Taylor Ramsey

Very good article.
The issue is really twofold. That all humor is contextual and that the people adapting a show from country A to country B rarely seem to be interested in what made it popular and successful in country A, they just see the potential for revenue generated and give it a try.

One of the worst US adaptations was Being Human. A mostly strong genre show in the UK with an amazing cast and clever writing, translated in the US into something that was nothing more than pretty people doing ugly things.

I am SO looking forward to the Marvel reprints and the completion of the story!
I cut my teeth on the Marvel Family reading Captain Marvel jr when I acquired some of the original comics in the 80s. Love that Mac Raboy art!

Nice list. I loved Power of Hope and Monster Society, but the rebooted version has mostly left me cold. I don’t hate it, but I see very little potential to build on.
I have always had a soft spot for the Big Red Cheese, and without him (or rather his sudden disappearance from comics), my favorite character Marvelman/Miracleman would not exist.

The old model is dead, true. Another issue is the cost involved in quality, and the potential risk. Quality is much easier than the networks want to admit, it just costs a great deal more to produce a good show than a middle of the road show.
The risk is in spending that money an a show not finding its audience, but the new business model takes into account the streaming an longer term life of a show on line that the networks, still stuck in their old model simply don’t yet believe in.

Looks like I am the only person who thinks Hemsworth and Portman, while both good in their roles, have almost no romantic chemistry.
It was nice to see Portman be given more of substance to do here, instead of spend the whole film looking amazed.

The best way I have heard to describe this is that the film lacked joy.
Particularly when you compare it to the Reeve ones, this is very tre.

The biggest problem of writing Superman has always been that writers tend to ignore the elephant in the room: the fact that in a real world setting, which is what MOS and SR tried to use, isthat Superman is a terrifying concept.
Writers like Grant Morrison, Mark Waid and JMS have tried and at least partially succeeded, but Superman is inherently hard to believe without accepting some of the very scary potential of the character.
MOS only hinted at it with the amazing level of destruction and countless unseen dead, but you never feel what anyone (other than maybe Zod) is really going through.
That coupled with the fact that Superman IS so very human never seems to work. It is an either/or proposition for most writers. What makes him more than simply a Nietzsche-esque Overman nightmare is that very Human part of him that holds him in check, and most stories in film and print today seem to about either that or the ‘punchy powers’ aspect.
Chris Reeve made the combo work entirely based on an astoundingly subtle performance, Brandon Routh got close and Cavill is not out of the running yet to my mind. But in failing to get the character’s essential formula right, the films and books are loosing the fans every day.
It is so much more then the basic origin story…