I don't even know where to begin with the story. I am not a Superman fan by any stretch of the imagination, and even I realized that this wasn't close to the original storyline. I get that in 72 minutes there was only so much they could have included, so the absence of things like the 4 supermen wasn't a suprise, but still... things like Lois sleeping with Superman, but not knowing that he was Clark?!?! WTF?! And Luthor being behind Doomsday? Is that what really happened? (I don't know, I don't read Supes) I seem to recall hearing a different version... The only thing that made some sense - and only because I am an on/off reader of Teen Titans - is that Luthor does some sort of cloning - Superboy DNA was a 50/50 split between Luthor and Supes, so I assume that maybe that the cloning did happen in the comics...
Luthor had nothing to do with the Supermen other than trying to hire Steel and Superboy. The cloning stuff came with Johns in Teen Titans. There was a Kryptonian AI that stole Superman's body and used it as a power source for his cloned body (the Visor Superman). The Cyborg Superman was another AI in a body using kryptonian DNA to simulate Superman's partial form.
A good and complex story, they could've simplified it by having the Cyborg be Lex's flawed clone and Superboy being an escaped under developed clone. They had the Fortress robot and could've had it take the Eradicator's place by creating a new Kryptonian body and then getting all weird about his duty, while Steel takes the role of the everyman. Then eliminate Coast City and Mongul and just have the Supermen feud in Metropolis over who has the right to the name. Or something, anything, that looked like they were trying to follow the source material in some way. I'm not too anal about such things most of the time. If they want to make a Superman show than I'm cool with them doing their own thing, but they were specifically adapting a storyline, and that comes with an obligation to actually adapt the storyline.
Superman/Doomsday just reinforces the fact that the quality of the current animated shows (I don't include the Fleisher Superman stuff, as that was in a class by itself) has plummeted at a stupifying rate since the B:TAS/JLU/Late '90's Superman animation ended. I realize that the bar was set incredibly high by these shows, but one look at The Batman and all the animated superhero shows confirms this fact - its almost like, "why did they even bother?"
true. and what gets me is that this was done by Bruce Timm. This isn't like Brainiac Attacks where the hack behind The Batman used DCAU styles, this is Bruce Timm's work. It boggles the mind that only a year ago he was producing the amazingly complex and intelligent JLU and had about a 15 year track record of high quality going back to Batman he would produce such crap.
