You want Lex to turn evil because he lost his hair? That’s supposed to be an understandable reason for becoming the nemesis of the world’s greatest hero?
That’s comic book storyline for third graders. Not the WB’s teen audience (and the guilty pleasure older audience).
The Superboy comic was just basically Superman as boy. Same costume, same powers, same ‘hide the identity’ issues. There were no real ‘formation’ events in Superboy.
Peace.
I’m doing this from memory, so I assume someone with more facts at hand will correct me.
The Superboy of the 50’s and 60’s was just Superman but younger.
After the Crisis series, in the mid 70s (IIRC), they revamped the whole story. Jor-El and Lara changed their looks (Jor-El dropped the cheesy green outfit with yellow sun emblem on the shirt and got a more alien look), for one thing. Jonathan and Martha Kent were still alive when Clark was in Metropolis for another. And Superman’s powers now came almost entirely from exposure to the yellow sun (prior, his muscle powers were mostly from earth’s lower gravity and his expanded sense were from the yellow sun.) Thus, his powers developed only gradually over time, so that there was no “Superboy” … Superman emerged somewhere during or just after college years.
The SUPERMAN movie (1978ish?) with Christopher Reeve made some minor changes in this, like giving Jor-El the “S” emblem on his robes, bumping off Jonathan but not Martha when Clark was a teen, and having Jor-El continue to be a direct influence via that little green ice thingie.
The concept of Superman being torn between his earth identity of Clark and his Kryptonian identity of Kal-El came into play after Crisis. There may have been some hints of it in the earlier versions, but they were pretty mild – Krypton was just like Earth except “more advanced”. Crisis set up Krypton as culturally different, and the movie set up the polarity (Jor-El arguing that Kal-El shouldn’t interfere in human destiny and Jonathan arguing that Clark should be helping people.)
The comics actually toyed with a triple conflict: Kal-El the Kryptonian, Clark who just wants to live a normal life, and Superman the Savior.
Hence, the current SMALLVILLE series is certainly a departure from the 50’s and 60’s comics. It adapts the post-Crisis version somewhat, by having Clark’s powers developing – the muscle powers are there, but the sense are sort of developing(IIRC, in season one, he first gets x-ray vision… and he still can’t fly, etc.)
The notion of Jor-El urging Kal-El to be Kryptonian is consistent with the movie, I suppose, but Jor-El arguing that Kal-El become World Dictator or something is just… wrong. The whole set up is that Jor-El sacrificed himself (he could have gone in the rocket) to save his son, and that seems completely inconsistent with Jor-El the Power-Mad Dominator. Hence, the speculation that this isn’t really Jor-El… I personally think that’s wishful fantasy. I think the SMALLVILLE writers just decided to take things in the direction of Psycho-Jor-El.
I have a theory. I call it my “Longer Life Than Expected Storyline Rewrite” theory.
It goes like this:
Develop a new series (comic book, whatever).
Draft a plotline for one year, or two if your cocky. Mostly these things fail. No one plans for three or more years while working on the first episode. (Unless you’re the Babylon 5 creator, and even then, that story arc was all over the map.)
Get caught by surprise. The series is going longer than you think. What sort of surprises can you create to keep things fresh?
Take an established plot point that was never fully developed, and turn it into something that wasn’t what it seemed.
And so, in this case, Jor-El was originally testing Clark to see if Clark would go power mad. But that has played itself out. So, the writers have now thought up some other force playing the part of Jor-El, making it seem like it wasn’t a test, but Jor-El pushing for Clark to go all Mussolini on the world, but in fact, it’s no longer Jor-El.
Peace.
Oh, he’s been physically able to fly in Smallville ever since the first episode. (I think it was the first one–where he woke floating over his bed.) He just doesn’t know how to do it conciously. Of course, that plays into the producers’ wishes of “no tights, no flights” for the series. He runs so quickly in the show that I can’t see where flying would be so bad.
Count me in as a second person who was glad to see Chloe leave. While attractive, she was just too much of a laziness focal point for the writers. Too often we found her magically calling up information on her school computer (first Macs, and then Alienwares), and the crutch they developed relying on her “journalistic talents” grew more unweildy with nearly every episode. With Willow in Buffy, the computer-ish “I can find anything!” worked because Buffy was intentionally campy; the creators of Smallville said from the beginning that they were trying to avoid camp. Unfortunately, that’s what it’s been: camp without embracing the camp.
But I feel they needed a cast change. I think they should have kept Pete around (and developed him), made Lana more interesting, ditched the whole magical “prophecy/Indian” thing, offed Luthor Sr., given Martha more to do (she wouldn’t get paid if she didn’t say “Oh, Clark!” or “Oh, Jonathan!” at least once per episode), destroyed the hospital (bonus: this week’s episode didn’t have one scene in the hospital) and, despite that I think they should have never brought Lois into this, made her naked as much as possible.
Because nudity is its own super power.
I didn’t particularly like Lois last week, but she grew on me. I hope she doesn’t hang around too long though for continuity and all. Whatever.
That T1000 guy is totally a Static Shock villian named Shiv, then again Shiv is just T1000 so again, whatever.
Your timeline is a little off. The movie was first. Crisis and the John Byrne reboot that got rid of Superboy and kept Jonathan and Martha alive was in 1986. I think it is one of the few good jobs that Byrne has done on his remakes of origins. He is certainly mangling the Doom Patrol right now.