Static Thoughts - The Doomsday Sanction

So, Batman v. Superman’s latest trailer has revealed the major plot point that Doomsday, the monster who killed Superman, will be the film’s ultimate boss.  For my part this isn’t that surprising a reveal, I’ve been hearing rumors Doomsday would pop up in the film for awhile now.  At the same time, it’s pretty clear the execs running the DC/WB branch are the same ones who helmed things back in the ‘90s when The Death of Superman was the biggest moneymaker in the world for them so it fits they’d try and fit their new Superman movie to that template somehow, they did the same thing with Batman in Dark Knight Rises. 

What is surprising a lot of fans is the major shift to Doomsday’s origin in the film, now seemingly a mutation or GMO created out of the corpse of General Zod.  That’s a nifty idea and an easy solution to how incredibly convoluted and byzantine Doomsday’s comic book origin is, which is why this isn’t a look at the character’s history or even his biggest storylines.  I’ll probably talk about comic book Doomsday somewhere down the line but for right now I’m zeroing in on the first time Doomsday’s origin was altered to be the genetically modified superior Kryptonian: in Justice League Unlimited.

Static Thoughts - DCAU Crossovers

So, this past Wednesday CW’s Arrow featured a one-off crossover with the cancelled Matt Ryan Constantine show in an episode called Haunted.  The episode was decent enough with most of the fun coming from just how gung-ho Matt Ryan was to both play John Constantine again and get to do all kinds of wizard shenanigans that he never got to sink his teeth into enough on his own show.  However, the episode got me thinking about the idea of crossovers in general, with a specific lens for the superhero genre.  Crossovers in superhero stories are as old as the genre itself mainly because “superhero” as a genre is so vague and open that it tends to absorb a ton of broader genres such as fantasy, adventure, sci-fi, and horror into it.  At the same time, crossovers have always been a great way for superhero TV to expand its world and test more obscure and bizarre characters who might not have found an audience otherwise.  The best example of this is from the DC Animated Universe that started with Batman: The Animated Series and concluded with the massive Justice League Unlimited, which included almost every DC hero imaginable (even Aztek got in there.)  I’m ranking the individual crossovers from the Batman and Superman shows.