Shazam! (1974)
With one word, Billy Batson becomes the World's Mightiest Mortal... but that's about the most believable thing in this series, which creepily featured the underage Billy traveling around the country in an RV accompanied by his "mentor" and occasionally talking to the gods who gave him his powers, who all happened to be badly-animated cartoons. Add in Billy or Captain Marvel helpfully telling you the moral of the episode at the end each week, and you've got a recipe for a dull show enlivened only by the size of Billy's hair.

Electra-Woman and Dyna-Girl (1976)
I'm not really sure this one needs any explanation as to why it's on the list, once you've watched the video.

The Amazing Spider-Man (1977)
In which television revealed the truth about Marvel's favorite superhero: He looked kind of ridiculous. This short-lived series also missed the point of the comic book altogether by not using any of the character's famous supervillains, instead giving him ninjas and terrorists to fight. What was the point of that?

Legends Of The Superheroes (1978)
No expense was spared on bringing DC's biggest name superheroes to the small screen in this live action version of Super Friends - well, unless you count the money that would've been spent on a good script. Again, proving that bad writing and poor special effects can overcome even the best intentions, this two-part series (The second episode of which was a celebrity roast of the heroes led by Ed McMahon. No, really) also featured a villain more diabolical than Lex Luthor: A laugh track.

Those Terrible Captain America TV Movies (1979)
We can just imagine the pitch meeting for these two TV movies: "So, we have the rights to Captain America - You know, the guy who embodies the American Dream and fought in World War II against Hitler? I've got a great take on him: We turn him into Evel Kinivel. And let's get rid of that mask, too. Make it into a motorcycle helmet - That's much more hep." It could've been worse, we guess... We're just not sure how.

The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988)
The original Hulk series was, if you ask us, one of the few superhero shows that worked - and that's because they didn't really treat it as a superhero show at all. When they revived the series a decade later and started pairing him with guest stars from the Marvel Universe, though...? Not a good idea:

(The Daredevil appearance in the next special, Trial of The Incredible Hulk, may be even worse; especially because they seem to have gotten the character mixed up with a generic ninja who happened to be blind.)

Superboy (1988)
An attempt to spin the Superman movies into a weekly format, the Superboy series had sincerity going for it - Sincerity and the seeming inability to not try and drastically rework the series between seasons every year (Including recasting the lead role after the original Superboy asked for a raise around the same time as getting arrested for drunk driving), leading to a schizophrenic, uneven show let down by shoddy special effects.

The Flash (1990)
The Flash comic book may be populated with colorful villains, but the television show didn't have the same luck (Mark Hamill's Trickster, in the clip below, aside), presumably for budgetary reasons. Add in a leading man as stiff as his ridiculously over-sculpted costume, and it's no surprise that this show only lasted one season.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (1993)
Secret identities, colorful outfits, super powers, fighting crime... These guys count as superheroes, right? Maybe it's our age, maybe our dedication to things like plot, dialogue and nuance, or perhaps it's just our aversion to cheap monsters in anything that doesn't actually involve Godzilla, but the long-running (and multiple-show-spanning: It's on its fifteenth different title right now) series always seemed... well, almost unwatchably bad to us.

Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993)
It's a judgment call as to whether this show really deserves to be here. On the one hand, the Moonlighting-esque relationship between its leads was cute, and John Shea's Lex Luthor was a lot of fun... But on the other, it was a show that struggled to come up with good ideas each week and often failed, leading to an episode where Clark married a clone of Lois, who needed to eat frogs in order to survive. Or something. And what was with essentially writing Lex out after one season, anyway?

Generation X (1996)
A pilot adapting Marvel's X-Men spin-off, Generation X made it to air but never to full-series, meaning that the world was spared the low-budget high-concept struggle of teens having to live with their mutant abilities in a world that hated and feared them... because they couldn't act.

Justice League of America (1997)
Possibly the ultimate proof that TV and superheroes don't mix, this is another unsuccessful pilot that aired nonetheless, and features bad writing, bad acting, bad special effects, and some of the most literal - and most embarrassing - superhero costumes ever seen on screen. It's like a landmark of fail.

Mutant X (2001)
Marvel's short-lived television series about mutants that isn't related to the X-Men at all oh no please don't sue us Fox (They did, nonetheless) tried to swerve away from comparisons to the publisher's successful mutant franchise by underplaying everything to the point of boredom. Even Generation X would've been better than this.

Birds of Prey (2002)
It had so much potential - Batman and Catwoman's daughter teaming up with the former Batgirl to fight crime? Hello, high concept - but the execution let it down badly with shoddy writing, lack of direction and the mistaken idea that camp was better than character development. When something makes Smallville look subtle and nuanced, you know you're in trouble.

The Ones That Didn't Suck
Batman (1966)
Almost everything about it is wrong - The cheap jokes! The ill-fitting costumes! Replacing Julie Newmar with Eartha Kitt! - but it all works nonetheless; Batman's 1960s incarnation may not be the best translation from page to screen, but as a weird totem of the era, it remains a classic.

Wonder Woman (1975)
We love Wonder Woman as a character, and this show may be a lot to do with that. While the comic version was having identity issues at the time this series was being made, the TV show took her back to her heyday, added the "let me twirl into my costume" and fittingly made Lynda Carter the star she should've been all along.

The Incredible Hulk (1978)
As we said above, the Hulk show worked despite its title character - Riffing on The Fugitive with an occasional need for a giant silent strongman, the show offered a completely different take on the character from the comics, and one that was arguably better.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1996)
When it comes to television series about people with magical powers, we don't think we're alone in thinking that Joss Whedon did everything right. Mixing just the right amounts of humor and tragedy into the supernatural and superpowered stories, Buffy is everything that superhero shows like Smallville and Heroes should be trying to emulate... if only they could drag themselves away from the superficial special effects and overcooked dialogue.

The Obvious Exceptions
Anything animated
Yes, all of the above shows were live-action, and yes, we know that superhero cartoons have a long and proud history on television as well; we're partial to some Justice League Unlimited, especially if Darkseid is the bad guy. But as much as adding animated series in here may have ruined the grade curve, let's not forget things like this:

or this:

I think you know what I'm saying.

The return of Connor Kent, AKA Superboy, in this week's fourth issue of Legion came as a double surprise to many people; not only has the character been dead since 2006's Infinite Crisis, but he's rarely been mentioned as Superboy since, due - most assumed - to an ongoing lawsuit with the heirs of Jerry Siegel over the ownership of the name. Does Connor's return, to life and as Superboy, mean that DC have settled the case? Not exactly, explains Newsarama's Jeff Trexler:

The comprehensive nature of the 2006 ruling–that "any comic strip material of the nature now and heretofore sold under the title SUPERBOY" belonged exclusively to the Siegel heirs–arguably prohibited DC from publishing any material that featured a character named Superboy, whether a young Clark Kent or a derivative work featuring a character with the same name and similar powers... However, in July 2007, after the Superboy case had been transferred to a different judge, the court granted DC's motion to reconsider the 2006 ruling... Even better for DC, the 2007 order went on to indicate that DC owns at least 50% of the Superboy copyright. Because the original material in question was drawn by Joe Shuster–whose rights at this point remain vested in DC–Superboy would arguably be a joint work co-owned by DC and the Siegel heirs.

As a co-owned property, DC would have the legal right to publish new Superboy material without permission from the Siegels... which would explain not only Connor's return this week, but also the news that he will go on to star in DC's upcoming Adventure Comics revival, written by Geoff Johns:

The series will feature one of my favorite characters to write and a mainstay of my run on TEEN TITANS - SUPERBOY... But that's not all. It can't be, right? I mean, it's called ADVENTURE COMICS. It's not called SUPERBOY. That's because the series won't just be featuring Superboy, it'll be co-featuring the Legion of Super-Heroes fresh from the Crisis of the 31st Century in LEGION OF THREE WORLDS. More on the details of the book, and Superboy and the Legion, will be coming out in the following weeks, but I think it's safe to reveal that STARMAN will be the Legionnaire taking front and center stage with our first issue.

Adventure Comics #1 will be released in August; the Superboy lawsuit is ongoing.

Explaining A Mysterious Return [Newsarama.com]

12) Shepherd Book. I almost mentioned Wash here, since his death in Serenity upset me tremendously — but at least Wash's death made sense in context. Wash gets to die heroically, piloting the ship through a crazy dogfight over a scary planet, then gliding a dead ship to a landing (almost) everyone can walk away from. His death is jarring and shocking, and it feels like we get to love him all over again before saying goodbye.

But Shepherd Book on the other hand — he feels like a throwaway character in the movie, and his death is pretty pointless. He's just there to mouth a few words about spirituality and then get wasted. And his death, unlike Wash, is purely there for plot-hammer purposes. He's Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru — he dies so that Mal can realize that there's no way to hide from the Operative any longer, and he's too mad to keep hiding. It's the plot-device death that lets Mal turn to the camera and (pretty much) say "Now it's personal." He's Mal's girlfriend in a refrigerator. Shepherd Book deserved so, so much more than that.

11) Marcus Cole in Babylon 5. He's madly in love with Susan Ivanova, but never gets anywhere with her. Until finally, he sacrificed his life to save hers, using an alien device to transfer all his life energy to hers. Says actor Jason Carter:

"The irony of it all is that I gave my life in order that someone else might live who then left the show!" Carter laughs, referring to Claudia Christian's decision to quit as Ivanova at the of B5's fourth season. "I mean, what was the point about that then? It kind of makes my heroic act a little pointless, I thought."

Carter actually filmed two versions of the story: one where Cole died, and one where he was cryogenically frozen. And later, we found out the frosty version of Cole's fate was the real version, and creator J. Michael Straczynski wrote a story where Cole gets revived and gets to live on a barren planet with a clone of Ivanova. Aww. (Runner up: I nearly put Boone from Earth: The Final Conflict in this slot.)

10) Pantha. Actually, she can serve as a stand-in for every great comics character who's had a throwaway death in a major crossover. It never fails: some character who used to be popular or star in their own book falls from grace, until he/she turns into cannon fodder. All in the name of showing how bad-ass the latest bad-guy is, like Eclipso killing off the Will Payton version of Starman, or Max Lord shooting Blue Beetle in the head. Or Black Goliath randomly dying off in Civil War. But poor old Pantha may be the worst. One of the most loved New Titans characters in the 1990s, she'd fallen into obscurity by the time Infinite Crisis came around. So she randomly gets in the way of Superboy Prime's backhand. He spends a few panels afterwards staring at her rolling head and trying to insist he didn't really mean to do that. Way to prove you're not stupid, Superboy Prime.

(Oh, and another comic-book runner up: I almost threw Superman in here, because his 1992 "death" was really cheap and weird. He and Doomsday just punch each other a whole lot, and then they're both dead. Except that they're not.)

9) Carson Beckett. Actually, there have been so many deaths on Stargate that left us unsatisfied, from Janet to Martouf to Her-ur (who shoulda been a contender!). But at least none of those other characters were killed by an exploding tumor, which apparently is the cutting edge in space terrorism. Watson has a tumor that was due to explode and kill everyone and Beckett insists on removing it instead of putting Watson in isolation. He gets it out in time, but then it blows up and kills Beckett and the bomb-disposal team. And yes, I know Beckett later comes back, but it's his clone or something.

8) The Lone Gunmen. They were cool enough to get their own short-lived spin-off series, but then they died (or possibly faked their deaths) in an episode that didn't even have Mulder and Scully in it. In the episode "Jump The Shark," the Lone Gunmen return to the show after the end of their own spin-off, only to get locked in a room with a virus bomb.

7) Trinity in the Matrix: Revolutions. Mostly, her death is weak because she gets killed and then keeps talking for another ten minutes. (Thanks to Meredith for the suggestion.)

6) Cpl. Hicks in Aliens 3. He's one of the coolest characters in Aliens, stepping up and taking charge after everything goes rotten. He stands up to the slimy Burke and listens to Ripley when she says they have to wipe out the aliens. But what does that get him in the third movie? An off-screen death at the movie's beginning, with just his name on a computer screen to confirm that he died. (Thanks again to Meredith for this one.)

5) Louanne "Kat" Katraine. She was one of my favorite characters on Battlestar Galactica, maybe because she was the only one who ever really called Starbuck on all her shit. So I was bummed when she got turned into a drug addict, and then it turned out she's an imposter who stole the name Louanne Katraine and is involved in running contraband. She may even have helped the Cylons infiltrate human society prior to the attacks. Even though I usually love Jane Espenson's writing, I really didn't like the episode "The Passage," in which Kat suddenly gets a whole new backstory as a smuggler, before being "redeemed" by sacrificing her life in a radiation field. It felt sort of cheap, as if the show was turning one of its coolest characters into a whole different person before disposing of her.

4) Judge Giant. He was one of the coolest characters in the Judge Dredd universe — until he got shot in the back during a riot in the "Block War" storyline. It was a quick, throwaway cheap death for such a cool character. Writer Alan Grant later apologized, according to Wikipedia: "When we wrote the death of Giant, I thought it was a great idea to kill him off in such a casual, natural (for a judge) way. But when the reader outcry came, I was startled and forced to see things from their point of view."

3) Cyclops in X-Men 3. This was a cheap death, except that it ended up being very expensive — it totally cost the movie my interest and suspension of disbelief. I spent about an hour after Cyclops died assuming they'd faked his death for some reason, and expecting him to pop up at a critical moment. And when I finally accepted that Cyclops had died off screen, at the hands of his true love, who had gone batshit after being hit with a plot hammer, I was so incredulous I could barely pay attention to all the waffling and wailing over whether Rogue was going to get Mutant-begone treatment or not. (Did she? I can't even remember.)

2) The Sixth Doctor. When the BBC fired Colin Baker as the star of Doctor Who, they asked him to come back so they could kill him off and regenerate him into a new actor. Not surprisingly, he said no thanks. In that instance, the classy thing would have been to introduce the new Doctor already settled in the role, and pretend the Colin Baker Doctor had died off-screen. (As a bonus, that approach would have allowed you to write out Bonnie Langford's Mel at the same time.) Instead, they put a curly blond wig onto the new Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, and had him pretend to be the old Doctor for long enough to blur his face. And poor old Colin's Doctor died, not saving the universe, but banging his head on the TARDIS console while the Rani was shooting pew-pew lasers at the time machine.

1) Captain Kirk. Actually, I pretty much want to make Captain Kirk numbers one through 10 on this list, since his death in Star Trek: Generations was the gold standard for disappointing ends. He finally agrees to leave the happy horse-barn paradise to help Captain Picard deal with Malcolm McDowell, who really shouldn't have posed much of a challenge for one Captain, let alone two. Maybe if it was Clockwork Orange Malcolm McDowell (before the treatments) or even Get Crazy Malcolm McDowell. But cranky old Malcolm McDowell? Why why why? McDowell basically beats the crap out of Kirk. It could have been worse. It could have been the original version they shot:

Trek runner up: Trip in the final episode of Enterprise. Why did he have to sacrifice his life when faced with a set of standard-issue thugs? Normally, he would have defeated the low-rent space-crooks with one pinky and some technobabble, but suddenly it becomes a matter of life and death because it's the final episode.

BONUS: I had to add Boba Fett from Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi, becuase as Rickotron and Bonniegrrl pointed out, he totally gets the short end of the lightsaber. He gets built up as this super-cool bounty hunter, and then he just sort of gets knocked into the mouth of the desert beastie. Yuck. And Star Wars runner-up status goes to Mace Windu and all the Jedi who get zapped by Clone Troopers in Revenge Of The Sith.

1. The characters are almost all named "Lad", "Boy", "Girl" or "Lass".
Sure, it's a holdover from the simpler era in which they were created - later additions to the team tried to sound cooler with names like "Wildfire," "Quislet" and "Blok" - but when writer Mark Waid rebooted the team's continuity for a second time (Actually a fourth time, but very few people remember that the 1989 series restarted continuity twice within two issues, just because), he made a point of preserving the tradition and having the characters point out that they did it because it was so awesomely retro.

2. In the future, anything can happen.
When you're the only comic book that's staking out a particular territory, then you get to say whatever goes. Like, for example, blowing up the Earth. Or, that your long-running lead character is actually being possessed by a bi-sexual pet and that his girlfriend is actually a man. Perhaps you'd prefer the revelation that your entire cast may be cloned versions of their original selves, and if not, then their original selves may in fact be cloned versions of your entire cast. All three of these plot twists appeared in the fan-favorite Five Years Later era of the series in the late '80s.

3. Everyone wanted to be them.
When you're a legion of super-heroes, it stands to reason that your bad guys would want to form their own Legion of Super-Villains in response. But that's not all; there was also the Legion of Super-Pets, who saved the Legion's asses on a couple of occasions, and the Legion of Substitute Heroes, a team made up of wannabes who'd applied for, and failed to get, Legion membership but wanted to save the day when their heroes were unavailable nonetheless. Which leads me to...

4. They held open auditions for new members.
For years, the Legion would open the doors of whatever headquarters they happened to have at the time - My favorite was the upside-down rocketship that had crashlanded in the ground nosefirst - to anyone and anything that wanted to join the team, American Idol-style. The current team-members would watch demonstrations of applicants' powers and listen to them explain why they wanted to join the team, and then vote whether or not to admit them. That's not the only proof that these kids of tomorrow had too much faith in democracy; they also voted for the leader of the team each year, with the results reflecting whoever the readers of the comic had wanted to see take the chair.

5. The Legion of Super-Heroes has the second greatest superhero high concept ever.
True, it's no Green Lantern (Seriously, does it get any better than "He's a space cop fighting alien crime with his magic wishing ring"?), but whether by accident or design, writer Otto Binder and artist Al Plastino managed to hit paydirt with their April, 1958 issue of Adventure Comics - even ignoring the Superboy connection, there's just something awesome about the idea of alien teenagers with super powers one thousand years in the future. Anyone who can't come up with something interesting from that set-up shouldn't call themselves a writer (Jim Shooter, I'm looking at you, based upon your current run).

With the 50th anniversary of the characters this year, and three different versions of the team in existence (two different versions being published as we speak, in Action Comics as well as the actual Legion of Super-Heroes series), rumors are that the franchise is going to get a significant (and multiple-Earth-spanning) push later this year in a mini-series that may tie in with Grant Morrison's Final Crisis, as well as a special collection of some of their greatest hits for newcomers. All I can say is, it's about time. When the world can't recognize the genius of a team with members called Bouncing Boy and Matter-Eater Lad, then something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

The Legion of Super-Heroes Online Companion [Legion Online]

I love the way Clark's mom is just a Charlie Brown-esque nagging voice on the phone.

Ilya and Alexander Salkind, producers of the first three Superman movies plus Supergirl, thought the world was ready for a weekly TV show about Superboy at college. Frat parties, mean jocks, bumbling campus administrators, plus energy-sucking "succubi" and teenage Lex Luthor! Unfortunately, Superboy doesn't turn up often enough to relieve the awfulness of the campus dramas.

Famous names: John Byrne, Dick Giordano

Crunchy goodness: 3

Elevator pitch: It's just like regular Superman — only without Superbaby and the legion of Super pets.

Stunt casting: Batman puts in an appearance in one issue, but he and Superman aren't best friends. Instead, Superman mistrusts the shrouded vigilante, who resorts to becoming a suicide bomber to halt Superman in his tracks.

Most painfully dated moment: The Man Of Steel tries to flee the silliness of classic Superman so frantically, that it ends up looking old-school twenty years later.

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: Byrne's reinvention of Superman helped to inspire the 1990s show Lois and Clark.

The Continuity Pages: Superman - John Byrne Era