Agreed. I really don't understand this resistance some people have to the writers reimagining or repurposing some of these villains and storylines for this show. Superhero movies and TV series have been reimagining characters and storylines from the beginning in one way or another (even the supposedly more "faithful" ones), and this doesn't seem any different to me.
Well, I don't know about that. It used to be very rare for comic-book adaptations to adapt specific plotlines or reuse villains from other versions. It did go the other way, when the Superman comics borrowed Perry White, Jimmy Olsen, and kryptonite from the radio show (plus the
Daily Planet from the newspaper strips and Superman's flight from the animated shorts), but adaptations usually told their own entirely original stories and created their own villains. The earliest instance I know of a superhero adaptation borrowing a villain was when the Superman radio series did a storyline around a robot very loosely based on the ones from the animated short
The Mechanical Monsters, which had been released just weeks earlier. The second instance I know is when the 1950
Atom Man vs. Superman serial used Luthor as its villain, the character's first screen appearance -- as well as giving him the Atom Man alias used for an unrelated character on radio (a Nazi spy with kryptonite powers). Other than that, we didn't begin to see adaptations of specific comics storylines or villains until 1966 and after, with the
Batman sitcom and animated TV cartoons based on DC and Marvel comics. (Although 2/3 of
Batman's guest villains were original creations.)
And once
Batman was over, live-action superhero adaptations mostly went back to using original villains, with a few exceptions -- the first two Lynda Carter
Wonder Woman episodes used obscure villains from the '40s comics, and the Reeve Superman movies used Luthor and Zod along with other original villains (though the computer in
Superman III was initially going to be Brainiac). It wasn't really until the Burton/Schumacher Batman movies and afterward that it became the default for superhero movies to use pre-existing villains, and TV doing it as the default is even more recent than that. The '90
Flash was effectively forbidden from using comics villains until the latter half of its season, and
Lois & Clark had Luthor as a regular in season 1 but otherwise made only occasional use of comics villains. Even
Smallville relied mainly on original weekly foes, though it brought in comics characters more often over time.
And the grass is always greener. Back in the day (at least by the '90s when I was familiar enough with comics and animated superhero shows to know the difference), I often wished that live-action superhero shows would use more established characters from the comics rather than striking their own separate paths. Now I feel they rely too heavily on pre-established characters and I wish they'd use more original ones. After all, the comics have often been enriched by the adoption of original characters from their adaptations, from Jimmy Olsen to Harley Quinn to Phil Coulson. (Hmm. Olsen... Coulson... coincidence?)
Although I think the reason most characters in comics adaptations today are comics-derived rather than original -- even when they just take the name and change everything else, like Felicity on
Arrow or Hunter and Mack on
Agents of SHIELD -- is because the shows are now being produced directly by the production arms of the comics publishers, and so they want to rely as much as possible on characters (or at least character names) they already own, rather than paying screenwriters royalties for the reuse of newly created characters. I mean, it's bizarre how far they'll go to reuse existing characters these days. Even Jason Wilkes,
Agent Carter's season-2 love interest, was loosely based on
a character from a single 1962 story in the
Tales of Suspense anthology.
2) I believe Smallville's version of Lena, Tess Mercer, was used in a slightly villainous role at one point, essentially replacing her brother as a foil for Clark and Co.
I believe she was fairly villainous for a while, or at least morally ambiguous, but I think her connection to Lena was a retcon. As originally conceived in season 8, she was an homage to Mercy Graves from
Superman: The Animated Series and Eve Teschmacher from the '78 movie, hence her name. (I think she was even addressed as "Mercy" as a nickname on occasion.) It was only in season 10 that she was revealed to be Lex's sister and given the full first name "Lutessa" to fit the obligatory LL initials -- and then somebody seems to have remembered that Lex already had a sister in the comics and gave her the middle name Lena as an Easter egg. So I don't believe she was originally intended to be Lena. If that had been anything more than an afterthought, they never would've saddled her with a first name like "Lutessa."
