2012 Movie News Archives

February 6, 2012: "The Death and Return of Superman" Short Film Reaction

Max Landis By Michael Bailey.

I woke up on Saturday in a pretty decent mood. Despite having to work that day I had plans to attend a one day comic show the next day, an event I had been looking forward to for a few weeks. I was checking my e-mail before taking the garbage to the dump when one of my Facebook friends posted the YouTube link to Max Landis' "The Death and Return of Superman".

I. Went. Ballistic.

It has been some time since I got my fannish dander up in such a manner and in all honesty I went through some highs and lows over the course of the day, which in retrospect is a tad silly. At the same time when you are emotionally invested into a character or universe this type of thing is bound to happen. I like to think that I have gotten to a place as a Superman fan where I won't flip out at the slightest provocation. Apparently I still have my rage center. Good to know.

For a while I thought of writing up a huge post that would show, point by point, everything that is wrong with this video. Then after getting some sleep and doing some thinking I realized that the best way to handle this is to address the broader problems I have with what Max Landis has put out there and then walk away from the whole thing outside of several podcasts where I know it will come up. I mean I could spend hours going over every factual error he made. Maybe even the better part of a day. Frankly I have better things to do with my time.

Actually, let's start with those factual errors, just not point by point. It seems from watching the video that Landis filmed himself talking about the story and then went back and did dramatizations of the events he related. I watched a bit of a Knightfall video he produced and it went down pretty much the same way. The more I think about it the more I get the feeling that when Landis is on camera he is going off of his memories of the story, not any kind of organized notes or a script. This means that any mistakes he made in the re-telling are because he was going off the cuff/stream of consciousness with everything else done in post production. Fine. I get that.

How in the heck do you then, in post production, get something as basic as the issue where Superman died wrong?

ACTION COMICS (vol. 2) #75?

Really?

This is where any argument about the mistakes he made will fall apart for me. If you mess up while doing the initial discussion that's fine. I make mistakes all of the time while I am recording. Things happen in the heat of the moment. Making mistakes with stuff done in post-production is pretty inexcusable and displays an absurd amount of laziness.

Oddly enough the details Max got wrong are not my biggest issue with this video. My biggest issue is that Landis mixed two great tastes that do not taste good together; parody and commentary. The ultimate point Landis was trying to make is that the death of Superman ruined death in comics. Forever. (I'll get to why that is complete hogwash in a minute.) To make his point Max pulls a bait and switch by spending fifteen minutes tearing the story a new one and getting his friends to dress up and act out what he is saying before "getting real" at the end. I guess to him the meaning of the piece would have more impact if you get the audience laughing first and then talk about the serious side of the story, which would normally work for me and if Landis wasn't so pretentious about the whole thing I probably would have enjoyed it more.

So in the end it is not the commentary, which I mostly disagreed with, that I had the biggest issue with. It's not the factual mistakes he made, though they annoyed me as well. It's this character Landis is playing, if it is in fact a character. He is sitting there in the beginning dressed like your average hipster minus the glasses holding a glass containing alcohol telling me that I don't give a f*** about Superman. Everything about this guy screams, "I'm so much better and smarter than you so everything I say is important and correct." The way Landis carried himself put me off to the point that anything he has to say after those first few minutes is going to be seen through the filter of, "I don't like this guy," and if I don't like you funny I am probably not going to like you when you start making your ultimate point.

Speaking of that point death was broken in comics long before Superman assumed room temperature. Hell, Jean Grey came back in 1986. Wasp died in the middle of Secret Wars and came back several issues later. Most of the deaths and rebirths that Landis lists all happened within the past ten or so years. So, to add insult to injury, his entire point is wrong.

Something else just occurred to me. I was going to end this by writing about the fact that once again Superman has become the target of an elitist hipster. I have had to put up with this sort of thing from other pretentious fanboys for most of my collecting life. Until very recently I was usually the one Superman fan in my collecting circles. The thing is that the Death and Return of Superman was one of the rare moments where people really got behind the Man of Steel and he enjoyed some level of popularity. Suddenly I wasn't such an outsider for liking the character. And now this Max Landis guy comes along and dumps on that one moment. A moment, I might add, that brought a whole new generation of readers to the Superman titles, most of whom eventually left but not because they felt they were lied to.

Sigh.

Oh well. Life goes on. This does nothing to diminish my love of this story, this era of Superman or the character in general. Max Landis makes a number of good points in his film but those points are lost in a sea of poor research, bad attempts at humor and the overwhelming feeling that I was being talked down to. If you like the video and/or thought it was funny that is fine. I didn't and kind of wish it had never been made.

Michael Bailey



2012 Movie News

Listed below are all the Movie News items archived for 2012 organized into various categories:

“Man of Steel” Movie News:

“Justice League” Movie News: “Superman: Unbound” Animated Movie News: “Justice League: Doom” Animated Movie News: “Superman vs. The Elite” Animated Movie News: Christopher Reeve Movie News: Other Movie News:

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