I’d wager that most of you visiting don’t remember the first live-action Spider-Man
on screen.
Clearly, based on the image above, I don’t mean Tobey Maguire. Or Nicholas Hammond, who starred as Peter Parker over 12 episodes of The Amazing Spider-Man on CBS starting in 1978, spun out of a TV movie the year before — or even the stuntman inside the costume for most of that show, Fred Waugh. Or, for that matter, Shinji Tōdō; he led Toei's スパイダーマン [Supaidāman], a very loose adaptation of the Marvel character, which aired in Japan during roughly the same span as its American counterpart.
No, I’m talking about Danny Seagren.
Mere weeks after rewatching 1941’s The Adventures of Captain Marvel as part
of the personal film festival I’d assembled for my 50th birthday, which I’ve neglected to dig into here for literal ages now, I was surprised and delighted to see its Billy Batson pop up on a 1974 episode of Shazam!
The CBS show was a staple of Saturday mornings during my childhood, as I noted in April of this year (and long before that). I’m hoping to write about the Republic serial at greater length the near future, but I first checked it out in high school — on a set of VHS tapes from West Coast Video — having read praise for it in Comics Buyer’s Guide; on both viewings, it lived up to its reputation as one of the finest of its kind. Even if Frank Coghlan Jr.’s Billy and Tom Tyler’s Captain Marvel don’t perfectly mirror their comic-book inspiration any more than do their Filmation counterparts — the serial gives us sparks and smoke in place of magic lightning, although it does have the ancient wizard himself rather than six Immortal Elders — we get some genuinely thrilling superheroics for the era.
I’ve mentioned before on the blog — 15 years ago, granted — how much I loved Shazam!, Filmation’s live-action series based on the original Captain Marvel that aired Saturday mornings on CBS in the mid ’70s.
Not very long ago it was incorporated into a dream of mine. An immortal Elder from the show appeared to me but (a) he looked more like Batman foe Maxie Zeus as drawn by the great Don Newton than Zeus himself or any of the other legendary figures making up the acronym that is Billy Batson’s magic word — yet still in the style used to illustrate those figures in the ethereal vision sequences in which they appeared, unmoving — and (2) he freaked me out by lifting his arms up instead of remaining static. I think he was giving me a mission that had something to do with cats.
Unlike most dreams, I could trace the components of this one quite clearly to stuff
from my waking life. It came as Matt Re’s look at the stretch of Batman and Detective Comics written by Gerry Conway, which ran throughout 2024 on his blog Not a Hoax! Not a Dream!, was drawing to a close; a fair number of those stories were penciled by Newton. And more germanely to the post I’m writing now, I’d begun playing the intro to Shazam! in an act of self-soothing on an almost daily basis to center myself before getting down to this or that task amidst my latest health crises and the general insanity of life.
I saw Dark Phoenix this summer and, not for the first time, was amazed at how my reaction to a $200 million effects-laden event film with bankable stars reprising popular roles could be “That was it? Eh.”
No spoilers ahead.
A photo of The Flash as he’ll appear in Zack Snyder’s upcoming Justice League has been released. Right away I, well, flashed on the classic cover you can see next to it below.
I quite like how the CW TV incarnation turned out, especially with a white background having replaced the red on his chest insignia, despite the first promo shots featuring him in an extremely awkward position. We have a much clearer head-on look here than we did there, however. My big question, as Snyder and his associates were probably not meaning to homage this delightfully ridiculous old tale, is why and how Barry forged that grungy armor out of candied apples.
Cover of The Flash #133 © 1962 DC Comics. Pencils: Carmine Infantino. Inks:
Murphy Anderson. Letters: Ira Schnapp. Colors, Script: Unknown. [enlarge]
Related: No Small Parts • Kind of Blue • Stars and Gripes
FX will air a marathon of Fargo Season 2 tomorrow starting at 10 a.m. ET/PT.
I can’t recommend it enough. Pretty much everything that TV does well, Fargo does very, very, very well. The cast is phenomenal; the score and soundtrack are just A+; the cinematography is outstanding. Even if the plot and dialogue were nothing special this would probably be captivating television.
But they’re quite special indeed. About half of the season’s scripts are credited to Noah Hawley, the novelist and former Bones story editor who wrote all of Season 1 — and who, given the copious love for the classic 1996 Coen Brothers film on which the series is based, was as bold in doing so as (it turns out) he was justified.
You don’t need to have seen the movie or Season 1 to watch Season 2. Really. I’ve seen and enjoyed the movie but, due to a low tolerance for Billy Bob Thornton, I opted out of Season 1 despite the raves. Hearing the raves for the second season and that it was set before the first, I caught up near the end of its 10-episode run last December, right in time for the finale.
“I’m gonna dip this potato in some crushed Vicodin... and there’s nobody who can
stop me.”
The Martian has more than its share of quotable lines, but that one stands out.
Not having read the book, I don’t know if it comes from Andy Weir’s 2011 novel, Drew Goddard’s screenplay, or even an on-set brainstorm, although Goddard — writer for Angel, Buffy the Vampire, and Lost on TV; co-writer and director of the highly recommended meta horror film The Cabin in the Woods — is a good bet. Matt Damon, as the NASA astronaut stranded on the surface of Mars in the year 2035 after his mission teammates evacuate, delivers it to the camera of his character’s video log perfectly.
Damon is excellent and the stagecraft amazing. Only about 40 minutes from the end
did I find myself realizing that, of course, the exterior Mars scenes weren’t filmed on Mars. The buy-in on verisimilitude for me was that high.
The Martian was directed by Ridley Scott of Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, and Gladiator renown and is now available on DVD.
Screencap © 2015 Twentieth Century Studios.
Related: Luna Ranger • Past of Future Days • Here
Am I Sitting in a Tin Can, Far Above the World
Teddy Sears as Jay Garrick in The Flash Ep. 2.01 “Flash of Two Worlds” © 2015
CW Network. Photo: Cate Cameron. Character TM/® DC Comics.
I didn’t see Tuesday’s Flash episode until after midnight — so it ended up a birthday present. And it was a gift to all the fans who’ve loved DC’s multiverse for decades. I’m honestly not able to put my reaction into words, because it basically involved giving
the astral projection of my 6-year-old self a high-five.
This post is currently down for maintenance.
We got a new trailer for Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice last month to coincide with the sprawling media crush of San Diego’s Comic-Con International.
I’ll admit that the movie looks impressive on its own terms. While Man of Steel had potential as a riff on the superhero genre with a heavy sci-fi bent, however, it was a terribly misguided Superman film. Based on the footage and conversations regarding its sequel, Zack Snyder continues to be at least as far off target in translating DC’s oldest, greatest icons from page to screen as he was in adapting Watchmen a half-dozen years back. (Read my non-spoiler post or my longer review of Man of Steel, and my detailed review of Watchmen, for more.)
Snyder et al. have jumped right to Frank Miller’s Dark Knight — a possible future extrapolating from the comics of the time in which a weathered Batman comes out of retirement and tangles with a godlike Superman whom he views as too powerful and too simplistic in the embrace of justice and the American Way — by setting up that dichotomy in the characters’ first meeting absent the weight of their history together. Huh?
Here’s our first look at Melissa Benoist in costume for CBS’s upcoming Supergirl.
Photos: Bonnie Osborne / Warner Bros. Entertainment © 2015.
A friend was decrying the dark blue on Facebook and he’s not alone there. I don’t
mind it myself. Bruce Timm & Co. opted to go in that direction for the WB Superman animated series in 1996, harkening back to the earliest depictions in the comics as well as the 1940s Fleischer cartoon shorts, and I think darker colors in general tend to work better in live-action portrayals. The Flash has done all right with a mostly lighter superhero — in tone — wearing a darker red than we get on the page. (Of course, Man of Steel went dark too…)
The CW’s Flash/Arrow crossover last week was loads of fun.
Still from The Flash 1.08 “Flash vs. Arrow” © 2014 CW. Photo: Diyah Perra.
I’d like to get to full-on reviews of both shows this season, but my inner 6-year-old demands that my adult self acknowledge this super-cool undertaking now. Just seeing
a green arrow slice through The Flash’s usual title sequence on Tuesday night and a lightning bolt flash through Arrow’s on Wednesday put a big, goofy grin on my face.
Groot might have been the breakout star of this past summer. I suppose to a broader extent he’s one half of it — er, them — as part of a tandem with his pal Rocket. Or perhaps the honor goes to the entire headlining quintet of Guardians of the Galaxy.
Cover of Tales to Astonish #13 [digital] © 1960 and Groot TM Marvel
Comics. Pencils: Jack Kirby. Inks: Steve Ditko. Colors: Stan
Goldberg. Letters: Artie Simek. Script: Stan Lee.
My reviews of Fox’s Gotham and The CW’s newly expanding Arrow/Flash
universe would be up by now had I not started tinkering with images to accompany them. Which is how these happened.
Superman
Inset: Detail of cover to Action Comics #1 © 1938 DC Comics.
Photo: Still from Superman Returns © 2006 Warner Bros. Entertainment.
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I’ve been trying for a while to finish a big piece on the recent flood of comics
being adapted for television and film. One problem has been that I keep writing too much about a specific movie or show and then spinning that material off into its own review. The silver lining is that the flood is only picking up pace — so even as I constantly kick the metaphorical can down the road there’ll be no shortage of hooks
to keep the subject current.
As I think I’ve said here before, I prefer to have a nice buffer between reading books
and watching the movies on which they’re based — with the book, ideally, coming first.
The film adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is scheduled to open in early October, so I’m glad to have finished the novel last week. I don’t want to spoil even a bit of it for those who haven’t, but I will say that it’s both a page-turner of a mystery and a surprisingly dark, incisive look at domestic partnership.
While I’m not sure whether the film attempts to evoke the book’s structure, I suspect
by dint of that alone they’ll be different enough works that you could pick up the book in the next few weeks and have the movie feel like its own thing when it rolls out. I’m still chewing on the controversial ending; I recommend the book, though, and hope to read Flynn’s previous novels sometime.
Related: A Great Escape • Grit Expectations • Forest Gumption
Man of Steel was released on home video a couple of weeks ago, which makes this
as good a time as any to finally post my full-on spoiler thoughts on the film.
This post is currently down for maintenance but I’ll point you to the roundtable discussion at Forces of Geek in which I participated and from which it draws.
I saw the latest Marvel flick this weekend and got into a new version of an old
debate: Thor vs. Superman.
Superhero films during the first three decades of my life were essentially limited
to Superman and then to Batman. A Thor movie, let alone more than one, was all but unthinkable. In my 30s it was pretty much just the Marvel stable and Batman’s resurgence, as Fox launched its X-Men dynasty, Columbia teed up a Spider-Man franchise, and even lesser Marvel-inspired films put DC, sister company to and/or division of Warner years before Marvel was purchased by Disney, in quite the awkward position regarding the dichotomy between its library of legendary characters and lack of live-action achievement.
