Subject: Superboy (1988) Reviews: "Countdown to Nowhere" & "The Jewel of Techacal" (spoilers)
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https://www.patreon.com/posts/superboy-1988-to-40266250
Since I subscribed to DC Universe for the sake of finishing my Flash and
Birds of Prey reviews and watching Stargirl uncut, I also finally got the chance to revisit the 1988-92 syndicated Superboy series (renamed The Adventures of Superboy in season 3, and under that title on DCU) from Alexander and Ilya Salkind -- the producers of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, who somehow ended up with the Superboy TV rights as a separate thing from the Superman movie rights they no longer had at this point. Superboy was the first live-action DC Comics television series since Wonder Woman had
ended in 1979, and the only one for its first two seasons (it was joined by The Flash and Swamp Thing in 1990). I saw the series when it first came out, though I haven't seen any of it for nearly 30 years and remember little from before its fourth season, so I went into this without knowing what to expect.
The show was filmed in Florida, by Disney/MGM Studios in the first season, moving to Universal Studios Florida for the remaining three. Its first season starred John Haymes Newton as Clark Kent/Superboy, Stacy Haiduk (whom I had
an intense crush on back in the day) as his love interest Lana Lang, and Jim Calvert as Clark's roommate T.J. White--not to be confused with The Once and Future King author T.H. White. Rather, he's the son of Clark's future boss Perry White. Perry has had a few sons in the comics, but T.J. is original to the show, a photographer meant as the stand-in for Jimmy Olsen (whom the Salkinds had redefined as a photographer after decades as a cub reporter). Recurring players include Scott Wells as Lex Luthor (replaced in season 2 by the vastly superior Sherman Howard), Michael Manno as Luthor's henchman Leo, West Side Story's George Chakiris as Professor Peterson, and Roger Pretto as police lieutenant Harris. The setting was Shuster University in Shusterville, Florida, with Clark and TJ attending the Siegel School of Journalism--named
in honor of Superman creators Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster, of course.
Ironically, the show began only a couple of years after Crisis on Infinite Earths rebooted the DC continuity and erased Superboy from Clark Kent's backstory. That made it something of a throwback to the Silver and Bronze
Ages of comics. It was also out of continuity with the Salkinds' Superman movies, as their Clark spent the corresponding period of his life getting intensive training from Jor-El's AI ghost (or whatever that was) in the Fortress of Solitude, and did not meet Lex Luthor until adulthood.
(I feel I should clarify the "Ages" of comics if anyone isn't familiar with them. As generally defined, the Golden Age began with Superman's debut in
1938 and gradually trailed off post-WWII as superhero comics faded in popularity. The Silver Age began with the debut of the Barry Allen Flash in 1956 and is characterized by the birth of the modern Marvel Universe under Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and others in the early '60s. The Bronze Age began in 1970 with DC taking a serious turn in reaction against the Batman sitcom, while Kirby moved to DC and a new generation of creators emerged at Marvel. Everything since Crisis in 1985-6 is considered the Modern Age. I've seen a couple of attempts to define a new age beginning around 2000, but there's no consensus.)
Superboy was the first full series scored by Kevin Kiner, who would go on to work on numerous series including contributions to early Stargate SG-1 and Star Trek: Enterprise, but who is probaby best known today for scoring Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels, as well as returning to DC to
score the current Titans and Doom Patrol series in partnership with Clint Mansell. Kiner's score in season 1 of Superboy is in a synth-and-guitar rock style--a novelty for the Super-franchise, but Kiner's Superboy motif is one I've always liked, a pretty good pastiche of the John Williams theme (which was in turn a pastiche of Sammy Timberg's theme to the Fleischer Superman cartoon shorts and Leon Klatzkin's theme to the George Reeves TV series). The music evolves over time along with the rest of the series. Indeed, it
survives beyond the series; Kiner will revive his Superboy theme as the leitmotif for the Conner Kent incarnation of Superboy in Titans.
The head writer for season 1 was Executive Story Consultant Fred Freiberger, better known as the man who produced the uneven third season of Star Trek and the terrible second season of Space: 1999. He had a reputation for ruining shows, and I'm afraid Superboy did nothing to change that. Be forewarned--the early episodes of this show are staggeringly inept. Apparently the producers didn't know if the show would be received well, so they put very little money and effort into it, which is kind of the opposite of what you should do if
you want a show to be received well. The stories are basic, the villains and crises mostly mundane, the budget microscopic, the production values and acting terrible. Despite that, the ratings were good enough that the
producers invested more money in the second half of the season and brought in established Superman comics writer/editor Cary Bates to join Freiberger as executive story consultant, along with fellow comics veterans Mike Carlin & Andrew Helfer, Mark Evanier, and Dennis O'Neil as episode writers. Thanks to them, the show began to take a more authentic direction with more comic-booky plots and villains. In broadcast order, this new approach begins with episode 9, interspersed with remaining episodes from the first half. It'll take a while to get there, though, so bear with me.
COUNTDOWN TO NOWHERE
The first episode filmed, "Countdown to Nowhere," featured Superboy's public debut; yet for some reason, it was aired fifth, with one of the two broadcast versions adding a frame sequence to present it as a flashback. The version on DCU is the straight version with no frame, so I'm covering it at the start where it belongs. The episode is written by Fred Freiberger and directed by Colin Chilvers, director of special effects for the Salkinds' three Superman movies.
The story opens with Lana Lang (who's even more gorgeous than I remembered, allowing for the '80s perm) on a picket line protesting the development of a military laser weapon at the university's science building. They're mostly carrying "No Nukes" signs, yet chanting "No lasers"--which seems
shortsighted, since no doubt many of them own CD players or have cats. Clark covers the story with TJ taking pictures, but the friendly guard won't let anyone in the building. Lana meets a trio of evident football players led by Roscoe (Douglas Barr), who slimily flirts with her but convinces her to help them sneak in and put a protest sign on the laser before its unveiling the next day. Lana goes along, but the men pull guns on her and force the guard
to let them in. Somehow, Clark's super-hearing fails to hear her screams over the protestors' chants, even though he earlier boasted to TJ that his reporter's ear could do essentially that.
The laser weapon is a device worn over the torso with a targeting helmet, and it's uncovered, so it's unclear how Roscoe's alleged "unveiling" scheme was meant to work. They take the laser and gas the guard, with Roscoe abducting Lana as a "bargaining chip" (and implicitly for other reasons, given how he paws her). Clark finally notices something's amiss and rescues the guard by blowing away the gas (though where he blows it to in an unventilated room is unexplained; in most stories he'd inhale the gas, or neutralize it with heat vision, or something). The guard later recalls them saying they had to get to a "big show" within 90 minutes.
In Clark and TJ's newspaper office, Clark asks TJ how far a van could drive
in 90 minutes, then suggests they're probably somewhere in the circumference he's already drawn on a map, so why ask? I think he was scripted to ask first and then draw. Clark then gets a phone call from Martha Kent (later played by Salome Jens, but the voice is uncredited here) and tells her of the crisis, and she asks if he plans to become Superboy, trusting his decision but asking him to be careful. Clearly this is something he's already discussed with Ma and Pa, but not yet carried out. Note that he's decided on his own to use the name Superboy, rather than being given his hero name by the press as in most versions from Superman: The Movie onward. Which seems a bit arrogant.
Clark and TJ draw a blank, but luckily they have the TV tuned to every fictional character's favorite station, the Conveniently Plot-Relevant News Channel, which mentions an impending space shuttle launch at the Cape. Why they didn't think of the launch themselves is unclear, given that shuttle flights had only just started up again in late 1988 after two years of inactivity following the Challenger disaster, so they were hardly a routine, forgettable event.
At an airfield near the cape, Roscoe hijacks a helicopter after a general
uses it to fly in for the launch; he boasts that nobody would try to stop a general's chopper from taking off. Note that his gang intends no harm to the shuttle; they just want the distraction while they fly to an offshore rendezvous to sell the laser weapon.
Clark makes an excuse to split up with TJ and finds a place to change to Superboy unobserved, then takes off and flies to the Cape (as well as in a cape), where he gets spotted on radar. Superboy lands before some soldiers
and official-looking people and stiltedly introduces himself: "I'm called Superboy. I fight for truth, justice, and the American way." Before he can
say anything else, he spots the chopper and flies off, rendering the scene kind of pointless.
When Roscoe sees a flying man in tights closing in and grabbing the chopper skid, he throws Lana out as a distraction. Her screams are incredibly shrill, which I feared I'd have to get used to over the course of the series, though fortunately that wouldn't turn out to be the case. Superboy catches her, of course, then drops her off next to TJ, who takes photos and asks a ton of questions Superboy doesn't answer, since he has to get back to the choppa. There's a decent stunt where the stuntman suspended under the chopper looks like he's pulling it in for a landing. He then changes back to Clark and lets Lana tell him how amazing Superboy was.
It's a decent start, I guess, but very understated as a superhero debut. We get very little discussion of Clark's decision to take this path. Roscoe is
an underwhelming foe, just a thug out for profit. And it's weird to tie Superboy's debut into a shuttle launch and never put the shuttle in any
actual danger. A few years later, Lois & Clark would also use a shuttle
launch in its pilot, but would actually make it integral to the climax. (Both were presumably drawing on John Byrne's The Man of Steel, Superman's post- Crisis origin story, in which he made his public debut rescuing a spaceplane that Lois Lane was aboard.)
The acting, frankly, is terrible. Both Newton and Haiduk give startlingly amateurish performances. Maybe that's because the director had more
experience with visual effects than actors, but it's still surprising how inept they both are. They'll both improve over time, Haiduk especially, but
it will take a while.
THE JEWEL OF TECHACAL
The first episode broadcast was "The Jewel of Techacal," written by Fred Freiberger and directed by Reza S. Badiyi. At the airport, Lana is awaiting the arrival of her archaeologist father (Peter White), who's bringing an exhibit of Mayan artifacts to display at Shuster University (and the dean pronounces "Mayan" like "may an"). Clark and TJ are there too, as is fellow college student Lex Luthor, who hits on a disgusted and impatient Lana--and, wow, Scott Wells is incredibly bad. I remembered very much disliking his version of Lex Luthor, but I thought it was because he was insubstantial and annoying in a Jesse Eisenberg sort of way. Instead, Wells plays Lex as haughty, arrogant, and calculating, a spoiled and toxically entitled rich brat, but he's just really bad at it. (I think I must've been conflating him in my memory with Jim Calvert, or maybe with his very annoying season 2 replacement Ilan Mitchell-Smith.)
Naturally, the landing gear on Professor Lang's plane jams, and Lana overreacts, crying into Clark's shoulder as if her father had already died,
an excuse for creating a touch of suspense by keeping him from changing to Superboy. When he does extricate himself, it takes him about two seconds to pull out the nose gear and save Lana's dad. Lex is oddly disappointed, saying "You can't win 'em all," which makes no sense, since his scheme is to steal and fence the artifacts, so why would he be disappointed that they remain intact?
Somehow almost losing her father doesn't change Lana's bitterness that he never has time for her, seemingly caring more about his digs and relics.
(This is hard to reconcile with "Countdown," where Lana was proud of her father for his activism in the '60s. And both episodes had the same writer!) Clark tries to play peacemaker with little success. He and TJ visit the professor at the exhibit room, introducing themselves (the first in-series mention that TJ is Perry White's son). A freak tornado strikes, with Clark clandestinely saving Lang's assistant from a falling beam, and the assistant is convinced it's the curse attached to a sacred jewel they removed from the temple of Techacal. Lang dismisses this, but soon, after trying but failing
to patch things up with Lana, he's stricken by a heart attack while standing over the jewel.
With Lang near death and Lana distraught, Clark unquestioningly accepts the assistant's curse idea and resolves to return the jewel to its rightful
place, saying he knows how to reach Superboy for help. But Lex and Leo have broken in to steal the artifacts. When Superboy shows up, the writing is weird; Lex refers to him as "the one called Superboy" as if they've never
met, but Superboy talks about Lex pulling another of his usual schemes as if they've done this dance a hundred times. SB takes the lead chest containing the jewel (did the Maya have lead?) and opens it, getting whammied by the purple sparkles of the curse and laid out flat on the ground, with his pose and the camera angle seeming consciously designed to call maximum attention
to his crotch. Let's just say this version of the costume doesn't try as hard as previous ones to flatten out what's under the briefs.
Lana says a tearful farewell to her father on his soon-to-be-deathbed, but Superboy recovers and flies after Lex, for some reason telling him to pull over rather than just grabbing the car. Some chase business ensues, with a police car getting involved, and finally Superboy just lands in front of the car so it swerves off the road, and the show actually puts a random fruit stand there for the car to smash through! The car ends up in a pond and Superboy pulls it out, leaves Lex in the cops' hands, and flies off to return the jewel offscreen. Lang is saved, he and Lana patch things up, and TJ asks Clark how he contacts Superboy. Clark says to look in the Yellow Pages under "S."
Well, it's a mediocre episode to open with, but at least they went for a character-driven story rather than pure action. As before, I'm surprised at how weak the actors are, especially Scott Wells. John Haymes Newton isn't as bad as before, though. One thing Newton does pretty well is differentiating his Clark and Superboy voices. It's not as effective as how Bud Collyer did
it on radio, but he manages to give Superboy a deeper voice than Clark, which is surprisingly unusual for live-action performers of the role.
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