True enough, I will agree that "Smallville" has created more Superman fans and I for one have increased my own fandom regarding the character due to the show.
Wonder Woman headed to the small screen
- Thread starter JacksonArcher
- Start date
J
Jetfire
Guest
I think a Wonder Woman show can start out being friendly to a wider audience but will eventually have to bring in and embrace the source material...much like Smallville has...more or less.
^
It has.But even those shippers & girls who watch just for Tom & Justin...want to see Welling in the suit.
But only because it's skintight.
So, what's wrong with that? Teenage girls aren't allowed to like the show for their own reasons?
Who says people can only watch genre shows for the "right" reasons? Or that SUPERMAN only belongs to "real" fans who truly understand his mythos?
Teenage girls have just as much right to a SUPERMAN show as anyone else.
She is and she's got a "Wonder Woman" look. Hopefully tharp will come back and post a link to her pics. I'm not sure I should.
AR07, who is that in your avatar? It looks like my cousin Lisa, except my cousin isn't blonde.
@Greg...oh teenage fan girls can have at it, I've no real problem with them except for the fact that they don't really seem to understand what is going on, seriously going on online boards these days and Brian and Kelly's facebook page you'd think that Lana and Clark were still dating each other and nothing else was happening. All the power to them, it just gets frustrating for "serious" fans (notice how I put that in quotations folks) when it seems that your show runners are continuously pandering to a specific demographic while ignoring the larger core audience. Now yes I realize that I'm generalizing and probably sterotyping or something bad pc here but I just hope that "Wonder Woman" goes in a different direction than "Smallville" has and you can not deny that the type of network that "Smallville" is on is why you have the the type of audience they have and write the way they do. Damn, ranting again, sorry folks.
Deteriorated? Weren't visiting the kryptonsite boards much during the first couple of seasons, were you? 'Cause I was and Smallville has always primarily appealed to the angsty teen drama crowd interested in shipper stuff - it was the very heart and soul of the series from day one.
As for whether or not the audience assumes or cares whether or not the show ends with Clark in the suit, I have to agree with Christopher. I think it became apparent years ago that Smallville is already a Superman series - without the suit. Never bothered me back when I was watching and I don't think it bothers most other fans who may be very into Superman - but who do not think he has to wear anything in particular to be Superman.
Times have changed. Superheroes no longer are required to wear colorful costumes as successful X-Men movies and tv series like Heroes have long since proved. I think the producers of the new Wonder Woman series would be wildly stupid to make too big a deal about the costume. Hopefully they'll be too busy worrying about the writing seeing as how that's far more important.
Hopefully they can focus on the complete package. Gotta have the right look, tone etc. in addition to good writing.
The real question, of course, is what is the "larger core audience." There's a fannish tendency to assume that we're the core audience, which often leads us to assume that the rest of the world cares about issues (like WW's secret identity) that actually matter to maybe 300 people on the internet . . . .
Let's be honest here. Nobody under the age of fifty has even seen the old Lynda Carter tv show, and even the older crowd probably hasn't watched an episode in decades. And the vast majority of the tv audience has never read the comic book. Which means that the producers of the new show probably shouldn't worry too much about what the hardcore fans expect or want.
What's your evidence that the "serious" fans such as yourself actually are the larger core audience? Particularly if, as you say, they're such a minority on most of the show's fan boards? True, BBS posters aren't a statistically representative sample, but one would expect that active Internet users would have a higher probability of being comics/SF fans. So if those other sites are dominated by people who only care about the relationships and romance despite the expected selection bias in the other direction, wouldn't that suggest that they're more likely to constitute the larger segment of the audience by a considerable degree?
I say again, Smallville was created to appeal to people who weren't comics fans, and that largely meant the female WB target demographic who liked teen romance dramas. I mean, think about it. Smallville has a tradition of wrapping up its action stories by the 45-minute mark and devoting the rest of the episode to conversations and musical montages. This is not, first and foremost, an action-adventure show. It's primarily a show about relationship drama, and always has been.
So I'd be very surprised if the people who watch it for the DC Comics mythology are more numerous than the people who watch it for the romance and the sexy leads.
Well, as I said, there's no reason to expect them to imitate Smallville, because the media climate has changed. Superheroes are more popular now thanks to Nolan's Bat-films and Iron Man, so there's less incentive for a superhero show to minimize those elements. Again, that's part of why Smallville itself is more superhero-themed now than it used to be.
Also, Smallville was developed by the WB network for its particular audience, and that network no longer exists. The show was a product of its particular time and place. A 2011 superhero show developed for another network would be different.
But it would still be designed for a general audience of diverse tastes, and thus would not be bound to conform to the expectations of established Wonder Woman fans, who would constitute a rather small percentage of the target audience. Given Geoff Johns's role in overseeing DC's media properties, I'm sure it'll be faithful in its own way, but it will also make what reinterpretations are deemed necessary to make it work as a television show.
Even the folks around here are more into Chloe, Lois, Lana, Tess, etc. than they are the mythos.
Or maybe it's 50/50.
Or 40/60.
Or maybe it's 50/50.
Or 40/60.
To be honest I kind have forgotten what we've been trying to debate about. I never was expecting "Wonder Woman" to emulate "Smallville" and we don't even know what network the show will be on the first place so it's premature to speculate what type of show it will be until we get more information on it. Also I was never disputing that "Smallville" wasn't created to bring in a new group of fans, in fact I agree with you on that point and stated a page or so ago that it is because of "Smallville" that I am the Superman fan I am right now. Granted different fans are going to take different things from the series and now I'm getting boggled down and lost in thought so I'm going to stop typing now lol.
Dusty Ayres
Commodore
Sorry, but that's the vibe that I got.
Doesn't squelch the fact that the show on the whole is a piece of shit with the Superman name and symbol attached to it (how would you feel if I created a Star Trek show, but with the characters dressed in current-day military clothing, and the spaceships looking like those from Star Wars, and the people on Earth dressed like it was the current day, and the characters acting like whiny brats? You'd be pissed off, I'd imagine, as would millions of fans! That's what Smallville has wrought.) And all Smallville's really done is make it hard to see and accept the real Superman on the big screen-the one of the real reasons, IMHO, Superman Returns failed. At least the Nolan Batman movies look like the comic books somewhat-this show's a POC by comparison, and also low-budgeted by comparison.
People (based partly on the Wonder Woman show with Lynda Carter) expect Wonder Woman to be who she is-no less, no more. Making her show like Smallville will invite just the nasty bitching I've mentioned before, and will kill it dead after a few episodes. If your niece or anybody else can't stand a heroine in tights, they don't have to watch-they can continue to see the same crap that they watch all of the time on TV and think that they're getting something good. The rest of us want what we see in the comic books-and the 'rest' is everybody else that's a casual fan who thinks of Wonder Woman as the lady in the iconic costume fighting crime.
If the people behind this show have any brains or common sense, they'll do the show with Wonder Woman in said full iconic costume (old or new, but I think that they should stick with the new one, as it looks less corny) and not be imitating Smallville in any way-after all, variety is the spice of life.
Ah, put my point is that decades of nasty bitching did NOT kill SMALLVILLE dead after a few episodes. To the contrary, it's the longest-running superhero tv show on American tv.
I actually don't have strong feelings regarding the whole costume issue. I'm just baffled by this idea that the SMALLVILLE approach is doomed to failure--when it obviously succeeded before.
If it worked with Superman, why would it kill Wonder Woman dead?
But there might be millions of other fans who loved a show like that and didn't give a damn whether it was faithful to some prior work of fiction. (Indeed, some would say what you describe is a lot like the 2009 ST movie, and that was the most successful Trek movie ever made.)
And really, I doubt it would be "millions" of fans who were angry about it. The most dedicated fans, maybe tens of thousands of people, would be upset, but most of the audience of millions who watch ST shows or movies are far more casual about it and don't care about how "pure" it is. The thing that purists never understand is that most people are not purists. It's not holy gospel to them, it's just an entertaining way to pass the time.
Like it or not, Smallville works. It's in its tenth season. How many shows have lasted ten seasons on a single network? Vanishingly few. It's been an astonishingly successful show -- far more successful than other, more "authentic" adaptations of Superman.
That's profoundly unlikely. For one thing, Superman Returns was the 6th-highest grossing movie (domestically) of 2006. Its worldwide gross was nearly twice its budget, which counts as a financial success. It just wasn't as big a success as the studio hoped.
And let's look at numbers. The film made over $200 million domestically. The average US ticket price in 2006 was $6.55, so that works out to over 30 million tickets. If we assume a fair amount of repeat viewership, that means the film was probably seen by anywhere from 15-20 million people. Smallville's ratings toward the end of season 5 -- shortly before the premiere of Superman Returns -- were between 4 and 5 million viewers. That means that at least 2/3 of the people who saw the movie did not watch Smallville at all -- probably more, because there are bound to be people who watched the show and didn't see the movie. Even aside from that, though, in raw numbers, the viewership for the film was several times greater than the viewership for the show. So it's completely illogical to say that the show kept people from seeing the movie.
If the film failed critically, it's because it was boring and unimaginative. It was more of an extended homage to a pair of movies made over two decades earlier than an innovative film in its own right, and it was overlong and understated.
On the issue of Wonder Woman's costume, I think the show would do well to emulate the '70s series' practice (and the comics' practice, at times) of giving her multiple costumes for different occasions. For one thing, it would be good for the toymakers.
HEY! I'm forty and I worshipped the show. 'Course I was 8 at the time.
But I think your point is well made - It's only us middle-agers who have any perception of the Lynda Carter version of WW at all. A much, MUCH smaller group has a perception of WW from the JL cartoon, and an even smaller group has a perception of her from the comics.
In short, they have a wide-open playing field in which to reinvent the character pretty freely. One thing I'm sure they will take from Smallville is to borrow widely and liberally from many different versions of WW, as well as other genres to create a wholly new interpretation. It's really what Wonder Woman desperately needs. Her book has never been terribly popular, even if she is the most enduring female comic book superhero, and she is generally pretty constrained in her comics incarnations. I recently watched the animated movie and I was amazed to see so many throwback elements to it which made it hard for even me, a lifelong WW fan, to enjoy. I've said it before in this thread and others - if WW is a feminst icon, then someone needs to send a note to DC that feminism has changed a great deal in the last 15 years. Having WW spout 1970s rhetoric just makes her sound ridiculous. Look to more contemporary versions of superpowered female heroes for inspiration, not back to WW's traditional history which tends to be a bizarre mix of girl power talk and cheesecake-y male fantasy wish fulfillment.
Wait a minute here, let's be serious for a minute, "Smallville" may "work" as a series but it has been well known that for the past several seasons that they've been sitting on their seat of their pants in May waiting for the news to be renewed. The fact that they've had to wait on occasion for the last hour for that news says volumes about CW not having a replacement show in place that they liked or thought would do well. "Smallville" does average ratings at best but is one of THEIR strongest rated shows and this is why it has been renewed.
Now again I must reiterate that I'm a big "Smallville" fan but let's not pretend that it's Emmy worthy here folks. It has tremendous amount of flaws that we point out every week in the threads, and if one went in there and read through the majority of responses in those threads one would recognize and acknowledge that fact. The argument that this show is the freaking bees knees of superhero shows is flawed at best and one would know that if one were truly being critical about it. I bitch because I care and demand quality and entertainment and there is no denying that "Smallville" has accomplished this to some degree but let's not pretend that it's won multiple Emmy's or something. I'm done.
Now again I must reiterate that I'm a big "Smallville" fan but let's not pretend that it's Emmy worthy here folks. It has tremendous amount of flaws that we point out every week in the threads, and if one went in there and read through the majority of responses in those threads one would recognize and acknowledge that fact. The argument that this show is the freaking bees knees of superhero shows is flawed at best and one would know that if one were truly being critical about it. I bitch because I care and demand quality and entertainment and there is no denying that "Smallville" has accomplished this to some degree but let's not pretend that it's won multiple Emmy's or something. I'm done.
I don't think anyone's been saying the show deserves Emmys or is the most high-quality superhero show ever, or even that it's a ratings success on the order of, say, AMERICAN IDOL. Hell, I haven't been talking about the show's artistic merits at all, just whether, on a pragmatic level, it found a large enough audience to survive. And ten seasons, even of moderate ratings, is nothing to sneeze at. That's longer than any previous superhero show, every Star Trek series, Buffy, Lost, or even the old Lynda Carter version. Any new WONDER WOMAN series would lucky to run even half as long as SMALLVILLE has . . .
What I keep being puzzled by is this insistence that somehow the general public would rise up in revolt, and abandon the show in droves, if this same approach was applied to WONDER WOMAN--despite SMALLVILLE's proven track record.
Fans grumbled about SMALLVILLE from Day One. Didn't make a bit of difference.
What I keep being puzzled by is this insistence that somehow the general public would rise up in revolt, and abandon the show in droves, if this same approach was applied to WONDER WOMAN--despite SMALLVILLE's proven track record.
Fans grumbled about SMALLVILLE from Day One. Didn't make a bit of difference.