Tagged: the cw

Ed Catto: Returning to Riverdale

Riverdale returns to the CW Wednesday night. The second season promises more of the guilty pleasures served up in this surprisingly fun take of the Archie gang. It’s been wicked fun and I’m encouraged that it’s such a big hit.

Archie has had success in media beyond comics before Riverdale. There was an Archie radio show in the 40s and 50s. It’s a tough one to sit through, even for an old-time radio buff like me. Filmation Studios provided year after year of Archie cartoons for Saturday mornings, starting with The Archie Show and continuing with many spin-offs and sequels. And there have been several TV and movie fits and starts over the years, most notably the early 90s Return to Riverdale.

I graduated from UNC’s Business School about that time, and although I would embark on a traditional marketing career, even then I was looking for a way to blend my traditional marketing skills with Geek Culture. It wasn’t until years later, when I co-founded Captain Action Enterprises and the Bonfire Agency, that I would successfully do it. So while I was interviewing with Lever Bros., P&G and Kraft for traditional MBA marketing jobs, I also arranged an interview with the Chairman of Archie Comics.

I was invited to Archie’s Mamaroneck headquarters. In hindsight, I now know that my interview was about ten years too early. In those days, few could envision how important the business of Geek Culture would become. But one of the big topics we discussed was all about making the brand bigger with a made-for-TV-movie called Return to Riverdale. There were a lot of hopes and dreams dashed as a result of that tepidly received show.

So it’s all the better that the new CW Riverdale series show is such a hit. I’ve enjoyed watching it so far. I was very surprised, when sorting through my pal Freddie’s comic collection (more on that here) to come across one particular letter in a tattered copy of Archie Annual #15 from 1963.

As you can see, one of the cast members of an Archie pilot engaged in a little promotion, combined with pleading for swag from the Archie Comics powers-that-be. Wayne Adams, the actor who would play Reggie, is almost in character.

It’s a crazy look back at how things were done in the early days of what would get labeled transmedia. Today folks would try to accomplish the same thing with a well-orchestrated mix of social media and PR.

Which Witch is Which?

Beyond the clique of Riverdale High’s most popular students, it’s been reported that Sabrina may be joining the gang on the small screen. I think that’s great. I’ve been enjoying the very creepy Chilling Adventures of Sabrina comic series by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Robert Hack, upon which the show is reportedly based.

I was introduced to this platinum beauty when she was cast as the “love interest” in what was essentially the Sugar, Sugar music video. We didn’t really call them music videos in those days but all the cool cartoons would feature chase scenes or spotlight songs within the framework of the larger cartoon. As I got older, it always seemed to me that all these quick-cut montages were an outgrowth of Richard Lester’s Hard Day’s Night.

Sabrina has had many incarnations over the years, but she debuted in Madhouse #22 along with her familiar Salem and her supporting cast. For years she was sort of a Bewitched type character with one foot in Archie’s neighborhood. She’d later leave the Archie style behind to become a stylized young girl and even an anime-esqe heroine. Sabrina was most widely seen in the long running ABC series starring Mellissa Joan Hart, of course.

But I’m really interested in Sabrina’s earlier walk on the wild side. In 1972, Archie Comics tepidly introduced the Red Circle line with a comic called Chilling Adventures in Sorcery as Told by Sabrina. Here Sabrina played the role of the spooky narrator. In comics, there is a rich and long tradition of horror hosts introducing macabre tales. During the first two issues, Sabrina would dutifully introduce watered down ghost stories. They were essentially EC comics by way of the Archie line’s house style.

By issue #3, it all changed. Each issue featured genuinely spooky stories, in the classic horror comics traditional, by top talents like Gray Morrow and Alex Toth. The Archie house style was thrown out the window, unfortunately along with Sabrina.

But the precedent was set. I’m leaving the lights on when CW does introduce this spooky Sabrina show.

Tweeks Supernatural Interview Pt 1

Supernatural will begin it’s 13th Season on October 12 on The CW. That is only three weeks away! So to catch you up to speed, here is our interview with Jensen Ackles (Dean), Jared Padalecki (Sam), and Misha Collins (Castiel)!

The possible spin off that was announced at SDCC, Wayward Sisters, is mentioned briefly. We’ll bring you more info on that when we have it, but so far we know it will be an episode during this season of Supernatural that will serve as the pilot. It will star Kim Rhodes as Sheriff Jody Mills, Briana Buckmaster as Sheriff Donna Hanscum, Kathryn Newton as Claire Novak, Clark Back as Patience Turner, and Katherine Ramdeen as Alex Jones.

Tweeks SuperFlash Duet

Musicals are life. And while we weren’t exactly caught up on both Supergirl and The Flash (though we’re told we really need to do that), we couldn’t miss the SuperFlash crossover event. Especially not with Broadway talents like Darren Criss, Jeremy Jordan, John Barrowman, Jesse L. Martin, Victor Garber and Glee alums Melissa Benoist & Grant Gustin!

Thing is, Maddy knew a little something about the Music Meister’s first appearance (played by Neil Patrick Harris, who also beat Darren Criss to the punch at playing Hedwig) on Batman: The Brave and the Bold, so we couldn’t help but compare the two musical episodes.

Could this CW musical event stacked with all our favorites be better than an animated episode featuring Black Canary singing about her love for Batman? Watch the video & find out.

Tweeks: Riverdale Cast Interviews

As you know, Anya is a huge fan of the Archie comics (those were her comics gateway drug) and she also fangirls hard over CW teen dramas, so Riverdale, premiering on The CW January 26, 2017, is kind of a big deal.

It’s a dark, film noir, take on the characters from Archie comics written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Greg Berlanti. In the pilot, Cheryl Blossom’s twin brother is murdered and they need to find out why. Jughead narrates the show and there’s of course a love triangle between Betty/Veronica/Archie. But there’s also a music component with Archie starting a band that seems to clash with Josie and the Pussycats.

At Comic-Con, Anya was able to sit down with the cast to ask about the show and here’s the interview. There are some really great bits in there. Like K.J. Aga (Archie) has a cute New Zealand accent and Luke Perry (Fred Andrews) is totally what you’d expect of the guy who played Dylan McKay on Beverly Hills. And speaking of actors on old shows we love, Cole Sprouse (Jughead) talks about why he returned to acting for this role and proves to be a total comic nerd.

What we’re really looking forward to on Riverdale is that strong feminist vibe in this version. Well, at least that’s what Camila Mendes (Veronica), Lili Reinhard (Betty), Madelaine Petsch (Cheryl Blossom) and Ashleigh Murray (Josie) seem to be saying. There’s a lot about the pressure to be perfect and topics that will really speak to teen girls today.

Watch the press table interviews and the trailer and tell us what you think!

 

Dennis O’Neil: The CW’s Adventure In Time and Space

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The big honkin’ four-part crossover on the CW is past and I guess we have no particularly interesting reactions to it. If I were in a mood to pick nits, I might raise an eyebrow, chuckle in the manner of one who knows he is not one of the little people, and observe that it was really only a three-part crossover. Oh sure, The Flash and his friend Cisco did pop into Supergirl’s turf at the very end of the first episode, but by then the Maid of Might and her crew had solved their difficulties and all was (temporarily) well. All The Flash and Cisco did was ask for help dealing with some of their problems.

This is a crossover? Maybe by your definition (I sneer, cocking an eyebrow). Anyway, it seems that some alien invaders were causing woe on the neighboring universe, where The Flash and company hang, and so Supergirl joins The Flash in a brief migration through – here we guess – some kind of rent in the space-time continuum and for the next three hours of programming good guys from The Flash, Arrow, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow smite the baddies, who look like something Alberto Giacometti might have dashed off after a particularly bad night.

I’m oversimplifying the story, which I kind of enjoyed. But if I were inclined to further quibble, while not rising to the level of complaint, I might ask since when did Earth – our Earth in our dimension – become a way station for extraterrestrials? I gather, from recent Supergirl episodes, that our good old terra firma is teeming with ETs, Hordes of them: Hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? And if this is the case, Supergirl’s reality sure as heck isn’t our reality, and if that’s the case, shouldn’t there be some sort of signifiers? At least something as simple as irising doors. I mean, a few aliens, sure, but armies of them?

And on a similar note: if we humans actually made contact with beings of another dimension, without wrecking the cosmos in the process, it would be the biggest of big deals – easily the most significant event in history. Questions would get answered and some of those answers would alter our reality and perhaps finally take us where we’ve never been able to go. This would be big. Maybe even bigger than the Kardashians. So would we treat it casually, even if we were superbeings? Sure, you might not want to reveal something that would risk your secret identity, but… to hell with your secret identity and excuse me, please!

At the end of the final scene in the crossover, someone gives Supergirl a gadget that would fit in her purse and that lets her travel between dimensions as casually as I travel to get the mail. Even though – yes! – we know it’s fiction, this kind of story might diminish, ever so slightly, our sense of awe and wonder and lessens our reverence for the universe and that would be a shame.

 

Dennis O’Neil: Crossing Over

  • News
  • December 1, 2016

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There you are, somewhen on the far side of one of these bedeviling time gaps, at least four days in the future from when I’m typing this and – I don’t really know – you just might be squirming with anticipation because in a few hours or less – your hours – you’ll be watching the final part of the season’s megaevent, the four-part television crossover featuring Supergirl, The Flash, Green Arrow and the members of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.

Is your breath taken?

Me, I’m sitting here in Monday afternoon, not knowing what the crossover is even about. (Of course, it’ll be in some way about the heroes mentioned in the previous 81 word! paragraph.)

So, again, tv is following behind comic books. Not a knock on the video guys: comics got there first because high speed printing was invented before video transmission – the first steam driven press debuted way back in 1825 and there’s your trivia of the day – and although television technology and print technology are vastly different, they are both what Stephen King calls story delivery systems and in that capacity deal with some of the same problems.

Among those problems: making lots of money from fictional characters. One answer occurred to mass audience storytellers when very few people had ever seen a television set and comics were in their infancy: have characters from one popular publication appear in another publication. A publisher could hope that the crossover stunt would expose readers of one magazine to the other magazine and the newbies would become regulars. So went the hope.

The ancestors of today’s two biggest comics companies were the first publishers to do the big crossover thing. (I’ll call that a coincidence if you will.) What became DC comics gave us All-Star Comics, which featured the company’s most popular heroes, and some maybe not so popular, joining together to solve various humdingers of crises and what became Marvel Comics put their Submariner in the same adventure with their Human Torch. All this in 1940, just before World War Two.

And so crossovers joined comics publishing’s tool kit and they’ve been appearing ever since.

In 1927 – yeah, that early – television was presented to the world but it took another 20 years, give or take, for the tube to start being a household fixture. Television, like comics before it, had to deliver exciting entertainment every week using the same set of characters while being careful not to kill them. Like comics. I’d like to say that it was inevitable that screen drama would start crossing over, especially since a lot of the material began as comics stories. But what do I know from inevitable? It happened and thus it’s reality and reality always trumps everything else.

Ooops!

Did I just use a naughty word?

 

Dennis O’Neil: Mayor Green Arrow? Really?

mayor-oliver-queen

What’s the pothole situation in Starling City? And the re-zoning hassle – that still a headache? And the business with the access lanes to the bridge – was that ever settled?

Since Oliver Queen’s been elected mayor, it’s reasonable to think that this kind of mayoral busyness is the better part of his days. At night, of course, he puts on a mask and hood and grabs his bow and arrows and kicks (or maybe punctures) miscreant ass. Oh, and his also training a bunch of wannabe vigilantes to help with the kicking/puncturing – and not always being Mr. Nice Guy while he’s doing it. (Maybe he’s got some marine drill sergeant DNA?)

The question is, who is better for Starling City, the politician or the archer? If you’ve been paying attention to the news, you’d probably choose the archer because obviously anybody would be better than a politician.

But that can of worms will be left unopened. Tell you what: let’s reframe the question. Who’s more useful to a storyteller, archer or pol? I guess it depends on the kind of tale being told. A story by…oh, say, Aaron Sorkin or Robert Penn Warren or Allen Drury would perhaps fare best as political drama. The kind of fantasy/melodrama/action tale we’re considering here is better with an ass-kicker as its protagonist. Which leaves our man Ollie where?

mayor-green-arrowA kind of hybrid, one who favors the arrow shooting part of his persona, is where. That’s pretty much how it has to be. Nobody with a taste for adventures – that is, nobody who’s Arrow’s natural audience – is going to tune in to watch a guy in a three-piece suit behind a desk reading policy papers. We want to see some arrows shot and some of that good martial arts action! Leave that other stuff to CNN.

Casting a superhero as a civic leader, it seems to me, strains the genre. Part of the appeal of costumed superdoers is that they can do what duly constituted authorities can’t. Where a mayor’s job ends, theirs begins. One explanation for adopting a second persona – and it’s not a bad one – is that the disguise keeps the bad guys from knowing who to wreak revenge on. The other reason for a civic leader hiding behind a costume and fighting crime is that he couldn’t do as mayor what he does as vigilante because the vigilante must break the law to do his deeds. But whoa! Don’t mayors swear to uphold the law? We got us some hypocrite mojo working here?

Another deep appeal of double-identited heroes might require some psyche excavation. The idea is, we all have more than one identity lurking within us – we behave differently in different situations – and we might feel that the real us is one of those unseen lurkers. Costumed heroes manifest this idea and also give us a hook into identifying with the good guy.

I think part pf the storyteller’s task is to make the two identities distinct and that’s often a failure. I tried and pretty much failed to convince my Batman writers that Bruce Wayne should present himself as a tough-as-nails businessman, but as a good-natured bumbler. And I never liked Clark Kent as the best reporter in town. (Didn’t he win a Pulitzer?)

Of course, as always, the secret is in the recipe, not the ingredients. If the story entertains, the creators have done their jobs and they’re free to go watch tv. Wonder what’s on the CW?

John Ostrander: Making a Better Superman

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As of last Monday night, Warner Bros grew a Superman problem. That’s the night that Supergirl started its second season on its new home, the CW… where one could argue that it always belonged anyway. The show guest starred Supergirl’s cousin, Superman, embodied on TV by Tyler Hoechlin.

tyler-hoechlin-supermanIf you don’t already know, DC – unlike Marvel – does not link its movie universe and its TV universe. Since DC Comics is currently in the Multiple Universe concept once more, it might help to think of their TV and movie universes as alternate dimensions. So we can have two Flashes, two Wonder Women – and two versions of Superman.

The DC movie version of Superman, as shown in Man of Steel and Superman vs. Batman: Dawn of Justice Whaddee Do Dah, is played by Henry Cavill and is a darker, more brooding, somewhat more Batman-ish Superman. His costume is also darker, almost a blue-black. He is, we are told, a more “realistic” Superman. And that’s where I think the trouble is going to lie.

Supergirl’s Superman is a more traditional Man of Steel. He’s a brighter, more confident, more hopeful vision. And, not to slam Henry Cavill, Tyler Hoechlin is a better actor. As a kid he held his own with Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Jude Law, and Daniel Craig in Road to Perdition where Hoechlin played a starring role as Michael Sullivan, Jr. (Sidenote: not everyone realizes that Road to Perdition is also a “comic book movie” based on the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner. Work that little factoid into your conversations. Amaze your friends. Go out and get a copy. Great read. End of plug.)

The Superman appearing on Supergirl is more my idea of who Superman is – confident, capable, friendly, powerful and, according to one character on the show, smells good. When he walks into the DEO, the government facility where Lara’s adopted sister Alex works, people just stop and stare. Superman works the crowd, smiling, shaking hands, setting people at ease not like a politician or even a celebrity but like a nice guy from Kansas which, for all his powers, he is.

Hoechlin also does a great Clark Kent, reminiscent of Christopher Reeve’s great turn, having a deft sense of humor to the portrayal and making the bumbling aspect work. When his cousin secretly congratulates Clark on a well executed file fumble in the elevator, he tells her it wasn’t an act. That’s endearing.

Also, in the TV aspect of the DCU, there isn’t the underlying mistrust that the DC movie universe has for this strange person from another world. Batman wants to kill Superman because the Kryptonian could be a threat; one of the arguments leading to the creation of the Suicide Squad was who could stop Superman if he decided to burst through the roof of the White House and grab the President? On Supergirl, people trust the Man of Steel. Seeing him, or his cousin, inspires hope. While the darker portrayal may be more “realistic,” it’s not what the character is about.

I’m not looking for a return to the Superman of the Fifties as seen in either the comics or the TV show. To be honest, that one bored me even as a kid. The movies, however, makes him more angsty, more dour, and less Super. Hoechlin is only scheduled to appear as a guest star on the TV show for right now but he wears the tights and the cape – and Clark Kent’s glasses – quite well.

I know that in BvS: DoJ (spoiler alert, I guess) Superman dies at the end of the film but we all know he’s coming back for the Justice League movie. I, for one, wouldn’t mind if the movie Superman uses the grave as a chrysalis and pops out as Tyler Hoechlin. Or maybe they can have Tyler spin off into a series as Superman. I’d watch it. And I bet lots of others would as well.

And that’s going to be WB’s problem – the better Superman isn’t on the big screen; it’s on the small one.

Dennis O’Neil: Defy! We Dare Ya!

 

cw-dare-to-defy

Done any daring to defy lately?

If you’re a fan of the television versions of superheroes, you know what I’m talking/typing about. The network that calls itself The CW has, for a while now, been advocating such daring and this is the very same the go-to corporate entity that has made itself the go-to bandwidth for costumed do-gooders. They already have, in Arrow and The Flash, a couple of established hits (provided your definition of “hit” is modest) and in Legends of Tomorrow a show that has at least enough watchers to warrant renewal for another season. And the biggie…Supergirl has, with much hype, migrated from the kind of old-folkish CBS to the youthier CW and we Maid of Might mavens are allowed a happy sigh.

But about that youthiness and that “daring to defy” business: Really? Can they possibly mean it? Since they don’t specify exactly what they want us to defy, I have to guess that what we’re asked to defy is what we children of the Sixties might refer to as “the Man.” You know – the Establishment. The necktie wearers. Wall Street. Politics. Corporate America. The military-industrial complex (a term coined by no less an Establishment icon than President Dwight D. Eisenhower.)

Well, okay, but…where to begin? A logical answer: Consumerism. A denial of, or least a vigorous questioning of, t shirt wisdom, something like Whoever Has the Most Toys When He Dies Wins. So, all you wannabe defiers, stop buying stuff you don’t need. Stop discarding clothing just because some Seventh Avenue pooh-bah has declared it unfashionable which, I think, means whatever the pooh-bahs say it means. (And rest in peace, Noah Webster.) And if this means buying clothing that’s durable instead of merely new, amen. While you’re at it, extend that policy to motor vehicles, appliances, furniture, housing, vacation sites, playthings. If you’re killing time waiting for Supergirl to come on, you can make your own list.

But whoa. Subtract the money wasted on the unnecessary and suddenly those bandwidth-borne heroes aren’t there anymore. The money we spend (waste?) on frivolities pays for the programs we enjoy. No wasted cash = no Supergirl (who, it might be said, is herself a frivolity, but we could be flirting with blasphemy here, so let’s not.)

Okay, we exempt consumerism from the list of things we defy. What else? School? Hey, I am the husband of a teacher and the father of a professor and have been known to stand at the front of classrooms myself, so you aren’t going to catch me knocking education, though some varieties of it might deserve a knock or two. Besides – big secret a’comin’ – it’s fun to know stuff.

Now, a true story. At my high school graduation the school’s principal told my mother that the good Christian Brothers never wanted to see me again. Maybe if you wore a funny collar you could spot a defier from a mile away and if they said Joe O’Neil’s offspring was a defier, well, they were the authorities. But that offspring didn’t know he was a defier.

You don’t believe me?

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