Smallville Season 1 DVD Boxset
  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 flesh 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
Get the complete first season on DVD here
|
