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Author Topic: What is your favorite live action COMIC BOOK BASED TELEVISION show?  (Read 2582 times)

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Offline paw broon

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Re: What is your favorite live action COMIC BOOK BASED TELEVISION show?
« Reply #15 on: June 06, 2013, 12:52:13 PM »
I enjoyed The Flash and early episodes of Birds of Prey but my favourite was, and is, The Green Hornet.  I tried various animation series and can't stand them but apart from classics such as Tweety and Sylvester; Tom and Jerry etc., I generally don't enjoy cartoons.   When i was really wee, before we had a commercial chanel on our telly, a neighbour let me watch Superman and I thought it was amazing.  I still enjoy the shows.  Having recently re-watched the sampler for The Phantom t.v. show I just wish it had ben picked up.
Stephen Montgomery

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Re: What is your favorite live action COMIC BOOK BASED TELEVISION show?
« Reply #15 on: June 06, 2013, 12:52:13 PM »

Offline Yoc

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Re: What is your favorite live action COMIC BOOK BASED TELEVISION show?
« Reply #16 on: June 06, 2013, 01:05:16 PM »
Thanks Narf!
Never got to see any Birds of Prey beyond the pilot which was Ok.  But I've never read any of the comics so it's hard t judge.

The Fleischer Superman cartoons, all in the public domain, were AMAZING!  I got a nicer restored collection on DVD.  You'll never top those for adaptions artwise.  The later stories were pretty average at best but the earlier ones were pretty good for the time.

Offline John C

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Re: What is your favorite live action COMIC BOOK BASED TELEVISION show?
« Reply #17 on: June 06, 2013, 03:51:06 PM »
To clarify, Yoc, my problem with the JL show wasn't a continuity issue so much as storytelling and characterization.  The episodes seemed (and still seem) to mostly be setup for yet another "epic battle."  There's what I consider a pretty weird obsession with Lex Luthor and the Fourth World stuff that don't really work for me as "Justice League" stories.

And then the heroes are all...kinda jerks, especially Superman.  They're also terrible at whatever it is the Justice League is supposed to do.  I just watched the first half of the "authoritarian League" episode, and had to laugh at the shock that Superman would kill someone, after spending the pilot literally pulping Martians and the time-travel episode crashing Nazi troop carriers that were filled with soldiers, and nobody bats an eyelash.  (Also, they get knocked out by everything.  I mean, c'mon, how clumsy can these idiots be and still be allowed on the streets...?)

Jim nailed it with the Flash.  The costume stinks (and the muscles aren't even supposed to be the character's, making it baffling), and the casting wasn't always a good visual match.  But it reimagined the character for a different genre, and it did a really good job of building a fresh background.  I would've loved to have seen it grow into the era of TV police procedurals, since it was already flirting with the idea in a lot of episodes (unsurprisingly, given Barry's day job).

For a while, I was trying the Green Lantern series (with the gaudy computer animation) and the new Young Justice series.  They were nothing to write home about either way, but the "DC Nation" shorts had some good stuff.  A lot like the B&B teaser episodes, they're mostly just a couple of minutes for some obscure character, and quite a few that I saw were very good.  The Amethyst spot could easily be expanded to a series that'd get a lot of attention.

Offline Yoc

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Re: What is your favorite live action COMIC BOOK BASED TELEVISION show?
« Reply #18 on: June 06, 2013, 04:36:02 PM »
I guess each to their own.  I liked the exceptional choices in voice actors used on JL/JLU and the respect to the source material most of the time.  Not being a huge DC reader I was also being exposed to some characters I only knew vaguely by reputation or covers.  I was hoping to see Ragman or Man-Bat show up.  I knew them from the Bat-Man Family issues I had.

Superhero books are always filled with anachronisms like those you mentioned.  Wasn't Hawk & Dove built around the problem?  The last DC movie I saw was 'Superman vs. The Elite' which also built itself around the inner conflict of what makes Superman a hero, etc. etc.  I quite liked the movie despite the odd character design they went with.

Offline John C

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Re: What is your favorite live action COMIC BOOK BASED TELEVISION show?
« Reply #19 on: June 07, 2013, 04:49:29 PM »
Entirely fair, and I don't generally watch TV or read for the same reason others do, and I'm not trying to start an uprising against Bruce Timm.  I just found/find the series to be lacking on the heroism side and sort of homogenous with plotting.

For example, the Despero episode, which I hadn't seen before.  The original Despero was a tactician banishing heroes to alternate dimensions to use them as game tokens.  That'd be a great match for animation, where you could model chess as an actual battle between armies, and so forth.  But nah, let's just make him yet another warlord and get everybody into a big fight inside a collapsing building exactly like what seems like half the episodes.  (The other half are Lex Luthor...doing whatever the heck it is he does; I really don't get his motivation or point, half the time.)

It's more of a "missed potential" thing than anything else, I guess.  A lot of the time, they even raised interesting issues, only to have the writers forget in the rush to get back to the punching.

(To be fair, a lot of the design was nice.)

Superman vs. The Elite was a pretty good try, yeah.  Far better than, what, the fifteen times Superman goes ballistic in the series for pretty much no reason?

I did love the Batman Family series.  It was a little before my time, but I was introduced to some of the material in one of those digest books, and later spent a lot of time hunting down issues, and then the Detective issues where it got merged in.