itt: consternation and wailing about Zach Snyder's upcoming SUPERMAN/BATMAN film/sequel to MAN OF STEEL -- official title: BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN7OBEd5hRM

She's in a tv/news chopper, right? Took me decades to realize how '70s as fuuuuuuuck it is to have a set-piece based on _a tv news chopper_.

Also, the earthquake/flood scene gave my younger brother nightmares for *years*. I just remember being disturbed by the shot of dirt tumbling from Kidder's mouth.

that's it, i'm watching Superman II tonight

i have been rewanting to watch Superman IV too. i've seen 1 and 3 so many times. the 1st one is the best movie but they are all good fun. i saw IV in the theater when it came out (i was under 10) and it was insane. plotholes be damned it was just completely ridiculous and i loved it.

Ducky as Lex Luthor's nephew

xpost It's a Golan Globus production, what else could possibly be expected.

i was raised on that stuff.

i love trash. i love it because its trash.

but it has to be fun trash. Snyder trash is glowery late 90s Playstation trash. boring and unimaginative.

Yes, exactly. Snyder's work is like a portentious and incoherent cutscene from a '90s Playstation game featuring extreme and tortured badasses.

and the 2000s ones that are all desaturated and everything is brown and grey

zack snyder: cinema's prince of persia: warrior within

http://comicbook.com/2016/03/03/batman-v-superman-ben-affleck-describes-lex-luthor-as-kurt-cobai/

thx for the new screenname

wait dammit

I've been saying since the '40s that Lex Luthor had a certain Cobain-esque quality about him.

I saw superman 4 when I was a kid but don't remember a whole lot about it. I just read the wikipedia synopsis and this:

Nuclear Man forces his way into the Daily Planet and abducts Lacy. Superman frees himself from the moon's surface and pushes it out of its orbit, casting Earth into an eclipse which nullifies Nuclear Man's powers. Superman rescues Lacy, then recovers Nuclear Man and deposits him into the core of a nuclear power plant, destroying him. What had been Nuclear Man becomes electrical power for the entire electrical grid.

definitely makes me want to see it again

it's certainly the movie that comes closest to the Weisinger-era comics

zach synder is the most literal-minded person to ever direct a movie, i think.

on the whole i find the "innocence" of 1978/1980/etc. superman movies a bit too willful to be truly charming, but reeve is great. i never know what to think about the ending of superman 1— it’s so profoundly dumb that it’s almost insulting, but in its batshit pulp way it’s very true to the comics. you could never pull that off now, legions of self-serious fanboys would be storming the internet proclaiming "that could never happen!"

the romantic stuff in the 2nd movie is probably the highlight of the whole franchise for me, it shouldn’t work but it does.
best superman is the fleischer cartoon superman obv.

i read that as glans globus

best superman is all-star superman

^ morrison nerd shaddup

those fleischer cartoons are /beautiful/. total A+ character design, color, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjdnCC6n4xk

also full of amazing art-deco trains, planes, automobiles, etc.

they're great but they're v one-dimensional and repetitive

yes, which is why they were shown monthly at the bijou, and not meant to be bingewatched on video.

exactly!

they do have very formulaic plots

or rather, the distribution is why they are that way -- give the kids what they expect xp

Fleischer cartoons look great, animated series and All-Star are probably the purest distillations of what makes the character work, and I personally really enjoy at least the first several years of the '80s reboot (kinda particularly after Byrne split).

those cartoons are magical. some of the coolest art deco design i have ever seen.

yeah the fleischer shorts are essential. not as much 'heart' as I and II and for that i'll give the edge to reeve. also hackman fucking around is kinda fun in a real old-school dumb villain way. the cartoons do kinda crush the movies in terms of visual effects and even just beauty in any given frame or minute of screen time. but that's only one aspect of what one goes to superheroes for.

i actually rewatched IV maybe a year ago. it's sooooooooooo bad. like the nuclear man stuff is mayyyybe okayish, if really one-dimensional. just very slightly better than your usual golan/globus schlock cause some of the effects look passably okay. (some by the way are UNBELIEVABLY bad, especially the flying scenes.) but i'd forgotten how much of that film is awwwwwful unfunny love-triangle hijinks with mariel hemingway (!) as a really badly-written lois rival, amidst a plot by her rich dad to take over the daily planet. none of those scenes work at all despite some stuff that's very classically superman and which we'd be gobsmacked and thrilled in 2016 to see in a superman film... clark and superman on overlapping dates, clark pretending to struggle on a first date at the gym. and then of course you have the nuclear disarmament story which really was not worked out very carefully at all but i do kinda love that they went there, same spirit as him turning back time in the first movie, like, okay, i guess in this world superman actually does succeed in eliminating the world's nuclear arsenal! cool!

i love how golan and globus were simulatenously making

- a film about a peacenik superman disarming the superpowers

- a bunch of movies about former US covert ops going into southeast asian jungles and nearly committing genocide

they would have made a movie with a pedophile superhero if they thought it'd make 3x its budget back

Like, if you’re just taking a cat out of a tree, you can’t touch anything or the arborists will say, ‘He damaged the tree branch when he got the cat down.’ Or, ‘The cat wasn’t neutered, so now there’s thousands of cats.’ There’s no winning any more for Superman.

this is reads so much like something from clickhole's 'they said what?!' section

Ohhhhhh God, I'm just now flashing back to some early 80s tv advert for either fish sticks or hashbrowns or some other prepared oven-baked breaded good that was completely ripping from the "Superman flies to Lois Lane's balcony" blue-nightgown and all, but any Google search comes up empty. Does anybody remember these? I think it was for some Obriens or Gordon's item?

The Superman III ep of How Did This Get Made brought this bit up that I'd completely forgotten: how Reeve pulls off drunk, date-rapey Evil Superman with Annette oToole

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYj-L8n75IU

Other fun acting bit, which I think we've talked about before: the bodywork required to make the Clark Kent disguise work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIaF0QKtY0c

Which Frank Quitely deconstructed so well here:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly3p0cB91H1qc63ooo1_r1_1280.jpg

Supes IV just proved the Cold War was infecting every damn franchise.

I was waiting for "It's 2 Minutes to Midnight, Charlie Brown"

Is this close enough?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/5171H6W9NJL.jpg

Let's Tear Down That Wall, Charlie Brown

i have a vague memory of snoopy doing some bit on jfk's ich bin eine berliner in the strips somewhere

i forgot what bookmark i'd clicked on, read that as "snoop" and was really confused for a second

Supes Upside Ya Head

All I remember about nuclear man is that he looks like a pro wrestler.

just like Superman!

lol the guy who played him is named Mark Pillow

For years I kept thinking he was Dolph Lundgren, or the ex-Chippendales guy from "Bachelor Party"

The doc "Electric Boogaloo" has an entertaining bit about Superman IV. Reeve didn't want to do it so they offered to do a plot he'd be interested in. His idea: Superman creates world peace. Which is an idea way above what Cannon was capable of.

coming out this november: it's going to be a beautiful wall, charlie brown

lol the guy who played him is named Mark Pillow

And to pile on the indignities (text via Cracked.com)

Bizarrely, the movie premiered in London as a charity event, with special guests Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Cannon inexplicably requested that the film's superheroes attend in costume, which may have been fun treat for the newly-wedded royal couple, were it not for one thing: Christopher Reeve did not come to the premiere in his Superman costume. In point of fact, he didn't come at all. Probably because even he thought that the movie was an "absolute mess."

This wouldn't have been a huge deal (Reeve's family attended in his absence), except for the fact that the poor schmuck who played Nuclear Man was now the only person at a highly-publicized event featuring the royal family dressed like a stupid asshole.

Nuclear Man isn't a recognizable character from the comics. Without someone else standing directly next to you in a Superman costume, no one is going to know who the hell you're supposed to be. So actor Mark Pillow was stuck explaining to every guest that he was Superman's nemesis, and that his bosses had requested he attend in costume, and that's why a thin layer of polyester was the only thing standing between the future King of England and his spandexed scrotum.

http://www.supermaniv.com/Superman_IV_BTS/41_Superman_IV_The_Quest_For_Peace_1987_Christopher_Reeve_Margot_Kidder_Lois_Lane_Marc_McClure_Jimmy_Olsen_Elstree_Studios_1986_Cannon_Pictures_Films_Milton_Keynes_1986.jpg

HahahahahHHhHAHAHAHh

nice.