DVD : Superboy - The Complete First Season

In association with Amazon.com

Rating:

- College Days, Go Clark!
I really wasn't sure what to expect since I missed this show completely when it was on the air. It took me a little by surprise being only 30 minute episodes, but I enjoyed it anyway. Anyone who enjoyed HR Puffenstuff or Sigmund the Sea Monster can appreciate this genre of Saturday morning serial. If you love Superman then given a chance to let the bad acting slide you'll enjoy "Superboy" for what it is...a walk down memory lane with Clark the Preppie. I was surprised the flying was as good as it was and noticed that with each episode the entire show as a whole gets better. The more you watch, the more it grows on you. I really do hope that the powers that be release the rest of the series for the die-hard Superman Fans like myself.

Rating:

- Starts a bit low
I didn't remember the first episodes of the First Season as I started watching the Second when it was broadcasted on Spain.But now I see that despite Iyla & Alexander Salkind produced this and the movies in the 80's the visuals are real cheap,acting mediocre,villains and plot very weak.Flying effects are normal altough sometimes u see the image is superimposed.Some guests starts adds some quality but result is average.I hope WB releases the 3 restant seasons which are much better.Some interesting episodes are Hollywood(time machine to 1939),Succubus(a creature that steals energy from the young to keep live)and Luthor Unleashed(where we know how he loses his hair).

Rating:

- THIS IS A JOB FOR........!!
Great show!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This show has an essence and houmour that can't be found in this day and age. Lana is the second best Lana and not by much when compaired to Lana in Super Man III. She is so hot!!!

Great packaging!!!!!!!!!!

I wish that the people who desigened the packages for Lois & Clark and Smallville wouldv'e made them like these. With L&C you have to take the first disk off to get at the one beaneath it and the cheep "pages" of the Smallville sets keep falling off. The DVD's in Super boy are way easy to get to.

Rating:

- Fun!
I gave up watching television in 1963, after having spent the majority of my teen years glued to the tube. Thus it came as a complete surprise to me that there even was a SUPERBOY series, let alone four seasons of it. I discovered it while looking for the third season of LOIS & CLARK and grabbed it immediately. I gather there are political and/or business reasons why the show was never shown beyond the initial airing. Whatever, I'm finding it a treat to watch the show now. (Actually it's a lot more fun than LOIS & CLARK, since that series degenerated into a soap opera by the third season. Why the idiots-that-be decided Clark and Lois should become engaged, let alone that she should discover his secret identity, I'll never know. They didn't consult me on this.)

The acting in SUPERBOY mostly is good, if occasionally wooden. The FX and productions values are fine (although I have caught the shadow of a crane when Superboy landed in a field, and in another shot, a microphone is clearly visible for several seconds). The stories and characters are fun.

What I find puzzling about the Warner Brothers release of the first season is that there is no pilot episode: nothing to explain why Lana Lang, Clark Kent and Lex Luthor have all migrated from Smallville and have converged on a university in Florida! And how did Perry White's son, TJ, from Metropolis end up there, too, and as Clark's roommate?

Bigger question: in the episode where Pa Kent is injured in a tractor accident and is in the hospital, why does Clark take an Eastern Airlines flight and a bus to get to Smallville when he could have just ditched the Clark Kent disguise and flown? Or hadn't he earned his interstate flying license at that point?

The shows in the DVD set are theoretically in the order in which they aired, but they're often out of sequence chronologically. For example, in about the fifth episode, after Superboy has rescued Lana and TJ several times, suddenly no one has ever seen him before. And TJ's hairstyle goes back and forth a few times, as do the opening credits.

All this carping aside, this is a fun series. The full four seasons are available in a set elsewhere, but not through Amazon. There are no bonus features, however. But then considering the inane bantering between Ilya Salkind and John Newton in the two commentaries in Warner Brothers' first season set, that's no big loss.

Rating:

- Oh, the memories...
This show holds a special place in my heart. I was 10 when it premiered, and it's what got me into a life of comic-book collecting.

The one thing that gets me the most about this show is the nostalgic factor. While I watched every single episode when it first aired, this show was never available in syndication after its initial run and it's left me nothing but memories - until now.

Yes, the acting is pretty bad. In many of the scenes the actors will fumble on their lines. Yes, the special effects were terrible, and even I could see that at age 10. And yes, the stories are pretty pedestrian.

But as I started watching the DVD's, I realized I couldn't stop. Something about this series was magical. Maybe it was it's innocence, maybe it was the fact that it felt like it was trying really, really hard. And maybe its because we'll never get a series like this again.

I have to wonder if there's a camp factor to this first season that people watching the original "Batman" series 20 years ago would have felt. I can't say for sure, all I can say is that I've had a pretty good time watching this set.

Let's hope this one does well so that we'll get to see seasons 2, 3, and 4. That's when the show started to get really good.

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