The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

I just watched this and enjoyed it. Very nerd-rage.

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Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

Is there an unwritten code that Hollywood directors need to name their son Max? (Brooks, Spielberg, Landis)

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

Ugh! I could only make it through 2 minutes before I quit.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

It wasn't Action Comics vol. 2 #75, it was SUPERMAN vol. 2 #75!!! [/nerdrant]

That really wasn't worth watching. :shrug:

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

It was great, plus Simon Pegg's in it, so it elevates it in quality.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

If this could have been compressed into five or six minutes it would have been EPIC!

Meandering at over sixteen minutes long this ridiculous mess makes me question my plans to go see Chronicle tomorrow.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

Good idea I guess, and could have been funny with some re-writing, condensing, and re-casting. But as is, it was the worst 16 minutes of my decade so far.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

It's a blatant ripoff of Drunk History but unfortunately it isn't nearly as funny.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

I took things away from it:

1) Max Landis talks exactly like his dad but is even less accurate with his facts
2) Max Landis knows a lot of cute girls.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

Personally, I enjoyed this. It made me laugh. But then, I don't watch a lot of Internet video content so I'm more easily satisfied, I suppose. I did catch some factual errors, of course, but one thing I liked was that even though this was all predicated on geek knowledge, it was presented in a very accessible way that I could show to people who hadn't read or cared about this and they could still follow along and enjoy it. Geek humor often goes too far down the rabbit hole for that level of accessibility.

One personal complaint: I have spent almost twenty years mocking the fact that Superman came back from the dead by having his solar battery recharged like an old calculator. I was disappointed this was not made clear.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

I don't watch a ton of youtube videos either, but would someone with no interest in Superman or the Death of Superman really sit through that? Somehow I don't think so.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

I'm not saying they would actively go looking for it, but if I showed it to several of the people I know who had a passing interest in Superman but weren't comic readers, they could follow along and be entertained by it.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

It's very disingenuous that DC still insists that they were surprised by the media attention and that people actually believed he would stay dead. "People come back all the time in comics!"

Except that Robin didn't come back up to that point. And that was the first time in comics that they included a black arm band so readers could mourn.

I would have been okay with the deception if it had atleast given us a great story. The actual lead up to Superman's death was like a dumb, decompressed version of the Miracleman/Kid Miracleman fight.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

There were people that really believed Superman would stay dead? I'm assuming you mean people who didn't follow comics up to that point, but even then how many of them bought it to read the story as opposed to saving it hoping to use it for their kid's college fund?

And the writing was really par for the course in that day and age of comics. Batman got his back broken by a character basically introduced for that story too. Hal went crazy because a Superman villain destroyed his hometown. There was really no progression towards these events, no groundwork carefully laid, it was an event. I'll admit that in each of these cases, the aftermath was handled pretty well, though.

The Robin that died was not the original Robin, and hey, was unpopular enough that the readers voted to off him.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

I was a kid back then, reading comics and I actually thought Superman was going to stay dead. Though, once I saw the next issue come out (Funeral For a Friend) I realized it something was up.

Those big events weren't very good stories. Knightfall was pretty bad. So was A Death In The Family.

Supposedly DC had a machine dial the KILL ROBIN number. I wouldn't doubt it because they wanted the media coverage of Robin dying.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

The reason DC did the whole Death/Funeral/Reign/Return stuff was because they were deliberately delaying the wedding. They wanted the wedding in comics to happen simultaneously with a wedding episode on the Lois and Clark TV series. Of course that ultimately didn't work out since Lois and Clark was canceled before it got that far, but that was the reason.

I wouldn't call A Death in the Family an event. It was a 4-issue story. Its a misconception that Jason Todd was massively unpopular. The final voting was actually nearly 50-50. There were a little over 10,000 total votes and the "kill him" votes only won by less than 100 votes. Actually Denny O'Neil has said in interviews that they later discovered that someone had rigged his computer to dial in over 200 votes to kill Jason. So it was actually a computer hacker that killed Jason because if he had not done that the votes to not kill him would have won.

Personally, I believe Jason was a victim of bad writing mostly. Pre-Crisis Jason was nothing really special. He was almost a carbon copy of Dick with nearly the same origin as a circus acrobat. He was a redhead but then dyed his hair black precisely so he would look like Dick. Post-Crisis Jason was heavily retconned with a street urchin origin and was naturally black-haired. It was a much better origin, but it still suffered from bad writing. Frank Miller wrote the epic Year One in Batman #404-407. Then they reintroduced Jason with his new origin in #408-411 with a different writer and it was very poor writing. It was basically a return to the Silver Age goofiness, which was a very stark contrast compared to Year One. When Bruce took in Jason, he enrolled Jason in Ma Gunn's School For Boys, and it ultimately turned out Ma Gunn was teaching the boys to be criminals. She was basically an evil Aunt May. Then Two-Face comes in with his Silver Age goofiness such as when Batman and Robin are chasing him across a baseball field, he actually takes the time to slide into second base while saying "I stole second." It was just so :rolleyes:. Eventually Jim Starlin comes on board as the new Batman writer, and the writing improves by leaps and bounds. Jim Starlin wrote an epic story of a diplomat's son who raped women and always got away with it because of his diplomatic immunity. In the end, he fell off his apartment's balcony to his death after encountering Robin. Batman asks Jason if he shoved him, and Jason just says "I spooked him." It was left open-ended with no clear idea of what really happened. It was an awesome story that showed Jason had real potential as a character under a competent writer. Unfortunately it was too little too late as the next story arc was A Death in the Family, and the previous Silver Age goofiness had already ruined Jason in the eyes of many readers.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

Yes. Superman died to delay the wedding.

However, Lois and Clark DID get married in comics and on television around the same time during Lois & Clark Season 4. Comic came out Wednesday, the episode aired that Sunday. I know this because my wife and I got married that same weekend. I was reading the Superman: Wedding Album on the way to the chapel then we watched the episode on the Honeymoon.

It doesn't mean anyone else actually watched that episode. Season 4's ratings were horrible. But it did happen. And the DC team had to scramble the Wedding Special to catch up.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

Yeah, I never watched season 4. I thought the show ended with them still dating. I didn't know they got married.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

You didn't miss much by skipping out on Season 4. Season 3 was definitely the strongest season.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

Max Landis didn't get Vic Morrow killed, so he has that over his dad.

Re: The Death and Return of Superman Video Rant
 

Wow, I can feel the heat from that burn from here! :D

I thought it was kind of odd that out of all his father's movies, Max Landis referenced The Twilight Zone - in a short film that's ultimately about death and its impact on a medium.