Young Peter Parker: With no power comes limited responsibility...

[seriousfic]

Many of you have, by now, heard of the CW's attempted successor to Smallville. Like Mercy Reef/Aquaman before it, it once more attempts to go the prequel route... unfortunately, by depicting Dick "Robin" Grayson at by far the least interesting time of his life: when he was a boy, before his parents died and before he met Batman, when he was just a happy little acrobat (this sentence has used commas, ellipses, colons, and now parentheses. I'm paid heavily by the punctuation lobby). Also, his name is DJ.

Now, consider that the "young superhero" concept has already netted us ideas like "The Lois Lane Chronicles," in which a young Lois Lane investigates strange occurrences in the DC universe (later translated into the character of Chloe Sullivan in Smallville) and "Bruce Wayne," about a young... well, guess... training to be Batman while reclaiming his inheritance from the evil corporate raider who's taken over Wayne Enterprises. Or even the story of Dick Grayson AFTER his parents died, as he sets out to solve the mystery of his parents' murder in a vengeful rampage, while Bruce and Alfred try to teach him the difference between vengeance and justice (basically, his unknowing path to being Robin).

Consider those and you start to see just how horribly uninteresting The Graysons is in comparison (if it's anything like its predecessor, Ma and Pa Grayson won't die until season six and Dick... sorry, DJ, will be 25 when he becomes Bruce's ward, which following in the proud tradition of Smallville makes everything much more homoerotic).

But it could be worst. Luckily, the series doesn't focus on some other Robins...

Jason Todd - The spitfire punk that everyone loves to hate! Watch before he met Batman, as he flips off the elderly and slaps minorities. In the pilot episode, his mother rues "Some days I could just let a psychopathic clown beat him to death with a crowbar."

Tim Drake - A terrifying journey into madness as a boy, neglected and unloved by his parents, becomes obsessed with Batman and Robin. Are they really Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, his next-door neighbors, or is it all in his head? And how far will he go to find out for sure? The terror begins this Fall on the CW.

Stephanie Brown - Juno: The Series!

Comments

[boywonder-iii.livejournal.com]

I love reading your entries. The Tim Drake scenario made me laugh because it's so correctly put, but the Stephanie Brown one was ftw.

[jlbarnett.livejournal.com]

they ought to do a Batman series. They can do a young Bruce Wayne series if they want to but his bedguys and his gadgets probably translate best to a TV series.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

It kinda amazes me that someone could actually think up a young Bruce Wayne series, which has a built-in audience, and then ditch that for The Graysons. I mean, that's not even a matter of coming up with a good idea; they had a good idea, and they ditched it for Cirque du Soleil: The Series.