Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. I’m a sucker for superhero animation of all stripes. Right now, one of the SUPERFRIENDS DVD collections is getting some heavy rotation play by my son. He’s learning to identify “Superdum,” “Bat,” and “WimmerWimmen,” and he’s adding them to the cast of characters that he peoples his inner life with right now. It’s great watching how excited he gets about what I consider one of the goofiest of the incarnations of the characters. I look forward to introducing him to some of the best versions at some point as well. Will I be adding SUPERMAN/DOOMSDAY to the list of essential superhero fare for him? We’ll see soon. This spy isn’t convinced:
Hey Harry, Long time fan of the site, first time contributing. I work at a rental establishment and had the opportunity to take the new Bruce Timm driven animated film Superman Doomsday home over the weekend to watch. A bit of history, I love the Batman Animated Series. I watched them every day after school growing up. The Superman Animated series I liked, but never thought it was at the level of Batman. I also enjoyed Mask of the Phantasm and the other direct to video movies such as Subzero. All that being said, this new film leaves me pondering what the hell happened? From the voice casting to the animation, things just go from bad to worse. The only member of the cast I felt worked was James Marsters as Lex. Anne Heche was absolutely forgettable as Lois. As much as I love Firefly and the character of Jayne, Adam Baldwin just never hits the right note with Superman's voice. The animation, while mostly good backgrounds and actions, the character designs made me shudder at times. Superman's face has a chin and cheekbones so pronounced, he looks craggier than Doomsday. Lex Luthor's face and chin seem to merge into a childs playground slide. There's a female associate of Lex who shows up and literally has no nose unless she's seen in profile. It looks awful. As for the story. This gets into spoiler territory. The story is barely there, at least in regards to the Doomsday/Superman struggle. The commercials should say as loosely based of the best selling graphic novel as possible. Even more so then the comics, Doomsday is a completely pointless throw away character. Supes and Doomsday only fight once. The battle lasting maybe 20 minutes, and both characters die. That's right. They fight for one day, not even very long and that is enough to kill the man of steel. What happens next? Supermen? Wannabes popping out of the woodwork? Steel? Nope just an evil clone made by, you guessed it, Lex Luthor. And surprise, surprise: Superman's not dead, it just takes him about 20 days to recooperate from the fight. Yet some how in little over two weeks, he's managed to grow long hair. Go figure. It gets even worse when we learn Superman was rescued by his robot sidekick voiced by Spongebob himself, Tom Kenny. This robot is just annoying in it's pointlessness. To top it all off, this is quite possibly the gayest Superman ever portrayed on film. I don't mean that in a derrogative sense, I mean that in the sense that this film is laced with slightly veiled homo-erotic phrases or imagery. At more then one occasion, Lex refers to Superman as a "Beautiful God." There's a seen were Lex is fighting his evil Superman clone, straddled on top of him and asking "Why did you leave me?" For a moment, not just myself but the others watching the film with me, honestly thought Lex was gonna kiss him! Throw on top of that a few shots of Supes in a thong with his flowing locks and some oil wrestling between the two Superman and you really get to wondering. My favorite part had to be when evil Superman grabbed the now long-locked Superman by the hair, repeatedly pulling him down to "Knee" him in the face. Of course, all we see is Superman's head bobbing up and down a few times, before falling to his knees and onto the ground. Evil Superman follows this attack with, "Now who's better EQUIPPED to defend the city." I almost fell out of my chair. Lex did have some good moments and some of the fights were visually interesting, but I would not recommend this film to any Superman fan or comic fan for that matter. Read the trade of the Death of Superman, you'll be a lot more satisfied. At best, I'd compare this to the sub-par Ultimate Avengers films as opposed to the great DC animated works that we've gotten in the past. If you use this, call me Garrison.
