jkarzen

I was a huge fan of the original show back when it was on tv so needless to say I was excited when Enter the Florpus was announced, but I'm a bit disappointed. For starters the animation is much different than how the original show was, it's almost more cartoonish which is really unnecessary in my opinion. The second thing is the humor here is a bit different, the original show didn't overly rely on the in your face slapstick humor but this movie does. If you're a fan of the original show then you'll definitely enjoy the movie, but don't expect it to bring back what made the show so great.

Let me start out by saying that I am a fan of most of the shows in the Arrowverse, Black Lightning is the first CW superhero show that is outside of the Arrowverse (for now) which in my opinion is a good thing. Black Lightning is trying to become the Luke Cage of the CW superhero shows, however it tries too hard and at times becomes too preachy almost to the point where it feels like this is a story about Black Lives Matter thrown in with a superhero who protects them, yes I understand that this is the first African-American superhero to have his own mainstream tv show but like I said its trying too hard, Luke Cage was so successful because there wasn't a huge underlying theme of racial tensions, Luke Cage understood that it too was a show about an African-American superhero but it didn't have constant repeating marches and protests akin to that of Black Lives Matter, it was about a man who understood his place in society and was just trying to protect his home from greed and corruption.

Now with that out of the way one of the most important parts of a superhero tv show, the action, also needs some work. I understand the story that Jefferson Pierce is a superhero coming out of retirement (overused superhero trope by the way) but the action scenes almost feel like a cutscene out of a video game at times, shows like Arrow and The Flash are so popular because they have more than one action sequence and those sequences are often complex but Black Lightning on the other hand has had for the first 3 episodes only one sequence per episode of Jefferson suiting up and taking down bad guys, usually a scene where the camera cuts to him standing on some rooftop overlooking where the bad guys are.

I get it that there have only been 3 episodes at the time of me writing this but if the CW has any hopes for this show to continue gaining popularity and of course be renewed then they must change these things I discussed.