super

In terms of "things I liked before and during elementary school", Superman ranks behind baseball and dinosaurs but ahead of trucks and garbage pail kids. I had a superman t-shirt and my mom made me a cape that I wore on days other than Halloween. I really wanted a superman action figure but by the time I had saved enough money, superman was sold out so I bought an on sale martian marauder action figure. (see here for a high priced recreation of what I spent $2.99 or less on)

I used to play superman with my brother. Around the age of seven (I'm guessing) I ran though our glass storm door with my arms outstretched in flight. It was bloody but not serious, and I wrote some kind of story in sixth grade about it that got printed in some kind of county writing contest thing.

I watched cartoons but not many movies. I don't know if I've actually seen any of the superman movies all the way through. I remember buying one of those twenty four page picture books (featuring real pictures from the movies) for Superman IV from the book fair at school. So I have a sense of that movie, and I remember being scared by super aliens in some other superman movie. I never watched the movies when I was older, because they never seemed too impressive when being replayed on Sunday afternoons on Channels 9 or 11 when baseball was rained out.

So the reviews of the new Superman movie are coming out. (New Yorker here, NY Times here) I might end up seeing it, even though I didn't think I would. I just purchased the DVDs of the Justice League Season 2, and there is some kind of coupon inside. (Then again, whenever I see the commercials for the movie featuring that dated sounding raprockish nonsense, I want to skip it....this site has some kind of retroish cover soundtrack, with that song from the r.e.m. album that wasn't an r.e.m. song starting it off, covered by someone else.)

I burned through all the Justice League DVDs in the past week. I even watched the commentary track episodes. It's a bit hard to explain why I like them. It seems like a good eduation into comics, even though I gather that this "DC Animated Universe" differs from the real comic timelines. It helps that a lot of the episodes are two-parters. It's also not watered too far down for kids. And the alternative universe and liberal use of strange yet somewhat familiar villains is appealing. I used to watch the Batman animated series even though I was kind of too old for it when it came out, but never watched Superman. I think having the other characters limit the amount of Superman makes Justice League more interesting. The sci-fi is a bit tiring, but I only wasted a week on these discs. I'll waste some other weeks when the other seasons come out. It's probably better than bugging other people late at night when I stumble across the episodes on cable.