Product Description
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Smallville: The Complete First Season (DVD)
Clark Kent takes on a whole new dimension in this precursor to
the Superman legend. You know how the story ends; now watch the
journey begin. The idyllic town of Smallville, Kansas, never
seemed the same after the meteor shower that rained down 12 years
ago. That was the day Clark Kent arrived on Earth-and the day
strange things started happening in Smallville. Now, Clark is a
teenager, and his growing pains are amplified by the burden of
his emerging superpowers. He longs for Lana Lang, the beautiful
girl next door, but the meteor fragment she wears around her neck
complicates his quest for her heart. When the charismatic Lex
Luthor arrives in town, he befriends Clark. With no inkling of
how their destinies will ultimately collide, Lex becomes the
older brother Clark never had.
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The venerable Superman mythos gets a 21st-century updating in
this imaginative and engaging television series from the WB
Network, and series fans can celebrate the ratings success of
Smallville with a six-disc set that compiles its entire first
season. The deluxe package offers a chance to revisit the origins
of the characters and their numerous plotlines, as well as view
deleted scenes and other bonus features.
The premise of Smallville--Superman as a teenager--takes up just
a few pages in Superman's very first comic book appearance (in
Action Comics back in 1938), but series producers Alfred Gough
and Miles Millar out that period by portraying young Clark
Kent (Tom Welling) not as the noble Superman-in-waiting, but as
an average teen with some not-so-ordinary supernatural powers,
including incredible strength and heat vision (Clark hasn't
lifted up, up, and away as of yet). Clark's desire to fit in with
his peers and make sense of his extraordinary abilities ground
him in very realistic and identifiable terms for the series'
primarily under-25 audience, as does his appealing and tentative
romance with Kristen Kreuk as Clark's dreamgirl Lana Lang. But
Smallville also strikes gold when it takes a turn towards more
comic book territory, as evidenced by the parade of
shape-shifting killers and other outlandish antagonists (many
generated, in one of the series' most ingenious notions, by the
same devastating meteor shower that brought the infant Clark to
Earth) that Clark must harness his powers to face and defeat.
Gough and Millar, along with their capable cast (which includes
Michael Rosenbaum as a young and already bald-pated Lex Luthor,
and Annette O'Toole and John Schneider as the Kents) manage to
pull off the precarious high-wire act of combining science
fiction with coming-of-age drama to create this highly watchable
program.
Smallville: The Complete First Season offers a very complete and
attractive DVD package that is rounded out by some highly
desirable extras for longtime series fans. The six-disc set
offers all 21 episodes of the first season, including the pilot,
in widescreen anamorphic format; Gough and Millar are featured on
the set's sole commentary track, which appears on the pilot
episode. Viewers can also access a number of deleted scenes from
various episodes as well as view original pre-production
storyboards and WB promotional spots. An interactive "tour" of
Smallville rounds out the extras, but DVD-ROM owners can use the
discs to access more features via the Smallville web site. --Paul
Gaita