Dan Liebke's Astonishing Tales

Funny, isn’t it, how a character previously unseen can go from not at all hated to universally loathed by all sane viewers within one hundred short episodes. Or, if not funny, certainly very tedious and stupid indeed. Let’s see how Lana went from reasonably likable to an object of hatred and scorn, huh?   Highlights [...]

Magic stones! To the seasoned Smallville viewer (or, indeed, to one who has seen only the fourth season) they are words that invoke trembling and fear. And eye-glazing. If your eyes glazed over every time those bloody stones were mentioned and you feel you may have missed something fundamental, then fret not. You are not [...]

In a time before Smallville (and let us never forget that there was such a time), kryptonite had a relatively simple role. Namely, it killed Kryptonians. And fair enough, too. Something had to. Sure, for a while there were various varieties – gold (which removed Kryptonian’s powers), red (which made them mutate in comical ways [...]

Rumour has it that there’s something queer going on in Smallville. That some of the balder members of the cast may be having a gay old time. That, to be perfectly blunt, there’s a strong homoerotic subtext to the Smallville storyline. After serious and prolonged investigation of these hoyay-iffic claims, I’ve come to the considered [...]

When one is rocketed to Earth from the exploding planet Krypton, almost all safety engineers recommend doing so in a spaceship of some kind. And, thus, the young Superlad arrived on Earth in an officially sanctioned, safety-inspected spaceship. You or I might have left it there. Thanks spaceship, job well done. But the writers of [...]

Opening credit sequences can be tricky beasts. Ostensibly a simple exercise in introducing the cast, a good opening credit sequence should be so much more. It should set the tone for the show, establish a connection between the characters and the viewer and, ideally, secure a chart-topping position for the song in question. The Smallville [...]

In the closing overs of the second season, Superlad was struck by a Kryptonian rainbow and, as Sir Isaac Newton proved in his groundbreaking research into prisms, thereby immediately gained knowledge of the Kryptonian language, including all Kryptonian symbols and writing. These Kryptonian symbols (also called ‘Kryptonese’ by traditionalists and the chemically medicated) were first [...]

Now how in red and blue blazes do you think that Native American cave paintings got muddled up with the Smallville experience? After all, he’s growing up to be Superman, not Batman. Caves should have little to no bearing on his origin. And yet, if we are to believe those zany Smallville writers, cave paintings [...]