Plot summary: Scientist Jor-El is running out of time to convince the people of Krypton that their planet is doomed, resorting to drastic measures to save his family.
Superman: The Animated Series
When I started this column in 2020 the idea was just to do BTAS and TNBA, and then when I finished those it felt organic to tack Beyond on the end. I completed everything in 2022 but found myself missing the work in the years that followed. In 2023 I discovered The Watchtower Database, who make excellent YouTube content on the DCAU, and their podcast Jump On The Batwagon, which aimed to cover the entire DCAU one episode at a time. This all led me to the decision to revamp The Matt Signal as this very website you’re on currently, spinning off from just being a recurring column at The Reel World. Now that I’ve imported everything over, tidied it up a little and given it a fresh coat of paint I decided it was finally time to branch out to the rest of the DCAU, starting with Superman.
When the second season of Batman: The Animated Series came to an end in 1995, Bruce Timm had little desire to do any more with the Caped Crusader. After a brief flirtation with Steven Spielberg (who was all-in on animation at the time following Tiny Toons and Animaniacs), Timm created Freakazoid!, but quickly distanced himself from it because of creative differences, as he wanted a more straightforward adventure show.
Happily enough, Warner Bros. were developing a new live action Superman movie, and much like BTAS was created as a quasi-companion to Batman Returns, WB were keen to have a Superman cartoon on the air in the near future. That movie (and Nicolas Cage’s mullet) never happened, but STAS sure did!
Timm brought his old BTAS pals aboard and they spent a long time trying to find the right look and feel for the character, ultimately going for a bit of a fusion of the classic 40s/50s era and John Byrne’s 1986 comic reboot of the character. The classic Fleischer Superman cartoons – which had a heavy influence on the BTAS art style – were once again drawn upon, but they ended up with a simpler, cheaper, and more optimistic aesthetic, inspired by ‘Ocean Liner Deco’ (or Streamline Moderne). When Timm was eventually persuaded to do more Batman, he insisted this art style be utilised, leading to the somewhat controversial artistic overhaul of The New Batman Adventures.
Final disclaimer: I’m no Superman expert. I have dipped in and out of the various comics, shows and movies over the years, but my Batman knowledge is far greater, which helped with The Matt Signal. Expect some shortcomings here and there, beyond the usual failings of my general character.
Notes and Trivia
Episode: 1 (S1.E1)
Original Air Date: September 6th, 1996
Directed: Dan Riba (1)
Written: Alan Burnett (1) & Paul Dini (1)
Animation: Koko Enterprise Co., LTD (1) & Dong Yang Animation Co., LTD. (1)
Music: Lolita Ritmanis (1)
This is one of only two episodes of the show without the Superman persona, which makes sense as Kal is still a freakin’ baby at the end of Part I.
Jor-El claims he was attacked by a ‘shoggoth’, a Lovecraftian creature described entirely differently to the beast seen here.
A shower of glowing green rocks trails Kal’s escape ship. Kryptonite, baby!
Recap
On the planet Krypton, Jor-El conducts subterranean research in an ice cave. He’s attacked by a bizarre flying slug creature and barely escapes alive.
Returning to his mobile research station, he bickers with the supercomputer Brainiac about privacy before reluctantly sharing his latest data.
Back in Kandor, Jor-El argues with his father-in-law, Sul-Van, due to the controversial nature of his research predicting the impending end of the world, ostracising him from Kryptonian society.
Sul-Van warns that unless Brainiac agrees with his findings, it’ll be the end of his career, just as a massive earthquake wreaks havoc, almost killing Jor-El’s young son, Kal-El.
Appearing before The Council, Jor-El pleads his case, imploring them to place the entire populace in ‘The Phantom Zone’ for their safety. Brainiac disagrees with his assessment, so The Council walk out.
Undeterred by the decision, Jor-El endeavours to go to Brainiac’s operation centre to prove it’s lying, upsetting his wife, Lara, who wonders if perhaps her husband is wrong after all.
Sure enough, after forcing his way into a locked central hub, Jor-El discovers that Brainiac is secretly downloading its program into a satellite in order to survive the destruction of Krypton.
Brainiac confirms there are mere hours until armageddon, and then orders security to arrest Jor-El as a traitor, but he outsmarts them (and Brainiac) and escapes.
Seeing no other option, Jor-El convinces Lara to enact their secret plan for a worst-case scenario, placing young Kal-El into a spacecraft so that he can survive the end of the world.
Brainiac coldly bids the planet farewell as his satellite and Kal’s rocket launch into deep space amid a cacophony of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes that rip Krypton apart.
Best Performance
For the most part I like Christopher McDonald as an actor, but I found his work here to be overly passive/softspoken given the severity of the situation. I suppose they were going for utterly world-weary after spending so much time trying to argue with people that won’t listen to him; a man of quiet conviction. But given how few characters there are, I would have liked a slightly more passionate lead performance.
Luckily, Tony Jay understood his assignment as Sul-Van, Jor-El’s father-in-law. It’s a very over the top performance but in a good way, as he shifts from the borderline evil scheming as he argues with Lara and Jor-El near the start, into a more nuanced sadness as he comes to accept the truth near the end. He caps this all off with a funny diversion of the police and the poignant “no, it’s last…” An episode so light on characters needs somebody to inject energy, especially when the main two actors are so sedate, and that’s precisely what Jay did.
Corey Burton was in a difficult position as Brainiac, an emotionless supercomputer. He’s a great voice actor, and the best choice for this role, but he’s going to struggle to take home honours in this category because of the nature of the character.
I thought Finola Hughes was straight up awful as Lara.
Episode Ranking
When reviewing Batman I came to regret considering multi-part episodes to be individual entities when it came to ranking, as the individual parts are generally less good in a vacuum. Part I’s are generally all set-up, giving the drama and character stuff room to breathe, but are fundamentally an incomplete story. Part II’s conversely tend to be all-action to pay everything off, which is never going to be as emotionally compelling. Therefore I’m going to choose to learn from that mistake and going forward each individual part will get a full review, but they’ll be ranked as a collective.
This first part is the very definition of a prologue, starring Superman’s parents during the final days of Krypton. They do sneak in a fair amount of action, from Jor-El’s tangle with the whacky monster in the ice cave, to him having to elude security in the third act, so there’s a bit more going on than in BTAS two-parters. But there’s still no way this is going to stand up to the best episodes in the show, I’d think. I do like Jor-El for the most part given his plight as a scientist desperately begging for politicians to listen to him about climate change before its too late. Jeez, the DCAU’s gone woke.
That being said, even with extended time on Krypton that most Superman media doesn’t afford, it’s difficult to fully invest in a cast of characters you know are doomed. There are only 20 minutes to work with, and most of the talking is done by Jor-El and Brainiac, with only a few lines here and there for Lara and Sul-Van, and even fewer for the various members of The Council and security. I don’t know if I’m asking for much more on Krypton or much less, but devoting most of the episode to a feud between a man and a computer didn’t feel like the most economical use of time to me.
I did really dig the art team’s choices for Krypton’s aesthetic, quickly establishing not just the topography of the planet itself, but also the clothing, technology and architecture of the populace. It all feels like a very 50s/60s dream of space/the future, in a good way, right down to Kal’s rather toyetic rocket. It’s almost as impressive as what this same team would achieve with Batman Beyond on an even tighter time frame a few years later. Actually, given it was all essentially for a single episode, maybe it’s more impressive? I also thought their depiction of Krypton’s destruction was really effective, achieving a grim sense of scale and violence.
It is kind of funny to me that the rest of the DCAU features full origin stories to start each new series, given one of the biggest strengths of BTAS was that it started in the middle, with Batman already fully established and assuming you understand the bullet points. But it did let them do some cute things with Brainiac, Krypto the Super-Dog, Argo and drawing Jor-El to look almost exactly like Clark. It all gives Krypton a sense of weight and legacy that you can’t achieve in a 5-minute flashback.
- The Last Son of Krypton (NEW ENTRY)
Rogues Roundup
Brainiac (Corey Burton) (first appearance)
Alan Burnett came up with this alternate origin story for Brainiac as a Kryptonian supercomputer that The Council have become overly reliant on to make decisions for them, and I think it was a stroke of genius. It instantly creates a personal feud for Superman, as Brainiac’s machinations doomed Kal’s family and entire planet. Plus establishing him as somewhat of a nemesis for Jor-El (again, drawn almost exactly like Clark) is a fun generational conflict.
The writing has to be good, because Brainiac is physically represented as a distinct logo on a series of screens, lacking a body at this point in the show. That in itself is effective as Brainiac simultaneously feels impossibly vast and powerful, but is also less able to actually stop Jor-El from breaking into his inner sanctum. But then he’s able to download himself off-world and survive the apocalypse. It’s a cute juxtaposition.
While Burton is playing the character with a general lack of emotion, there is some nuance to it with his genuine surprise that he has failed to kill Jor-El with lasers. Plus the wild degree to which he’s deceiving The Council, able to completely lie to his creators, and all because he believes telling them the truth will lead to wasted time on his part trying to save them all… only for Jor-El to have hatched a plan that ostensibly would have worked. Bested by a mere fleshing!
- Brainiac (NEW ENTRY)
The Matt Signal 
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