Convenient Amnesia

Last week I was having a debate with a aficionado of the superhero world regarding the TV Series Smallville. Basically he banned watching of it in his house, due to it's 'factual inaccuracies'.

Factual Inaccuracies, I should clarify, refer to the differences between events portrayed in Smallville and ones portrayed in the comics. Or the movies.

Now I'm not always the biggest fan of Smallville. I found that the earlier series had a fairly poor 'monster of the week' format with the recurrence 'oh X found some Kryptonite and it mutated them with weird powers' kinda stories. While it grew out of that and improved greatly, I still tended to find the episodes a bit hit and miss in places. But overall I've found it generally annoying.

So I countered this statement of factual inaccuracies, by pointing out that Superman gets a new origin story pretty much every decade. Add to that the fact of the DC multiverse allowing for either infinite or at least 52 versions of Superman, can you not just let the differences in story slide and enjoy it as a different take on the Superman legend? I mean the basic key elements are there, he's from another planet, sent to earth when Krypton was destroyed, crash landed in Kansas and was raised on a farm. Sure, I guess that there's some character appearences that can feel a bit 'gimmicky' and don't always reflect the characters as we know them from the comics. Bart Allen's appearence as a superfast thief for instance. But then everytime Bane is portrayed by any Batman thing that's not the comics I get mad, so Smallville's transgressions in that area barely register.

So the following point of annoyance that was raised, is that why would characters like Lex Luthor not remember Clark and the odd occurances from their youth? Well, this is fine, assuming, that the grown up characters will revert to the accepted status of film and comics. Again, as an alternate reality, I'd argue that this Lex Luthor could concievably investigate Clark forever. But, and I liked this point, is that argument not just ignoring the concept of future storylines? They way that after the Phantom Menace came out, everyone cried out 'Why doesn't C-3PO remember all this stuff?' Ok, 'everyone' is an unfair generalisation, but I heard the question a lot. Did all those people forget that a trilogy means 3 films? Which, minus the one you just watched, leaves two more films to go? But surely a story which involved Threepio forgetting he knew Anakin and so on, would be a vast epic that could never be contained in a mere 2 movies? Oh, wait, they say at the end of Revenge of the Sith that they'll wipe his memory. Ok then.

In the same vein, I would imagine that there's scope in future Smallville storylines to have traumas occur that cause characters to forget key facts. Actually, now I think about it, that happens in Smallville every third episode doesn't it? How many times did someone find Clark's secret only to suffer conveniant amnesia 3 minutes before the end credits?

Anyway, it was a fun discussion. Right up till the point when someone said that Smallville using Green Arrow was good, certainly better than using Green Lantern. After all, what's the point of a guy with a magic ring that doesn't work against yellow?

And that's when I got mad...