something along those lines.

to me, DKR is a book. i read it (past tense), i read it (current tense) and i love it. it'd be great to see a complete, literal adaptation in animated form, i'd love that, too. but i don't at all think the only way i would love an animated form is if it were 90 or 80 or X percent identical to the book. its not at all necessary. if something were to be released that was close, or even "an homage" i could live with that.

for example, BTAS did an episode towards the end of their run that featured roughly 8 minutes of "DKR-like" animation. it wasn't exactly the same, there were sequence and dialog changes, and of course the overall presentation was altered to fit the briefer media. but i liked it all the same.

batman begins was a mass-market-appeal, "hollywood" take on batman: year one. some stuff was the same, some stuff wasn't. i was fine with that. mostly because i felt the movie's quality was top notch.

i have (and would have) my gripes about things that i felt were better in one media than the other, but thats because i'm a whiney internet fanboy, and thats what the internet is for. however, i'd more or less be fine with everything.

no, that was the story as published in 1993. I'm really not sure what the current continuity is on it because of the changes to the Eradicator and Krypton since.


and wuzzis all about[/quote]
Jonathan had a heart attack and then his soul and Clark's soul were in limbo together (which was the big story of Adventures 500) and then they fought some demons to come back. This lead into Reign.

That episode was an example of changing things and still retaining the essence of the concept. You could tell that they did it because they love DKR. I don't think the people who made S/D had the least interest in the Death of Superman storyline.

The Phantom Stranger explained to Superman and Lois that it was a unique string of circumstances that brought Supes back. It's unlikely (in the Byrne/Jurgens continuity) that it could happen again.

I picked this up this weekend and watched it. As much as I would have loved for it to be exactly like the comics, I liked it. After seeing this I wonder how much New Frontier and Judas Contract will be changed.

If they're going to attempt this stuff, they should do it in mini-series formats, 'cuz that's just crap.

yeah, i think the story would have more impact if they didn't rush the death, the mourning, and the tension of a fake superman.

Or at least not try to cram it in a 70 min running time. What would be wrong with a two-hour animated movie?

Saw this last night. Not horrible, but not very good either. I think it's a good for non-fans because other than the things like the Fleisher bullet car and robot in the Fortress, there wasn't too much else there for the fans. Anne Heche was fucking horrible. I swear, it felt more like a Godzilla movie because her voice was so detached. And Luthor was terrible as well. This was especially noticeable by how well the professional voice-over talent did around them. John 'Bender' DiMaggio was a good Toymaster, and I even enjoyed that bit. There were some good things here. They were just ill-defined and executed. Had they taken more than 70 minutes and gotten real voice actors for the main roles, this could have been a terrific debut for this line of direct-to-video movies.

SPOILERS...












I have only watched the first like, thirteen minutes. They were all bad.

Man...

You're the only person(othen than myself) I know who liked this book! After seeing the footage at Wizard World, I have high hopes but then I thought the Superman footage looked good!






Agreed!

I loved Reign of the Supermen but I felt Death of and Funeral to be underwhelming.

SHIT!

I was really looking forward to this! I felt quite optimistic......, until the master spoke.

I you!

I've read NF several times. I think it's my favorite book of the decade. Doc also enjoyed it, and we got Pro to read it also and he dug the hell out of it as well. Piggie also is a big fan of it. all I can remember off the top of my head.

I loves you too!


Sha la la la...

That's good to hear that other people on here like NF!

I was wetting myself in anticiation when I saw the clips of NF, only to learn that my cohorts - Franta, Rufie, LLance didn't like it and Ailver Armadillo thought it was average at best!

Yeah, I was looking forward to it too... Now I'm looking forward to being old enough to forget all about it.

I thought the Doomsday fight was ok, but they had major flaws. The main one being that Superman got Doomsday into space, instead of pushing him into space and letting him drift, Superman returned him to Earth. In the comics he tried to carry Doomsday into space to get rid of him, but Doomsday kicked himself free and the fight continued on the ground.

The mourning was way too short. It was 5 maybe 10 minutes max. Not enough time to really feel his passing.

Finally, and this is the biggest flaw, the fake Superman was crap. Having the Cyborg and Eradicator as potential Superman added mystery to it. Either could be Superman. This clone was just presumed to be Superman right off the bat and they didn't have any mystery as to who or what he was.

ok, I originally put this post in the DVD thread, since I had just seen Superman/Doomsday this week. Here:

I saw it this week and I can understand why people think its sucks. Because it does. First, the superficial: The animation was crap and the voices were awful! Everyone looked like an emaciated version of their JLU/animated Superman version of themselves. And what the fuck was up with the lines on Supes' face? Were they trying to show that he has cheek bones or something? Because it didn't work at all - everytime he was on screen I was mentally trying to erase those lines - they were ugly and distracting. As for the voices - I love James Marsters, but as Luthor his voice just didn't work. When you think of how majestic and commanding Clancy Brown's voice was...well, anything less is going to pale. Anne Heche - I loathe her, but that aside, her voice had a high pitched, squeakiness to it that ruined Lois for me - I kept thinking about how awful she sounded. Adam Baldwin's voice was just ok as Supes.

I don't even know where to begin with the story. I am not a Superman fan by any stretch of the imagination, and even I realized that this wasn't close to the original storyline. I get that in 72 minutes there was only so much they could have included, so the absence of things like the 4 supermen wasn't a suprise, but still... things like Lois sleeping with Superman, but not knowing that he was Clark?!?! WTF?! And Luthor being behind Doomsday? Is that what really happened? (I don't know, I don't read Supes) I seem to recall hearing a different version... The only thing that made some sense - and only because I am an on/off reader of Teen Titans - is that Luthor does some sort of cloning - Superboy DNA was a 50/50 split between Luthor and Supes, so I assume that maybe that the cloning did happen in the comics...

Superman/Doomsday just reinforces the fact that the quality of the current animated shows (I don't include the Fleisher Superman stuff, as that was in a class by itself) has plummeted at a stupifying rate since the B:TAS/JLU/Late '90's Superman animation ended. I realize that the bar was set incredibly high by these shows, but one look at The Batman and all the animated superhero shows confirms this fact - its almost like, "why did they even bother?"

Luthor had nothing to do with the Supermen other than trying to hire Steel and Superboy. The cloning stuff came with Johns in Teen Titans. There was a Kryptonian AI that stole Superman's body and used it as a power source for his cloned body (the Visor Superman). The Cyborg Superman was another AI in a body using kryptonian DNA to simulate Superman's partial form.
A good and complex story, they could've simplified it by having the Cyborg be Lex's flawed clone and Superboy being an escaped under developed clone. They had the Fortress robot and could've had it take the Eradicator's place by creating a new Kryptonian body and then getting all weird about his duty, while Steel takes the role of the everyman. Then eliminate Coast City and Mongul and just have the Supermen feud in Metropolis over who has the right to the name. Or something, anything, that looked like they were trying to follow the source material in some way. I'm not too anal about such things most of the time. If they want to make a Superman show than I'm cool with them doing their own thing, but they were specifically adapting a storyline, and that comes with an obligation to actually adapt the storyline.


true. and what gets me is that this was done by Bruce Timm. This isn't like Brainiac Attacks where the hack behind The Batman used DCAU styles, this is Bruce Timm's work. It boggles the mind that only a year ago he was producing the amazingly complex and intelligent JLU and had about a 15 year track record of high quality going back to Batman he would produce such crap.

Brainiac Attacks failed in every way possible.

yeah, it was actually worse to have dana delaney and tim daly back in the roles. it cheapened my memories of the animated series.

JLA and JLU.. and BTAS were and continue to be awesome

Glad we still have all those terrific episodes

They make up for crap before and after

Would great to see some cool new stuff though

Legion is awesome, but not in the same class as JLA- JLU and BTAS

Pro, and I say this with a certain amount of respect, you are perhaps the only man in America who would write a paragraph containing the concepts of "wife out of town," "guy time," "what the hell" and "'on demand'" and then end it with the watching of a cartoon.

LMFAO!!!

Eh, what can I say? I vented all of my "wild" out in my twenties. I live like a fifty-year-old geek trapped in a thirty-five-year-old geek's body...

Besides, it was a combination of Guiness, Vicodin, and the newly cool Fall breeze blowing through the house. I needed something warm and fuzzy. You're lucky I didn't break into a Pina Colada, or something.

Exactly what I was thinking. Six months in a now physical relationship and she doesn't know that Superman writes novels in his spare time and grew up on a farm? I can see this in Friends or Melrose Place, but he's Superman, the big blue boy scout. Martha should have said "That's not the boy I raised." ten minutes into the movie.

I'd have liked the Doomsday battle more if I saw it through fresh eyes, but I have already read Death of Superman in comics, beaten the SNES game, sold the trading card set on eBay, and read the Roger Stern novel.

The soundtrack was good though.

Anyone get a copy of the San Diego Comic Con Update # 3 Wednesday from their comics shop?
(if not, click the link)

In it, there was a big feature on DC: The New Frontier and several articles on DC's direct to Video offerings.

On page 6 (page 8 on the PDF)is an interview with Gregory Noveck: DC's VP of Creative Affairs.



Which is one of the things I've been arguing. The almost disingenuous way DC marketed this turkey. This was A story about Superman and Doomsday. This was NOT the Death of Superman story nor even a good story in any sense.

The rest of the New Frontier stuff is quite good though and an encouraging read. If anyone else wants to paste it up in the New Frontier thread, be my guest.

When is New Frontier scheduled to come out?

It's set to premiere at Wonder Con in San Francisco on Feb 22-24. The DVD goes on sale after that during the "1st quarter 2008".

If Superman/Doomsday is any indication though, it should go on sale roughly 2 months after the convention. So I'm guessing it'll be on sale some time in April.