Plus: Entertainment Geekly podcasts about the Berlanti-verse!
On Mondays Entertainment Geekly podcast,Jeff Jensen outlined a complete history of superhero TV shows.
Now, were talking specifically aboutLegends of Tomorrow, the latest DC Universe series from super-producer Greg Berlanti.
Credit: The CW
The assignment to watchLegends of Tomorrowgot me thinking.
Look, I know about superheroes.
I read comic books when I was a kid.
Ive seen every superhero movie twice or more.
I could name my 100 favorite X-Men and my 20 favorite alternate universe versions of Batman.
(I liked whenBatman was Green Lantern, but IlovedwhenBatman was Superman.)
(I dont think Batman was ever Wonder Woman.)
(Thatd be awesome, though.)
But I have blind spots.
A small one that suddenly became a big one: Im not a devotee of Berlantis shows.
Truth is, I felt like I had seen them both before.
Because, well, I have seena lotof superhero stories before.
Like, there are potentially-baseless rumors that the nextX-Menmovie after the next fourX-Menmovies will be calledThe Dark Phoenix Saga.
In comic books, the Dark Phoenix Saga was one of the great weird ongoing stories in X-Men lore.
Now, Im not against adapting famous stories.
But more and more, I dont feel like Im the key demographic for superhero movies or superhero TV.
Never forget that Christopher Nolan and Heath Ledger recreated the Joker from scratch forThe Dark Knight.
For me, I think, it all comes back totheAmazing Spider-Manproblem.
I know too damn much about Spider-Man to ever care about Uncle Ben being alive.
The first Spider-Man comic I ever read was about Spidey fighting thesecondGreen Goblin.
Im not saying these stories were all good, per se.
But 2/5 of the existingSpider-Manmovies are about Spider-Man meeting the Green Goblin for the first time.
I cant pretend to get excited about that.
I have, I admit, found myself feeling faintly nostalgic for an older kind of superhero story.
A story that doesnt think you better see Batman and Superman meet, again, for the first time.
A story that doesnt need to spend the first half hour of the movie inventing Ultron.
Bonus points if theres time travel.
Theres a moment early in the second episode ofLegends of Tomorrowwhen Neal McDonough walks onscreen.
The year: 1975.
(Its the kind of auction where you bid by firing your gun into the air.)
McDonough has maybe three lines.
A fight breaks out, involving acrobatic kicks and superpowers and two heroes with wings.
The nuclear bomb goes off and gets absorbed by Firestorm, an atomic superhero made of two different people.
All this before the title of the show appears onscreen.
One of the initial main characters inLegends of Tomorrowis Hawkman, a character introduced in 1940.
That makes Hawkman only a couple years younger than Superman and 34 years older than Wolverine.
So you feel, watchingLegends of Tomorrow, like youre coming in late to a very long story.
There are appearances by a coupleArrowcharacters.
One scene, in particular, barely made any sense to me.
And theres another character, apparently also Black Canary, played by Katie Cassidy.
Theyre sisters, and theyre fighting like, actual martial arts fighting.
And then Caity Lotz joins of a team of people to pursue an immortal maniac across time and space.
There are a lot of pleasures inLegends of Tomorrow.
(Typical Captain Cold line: You dont break into the candy store and steal one gumball.)
The main characters ofLegendsare every kind of superhero supernatural, science-fictional, resurrected.
There are plenty of pleasures to be had in restarting something nobody who sawBatman Beginscould deny that.
Like, Neal McDonoughs character onLegendsactually appeared, with some frequency, onArrow.
InAvengers Forever, a time traveler named Kang the Conqueror unites several different Avengers from throughout the superteams history.
Each issue sees the team hop to one or three different eras or alternate realities.
This may sound goofy, and it kind of is.
When Whedon wrote the firstAvengersmovie, he usedThe Ultimatesas a clear template.
Im not sure anyone will ever useAvengers Foreveras a template for anything.
Compare that toLegends of Tomorrow.
By the end of the second episode, Hawkman is dead.
It shouldnt be a big deal: This Hawkman has died 206 times, and he remembers every death.
The weird joy ofLegends of Tomorrowis that Hawkmans 207th death actuallydoesfeel important.
Most superhero stories on the big and small screen remove their characters history.
Legendsgoes in the opposite direction: It demands you to understand that these characters have a long history.
