February 7, 2025 • 33 mins
From super strength to awkward teen romance, the Podcast Full of Kryptonite is trading in capes for combine harvesters! Now that Superman & Lois has wrapped, we're rewinding to the beginning with a rewatch and review of Smallville's pilot episode. Get ready for long dramatic glances, meteor-freak mayhem, and the birth of Clark Kent's Superman journey. Because let's face it, before there was a Man of Steel, there was a farm boy with a serious case of meteor-induced angst. Join us this week as we ask the important questions: Was Lana Lang's hair always that perfect? And just how many times can one town be hit by meteor showers?
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
The Superman Superman.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Hey, I like it, Superman. It's catchy, sticks with you.
The kind of name that looks great splashed across three
college Superman, Supermanan. My name is Clark Kent and I
am Superman.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
I'm Clark Kent. I'm the Daily Planet.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
So what are you?
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Man or Superman?
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Welcome to another episode of the podcast Full of Kryptonite.
I'm your host, John Reid.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
We're back.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
We had a little bit of a hiatus because the
show ended, the Superman and Lewis show ended. I had
been talking about what I wanted to do after this,
and I had been wanting to go back through and
do a rewatch of Smallville and the other Superman TV shows.
So I said, you know what, I don't have enough
going on podcasting wise with our own show over the
(01:01):
thirty something movie podcast, and I love this one.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I love talking about Superman.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
So I did definitely want to take the opportunity to
kind of keep this going. And there is plenty of
smaller There's ten seasons of Smallville to take a look at,
so I'm excited to jump into that. And so for
this episode, I'm going to try to keep them fairly short,
maybe half hour or so, and just to get an
opportunity to go through each episode of Smallville. Now, this
(01:26):
will be weird for me to do this right up front,
but I'm going to direct you too, if you really
and truly want to get a great review of the
episodes of Smallville and find out more about behind the
scenes and things like that. If you haven't listened to Talkville,
that's the one that Michael Rosenbaum and Tom Welling do.
They've been doing for a few years now. That is outstanding.
I do listen to that one all the time. Actually
(01:47):
just started listening, didn't really catch up on it until
just recently. But that is an amazing show, and it's
just really fun to get to hear some of the
background that they bring into it, talking about when they
were on set and you know how they're it kind
of interactions with each other, went getting to know each other,
and then they just start to kind of dive into
behind the scenes stuff that happened on the show. So
absolutely check that out if you have not had a
(02:09):
chance to. But I'm happy that you're here, very excited
that you're here, and would love to eventually hear from everybody.
If you are a fan of Smallville, or if you're
going to go back through and do a rewatch with me,
I'd love to hear from you. Hear what you're loving
about the show. I hear what you're not liking about
the show. We may get to some seasons where you're like, eh,
I don't know, because I got to some seasons where
I was like, eh, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
So that's totally fine. I totally get it.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
I am a huge fan of this show, but I
fully understand there's some rough stuff there in the kind
of the middle area, right about the mid section. So
let me start with kind of my experience with Smallville.
I have always been a Superman fan from childhood. You
know this if you've been listening to us since we've
been doing podcasts Full of Kryptonite. I had the toys,
(02:55):
I would read the comics, watch the movies, watch the cartoons, spears.
Superman was some of my first to see it on
the screen, other than the movies themselves, The Super Boy Show,
which eventually I'd love to cover. The Super Boy Show.
It's been a long time since I've seen that one.
I used to watch that one when I was a kid.
Pretty much watched everything when I was in middle school
and high school is when Lewis and Clark was taking place,
(03:18):
and so just dove into that one too, and that
was appointment television for me. And then by the time
we reached I had heard that Smallville was coming out
and that it was going to be featured as a
kind of prequel story of Superman. You know, Superman, Clark
kent growing up in high school and kind of becoming
He's not Superman, but he is developing into the person
(03:42):
that Superman is going to be. So I was very
excited to hear that this show was coming out. At
this point, I was I believe at this point, I
was maybe a junior in college when this one came out.
And I can tell you exactly what happened the night
this one came out. It was a Tuesday night. The
(04:02):
reason I know that is because there were specials at
Buffalo Wild Wings in the college town that I lived
in on Tuesday nights. So we went to go get
some Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner and we came back
to my apartment. I had a single apartment by myself,
but a bunch of my friends were also kind of
nerdy Superman fans, and so they wanted to watch it
with me, so we all came back to my apartment
(04:23):
popped it on the TV. The pilot premiered on October sixteenth,
two thousand and one, was a Tuesday, and I believe,
if I recall this correctly, it had been delayed a
little bit because of nine to eleven. If I recall,
they were concerned that the media shower scene that it
starts off with and things exploding and people dying was
(04:43):
a bit too much, and so I believe it got
moved back a little bit that it was supposed to
have been premiered earlier. Don't quote me on that one
hundred percent sure, but I'm pretty certain that that is
a little backstory behind when it first came out. So yeah,
I'm going to spend these episodes talk all about Smallville.
This episode will be for the pilot, and then we'll
(05:04):
just go from there and if I've got some guest
hosts I can bring in. I've got plenty of other
people I know that love Superman who enjoyed Smallville. This
is the podcast that really when I first started listening
to podcasts, it really got me going, and it was
what inspired me to want to do my own podcasts,
and I've been doing them for about probably ten years
now with our other one. But originally I started listening
(05:27):
to I was looking for pod I was like, this podcast,
this is kind of cool. I can find any topic
I want. So one of the first ones was Raging Bullets,
a DC comics podcast, and these guys would have like
three four hour episodes where they would review everything that
had come out that week from DC Comics.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
It was amazing.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
I didn't even have to read the comics because they
were just going through everything. Like this is saving me
a ton of money. At the same time, I was like, well,
what other topics can I look up for podcasts?
Speaker 1 (05:52):
What else is there?
Speaker 3 (05:54):
And at the time, I was still, you know, knee
deep in Smallville, so it's I could maybe there's a
Smallville podcast. Searched it up, and sure enough, there was
one called the Shoe Podcast. It was Starkville's House of
l and that was Derrek Russell and Steve Glosson had
done that one, and I know that.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
I ended up doing some.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Kind of fake commercials and stuff for Steve's other shows
when he did other podcasts, and I would show up
on there. If anybody, if anybody listening to this knows
the person of Pipes that he would refer to because
of my voice, that was I was Pipes, and I
would show up every now and then and do some
stuff for Geek Out Loud and some of his other shows.
But that's what got me started was Starkville's House of
l and loved their those guys were hilarious and just
(06:33):
going through their review of Smallville and just their genuine
care for the character of Superman and how much they
just genuinely enjoyed the show. I mean, warts and all,
they enjoyed the show, and you know, just such fans
and they were so positive and so upbeat about it,
so very very cool. Love those guys. So yeah, I'm
(06:53):
not going to attempt to outdo them. I'm not going
to attempt to outdo Talkville because that would be impossible,
but just kind of sharing my thoughts about it, and
if you want to share yours, I would be more
than happy to hear yours as well. So yeah, it's
gonna be a fun journey. So we're gonna do one
episode a week. We're going to go through the ten
seasons of Smallville and then once that's done, I'll pick
another Superman show and we'll go from there. Excited to
(07:14):
kind of go back through and talk about the pilot
for this one. I started rewatching these just a little
while back, and it was fun to get back into
it because it had been several years since i'd done that.
One of the things I really have a strong connection
with in terms of Smallville is when Smallville was still going,
it was still live, it was around about the time
(07:37):
that my son was born, and then when it was
ending was kind of just right before when my daughter
was born.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Well, one of the things when my.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Kids were very, very little, I was trying to get
my wife an opportunity to get some sleep. So I
would try to be up with the kids if they
were up at night and needed a bottle or something
like that and we just couldn't get to sleep, and
so I would sit up with them for a bit
and put him a little bouncy chair that they had,
and I'd kind of sit next to him on the
couch and move their little bouncy chair so they'd fall
back asleep again.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
And for my son, I know, in.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Particular, all of those late nights that we spent I
would pop in my DVDs of Smallville, because at that
point I had been buying the seasons of Smallville on DVD,
and so that was a chance for me in both
two thousand and seven and twenty ten was a chance
for me to go back through and rewatch them. We
stayed up and we watched Smallville, and that's how we
(08:28):
got through a lot of those really late nights and
long late nights sometimes. So that was kind of a
fun memory to build, and you know, eventually maybe they'll
end up watching it themselves, but even if not, I've
got that memory that I can fall back on. So
this was if you're not as familiar with the shows
created by Al Goff and Miles Miller, who pitched this
as kind of a the phrase you're gonna hear regularly
(08:49):
when it comes to this show is no tights, no flights.
Their goal was to explore Clark Kent's teenage years without
jumping straight into the Superman lore, and it was inspired
by some other w B hits Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
Dawson's Creek, but had a bit of a superhero twist,
and so one of the kind of running jokes amongst
my friends and sometimes my wife was you know, this
(09:12):
was a wb show where all of the high school
kids look like they're about twenty five, and they're all
beautiful people. There's no people in these towns, in the
town of Smallville, Kansas that are not beautiful people. Tom
Welling initially turned down the role of Clark Kent before
being convinced to audition. Michael Rosenbaum won over the producers
with his comedic timing. Actually, Lex was originally conceived as
(09:36):
a more of kind of a dark brooding character, and
Michael and rosemm brought a little bit of comedy to
it when he was doing his audition, But you know,
still very much a dark, brooding character. But you know,
Michael Rosenbom's personality and this whole thing just makes a
phenomenal Lex luthor. Kristin Kruk was cast pretty quickly. I
think she was one of the first ones. The role
of Chloe Sullivan, played by Alison Mack, was created specifically
(09:58):
for Smallville. She was meant to be kind of the
lowest lane. And my understanding is is that at the
time they were possibly even considering that maybe she would
change her name at some point, or she would become
Lowest Lane because she's she's the reporter. She works for
the school newspaper, and she's always investigating weird things that
are going on. So that I believe was kind of
(10:19):
a bit of a I don't know if that was
an idea or a rumor going around that she would
become Lowess possibly, and then obviously they if that was
the case, they switched part way through the series, John Schneider.
If you're a fan of Dukes of Hazzard, you know
John Schneider from there, an Nett O'Toole, who was Superman
Three's Lana Lang. Those were Jonathan and Martha Kent, and
that was kind of a nice nod to past Superman
(10:42):
adaptation to have her in there. Originally, there was another
pilot originally that had a different Martha Kent in there,
So yeah, and that O'Toole was brought in after that.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
And I've actually seen some clips online.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
It's funny to see almost the exact same show and
see someone else playing the part that is not what
you ended up seeing on TV. And I think that
Martha did a decent job and that O'Toole is kind
of a you're leveling up there when you bring her in.
So the pilots I recall, had a huge budget, I
believe somewhere over four million dollars, maybe even more than that.
(11:16):
One of the most expensive TV pilots at the time,
shot in Vancouver, Canada, which is where the show ended
up living for all ten of its seasons. The Luther
mansion is known as Hatley Castle and has been used
in other comic book related movies and TV shows. You
would recognize it as Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters in
(11:37):
the television film Slash Failed Pilot Generation X from nineteen
ninety six.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
I actually watched that one too. I recorded that on
TV and.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
In the X Men film series X two, x Men United,
x Men, The Last Stand, x Men, Days of Future Past, Deadpool,
X Men Apocalypse. It was also used in Arrow so
seen there as well as the TV show as Oliver
Queen's mansion where he and his family lived. All Right,
so this we start off here with a very dramatic beginning.
(12:10):
As we start off the pilot, we get the meteor
shower right off the bat, and it is just you
see these meteors hurtling towards the earth, and then there's
a spaceship mixed in with those meteors, so anybody familiar
with the Superman lor knows exactly what's going on. Then
we cut to a helicopter flying over a cornfield. We
see that it is nineteen eighty nine. I believe it
(12:30):
says October nineteen eighty nine here and we see a
sign that tells us welcome to small Villcansas, population twenty
five thousand and one, creamed Corn Capital of the World.
Clark from Superman and Lois would be thrilled that is
the cream corn capital of the world. Interesting kind of
easter egg. Here we see a cover of the Daily
(12:53):
Planet that says Queen Industry CEO missing, presumed dead. And
as this paper is folded up we get to see
Lionel and Lex Luthor here. John Glover is an amazing
He's such a good villain in this show, and as
he progresses through these seasons, he is an amazing Lionel
Luther just he is one of the best parts of
(13:14):
this show. Then we kind of fly into Smallville and
we start to get introduced to some of the characters.
We get introduced to Lana Lang's aunt Nell, and she's there.
She's getting a Little Flirty with Jonathan Kenton, and this
is the day of what will become known as the
Day of the Meteor Shower. And so there's a parade
going through town. It's probably homecoming or you know, there's
(13:36):
a big game coming up. So everybody's got there there
waving their yellow and they're red, and everybody's excited.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
It's a great day.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
And then all of a sudden, we start to see
the meteors come flying in with Clark's ship flying in
as well. One thing I wanted to mention real quick
is we get a scene where Lex Luthor is running
through some cornfields and he ends up accidentally running into
some kid who's been stuck up on a scarecrow's pole,
(14:04):
and he's begging Lex to help him get down. And
this is a kind of a hazing thing that some
of the football players at Smallville High School do.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
This will come in later.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
But while he's there and little Lex with his curly
red hair, is trying to he's just terrified of this
whole thing. All of a sudden, a meteor hits in.
This massive shockwave runs through and flattens this cornfield, nearly
flattening Lex and the kid who's up on the scarecrow post.
And what we will eventually see later on is that
Lex is buried under some of the corn here and
(14:36):
has lost his hair. We see the people Smallville coming
out and they've seen that this meteor has crashed, and
all of a sudden, more meteors start to crash, and
we get a shot here of little teeny tiny Lona Lane.
She's got her little princess costume on. And there's a
media that comes in and I'm just gonna say, I
think this meteor was sentient and it has something against
(14:58):
the Lang family because it goes straight for them, lands
directly on them. I mean, people are being it's mass hysteria.
It's cats and dogs living together. And then they blows
up the water tower. It's just destroying so much in
the town. Cars are exploding, everything is just being shot
completely up in the air, just mass chaos. And so
(15:21):
this was what will kind of become known as turning
point the meteor shower. It's going to be a point
of contention for Clark later on when he learns that
because his ship was coming down in this meteor shower.
It's basically I mean, it's not his fault, but it's
kind of his fault that, you know, people died. Lana's
parents died during this whole thing. There is a meteor
(15:42):
that crashes in front of Jonathan and Martha's car, in
front of their truck, and they kind of the truck
runs off the road just a bit into a crater,
and when they get out to go check it out,
they find a little naked boy climbing out of a spaceship.
So they find him and they take him home. They've
had conversation earlier in this episode about how they had
(16:02):
always wanted kids and they haven't been able to. So
this is the traditional Superman story of you know, they've
wanted to have children, they're unable to have children, and
this is they've basically been given a gift.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
And so.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
After this scene, we fast forward to present day and
where now Clark is in high school and we see
him he's doing some Google searching. Probab wouldn't even Google
at that point. He's doing some Google searching because he
has kind of been probably been developing these abilities, and
we see he's looking up things like six year old
(16:37):
Korean boy lifts car off injured father, so he's probably
looking up to find out like why am I stronger
than I think I should be? And why am I
faster than I think I should be? So he doesn't
know yet what he is, just trying to kind of
figure things out. One of the strengths of this show
is how well Tom Welling plays a young Clark Kent.
I mean, not only does I always felt like, not
(16:59):
only does he look like a young Christopher Reeve, especially
as parts of the show kind of go on, as
it extends into you know, future seasons, he looks like
a young Christopher Reeve. And it was a lot of
fun to have Christopher Reeve show up in some later
seasons before he passed. But always one of the strengths
of this show was how Clark and his parents interacted,
Like it was just always It's exactly what you would
(17:21):
kind of expect from a young Clark, from a you know,
often curmudgeonly Jonathan, from a Martha that's trying to kind
of keep the piece between the two of them, And
I think that was always one of the strengths of
the show. The probably the biggest strength of the show
is the relationships Like this was, as with a lot
of other CW shows, it's all about the relationships.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
And this show, you know, did it well.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
And John Schneider played such a great Jonathan Kent, and
that o'tool was such a great Martha Kent, and they
This is one scene that you're gonna see regularly in
a lot of these episodes, and that is them having
a conversation about Clark keeping his power in check, keeping
his abilities in check, and Clark wants to go out
for the football team, and Jonathan basically says, Nope, not
(18:07):
not gonna happen, because what happens if you what happens
if you hurt somebody? What if something happens, You don't
know if you'll be able to control your powers. Clark
just wants to be normal like that. He's like any
other teenage kid. He just wants a normal life. And
he hasn't watched Tombstone yet to learn that there is
no normal life, Clark, There's just life, So go live
it and don't be late for the bus, else you're
(18:28):
gonna have to use super speed and run across the cornfield.
We see on the bus that he misses Chloe played
by Alison Mack and Pete Ross played by Sam Jones,
the third and they, I guess, placed a bet that
Clark would miss the bus, and then we get a
kind of a funny scene of Clark racing across the field.
We get to see the Smallville sign again of this
(18:48):
time and now it's Smallville, Kansas, the meteor.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Capital of the world.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
So unfortunately, creamed corn is no longer part of their
forte So Clark catches the bus. They end up at school,
and as we're kind of getting introduced to these different characters,
we end up at Smallville High School. We have just
this great scene of them getting to the school, Clark
kind of meeting up with his friends, and then we
(19:12):
get introduced to Lana Lang. And I always feel like
anytime Lana shows up, especially in these early episodes, this
(19:33):
is what I feel like like every time Clark sees Lana,
it's like time slows down. Her hair is blowing in
the wind. They make a comment, and I think this
is a great little easter egg here. They make a
comment and it's I think Chloe and Pete are saying, Okay,
now watch this. Clark tries to go talk to her
and then just trips and falls like a complete dufist
(19:53):
when he gets close. They're betting again on whether or
not he's gonna, you know, make a fool of himself,
and he absolutely does. He gets probably within about ten
feet of Lana and just completely trips and face plants,
and Chloe says something like, yeah, he can't get within
five feet Alana Lang without turning into a total freak show.
What we see is that Lana is wearing a necklace
(20:14):
with a green stone in it, and so the little
easter eggy thing here is Clark doesn't know what he
doesn't even know what this is. He doesn't know why
he feels weird and queasy around Laana. But we know,
if you know the Superman Laura, we know that her
necklace that she's got is kryptonite. It is made out
of the same meteor rock that you know killed her
parents and destroyed parts of the town. We don't know
(20:36):
this point. He doesn't know at this point that that's
his weakness. So he doesn't understand why he's feeling sick
and why he trips and falls and looks like a
complete fool around Laana. Her boyfriend, captain of the football team, Whitney,
shows up, and this is going to be kind of
a running thing, especially in this first season, where Clark
really likes Lana, would love to be with Lana, but
you know, he can't show his powers, so he can't
(20:59):
really compete with Whitney, who seems to be the big,
strong football player who just you know, has everything going
for him. We do get introduced to and Smallville tended
to refer to these as the freak of the week.
We get introduced to our freak of the week here,
and it is the same kid. He has not aged much.
It is the same kid who was the scarecrow at
(21:21):
the beginning of the show, and so we're going to
start to get kind of the idea that these meteor
rocks have imbued people with powers. We'll find out more
about that later, and that's kind of why we end
up having the freak of the week. Lex shows up,
this is now a grown up Lex with no hair,
shows up at a Luther Core plant in Smallville. Drives
up in his Porsche, gets out. In his very first moment,
(21:43):
he looks around and just goes, thanks Dad. And so
we get the idea that Lionel has sent almost kind
of like exiled Lex here to Smallville to run this
plant and it's not a very glamorous thing at all,
and so Lex is not super excited to be there.
Then we get to see this kind of the the
impetus for their relationship and this whole thing is Clark
(22:05):
is kind of standing on this bridge overlooking a river,
and Lex is driving fast in his car. He tries
to answer a phone call. Then he runs into some
like a giant thing of wires that has fallen on
the ground on the road off of a truck and
ends up crashing into Clark and going off the bridge
into the water. Clark tears open the top of the car,
pulls Lex out, saves his life. And this is going
(22:27):
to start running through the seasons that Lex is a
part of. I believe he was there for seven seasons.
This is going to start his pretty constant paranoia and
sense that there's more to Clark than meets the eye.
He can't really ever prove it, but he's not going
to stop looking. We also get a little hint there
that Jonathan Kent does not care for the Luthers. It
sounds like there is either some bad blood there, or
(22:49):
they know them from somewhere, or maybe just by reputation.
But Jonathan not a fan of anybody with the last
name Luther, and especially not a fan because you know,
Luther ran over his son with a car, and that's
you know, usually kind of a big no no. One
of the other cool things about this if you look
at any of the letterman jackets that the high school
football players are wearing in this show, the S it
(23:11):
looks different, I think in other seasons, but especially this
first season, the way the S is done for Smallville
on their jackets looks like the Superman symbol. There's kind
of a almost like a I don't know what you
call that shape, it's almost like a baseball the outline
around the S and then with the kind of the
stylized S in the middle of that, and always that
was kind of a fun little easter egg that they
(23:33):
did for the first season. I do believe it does
change to more of a traditional traditional kind of letterman
jacket type s in later seasons. But yeah, so and
then we've got we've got our Freak of the Week
shows up and starts attacking and killing the players who
had put him on the scarecrow poll twelve years ago.
(23:53):
And so he's electrocuting them somehow with these powers. Clark
shows up back at home in the next scene and
there is a truck, a brand new truck with a
big bow on top, and a letter from Lex Luthor,
you know, telling him to make sure he drives careful.
But this is a gift for him for saving his life.
Of course, Jonathan says, nope, there's no way you're keeping this.
You don't get No, we don't take anything from the
(24:14):
Luther's not a chance. So Clark is obviously upset. Mentions
again just about wanting a normal life, and or Jonathan
says something about, you know, having a normal life, and
Clark says normal, you want to talk about normal, and
then shoves his hand in the wood chipper to show
his father that he is invulnerable up to that point.
So I'm kind of wondering too, like, what are the
(24:35):
different abilities that Jonathan and Martha know that their son
has at this point. Clearly he did not know that
his son was invulnerable, because he panics as soon as
Clark shoves his arm in that woodchipper. You know, I
think it's probably time that you find out a little
bit more about so your parents. So let me show
you something, and he shows him this piece of metal
that has what we know as Kryptonian symbols on it,
(24:57):
and he basically says, or Clark says, what is And
he says, I don't know. I've tried to have it
deciphered and it's not in any language known to mankind.
And he's like, what are you saying, dad, And he's like, well,
I'm just saying I don't think your parents.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Were from around here.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
It's like, yeah, what, like I'm from another planet And
he's like, hm, I guess you'll tell me next that
you've got my spaceship stassed in the attic and he's like, well,
it's in the storm cellar, so why don't I show
you that? And then the next scene they do take
him down to the storm cellar and show him the
ship that he came in, and so Clark is having
a little bit of a tough time accepting this. At
this point, we get a little scene here where Clark
(25:34):
is kind of walking around, probably just trying to figure
out life. At this point, runs into Alta in the
cemetery and finds out that she goes there to kind
of talk to her parents, and they have a little
moment there where she's talking to her parents and tells
Clark some stuff about them, and we kind of realized
that maybe, even if they're not going to be together
as love interests, she confides in Clark there's something about
(25:55):
him that makes him easy to talk to and that
maybe they can be friends even if it's not going
to be more than that. So then we get after
the scene with them talking to together, we kind of
cut back to the Luther mansion. Clark goes to visit Lex.
He's he's doing fencing. Lex is going to be fencing
a lot in this series, and so he goes to
visit and Lex. This is kind of an interesting scene
(26:17):
because Lex starts making all of these grand overtures about
how their friendship is going to be the stuff of legends.
First of all, you're older than this kid is by
you know, by several years, so kids in high school.
You're probably I don't know, maybe twenty something, so you're
quite a bit older than this kid. And you hit
(26:37):
him with your car, and now he's come to your
house and you're telling him that our friendship will be
the stuff of legends, and you're special and all these
other things, and I'm like, I think it's a little creepy.
I just I mean, I was just gonna put it
out there. It's probably a little creepy. I like that
if somebody said that to me, I would find that
(26:58):
to be a little off putting, and maybe I just
run so that they didn't kill me and take my liver.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
We get Chloe investigating.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
They kind of, you know, team up with Chloe and
she's investigating what happened because there was a death. We
get introduced to the wall of weird. This is something
that's going to be a recurring thing, especially with her
where she has been collecting all these stories of the
weird things that go on in Smallville because her theory
is that since the meteor shower, Smallville has been a
hotbed of weird activity, unexplained activity. The high school kids
(27:31):
grab Clark in the parking lot and they decide they're
going to make him this year's scarecrow. Normally, they wouldn't
be able to overpower Clark and bring him, but because
Whitney saw him kind of eyeing Lana, he had taken
Lana's necklace and put it on Clark and said, well,
if you like her so much, here, you can wear
her necklace. Of course, that's going to keep him weak
and allow them to overpower him. Overpower him. So they
(27:53):
did take him out. They put him on the scarecrow pole,
and then the kid actually who was the scarecrow twelve
years ago shows up in the cornfield and Clark is like,
can you get me down from here? He's like, no, sorry,
I got to go go take care of my stuff.
Lex does end up finding Clark and gets him down
just in time for Clark to go and rescue everybody
and stop the Freak of the Week from killing everybody
(28:14):
at the high school.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Freak of the.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
Week actually ends up elect cuting himself inside of a
truck like there was some gasoline spilled and he tried
to use his powers and it backfired on him big time.
And then we kind of end the episodes with you know,
Clark and Jonathan kind of talking through some things, and
Clark imagines that he gets a chance to talk to Lana,
but we find out it was just imagination, and she
(28:38):
comes home from the dance and he's their house is
like right across from her house, and so he's kind
of looking out and then sees her come home. So
that is the first Then credits are up, and that's
the first episode. So there were a lot of a
lot of songs that were featured in this first episode.
I tried to pull kind of a list of them.
I think I got him, so some of these I
(28:58):
don't know if I have got the right ones. But
there was The Way It Is by Bruce hornsby Long
Way Around by Eagle Eye Cherry, Everywhere You Go by Stereo, Stereobliss, Unstoppable,
by The Calling, Wander by Embrace Inside the Memories, Feared
the Clown, Let's Go Capital I Maybe by Stereophonics, Everything
(29:18):
I Own by Jude Woodstock, Alice by Paul Trudeau, everything
by Lifehouse. I mean, this is when I started playing
this again. I had even though this came out in
two thousand and one, and I think of this as
a two thousands show musically, and just the way the
show looks, it's it's very late nineties like. It has
so much of that late nineties vibe to it, and
(29:39):
the music. The late nineties music was a lot of
fun to hear too. But that'll be a thing, you know,
because eventually they started putting out CDs of the Smallville
Mix or the Talent Mix. That's what the Coffee Shop
would come to be known. So yeah, so a lot
of pop music, as most of the CW shows did.
So yes, that is the first pilot. That's the pilot,
(30:00):
and we start to get hints here of Lex beginning
his investigation into Clark. Clark is kind of a natural hero.
He's going to struggle with his identity throughout this show,
especially this season. We get some hints here and there.
I mean they are constantly dropping little lines of dialogue
and hints that Clark will be a savior figure at
some point in the future, and just there's a lot
(30:22):
of fun stuff. If you're a especially at the time,
if you were a Superman fan and the last shows
you got were back in the eighties, you got the
super Boy Show. In the nineties you had Lois and Clark.
So really, especially if you were younger, and at this point,
I mean, I was older than these characters are supposed
to be. But there's a bit of a difference between
a Superman show where it's you know, it's almost like
(30:45):
Desperate Housewives Superman with Superman. With Lois and Clark, it
was much more of a kind of comedy romance.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Type show.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
I enjoyed it, but I don't know that I was
the target audience for that because I was a high
school kid when that was coming out, and so, you know,
I love the show because it was Superman, but there
were certain things about the show, especially when it started
to get a little goofy.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
It was a little weird.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
But the idea that we get to go back and
have a serious look at this is Superman when he
is first starting out, when he's not Superman yet, He's
got to learn how to be Superman, and we're going
to see because one of the interesting things to me
was always how does someone with those kind of powers
become good versus becoming bad? And in this show you
(31:32):
actually get to see it. You get to see why
does Lex become the way he does. Lex is not
evil when we start this show off. He's trying to
fight back against the influence of his father. As the
show goes on, we're going to see how Lex becomes
the person he becomes. Same thing with Clark. He's not
the fully formed Clark Kent that we see in the
movies and that we see when we get Lois and Clark.
(31:54):
He's a high school kid, and so we get to
see from every step of the way how someone gets
raised by his parents into a superman. This is how
he gets there, this is where he develops the moral
compass that he has later on. So such a fun show.
It's fun to get the start going back through it again.
I am really looking forward to going through the next
ten seasons of this show here on the podcast Full
(32:16):
of Kryptonite. If you want to reach out, there's a
good chance that might feature some of your comments here.
If you leave any reviews for us on Apple Podcasts
or wherever you get your podcasts. I would definitely love
to share any of your comments here on the show.
If you've got any questions about this, if you just
want to share some of your memories of where you
were when you watch these episodes, if you recall, would
(32:38):
love to hear from you, so please feel free to
do that, and would end up loving to read your
words here on the show. So thank you so much everybody.
This has been another episode of the podcast Full of Ryptonite.
You can find us in all the different social media spots.
You can find these episodes anywhere you find your podcast,
and I am looking forward to coming back here next
week to talk about episode two, which is called a
(32:59):
metamorph physis. We get we get bug a boy in metamorphosis.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
It's gonna be a lot of fun, all right. Everybody up,
up and away. We see you back here next time.
So M.
The Superman Superman.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Hey, I like it, Superman. It's catchy, sticks with you.
The kind of name that looks great splashed across three
college Superman, Supermanan. My name is Clark Kent and I
am Superman.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
I'm Clark Kent. I'm the Daily Planet.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
So what are you?
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Man or Superman?
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Welcome to another episode of the podcast Full of Kryptonite.
I'm your host, John Reid.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
We're back.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
We had a little bit of a hiatus because the
show ended, the Superman and Lewis show ended. I had
been talking about what I wanted to do after this,
and I had been wanting to go back through and
do a rewatch of Smallville and the other Superman TV shows.
So I said, you know what, I don't have enough
going on podcasting wise with our own show over the
(01:01):
thirty something movie podcast, and I love this one.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I love talking about Superman.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
So I did definitely want to take the opportunity to
kind of keep this going. And there is plenty of
smaller There's ten seasons of Smallville to take a look at,
so I'm excited to jump into that. And so for
this episode, I'm going to try to keep them fairly short,
maybe half hour or so, and just to get an
opportunity to go through each episode of Smallville. Now, this
(01:26):
will be weird for me to do this right up front,
but I'm going to direct you too, if you really
and truly want to get a great review of the
episodes of Smallville and find out more about behind the
scenes and things like that. If you haven't listened to Talkville,
that's the one that Michael Rosenbaum and Tom Welling do.
They've been doing for a few years now. That is outstanding.
I do listen to that one all the time. Actually
(01:47):
just started listening, didn't really catch up on it until
just recently. But that is an amazing show, and it's
just really fun to get to hear some of the
background that they bring into it, talking about when they
were on set and you know how they're it kind
of interactions with each other, went getting to know each other,
and then they just start to kind of dive into
behind the scenes stuff that happened on the show. So
absolutely check that out if you have not had a
(02:09):
chance to. But I'm happy that you're here, very excited
that you're here, and would love to eventually hear from everybody.
If you are a fan of Smallville, or if you're
going to go back through and do a rewatch with me,
I'd love to hear from you. Hear what you're loving
about the show. I hear what you're not liking about
the show. We may get to some seasons where you're like, eh,
I don't know, because I got to some seasons where
I was like, eh, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
So that's totally fine. I totally get it.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
I am a huge fan of this show, but I
fully understand there's some rough stuff there in the kind
of the middle area, right about the mid section. So
let me start with kind of my experience with Smallville.
I have always been a Superman fan from childhood. You
know this if you've been listening to us since we've
been doing podcasts Full of Kryptonite. I had the toys,
(02:55):
I would read the comics, watch the movies, watch the cartoons, spears.
Superman was some of my first to see it on
the screen, other than the movies themselves, The Super Boy Show,
which eventually I'd love to cover. The Super Boy Show.
It's been a long time since I've seen that one.
I used to watch that one when I was a kid.
Pretty much watched everything when I was in middle school
and high school is when Lewis and Clark was taking place,
(03:18):
and so just dove into that one too, and that
was appointment television for me. And then by the time
we reached I had heard that Smallville was coming out
and that it was going to be featured as a
kind of prequel story of Superman. You know, Superman, Clark
kent growing up in high school and kind of becoming
He's not Superman, but he is developing into the person
(03:42):
that Superman is going to be. So I was very
excited to hear that this show was coming out. At
this point, I was I believe at this point, I
was maybe a junior in college when this one came out.
And I can tell you exactly what happened the night
this one came out. It was a Tuesday night. The
(04:02):
reason I know that is because there were specials at
Buffalo Wild Wings in the college town that I lived
in on Tuesday nights. So we went to go get
some Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner and we came back
to my apartment. I had a single apartment by myself,
but a bunch of my friends were also kind of
nerdy Superman fans, and so they wanted to watch it
with me, so we all came back to my apartment
(04:23):
popped it on the TV. The pilot premiered on October sixteenth,
two thousand and one, was a Tuesday, and I believe,
if I recall this correctly, it had been delayed a
little bit because of nine to eleven. If I recall,
they were concerned that the media shower scene that it
starts off with and things exploding and people dying was
(04:43):
a bit too much, and so I believe it got
moved back a little bit that it was supposed to
have been premiered earlier. Don't quote me on that one
hundred percent sure, but I'm pretty certain that that is
a little backstory behind when it first came out. So yeah,
I'm going to spend these episodes talk all about Smallville.
This episode will be for the pilot, and then we'll
(05:04):
just go from there and if I've got some guest
hosts I can bring in. I've got plenty of other
people I know that love Superman who enjoyed Smallville. This
is the podcast that really when I first started listening
to podcasts, it really got me going, and it was
what inspired me to want to do my own podcasts,
and I've been doing them for about probably ten years
now with our other one. But originally I started listening
(05:27):
to I was looking for pod I was like, this podcast,
this is kind of cool. I can find any topic
I want. So one of the first ones was Raging Bullets,
a DC comics podcast, and these guys would have like
three four hour episodes where they would review everything that
had come out that week from DC Comics.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
It was amazing.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
I didn't even have to read the comics because they
were just going through everything. Like this is saving me
a ton of money. At the same time, I was like, well,
what other topics can I look up for podcasts?
Speaker 1 (05:52):
What else is there?
Speaker 3 (05:54):
And at the time, I was still, you know, knee
deep in Smallville, so it's I could maybe there's a
Smallville podcast. Searched it up, and sure enough, there was
one called the Shoe Podcast. It was Starkville's House of
l and that was Derrek Russell and Steve Glosson had
done that one, and I know that.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
I ended up doing some.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Kind of fake commercials and stuff for Steve's other shows
when he did other podcasts, and I would show up
on there. If anybody, if anybody listening to this knows
the person of Pipes that he would refer to because
of my voice, that was I was Pipes, and I
would show up every now and then and do some
stuff for Geek Out Loud and some of his other shows.
But that's what got me started was Starkville's House of
l and loved their those guys were hilarious and just
(06:33):
going through their review of Smallville and just their genuine
care for the character of Superman and how much they
just genuinely enjoyed the show. I mean, warts and all,
they enjoyed the show, and you know, just such fans
and they were so positive and so upbeat about it,
so very very cool. Love those guys. So yeah, I'm
(06:53):
not going to attempt to outdo them. I'm not going
to attempt to outdo Talkville because that would be impossible,
but just kind of sharing my thoughts about it, and
if you want to share yours, I would be more
than happy to hear yours as well. So yeah, it's
gonna be a fun journey. So we're gonna do one
episode a week. We're going to go through the ten
seasons of Smallville and then once that's done, I'll pick
another Superman show and we'll go from there. Excited to
(07:14):
kind of go back through and talk about the pilot
for this one. I started rewatching these just a little
while back, and it was fun to get back into
it because it had been several years since i'd done that.
One of the things I really have a strong connection
with in terms of Smallville is when Smallville was still going,
it was still live, it was around about the time
(07:37):
that my son was born, and then when it was
ending was kind of just right before when my daughter
was born.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Well, one of the things when my.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Kids were very, very little, I was trying to get
my wife an opportunity to get some sleep. So I
would try to be up with the kids if they
were up at night and needed a bottle or something
like that and we just couldn't get to sleep, and
so I would sit up with them for a bit
and put him a little bouncy chair that they had,
and I'd kind of sit next to him on the
couch and move their little bouncy chair so they'd fall
back asleep again.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
And for my son, I know, in.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Particular, all of those late nights that we spent I
would pop in my DVDs of Smallville, because at that
point I had been buying the seasons of Smallville on DVD,
and so that was a chance for me in both
two thousand and seven and twenty ten was a chance
for me to go back through and rewatch them. We
stayed up and we watched Smallville, and that's how we
(08:28):
got through a lot of those really late nights and
long late nights sometimes. So that was kind of a
fun memory to build, and you know, eventually maybe they'll
end up watching it themselves, but even if not, I've
got that memory that I can fall back on. So
this was if you're not as familiar with the shows
created by Al Goff and Miles Miller, who pitched this
as kind of a the phrase you're gonna hear regularly
(08:49):
when it comes to this show is no tights, no flights.
Their goal was to explore Clark Kent's teenage years without
jumping straight into the Superman lore, and it was inspired
by some other w B hits Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
Dawson's Creek, but had a bit of a superhero twist,
and so one of the kind of running jokes amongst
my friends and sometimes my wife was you know, this
(09:12):
was a wb show where all of the high school
kids look like they're about twenty five, and they're all
beautiful people. There's no people in these towns, in the
town of Smallville, Kansas that are not beautiful people. Tom
Welling initially turned down the role of Clark Kent before
being convinced to audition. Michael Rosenbaum won over the producers
with his comedic timing. Actually, Lex was originally conceived as
(09:36):
a more of kind of a dark brooding character, and
Michael and rosemm brought a little bit of comedy to
it when he was doing his audition, But you know,
still very much a dark, brooding character. But you know,
Michael Rosenbom's personality and this whole thing just makes a
phenomenal Lex luthor. Kristin Kruk was cast pretty quickly. I
think she was one of the first ones. The role
of Chloe Sullivan, played by Alison Mack, was created specifically
(09:58):
for Smallville. She was meant to be kind of the
lowest lane. And my understanding is is that at the
time they were possibly even considering that maybe she would
change her name at some point, or she would become
Lowest Lane because she's she's the reporter. She works for
the school newspaper, and she's always investigating weird things that
are going on. So that I believe was kind of
(10:19):
a bit of a I don't know if that was
an idea or a rumor going around that she would
become Lowess possibly, and then obviously they if that was
the case, they switched part way through the series, John Schneider.
If you're a fan of Dukes of Hazzard, you know
John Schneider from there, an Nett O'Toole, who was Superman
Three's Lana Lang. Those were Jonathan and Martha Kent, and
that was kind of a nice nod to past Superman
(10:42):
adaptation to have her in there. Originally, there was another
pilot originally that had a different Martha Kent in there,
So yeah, and that O'Toole was brought in after that.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
And I've actually seen some clips online.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
It's funny to see almost the exact same show and
see someone else playing the part that is not what
you ended up seeing on TV. And I think that
Martha did a decent job and that O'Toole is kind
of a you're leveling up there when you bring her in.
So the pilots I recall, had a huge budget, I
believe somewhere over four million dollars, maybe even more than that.
(11:16):
One of the most expensive TV pilots at the time,
shot in Vancouver, Canada, which is where the show ended
up living for all ten of its seasons. The Luther
mansion is known as Hatley Castle and has been used
in other comic book related movies and TV shows. You
would recognize it as Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters in
(11:37):
the television film Slash Failed Pilot Generation X from nineteen
ninety six.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
I actually watched that one too. I recorded that on
TV and.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
In the X Men film series X two, x Men United,
x Men, The Last Stand, x Men, Days of Future Past, Deadpool,
X Men Apocalypse. It was also used in Arrow so
seen there as well as the TV show as Oliver
Queen's mansion where he and his family lived. All Right,
so this we start off here with a very dramatic beginning.
(12:10):
As we start off the pilot, we get the meteor
shower right off the bat, and it is just you
see these meteors hurtling towards the earth, and then there's
a spaceship mixed in with those meteors, so anybody familiar
with the Superman lor knows exactly what's going on. Then
we cut to a helicopter flying over a cornfield. We
see that it is nineteen eighty nine. I believe it
(12:30):
says October nineteen eighty nine here and we see a
sign that tells us welcome to small Villcansas, population twenty
five thousand and one, creamed Corn Capital of the World.
Clark from Superman and Lois would be thrilled that is
the cream corn capital of the world. Interesting kind of
easter egg. Here we see a cover of the Daily
(12:53):
Planet that says Queen Industry CEO missing, presumed dead. And
as this paper is folded up we get to see
Lionel and Lex Luthor here. John Glover is an amazing
He's such a good villain in this show, and as
he progresses through these seasons, he is an amazing Lionel
Luther just he is one of the best parts of
(13:14):
this show. Then we kind of fly into Smallville and
we start to get introduced to some of the characters.
We get introduced to Lana Lang's aunt Nell, and she's there.
She's getting a Little Flirty with Jonathan Kenton, and this
is the day of what will become known as the
Day of the Meteor Shower. And so there's a parade
going through town. It's probably homecoming or you know, there's
(13:36):
a big game coming up. So everybody's got there there
waving their yellow and they're red, and everybody's excited.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
It's a great day.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
And then all of a sudden, we start to see
the meteors come flying in with Clark's ship flying in
as well. One thing I wanted to mention real quick
is we get a scene where Lex Luthor is running
through some cornfields and he ends up accidentally running into
some kid who's been stuck up on a scarecrow's pole,
(14:04):
and he's begging Lex to help him get down. And
this is a kind of a hazing thing that some
of the football players at Smallville High School do.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
This will come in later.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
But while he's there and little Lex with his curly
red hair, is trying to he's just terrified of this
whole thing. All of a sudden, a meteor hits in.
This massive shockwave runs through and flattens this cornfield, nearly
flattening Lex and the kid who's up on the scarecrow post.
And what we will eventually see later on is that
Lex is buried under some of the corn here and
(14:36):
has lost his hair. We see the people Smallville coming
out and they've seen that this meteor has crashed, and
all of a sudden, more meteors start to crash, and
we get a shot here of little teeny tiny Lona Lane.
She's got her little princess costume on. And there's a
media that comes in and I'm just gonna say, I
think this meteor was sentient and it has something against
(14:58):
the Lang family because it goes straight for them, lands
directly on them. I mean, people are being it's mass hysteria.
It's cats and dogs living together. And then they blows
up the water tower. It's just destroying so much in
the town. Cars are exploding, everything is just being shot
completely up in the air, just mass chaos. And so
(15:21):
this was what will kind of become known as turning
point the meteor shower. It's going to be a point
of contention for Clark later on when he learns that
because his ship was coming down in this meteor shower.
It's basically I mean, it's not his fault, but it's
kind of his fault that, you know, people died. Lana's
parents died during this whole thing. There is a meteor
(15:42):
that crashes in front of Jonathan and Martha's car, in
front of their truck, and they kind of the truck
runs off the road just a bit into a crater,
and when they get out to go check it out,
they find a little naked boy climbing out of a spaceship.
So they find him and they take him home. They've
had conversation earlier in this episode about how they had
(16:02):
always wanted kids and they haven't been able to. So
this is the traditional Superman story of you know, they've
wanted to have children, they're unable to have children, and
this is they've basically been given a gift.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
And so.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
After this scene, we fast forward to present day and
where now Clark is in high school and we see
him he's doing some Google searching. Probab wouldn't even Google
at that point. He's doing some Google searching because he
has kind of been probably been developing these abilities, and
we see he's looking up things like six year old
(16:37):
Korean boy lifts car off injured father, so he's probably
looking up to find out like why am I stronger
than I think I should be? And why am I
faster than I think I should be? So he doesn't
know yet what he is, just trying to kind of
figure things out. One of the strengths of this show
is how well Tom Welling plays a young Clark Kent.
I mean, not only does I always felt like, not
(16:59):
only does he look like a young Christopher Reeve, especially
as parts of the show kind of go on, as
it extends into you know, future seasons, he looks like
a young Christopher Reeve. And it was a lot of
fun to have Christopher Reeve show up in some later
seasons before he passed. But always one of the strengths
of this show was how Clark and his parents interacted,
Like it was just always It's exactly what you would
(17:21):
kind of expect from a young Clark, from a you know,
often curmudgeonly Jonathan, from a Martha that's trying to kind
of keep the piece between the two of them, And
I think that was always one of the strengths of
the show. The probably the biggest strength of the show
is the relationships Like this was, as with a lot
of other CW shows, it's all about the relationships.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
And this show, you know, did it well.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
And John Schneider played such a great Jonathan Kent, and
that o'tool was such a great Martha Kent, and they
This is one scene that you're gonna see regularly in
a lot of these episodes, and that is them having
a conversation about Clark keeping his power in check, keeping
his abilities in check, and Clark wants to go out
for the football team, and Jonathan basically says, Nope, not
(18:07):
not gonna happen, because what happens if you what happens
if you hurt somebody? What if something happens, You don't
know if you'll be able to control your powers. Clark
just wants to be normal like that. He's like any
other teenage kid. He just wants a normal life. And
he hasn't watched Tombstone yet to learn that there is
no normal life, Clark, There's just life, So go live
it and don't be late for the bus, else you're
(18:28):
gonna have to use super speed and run across the cornfield.
We see on the bus that he misses Chloe played
by Alison Mack and Pete Ross played by Sam Jones,
the third and they, I guess, placed a bet that
Clark would miss the bus, and then we get a
kind of a funny scene of Clark racing across the field.
We get to see the Smallville sign again of this
(18:48):
time and now it's Smallville, Kansas, the meteor.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Capital of the world.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
So unfortunately, creamed corn is no longer part of their
forte So Clark catches the bus. They end up at school,
and as we're kind of getting introduced to these different characters,
we end up at Smallville High School. We have just
this great scene of them getting to the school, Clark
kind of meeting up with his friends, and then we
(19:12):
get introduced to Lana Lang. And I always feel like
anytime Lana shows up, especially in these early episodes, this
(19:33):
is what I feel like like every time Clark sees Lana,
it's like time slows down. Her hair is blowing in
the wind. They make a comment, and I think this
is a great little easter egg here. They make a
comment and it's I think Chloe and Pete are saying, Okay,
now watch this. Clark tries to go talk to her
and then just trips and falls like a complete dufist
(19:53):
when he gets close. They're betting again on whether or
not he's gonna, you know, make a fool of himself,
and he absolutely does. He gets probably within about ten
feet of Lana and just completely trips and face plants,
and Chloe says something like, yeah, he can't get within
five feet Alana Lang without turning into a total freak show.
What we see is that Lana is wearing a necklace
(20:14):
with a green stone in it, and so the little
easter eggy thing here is Clark doesn't know what he
doesn't even know what this is. He doesn't know why
he feels weird and queasy around Laana. But we know,
if you know the Superman Laura, we know that her
necklace that she's got is kryptonite. It is made out
of the same meteor rock that you know killed her
parents and destroyed parts of the town. We don't know
(20:36):
this point. He doesn't know at this point that that's
his weakness. So he doesn't understand why he's feeling sick
and why he trips and falls and looks like a
complete fool around Laana. Her boyfriend, captain of the football team, Whitney,
shows up, and this is going to be kind of
a running thing, especially in this first season, where Clark
really likes Lana, would love to be with Lana, but
you know, he can't show his powers, so he can't
(20:59):
really compete with Whitney, who seems to be the big,
strong football player who just you know, has everything going
for him. We do get introduced to and Smallville tended
to refer to these as the freak of the week.
We get introduced to our freak of the week here,
and it is the same kid. He has not aged much.
It is the same kid who was the scarecrow at
(21:21):
the beginning of the show, and so we're going to
start to get kind of the idea that these meteor
rocks have imbued people with powers. We'll find out more
about that later, and that's kind of why we end
up having the freak of the week. Lex shows up,
this is now a grown up Lex with no hair,
shows up at a Luther Core plant in Smallville. Drives
up in his Porsche, gets out. In his very first moment,
(21:43):
he looks around and just goes, thanks Dad. And so
we get the idea that Lionel has sent almost kind
of like exiled Lex here to Smallville to run this
plant and it's not a very glamorous thing at all,
and so Lex is not super excited to be there.
Then we get to see this kind of the the
impetus for their relationship and this whole thing is Clark
(22:05):
is kind of standing on this bridge overlooking a river,
and Lex is driving fast in his car. He tries
to answer a phone call. Then he runs into some
like a giant thing of wires that has fallen on
the ground on the road off of a truck and
ends up crashing into Clark and going off the bridge
into the water. Clark tears open the top of the car,
pulls Lex out, saves his life. And this is going
(22:27):
to start running through the seasons that Lex is a
part of. I believe he was there for seven seasons.
This is going to start his pretty constant paranoia and
sense that there's more to Clark than meets the eye.
He can't really ever prove it, but he's not going
to stop looking. We also get a little hint there
that Jonathan Kent does not care for the Luthers. It
sounds like there is either some bad blood there, or
(22:49):
they know them from somewhere, or maybe just by reputation.
But Jonathan not a fan of anybody with the last
name Luther, and especially not a fan because you know,
Luther ran over his son with a car, and that's
you know, usually kind of a big no no. One
of the other cool things about this if you look
at any of the letterman jackets that the high school
football players are wearing in this show, the S it
(23:11):
looks different, I think in other seasons, but especially this
first season, the way the S is done for Smallville
on their jackets looks like the Superman symbol. There's kind
of a almost like a I don't know what you
call that shape, it's almost like a baseball the outline
around the S and then with the kind of the
stylized S in the middle of that, and always that
was kind of a fun little easter egg that they
(23:33):
did for the first season. I do believe it does
change to more of a traditional traditional kind of letterman
jacket type s in later seasons. But yeah, so and
then we've got we've got our Freak of the Week
shows up and starts attacking and killing the players who
had put him on the scarecrow poll twelve years ago.
(23:53):
And so he's electrocuting them somehow with these powers. Clark
shows up back at home in the next scene and
there is a truck, a brand new truck with a
big bow on top, and a letter from Lex Luthor,
you know, telling him to make sure he drives careful.
But this is a gift for him for saving his life.
Of course, Jonathan says, nope, there's no way you're keeping this.
You don't get No, we don't take anything from the
(24:14):
Luther's not a chance. So Clark is obviously upset. Mentions
again just about wanting a normal life, and or Jonathan
says something about, you know, having a normal life, and
Clark says normal, you want to talk about normal, and
then shoves his hand in the wood chipper to show
his father that he is invulnerable up to that point.
So I'm kind of wondering too, like, what are the
(24:35):
different abilities that Jonathan and Martha know that their son
has at this point. Clearly he did not know that
his son was invulnerable, because he panics as soon as
Clark shoves his arm in that woodchipper. You know, I
think it's probably time that you find out a little
bit more about so your parents. So let me show
you something, and he shows him this piece of metal
that has what we know as Kryptonian symbols on it,
(24:57):
and he basically says, or Clark says, what is And
he says, I don't know. I've tried to have it
deciphered and it's not in any language known to mankind.
And he's like, what are you saying, dad, And he's like, well,
I'm just saying I don't think your parents.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Were from around here.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
It's like, yeah, what, like I'm from another planet And
he's like, hm, I guess you'll tell me next that
you've got my spaceship stassed in the attic and he's like, well,
it's in the storm cellar, so why don't I show
you that? And then the next scene they do take
him down to the storm cellar and show him the
ship that he came in, and so Clark is having
a little bit of a tough time accepting this. At
this point, we get a little scene here where Clark
(25:34):
is kind of walking around, probably just trying to figure
out life. At this point, runs into Alta in the
cemetery and finds out that she goes there to kind
of talk to her parents, and they have a little
moment there where she's talking to her parents and tells
Clark some stuff about them, and we kind of realized
that maybe, even if they're not going to be together
as love interests, she confides in Clark there's something about
(25:55):
him that makes him easy to talk to and that
maybe they can be friends even if it's not going
to be more than that. So then we get after
the scene with them talking to together, we kind of
cut back to the Luther mansion. Clark goes to visit Lex.
He's he's doing fencing. Lex is going to be fencing
a lot in this series, and so he goes to
visit and Lex. This is kind of an interesting scene
(26:17):
because Lex starts making all of these grand overtures about
how their friendship is going to be the stuff of legends.
First of all, you're older than this kid is by
you know, by several years, so kids in high school.
You're probably I don't know, maybe twenty something, so you're
quite a bit older than this kid. And you hit
(26:37):
him with your car, and now he's come to your
house and you're telling him that our friendship will be
the stuff of legends, and you're special and all these
other things, and I'm like, I think it's a little creepy.
I just I mean, I was just gonna put it
out there. It's probably a little creepy. I like that
if somebody said that to me, I would find that
(26:58):
to be a little off putting, and maybe I just
run so that they didn't kill me and take my liver.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
We get Chloe investigating.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
They kind of, you know, team up with Chloe and
she's investigating what happened because there was a death. We
get introduced to the wall of weird. This is something
that's going to be a recurring thing, especially with her
where she has been collecting all these stories of the
weird things that go on in Smallville because her theory
is that since the meteor shower, Smallville has been a
hotbed of weird activity, unexplained activity. The high school kids
(27:31):
grab Clark in the parking lot and they decide they're
going to make him this year's scarecrow. Normally, they wouldn't
be able to overpower Clark and bring him, but because
Whitney saw him kind of eyeing Lana, he had taken
Lana's necklace and put it on Clark and said, well,
if you like her so much, here, you can wear
her necklace. Of course, that's going to keep him weak
and allow them to overpower him. Overpower him. So they
(27:53):
did take him out. They put him on the scarecrow pole,
and then the kid actually who was the scarecrow twelve
years ago shows up in the cornfield and Clark is like,
can you get me down from here? He's like, no, sorry,
I got to go go take care of my stuff.
Lex does end up finding Clark and gets him down
just in time for Clark to go and rescue everybody
and stop the Freak of the Week from killing everybody
(28:14):
at the high school.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Freak of the.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
Week actually ends up elect cuting himself inside of a
truck like there was some gasoline spilled and he tried
to use his powers and it backfired on him big time.
And then we kind of end the episodes with you know,
Clark and Jonathan kind of talking through some things, and
Clark imagines that he gets a chance to talk to Lana,
but we find out it was just imagination, and she
(28:38):
comes home from the dance and he's their house is
like right across from her house, and so he's kind
of looking out and then sees her come home. So
that is the first Then credits are up, and that's
the first episode. So there were a lot of a
lot of songs that were featured in this first episode.
I tried to pull kind of a list of them.
I think I got him, so some of these I
(28:58):
don't know if I have got the right ones. But
there was The Way It Is by Bruce hornsby Long
Way Around by Eagle Eye Cherry, Everywhere You Go by Stereo, Stereobliss, Unstoppable,
by The Calling, Wander by Embrace Inside the Memories, Feared
the Clown, Let's Go Capital I Maybe by Stereophonics, Everything
(29:18):
I Own by Jude Woodstock, Alice by Paul Trudeau, everything
by Lifehouse. I mean, this is when I started playing
this again. I had even though this came out in
two thousand and one, and I think of this as
a two thousands show musically, and just the way the
show looks, it's it's very late nineties like. It has
so much of that late nineties vibe to it, and
(29:39):
the music. The late nineties music was a lot of
fun to hear too. But that'll be a thing, you know,
because eventually they started putting out CDs of the Smallville
Mix or the Talent Mix. That's what the Coffee Shop
would come to be known. So yeah, so a lot
of pop music, as most of the CW shows did.
So yes, that is the first pilot. That's the pilot,
(30:00):
and we start to get hints here of Lex beginning
his investigation into Clark. Clark is kind of a natural hero.
He's going to struggle with his identity throughout this show,
especially this season. We get some hints here and there.
I mean they are constantly dropping little lines of dialogue
and hints that Clark will be a savior figure at
some point in the future, and just there's a lot
(30:22):
of fun stuff. If you're a especially at the time,
if you were a Superman fan and the last shows
you got were back in the eighties, you got the
super Boy Show. In the nineties you had Lois and Clark.
So really, especially if you were younger, and at this point,
I mean, I was older than these characters are supposed
to be. But there's a bit of a difference between
a Superman show where it's you know, it's almost like
(30:45):
Desperate Housewives Superman with Superman. With Lois and Clark, it
was much more of a kind of comedy romance.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Type show.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
I enjoyed it, but I don't know that I was
the target audience for that because I was a high
school kid when that was coming out, and so, you know,
I love the show because it was Superman, but there
were certain things about the show, especially when it started
to get a little goofy.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
It was a little weird.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
But the idea that we get to go back and
have a serious look at this is Superman when he
is first starting out, when he's not Superman yet, He's
got to learn how to be Superman, and we're going
to see because one of the interesting things to me
was always how does someone with those kind of powers
become good versus becoming bad? And in this show you
(31:32):
actually get to see it. You get to see why
does Lex become the way he does. Lex is not
evil when we start this show off. He's trying to
fight back against the influence of his father. As the
show goes on, we're going to see how Lex becomes
the person he becomes. Same thing with Clark. He's not
the fully formed Clark Kent that we see in the
movies and that we see when we get Lois and Clark.
(31:54):
He's a high school kid, and so we get to
see from every step of the way how someone gets
raised by his parents into a superman. This is how
he gets there, this is where he develops the moral
compass that he has later on. So such a fun show.
It's fun to get the start going back through it again.
I am really looking forward to going through the next
ten seasons of this show here on the podcast Full
(32:16):
of Kryptonite. If you want to reach out, there's a
good chance that might feature some of your comments here.
If you leave any reviews for us on Apple Podcasts
or wherever you get your podcasts. I would definitely love
to share any of your comments here on the show.
If you've got any questions about this, if you just
want to share some of your memories of where you
were when you watch these episodes, if you recall, would
(32:38):
love to hear from you, so please feel free to
do that, and would end up loving to read your
words here on the show. So thank you so much everybody.
This has been another episode of the podcast Full of Ryptonite.
You can find us in all the different social media spots.
You can find these episodes anywhere you find your podcast,
and I am looking forward to coming back here next
week to talk about episode two, which is called a
(32:59):
metamorph physis. We get we get bug a boy in metamorphosis.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
It's gonna be a lot of fun, all right. Everybody up,
up and away. We see you back here next time.
So M.
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