Watched: The Medici TV Series and Reign of the Supermen Animated Movie

Tom loves to watch movies and television series. Rob is a lot more particular and doesn't watch much televisionm, but watched an animated Superman movie recently that was based on a comic book storyline. Tom's latest Television series obesssion is called Medici because he loves historic series.  Today's blog is about both of those and what we think of them.

TOM RECOMMENDS-  Tom loves this series, and because we went to Italy together on vacation, he loves to point out the historic buildings in the series (which is really cool to see). There were only three seasons to this series, sadly. It's really well done. Tom highly recommends this series! 

ABOUT THE MEDICI SERIES -Medici  is an Italian-British historical drama television series created by Frank Spotnitz and Nicholas Meyer.  The series follows the House of Medici, bankers of the Pope, in 15th-century Florence. Each season follows the events of a particular moment of the family's history exploring the political and artistic landscape of Renaissance Italy.

The first season of the series, titled Medici: Masters of Florence, premiered in Italy on Rai 1 on 18 October 2016. It takes place in 1429, the year Giovanni de' Medici, head of the family, died. His son Cosimo succeeds him as head of the family bank, the richest in Europe and fights to preserve his power in Florence.

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ROB GIVES 2.5 STARS - This animated version of the famous post- "Death of Superman" comic book storyline "Reign of the Supermen" is about 4 different men who create their own version of Superman, to fill in for the fallen hero (who later revives). - Although the characters are there and three of them are accurate to the comics- Superboy the clone, and Steel/John Henry Irons, the Eradicator (an ancient Kryptonian weapon, merged with a human body to form the Last Son of Krypton an extreme vigilante) , the Cyborg Superman was not AND they added in way-overused villain for no reason - and that soured me on the story!!

WHY I DIDN'T CARE FOR IT MUCH: ADDING A WAY-OVERUSED VILLAIN NOT IN THE ORIGINAL STORY - DC Comics feels like they have to insert the cosmic villain Darkseid into every darn storyline to make it interesting, so they ADDED him into this story. The story said Darkseid created the cyborg body for the Cyborg Superman, which is not true.  As a comic reader for about 45 years, I am tired of the Darkseid character, and he was absolutely not part of this famous comics storyline. They should have stuck to the comics story.

THE MOVIE VERSION OF REIGN OF THE SUPERMEN - After Superman is put to rest, following his battle with Doomsday, his body is stolen from it's tomb. As authorities investigate, new and completely different Supermen start appearing on the scene, making everyone wonder if Superman has been reincarnated, and if so, which of the new Supermen is the real Man-of-Steel? Includes Lex Luthor and Darkseid from Apokolips.  

THE ORIGINAL COMIC BOOK STORYLINE - The premise was that, since Superman's death, four other supermen have appeared, claiming to be the resurrected Man of Steel, each with different powers and personalities, each having some claim to the Last son of Krypton's legacy. Each of the four superman books featured one of the four supermen, which were all created by the creative teams of those books.

The Supermen were: Last Son of Krypton (Action Comics), a cold, emotionless Kryptonian persona; Superboy (Adventures of Superman), a teenage clone of Superman; Steel (Superman: The Man of Steel), an engineer who built a high-powered suit of armor to carry on Superman's legacy; and finally Cyborg Superman (Superman), who most resembled the real Man of Steel but who was a cybernetic organism.