Buy Smallville - The Complete First Season

Description:
Before the Legend...Before the Icon...He was a teenager growing up in Smallville. The Complete First Season of the hit series that chronicles the life of the boy who would be Superman is on DVD in a 6-disc collector's set with super bonus features.

Amazon.com:
The venerable Superman mythos gets a 21st-century updating in this imaginative and engaging television series from the WB Network, and series fans can celebrate the ratings success of Smallville with a six-disc set that compiles its entire first season. The deluxe package offers a chance to revisit the origins of the characters and their numerous plotlines, as well as view deleted scenes and other bonus features.

The premise of Smallville--Superman as a teenager--takes up just a few pages in Superman's very first comic book appearance (in Action Comics back in 1938), but series producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar flesh out that period by portraying young Clark Kent (Tom Welling) not as the noble Superman-in-waiting, but as an average teen with some not-so-ordinary supernatural powers, including incredible strength and heat vision (Clark hasn't lifted up, up, and away as of yet). Clark's desire to fit in with his peers and make sense of his extraordinary abilities ground him in very realistic and identifiable terms for the series' primarily under-25 audience, as does his appealing and tentative romance with Kristen Kreuk as Clark's dreamgirl Lana Lang. But Smallville also strikes gold when it takes a turn towards more comic book territory, as evidenced by the parade of shape-shifting killers and other outlandish antagonists (many generated, in one of the series' most ingenious notions, by the same devastating meteor shower that brought the infant Clark to Earth) that Clark must harness his powers to face and defeat. Gough and Millar, along with their capable cast (which includes Michael Rosenbaum as a young and already bald-pated Lex Luthor, and Annette O'Toole and John Schneider as the Kents) manage to pull off the precarious high-wire act of combining science fiction with coming-of-age drama to create this highly watchable program.

Smallville: The Complete First Season offers a very complete and attractive DVD package that is rounded out by some highly desirable extras for longtime series fans. The six-disc set offers all 21 episodes of the first season, including the pilot, in widescreen anamorphic format; Gough and Millar are featured on the set's sole commentary track, which appears on the pilot episode. Viewers can also access a number of deleted scenes from various episodes as well as view original pre-production storyboards and WB promotional spots. An interactive "tour" of Smallville rounds out the extras, but DVD-ROM owners can use the discs to access more features via the Smallville web site. --Paul Gaita

Facts

The pilot episode broke the record for highest rated debut for The WB, with 8.4 million viewers.

The music is primarily composed by Mark Snow from X-files fame.

Season one sees the introduction of the regular cast, and storylines that regularly included a villain deriving a power from kryptonite exposure; the one-episode villains were a plot device developed by Gough and Millar. The first season primarily dealt with Clark trying to come to terms with his alien origins, and the revelation that his arrival on Earth was connected to the deaths of Lana's parents. After the first season, the series used fewer villain of the week episodes, focusing more on story arcs that affect each character and explore Clark's origins.

More on the DVD Set

The deluxe DVD collection of Smallville: The Complete First Season contains super special features including audio commentaries on the pilot by executive producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, as well as pilot director David Nutter. Another commentary with Gough and Millar appears on the show¹s second episode entitled "Metamorphosis." Additional special features include deleted scenes from two episodes, including the pilot, a storyboard to screen featurette for the pilot, an interactive tour of Smallville, English and French audio and English, French, Spanish and Portuguese subtitles. A DVD-ROM link to smallville.net website also provides access to additional bonus content.

The name Clark Kent is recognizable to generations of fans, but never before has there been an interpretation of the Superman legend quite like Smallville. Growing up in Smallville, Kansas, Clark Kent (Tom Welling) is a teenager who is slowly discovering his destiny as the champion of justice who will one day be known the world over as Superman. Someday, he¹ll master his powers and true calling, but for now he just has to get through adolescence. With realistic portrayals and state-of-the-art special effects reinterpreting the Superman mythology from its roots, Smallville was written and developed by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar, based on the DC Comics characters created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Smallville is produced by Tollin/Robbins Productions and Warner Bros. Television Production Inc.

 Season 1 Episode Guide

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