#if superman is treated too seriously the themes of the character gets drowned out

[justletmeramble1701]

My favorite part of My Adventures with Superman so far is how they handle the trunks.

When he first gets the suit, it's trunkless, making the audience believe it's going to be another Superman thing that is trying to make the suit look cool by ditching the trunks no matter how important they are to the design. Then, Ma Kent sees the suit and goes, like, "Ya know, it's missing something," and gives him the trunks! This gets me more hyped for the show than anything else.

This shows that the creators understand the importance of the trunks. Of course, there's the design aspect. Generally, if the Superman suit is broken down into its value scale, the red is the dark tones, the yellow the light tones, and the blue the mid tone (sometimes the red and blue switch and, when the yellow is replaced with black, one of the other colors, usually the red, has to become the light tone). Since classic Superman is an inspirational character, the light and dark tones tend not to be that far apart, so that causes the blue to look very muddy if it is not broken up by something, in comes the trunks.

The red trunks and the yellow belt break up the blue by adding both the light and dark tones in the middle of the design, making it pop more. There are ways of doing this without the trunks, but it tends to move away from the classic design. Common examples are adding black and/or white, putting more red and yellow throughout the suit, or having multiple shades of blue (which the cartoon's design also does).

The trunks also represent something very important tonally, Superman is inherently goofy. That's why a lot of modern designs tend to forgo them. They are a reminder that Superman is a silly character tied to the childlike idealisn of a non cynical past. This scene is the show telling us that it believes that the silliness of the base concept (idealized sci-fi) is a key component of the character. It proves (along with the overall tone) that the show is going to allow itself to be goofy, which is great.