Big Blue’s experiment is, of course, a failure, and he laments that he wishes he could do more for Earth than being the resident strong man. He goes on to point out (in case the audience rode the short bus to school and hasn’t figured this out by now) that the “people with powerâ€? (in other words, Lex Luthor) don’t always have the people’s best interests at heart. We get it. Lex Luthor is in control of everything and he’s really fucking evil.
You’ve probably noticed it before when looking at Clark (or maybe not, if you’re Lois and can’t tell the two apart), but dear God is the model for Clark/Superman ugly. Why the hell does everyone have those macho age lines? And if chins could kill, that would be a homicide waiting to happen. Superman’s chin is bigger than Bruce Campbell, Jay Leno, and myself combined. I thought I had a serious lump at the end of my face, but Big Blue has me beat.
On a side note, I’m going to challenge Jay Leno and Bruce Campbell to a three-way chin-busting match to see which of us can ram his chin through the most armor plate. Jay would probably win, but Bruce and I would give him a run for his money.
To make matters worse, voicing the ugliest Superman ever is Adam Baldwin. God help me, I love Adam Baldwin and want to have his babies (if such a thing was biologically possible). He’s #3 on my top ten list of “Men I Would Sleep With If I Was Gay” (right behind Sean Connery and Nathan Fillion). However, he’s just not right for Big Blue. Baldwin’s voice is completely unsuitable. He lacks both the dignity of Superman and the stiff geekiness of Clark Kent. Although he’s clearly trying to hold it back, his voice is too gruff & scratchy. This may be because in my mind he’s been typecast as a tough guy. I know he can do voice acting well, because he’s done a couple of guest roles on Justice League Unlimited and did them damned well (Yes, I keep referring to that series. No, I don’t fucking care.). This just isn’t his role. I get the feeling that they chose him because they didn’t want George Newburn (the most recent animated universe Superman) because people might get the idea that it’s the same continuity. As if they couldn’t tell by the knob the size of a Buick on Superman’s chin.
And by the way, hearing Adam Baldwin pronounce “metastasizing� is a real hoot.
Then, Lois walks in, wearing nothing but a towel. Let’s get this straight: he hasn’t trusted her enough to tell her that he’s really the dweeb in the next cubicle, but he lets her into his super-secret base where he works to cure cancer and stop really fucking evil capitalists from taking over the world? Apparently, Lois isn’t the only one who’s dumber than a bag of hammers.
The two engage in what attempts to be witty banter and fails. Lois and Clark had better banter than this, and it was mostly a soap opera. And Superman playfully threatens to use his x-ray vision on Lois. Apparently, he’d get a thrill in his tights from seeing her internal organs.
All the while, the screens behind them are flashing the word “Failure�. Yeah, that just about sums it up.
Cut back to Luthor’s idiots digging up Things Man Was Not Meant To Dig Up (like Satan’s rectum). They set Doomsday free from his prison vessel (and somehow Luthor automatically knows the message that the ship sends out is a warning, despite it not being in a language anyone understands). By now, if anyone was watching this movie with me, I’d be asking them to join me in a suicide pact, and it’s only nine minutes in.
Unsurprisingly, Doomsday kills all of the minions at the site and heads for Metropolis. I’ll say one good thing about this movie: Doomsday is a badass. Unlike his main DCAU counterpart, he is genuinely fearsome and brutal (and does manage to kill Superman). During his rampaging, there’s another “let’s be matureâ€? moment, when Doomsday casually snaps a guy’s neck. Probably not really necessary, but it’s Doomsday – are you really going to argue with a guy who wears his skeleton on the outside of his body?
Superman’s magic warning psychic network lets him know about the trouble, of course. I find it odd that his Kryptonian database has an entry detailing what Doomsday is. How the hell could this be, if Doomsday landed here “before Christâ€?? The explanation takes something away from Doomsday’s mystique. In the comics, one of the things that worked about the “Death of Supermanâ€? storyline was the mystery of Doomsday’s origins. He just appeared out of nowhere, damn near killed most of the Justice League (granted, at the time, the Justice League was made up of dweebs like Blue Beetle and Booster Gold – and when you’re being led by Ted Kord, you don’t really stand a chance of beating a third-grader armed with a sharpened pencil, much less Doomsday), rampaged across the country like Ted Kennedy going through a liquor cabinet, and beat Superman to a bloody pulp. No one knew where he came from or what he was, which made him that much scarier. Turns out he was some kind of genetically engineered Kryptonian-slayer or something, which isn’t half as cool as the origins everyone imagined for him when he was killing Superman.
The Chef was born 856 years ago on a small planet orbiting a star in the Argolis cluster. It was prophesied that the arrival of a child with a birthmark shaped like a tentacle would herald the planet's destruction. When the future Chef was born with just such a birthmark, panic ensued (this would not be the last time the Chef inspired such emotion). The child, tentacle and all, was loaded into a rocket-powered garbage scow and launched into space. Unfortunately, the rocket's exhaust ignited one of the spectators' flatulence, resulting in a massive explosion that detonated the planet's core, destroying the world and killing everyone on it.
When the would-be Chef awoke from his torpor, he looked around at the new world he found himself on. His first words were, “Hey, this place sucks." Disguising himself as one of the planet's dominant species of semi-domesticated ape, the being who would become known as the Chef wandered the Earth until he ended up in its most disreputable slum - Paris, France.
Taking a job as a can-can dancer, the young Chef made a living that way until one day one of the cooks at a local bistro fell ill with food poisoning (oh, bitter irony). In a desperate move, the bistro's owner rushed into one of the local dance halls, searching for a replacement. He grabbed the ugliest can-can dancer he could find, and found himself instead with an enterprising (if strange) young man who now decided, based on this random encounter, to only answer to the name “Chef".
His success as a French chef was immediate (but considering that this is a country where frogs and snails are considered delicacies, this may or may not be a significant achievement). Not only was the Chef's food delicious, it also kept down the local homeless population. He rose to the heights of stardom in French cuisine, and started a holy war against the United Kingdom to end the reign of terror British food had inflicted on its citizens.
When the Crimean War broke out around France, the Chef assisted Nikola Tesla and Galileo in perfecting the scanning electron microscope, which was crucial in driving back the oncoming Communist hordes. It would later be said that without the Chef, the war would have been lost. He was personally awarded a Purple Heart by the King of France.
After that, the Chef traveled to America, home of such dubious culinary delights as McDonald's Quarter Pounder With Cheese. He immediately adopted the Third World nation as his new home, seeing it as his job to protect and enlighten it. When the Vietnam War began, he immediately volunteered and served in the Army of the Potomac under Robert E. Lee and General Patton. During the war, the Chef killed dozens of Nazis, most of them with his bare hands.
Marching home from war across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, stark-naked and freezing, the Chef wound up on the shores of Mexico. He spent several years there, drinking tequila with Pancho Villa and James Dean. He put his culinary skills to the test when he invented the 5,000-calorie Breakfast Chili Burrito With Orange Sauce (which is today still a favorite in some parts of Sonora).
Eventually, the Chef returned to his adopted home of America, where he met a slimy, well-coiffed weasel who was starting up a new kind of buffet - one dedicated to providing the highest-quality unmentionable appetizers to the online community. The Chef dedicated himself to spreading the word of his famous Lard Sandwich (two large patties of fried lard, in between two slices of toasted buttered lard, with bacon and cheese), as well as occasionally writing about his opinions on less-important topics than food.
Every word of this is true, if only in the sense that every word of this exists in the English language.
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