Superman’s Pal

Plot summary: When a story runs labelling Jimmy Olsen as Superman’s friend, the young photographer begins to receive a lot of unwanted attention.

  1. Notes and Trivia
  2. Recap
  3. Best Performance
  4. Episode Ranking
  5. Rogues Roundup

Notes and Trivia

Episode: 49 (S3.E8)

Original Air Date: February 20th, 1999

Directed: Kazumi Fukushima (1)

Written: Robert Goodman (8)

Animation: Group T.A.C. Co., LTD. & Jade Animation (2)

Music: Lolita Ritmanis (13), Shirley Walker (5), Michael McCuistion (13) and Kristopher Carter (14)

This episode’s title takes its name from the long-time comic series ‘Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen’ that saw Jimmy get into all kinds of bombastic hijinks. The book was also the first to feature Darkseid, as it was one of the four that formed Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Saga because Jack didn’t want to hijack the main Superman book and ‘Superman’s Pal’ was temporarily without a creative team so he didn’t cost anyone a job by taking control.

The music from the montage where everyone keeps hounding Jimmy was also used for the one where Joker spends his newfound riches in ‘Joker’s Millions‘

Speaking of music we have FOUR credited composers for this episode. My pet theory is this episode was a bit of an afterthought and the score was stitched together from various unused pieces, hence the recycled piece mentioned above.

Recap

Jimmy Olsen pines for the new intern at the paper, Tina. Clark tries to hype him up but Jimmy reveals she’s already turned him down twice. Nothing a little high-speed chase and near-helicopter crash can’t fix though!

Superman saves everybody, but refuses an interview with Angela Chen (remember her?), so she leads Jimmy into some answers that she’s able to cut together to publicly label them ‘pals.’

Lois is furious, but everybody else in town starts to treat Jimmy like a hero, particularity Tina the intern, who he takes to dinner (no charge for Superman’s pal!)

A group of thugs spot them walking home and try to take revenge against Superman through Jimmy. The Man of Steel hears Tina screaming for help and saves them, but warns him to put a stop to this public perception.

Angela refuses to recant the story, strangers constantly harass Jimmy asking him to pass on messages to Superman… and Tina introduces him to her boyfriend, Metallo!

Jimmy tries to run but they trap him in a car crusher (Metallo is living at a scrapyard) and then Tina calls Lois begging for help. Clark overhears and flies off to the rescue.

Metallo and Superman brawl across the junkyard, flinging cars back and forth and trying to crush each other. Jimmy flings battery acid at the villain, which causes his Kryptonite Core to fall out, burying him under a truck.

Jimmy mopes apologetically in the aftermath, but Superman thanks him for saving his life and gives him a special watch to summon him if he’s ever in trouble. Cute!

Best Performance

As ever, I enjoyed the limited amount of Dana Delany we got, specifically her outrage that Jimmy receives too much credit from Angela.

I don’t know if Malcolm McDowell was making a token effort to conceal his voice at first given how laughably obvious that it was him when they were pretending otherwise in the past, or if he was just kind of ‘over’ playing the character and had become grumpier. He’s mostly fine after that, taking naturally to the fight banter, and I’m once again tickled by his little shriek when Jimmy knocks his Kryptonite core loose.

Both of those people have won this category many times in the past, but I’m going to go with David Kaufman who has been a bit of an unsung hero as Jimmy Olsen throughout the show. He’s got a good dorky teenager sound to his voice, with Jimmy sounding like his voice is still not fully broken yet. He just never really gets many lines so has never had a look in before now. This isn’t one of the best vocal performances in the show by any means, but it’s still nice for one of the peripheral regulars to get their moment in the spotlight, and Kaufman was up to the task of scaling his role up substantially.

Episode Ranking

Another of the episodes Bruce Timm considers to be among the worst in the entire DCAU. I should probably have been keeping a tally of those, because while I rarely think they’re Actually Good, they’ve rarely been as awful as he claims in my opinion.

And the same applies here. I think this is a perfectly fine little karmic lesson episode that basically every show in history has done at some point. Jimmy revels a little too much in his newfound fame as Superman’s bestie and almost gets murdered by dudes who wouldn’t have looked at him twice before. Plus all the irritating interactions with strangers. He’s always been desperate for female attention… and then finds himself fleeing from a literal gaggle of women chasing him. He thinks his dream girl is finally interested in him, but it turns out she’s trying to pump him for information for her secret supervillain boyfriend. It’s also solid evidence for Clark’s whole deal about not revealing his identity to protect his loved ones, so it’s kind of surprising it would come so late in the series. It’s also surprising it took this long to give Jimmy a focus episode, but I suppose even Lois didn’t start getting them until Season 2.

Similar to the last Group TAC/Jade collab episode there are several spots where this episode looks significantly worse than normal, generally in long shots where characters lack facial features, or there are very low-detail backgrounds. Though I did enjoy the green light pouring out of the derelict bus as Metallo wails on Supes. The music is good, but can’t quite make up for the shoddy visuals.

I know the aim was to be a goofier, dare I say campier episode, but not sure about the joke with Lois’ skirt blowing up when Superman flies past and her saying “I gotta start wearing pants.” Also the unnecessary cattiness of her hating Tina for wearing a lot of jewellery.

I think there’s enough fun to be had through Jimmy growing to resent his newfound fame and the extended brawl between Superman and Metallo to keep it out of the very bottom of the list. Yes it’s one of the uglier looking episodes, and yes the Metallo fight scenes have diminishing returns, but the core concept is solid, whereas I’d say almost all of the episodes below this have a fundamentally broken premise.

Plus I’ll never be mad at a show for throwing the ball to a side character for once.

  1. Obsession
  2. The Late Mr. Kent
  3. Brave New Metropolis
  4. Apokalips… Now!
  5. World’s Finest
  6. Livewire
  7. Double Dose
  8. Fun and Games
  9. Warrior Queen
  10. Knight Time
  11. Father’s Day
  12. Little Girl Lost
  13. The Hand of Fate
  14. The Last Son of Krypton
  15. Ghost in the Machine
  16. Stolen Memories
  17. Action Figures
  18. The Prometheon
  19. In Brightest Day…
  20. Tools of the Trade
  21. The Main Man
  22. Mxzypixilated
  23. Blasts from the Past
  24. Target
  25. The Way of All Flesh
  26. Solar Power
  27. Where There’s Smoke
  28. Protoype
  29. My Girl
  30. A Little Piece of Home
  31. Feeding Time
  32. New Kids in Town
  33. Superman’s Pal (NEW ENTRY)
  34. Little Big Head Man
  35. Speed Demons
  36. Two’s a Crowd
  37. Absolute Power
  38. Identity Crisis
  39. Heavy Metal
  40. Monkey Fun
  41. Bizarro’s World

Rogues Roundup

Metallo (Malcolm McDowell) (sixth appearance)

Tina’s line about liking metal becomes so much funnier when you learn she’s secretly dating Big Corbs… although wasn’t his main gripe in ‘The Way of All Flesh‘ that he couldn’t feel anything anymore, emotional or physical? I guess the initial plan was for her to get close to Lois and use her as bait, so the entire thing could be a long con on his part, but yeah.

Anyway, he”s living at a scrap yard and has returned to wearing turtlenecks and has an evil girlfriend. What a bizarre final appearance for one of the series’ most prominent villains. Plus the whole point of the eye lasers was to remove his need to expose his weak spot. He does both here for some reason, and just like always his open chest cavity proves to be his downfall.

It’s still kind of cool to see him have Superman at such a disadvantage, but there are such diminishing returns on that now, and he’s far from alone in this respect now compared to the early days. There have been just enough fun uses of him over the show that I think he’s still in the Top 10, but I am going to move him down a spot.

  1. Livewire
  2. Darkseid
  3. Toyman
  4. Lex Luthor
  5. The Joker
  6. Queen Maxima
  7. Parasite
  8. Metallo (↓)
  9. Karkull
  10. Brainiac
  11. Mr. Mxyzptlk
  12. Harley Quinn
  13. Granny Goodness
  14. Kalibak
  15. Volcana
  16. The Gotham Rogues
  17. Lobo
  18. Luminus
  19. Sinestro
  20. Project Firestorm
  21. The Female Furies
  22. DeSaad
  23. Detective Bowman
  24. Bruno Mannheim (and Intergang!)
  25. Steppenwolf
  26. The Preserver
  27. Bizarro
  28. Kanto
  29. Mercy Graves
  30. The Prometheon
  31. De’Cine
  32. Mala & Jax-Ur
  33. Corey Mills
  34. Earl Garver
  35. Titano
  36. Weather Wizard

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