Smallville (Page 2 of 2)

Smallville is a show I'd like to revisit, but it was such a mixed bag.

I have been wondering what would've happened if Smallville had been the Arrowverse.  What if we'd had:

The Flash (2005) - starring Kyle Gallner
Aquaman (2006) - starring Alan Ritchson
Cyborg (2006) - starring Lee Thompson Young
Green Arrow and the Justice League (2008) - Starring Justin Hartley, Alaina Huffman, and Phil Morris
The Chloe Chronicles (2008) - Starring Allison Mack and Kristen Kreuk

Could've been interesting (I know a lot of these actors had dark things happen to them, but I'm hoping this world would've been kinder to them / they were kinder to others).

https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/smallville … inal-cast/

A SMALLVILLE animated series? ... I don't know. There are challenges.

The thing about SMALLVILLE is that it was mostly about having very specific actors onscreen and it lasted 10 seasons because people liked the actors. Their physicality. Their rapport. Tom Welling's performance as Clark is based in his huge body mass and his incredibly gentle screen presence. Michael Rosenbaum's appeal as Lex is through his ability to make really lengthy monologues about THE ART OF WAR seem like he's coming up with them off the top of his head.

Animation and dialogue recording on the DC Animated Films budgets is never going to pull that off, unfortunately. The voice performances in those projects always make it obvious that the actors are recording in isolation and create the weird sense that the conversations are stitched together from the actors' voicemails. The animation is also incredibly stiff with very little performance or body language in the movements.

Japanese animation often has limited animation with an emphasis on hyperdramatic composition because their budgets don't allow fluidity. Western animation often rejects that approach but also can't afford for fluidity; there's the sense of seeing action figures in their posed stiffness being marched on and offscreen. To capture what made SMALLVILLE work (as much as it ever worked), you'd need Don Bluth style animation with live actors performing all the scenes and animators adding the actors' body language to the drawings. But it's super expensive and this sort of budget actually killed the FOX Animation division.

The SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN series used very simple character designs for fluid animation. But SMALLVILLE needs the likenesses.

A CG animated series might address this problem, however; the Nickelodeon NINJA TURTLES series has a delightful sense of characterization in all their character models and movements for each Turtle and the human characters. However, there is often the sense that these aren't living beings as much as highly expressive children's toys; they would be a (loving and artful) caricature of Welling and Rosenbaum if that style were used on a SMALLVILLE animated show.

I was a big fan of the SMALLVILLE Season 11 comic books, but I have to say, there was a point towards the last 1/3 or so of the run where it stopped working. The problem: the comics stopped using the likenesses of the actors. Originally, there was a lot of effort to showing Tom Welling and Erica Durance's faces as Clark and Lois with Michael Rosenbaum as Lex. However, due to sales not being terrific, the budget and schedule for the comics got lower. Newer artists were brought in to finish the run.

The newer artists were very good, but they were made to work faster and didn't do the careful photo referencing to maintain the likenesses. Tom Welling's wide face, full lips and lengthy hair were lost; he just had the usual DC Comics Superman face with the square-jaw and short-hair. Erica Durance's distinct nose and cheeks were flattened into her being generically female. Justin Hartley's spikey hair and sculpted cheeks became a bland rectangle with a mop of blond hair; Allison Mack's face lost all definition beyond being a blonde girl -- it wasn't the SMALLVILLE actors any longer.

The writing was strong from start to finish. But visually, SMALLVILLE's comic book run concluded in a disappointing yet oddly appropriate fashion: it looked like pretty much any other Superman comic book by the end. I'd hope that a SMALLVILLE cartoon could avoid that.

Couple things.  Firstly, an animated series is only as good as its production team.  If they get one of the typical ones, it will be fine.  Rosie is a voice acting pro by now, and he knows everybody including famed voice director Andrea Romano.  I'd definitely watch. 

Allison got 3 years in prison, though obviously she'll likely only have to serve half of that or whatever.  She was clearly mentally/emotionally broken in various ways, and was manipulated by Raniere.

Ha ha, look I'm not trivializing what she's done; however, when one is in a runaway cult, crazy crap goes down.  It's a Lord of the Flies mentality.  Look at January 6th!

As for me, hey I was happy at the time to be at a play of John Glover's, and she randomly was there too.  I'd follow John right into the apocalypse!  He beat those Gremlins once, and as for the walking dead....

I was listening to Michael Rosenbaum's latest podcast, INSIDE OF YOU. Rosenbaum got COVID-19. He was fully vaccinated. He didn't realize he had COVID-19; he was recovering from back surgery, experiencing exhaustion and thought he was just tired, but when his tiredness got worse and worse, he got tested and tested positive. He stayed home for two weeks and made a full recovery. He didn't need to be hospitalized; he never needed a ventilator; the vaccine enabled him to build the antibodies needed to fight off COVID-19 and all he had to do was rest and take extra vitamins.

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I'm not sure if I can wholeheartedly recommend spending about $90 on buying all the SMALLVILLE comics. They start out really, really well, but as I explained, with all the art shifts and reduced budgets, the artists were no longer able to maintain the likenesses of the actors for all the characters, so by the last third or so of the SMALLVILLE comics, they stop looking like a SMALLVILLE comic book series. They just look like any other SUPERMAN comic, sadly.

However, Tess is revealed to be alive after her death in "Finale," so that's nice. I remember after "Finale" aired, I was appalled by Tess' death and pointed out that Tess had died like three times already and surely this fourth death would be undone as well in a future season of SMALLVILLE. Other fans pointed out that there wouldn't be any future seasons of SMALLVILLE, but I petulantly insisted that Tess would be back and I was mildly astonished to be proven right because I wasn't actually being serious.

Serinda Swan, who played Zatanna on SMALLVILLE, was one of the worst actresses I'd ever seen, performing a stilted, overposed character who seemed more like a shop window dummy than a human being. I could always see Swan thinking how to best frame her body for the camera instead of behaving like a person.

I recently saw Swan in the new series CORONER where she plays a medical examiner who has experienced some severely traumatic events. Swan's performance is riveting and sincere; she plays a panic attack with such gnawing agony. Her acting is incredible and because she's cut her hair short and is dressing like an adult professional instead of a comic book cosplayer, she's almost unrecognizable.

My actress friend tells me that a lot of what I describe of Swan's acting is something male directors often ask female performers to do and it's possible that Serinda Swan was always an amazing actress but getting terrible direction until now with CORONER.

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Finally got around to watching a few episodes of Kristin Kreuk playing a police detective in BEAUTY IN THE BEAST and oh my goodness, Kreuk's ability to sell non-superpowered fight scenes is quite impressive.