Supernatural has run long enough to share The CW with both Smallville and the current generation of Arrow, Flash, Supergirl and Legends, as well as their many crossovers. We’d never expect Sam and Dean to drive the Impala through Central City, but it seems the Winchesters very nearly took a trip to the Smallville set.

Mind you, the Supernatural boys weren’t about to hop dimensions and cross paths with Clark Kent himself, but writer Jackson Stewart tells Entertainment Weekly the series once sought to have Sam and Dean meet Tom Welling in a Smallville-themed crossover:

There was a lot of really cool ideas that some of the writers had. They had an episode where they really wanted to do a Superman curse that was about every actor who plays Superman ends up getting killed. So they find out that Tom Welling from Smallville is next and have to save him. I thought that was one of the funniest ideas that I’d heard.

For one, the so-called “Superman Curse” is a real-world myth, most commonly associated with Superman actors George Reeves (mysterious suicide after the 1951 series) and Christopher Reeve (paralyzed in 1995, died in 2004). So far as we can tell, Dean Cain, Brandon Routh and Henry Cavill are all doing just fine.

Secondly, a Smallville crossover would no doubt poke fun at Ackles himself, who served as a series regular in the fourth season (see above), and had himself been runner up for the role of Clark Kent. Supernatural has a habit of such meta-humor, as an in-show trip to the Gilmore Girls set made Jared Padalecki visibly uncomfortable.

There’s every chance The CW might throw us for a loop and induct the Winchesters into the next Arrow-verse crossover, but would a Smallville episode have gone too far?

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