Sports

I've stayed away from sports related supermen lately, but this one is interesting. It's about a football player who was injured in a car crash. Corey Wilson now gets around in a wheelchair.

[H]e has a large Superman symbol tattooed on his chest. He said it's mostly about the concept of overcoming any obstacle as opposed to Clark Kent's alter-ego.
Wilson's girlfriend, Pamela Telliz, suggested the idea of rubber bracelets for the players, fittingly in Superman blue.
"I really feel like he has a little bit of Superman in him to go through what he's gone through and still have high spirits," Clayton said.

The two bits I find curious are the way Superman is referred to as "Clark Kent's alter-ego" for no reason and that Wilson has a little bit of Superman in him.

Obama

I've posted plenty of pictures of Obama as Superman on this site, but this is the first time I've encountered Obama as the Joker. Interesting.

Smallville

The show Smallville is soon to begin its ninth season. I watched it long ago (I suppose I'm supposed to refer to the seasons I watched, but I don't remember which ones they were), but stopped because the show went from mildly amusing to uninteresting. Since then, I've checked it out on occasion, and always found it not to my tastes. Still, it's got quite a following nowadays.

When I was in Metropolis for the Superman Celebration, I saw a line forming outside a building. Not knowing what it was all about, I just joined it. It was a good move on my part, because the guy who stood in front of me wanted to chat. He started telling me about how he had just come to town from Cincinatti for the morning so he could get tickets for the autographing lines for his grandchildren, whom he would pick up that evening and bring back the next day. They were all fans of Smallville--they didn't care for the recent movie, didn't read the comics, etc. But they watched the show together. And this guy, Terry was his name, liked to find out all about the show and the actors on the Internets.

He'd told me also that he'd been a big fan of Superman until about the age of 5, when he discovered baseball. He's a Reds fan, of course.

So he went on, revealing that the producers of the show were allowing the lead actor, Tom Welling, to determine whether or not Superman would fly in the show. It hadn't occurred to me that they'd gone eight years without letting Superman fly.

Kevin Smith, writer and director of Clerks and Mallrats, was once employed to write a Superman film. This never came to fruition, but he tells an interesting story about it. Evidently, the produceer of that never-made film wanted this particular incarnation of Superman not to fly and not to wear a cape. Smith points out that these are perhaps the two most important aspects of the character ("The suit and flying defines Superman" in Smith's words).

In conversation with a friend round about fourth of July, this same story came up. Mike Minter (sometimes called Ian) pointed out that the producers of this show Smallville had done the very thing the producer does in Kevin Smith's story: they take away the cape and the flying (that part's about 8 minutes into the video). Interesting to see that it's in part the actor's choice.

Also, evidently in the newest season of Smallville, there will be some sort of suit: "Clark's new look is black with a silver logo and a black cape trenchcoat. But it does sport the Superman logo (in silver)."

I have no idea what to make of all of this. Except key to the suit are the colors. Red, yellow, blue. In Steven Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen's "It's a Bird," the writer devotes several pages to the importance of the colors. Primary colors. It's vital to the character.

That, and Superman ice cream is red, yellow, and blue. You can't go against the ice cream.