TV and Me: "It's Superman!"

 

Television and I grew up together.  This is our story. Fifth in a series.

  I was stuck inside one weekend afternoon in December 1952, probably a Saturday.  I was six years old, and had just started first grade at Sacred Heart School in September.   One of my aunts on my father’s side was visiting, accompanied by at least one daughter. All of my Kowinski cousins at that point were girls, so they would play with my sister.  That usually involved a lot of screaming and running around.  On this day they would erupt from my sister’s room and barge into mine, point at me, scream and run away.

 My mother and my aunt, busy talking over coffee in the kitchen, were no help.  So I parked myself in front of the television set in the living room, and turned it on, with no expectation of what I might see. 

What I saw was a man in a futuristic Flash Gordon outfit, explaining to others dressed in a similar way that their planet was about to explode.  They got angry and didn’t believe him.

 I had stumbled upon the first episode of The Adventures of Superman.  But I’d missed the opening—the “Look! Up in the sky!” and the “faster than a speeding bullet” and probably the most famous description in early television, of the “strange visitor from another planet, who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.”  I even missed the name: Superman.

 I started with that first scene on Krypton. So I didn’t really know what I was watching, but I was mesmerized. I don’t know how much of the story I followed that first time, but by the end I’d seen Clark Kent become Superman, and fly to the rescue—of a man dangling from a dirigible. 

I know I felt completely absorbed in that world, and when the program ended I felt bereft, confused. I didn’t know what to do.  My mother and my aunt were still in the kitchen. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it.  So I went back into my room, closed the door, and thought about it.  And then I did what many others would eventually do: I tied a blanket around my neck to create a cape.

 I watched episodes all that school year.  At the same time I was getting my first doses of Catholic doctrine, mostly through stories Sister Mary Kathleen would tell every morning (although since first and second grade were taught in the same classroom, I probably also got my introduction to the Baltimore Catechism.)  For awhile I started to think of Superman’s father Jor-El as God the Father (anticipating a theme of the Christopher Reeves’ Superman movies.)

 I was especially taken with Superman’s secret identity as Clark Kent, and the episodes in which that secret was endangered.  Perhaps this had something to do with going to school, where I was no longer the hero of epics my playmates and I invented as we performed them, but I had to be meek Clark Kent and fold my hands and put them in the center of my desk. 

Still, I didn’t want to keep my true identity a secret from a blond second grade girl named Judy, and once stood outside the classroom where I knew she was, significantly glancing to the sky and making those quick movements George Reeves did, as I ran off to transform into the Boy of Steel.  Somehow I believed she would interpret my actions correctly—the first of many such mistakes.

 But before that December day, I was a complete Superman innocent.  Superman did not exist for me until I saw that first television episode.

 But Superman had been around since his first comic book appearance in 1938.  He was an immediate hit, far beyond comic book readers.  His first “personal appearance” was on Superman Day at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair.  Superman has still sold more comic books than any subsequent superhero.

  A radio show soon followed in 1940 (the voice of Superman belonged to Bud Collyer, who I would see as the mild-mannered host of the TV game show “Beat the Clock”), which ran until 1950. 

 Then a series of theatrical cartoons in 1941 and 1942, the first nine of which were made by the Fleischer Studios, with an unusually large budget. (Eight more were made by different directors, with lower budgets and a choice of wartime stories that exposed elements of the racism of the time.)

  These nine full color cartoons are still striking, notable for their art deco look and an emphasis on Superman in action—in several there is almost no dialogue (although Bud Collyer is tapped to again to give his signature radio line: “This looks like a job [voice suddenly lowers] for Superman!”)  Also they feature a sexier Lois Lane, who flies her own plane and can handle a tommygun.   The famous George Reeves Clark Kent wink is previewed in this version, as is the hands-back flying style of Christopher Reeve in his feature films.

 After that there were a couple of live action movie serials in 1948 and 1950, with Kirk Alyn.  These were the most profitable serials in movie history, outdoing the classic Buster Crabbe Flash Gordons.  In these, Superman was seen flying in animation.

 The next step was a feature film in 1951, though it was really a low-budget test drive for the upcoming television series.   Superman and the Mole Men starred George Reeves as Superman and Phyllis Coates as Lois Lane, and clocked in at under an hour.  It would later be edited into two half hours for the TV series.  This time, and for the first time, a live action Superman flew.

 The first season of the television series The Adventures of Superman went into production immediately after the movie was shot in the summer of 1951, with the addition of Jack Larson as Jimmy Olsen, Robert Shayne as Police Inspector Henderson and John Hamilton as Perry White, editor of the Daily Planet. Nothing happened for awhile until Kellogg’s cereals (eventual sponsors of the radio version) agreed to sponsor it. It was a syndicated program, which means it wasn’t on any network schedule. So it was up to individual stations to take the chance.

 The first to air it was WENR in Chicago, in September 1952.  Then Davenport, Iowa and other small Midwestern markets in October.  Then Buffalo in November, and Pittsburgh’s WDTV in December.  Most scheduled it in an open early evening slot.  I may have seen a Saturday afternoon re-showing from the previous week, a not uncommon practice at the time.  Or it may have been where it was first scheduled, though it soon had an evening time.

 Those of us in Chicago or in range of the Pittsburgh station got a head start, since the big markets—Los Angeles, Baltimore/Washington and New York City—didn’t air the first episode until the spring of 1953. Once it hit New York in April, though, the show was an instant smash hit. 

Kirk Alyn and Noelle Neill in the movie serial

The series went back into production for a second season, with a change in producer and in the cast. Noelle Neil, who had been the first screen Lois Lane in the movie serials, became the television Lois for the remainder of the series. 

 Though apparently a result of Phyllis Coates being unavailable, this change was fortuitous.  Coates’ Lois had a harder edge, and her belittling of Clark Kent bordered on abusive at times. This reflected the character division between the meek Clark Kent and the dominant Superman of prior versions.  But the TV series couldn’t afford a half hour of Superman special effects—a lot of the story had to be carried by Clark Kent, and George Reeves played him more as a crusading reporter.  (The opening narration, after all, ended with “…and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American Way.”)  Superman works through Clark as well as in his own identity.

 The Adventures of Superman made six seasons of half-hour shows, though only the first two were of the full 26 episodes (which were then re-run for a year of 52 weeks.) The next four seasons had 13 new episodes each, with the second half of the season as re-airing of previous episodes, including from earlier years.  Starting with the third season in 1955, the series was shot in color, though most stations didn’t air it in color until there were enough color sets, at least a decade later. 

The color episodes helped extend the life of the series, but it didn’t really need much help.  The Adventures of Superman was seen off and on for decades—so kids in the 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond might replicate something like my first-time experience.  (One fan site I ran across was run by someone who first saw it on a cable station in 1986.)

 Superman was a touchstone during my entire childhood. Even in the 50s, Superman episodes were aired and re-aired many times, so my memories include responses from throughout my childhood. Still, when I’ve gone back to view these episodes on DVD, it’s been clear that my sharpest memories are from the first and second seasons. 

 I remember a moment in an early first season episode, “Mystery of the Broken Statues” (a variation on a Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes plot) when Lois Lane suddenly cries in surprise, “Eureka!”  I’d never heard the word before and wondered what it meant.  I was fascinated to learn in one second season episode that diamonds are made from “coal, carbon: you put a lump of coal under a million tons of pressure for a thousand years, you get a diamond.”  But of course, Superman did it with one hand.

 And I recall Clark Kent playing with words when he teased Lois, “You wonder?  No wonder that you wonder—you’re a pretty wonder-ful girl.”

 Most of all I remember the attempt to kill Superman in the final first season episode, “Crime Wave.”  Superman was lured into a large room, with geometrically shaped objects on the walls, presumably parts of the deadly device.  The door crashes closed behind him—he tries to find a way out, pressing the walls at the corners, but he’s trapped.  Then the “professor” in the next room turns on his machine, which attacks Superman from all directions with jagged lightning-like spears, crackling like electricity.  Superman ends up in the center of the room, trying to ward off the rays with his hands, but sinking to his knees and then falling, inert on the floor.

 The professor comes in and pronounces him dead.  The Big Boss (the one that Superman and the Metropolis police have searched for in vain) arrives to gloat—until Superman jumps up, and demonstrates how easy it is for him to escape.  He has baited the Big Boss into revealing himself (he turns out to be the head of the citizen crime commission.) 

 This attack on Superman remained vivid in my memory for a long time. In fact, either it has been edited down since or I added every more agony in my imagination, because it seemed longer and more convincing.  I “remember” specific moves that aren’t in there anymore.

 But the stories in a sense were secondary: everything was in that still haunting opening—that strange visitor from another planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, standing against a background of the stars, just above the Earth —energized my imagination and yearning. 

I became such a loyal fan that I sent away for my “Supermen of America” membership and secret code book, probably from the comic books.  (There were actually nine codes: one for each planet, including Krypton, but not, of course, Earth.  I kept the booklet under my mattress.) 

 The edge and seriousness of the first season became lighter at times in the second (in one episode, the bad guys are defeated by customers at a diner throwing pies at them) and in later years, plots began veering off into low-budget fantasy. (Though they could hardly compete with the comic book fantasies of that decade.)

   Towards the end there were surreal moments that seemed to be coming from writers entertaining themselves, as when one hoodlum described what he was going to do with his share of the loot—he would build a big house that looked just like the penitentiary, so his friends would feel at home. 

Still, there was a theme communicated to us, maybe even better when the early crime-fighting faded: Superman rescued those in trouble (even if too often it was Lois and/or Jimmy).  He was the strong champion of those who needed help.

   This was the apparent paradox of Superman: a man so powerful he could take anything he wanted, but he only helped others.  In a first season episode, a criminal mastermind type who is trying to figure out which Daily Planet reporter might be Superman in disguise, questions Lois Lane and speculates it might be her.  Superman might be a woman, he suggests, because he defends the weak, and acts out of compassion.  Implicit in this telling observation is  that Superman redefine the conventional view of the masculine to emphasize altruism. 

 According to Superman’s chief creator, a young man in Cleveland named Jerry Siegel, this idea of the altruistic champion was a motive for the character’s origin in 1934.  He described his state of mind at the time:  “Being unemployed and worried during the Depression and knowing hopelessness and fear.  Hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless, oppressed Jews in Nazi Germany…seeing movies depicting the horrors of privation suffered by the downtrodden…How could I help them when I could barely help myself?  Superman was the answer.”

 Siegel and his drawing partner and friend, Joe Shuster, looked to science fiction, movies, pulp and comic strip adventures to shape the character and his environment.  “Metropolis” came from the classic Fritz Lang futuristic movie of the same name.  Superman’s dual identity was preceded by such fictional figures as Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel. Clark Kent’s look was partly inspired by silent film comic Harold Lloyd.  Lois Lane was derived from a B-movie heroine, a reporter called Torchy Blane. (Shuster hired a Cleveland girl to model for his first drawings of Lois, and later married the model.)

 While the Superman costume was influenced by a variety of fictional characters, ultimately it comes from the shared imagery of the circus, for many years a major source of entertainment in America: the aerialist’s tights, the bodysuit with the underwear on the outside of the circus strongman, and the magician’s cape.

  (The first comic strip character by a couple of years to wear what is now the standard superhero costume was The Phantom, who technically wasn’t a superhero because he had no superpowers. The Phantom was a long-running comic strip series, with one movie serial.  I followed his exploits in our daily paper when I was old enough. A proximate inspiration for his costume was Douglas Fairbanks’ Robin Hood. Fairbanks was also a model for Siegel and Shuster’s Superman.)

 When Siegel got to actually write Superman stories for comic books, the character he created was that idea of Superman that inspired him in 1934. In his first story Superman prevented a woman from being wrongfully executed.  In his second, he went after a wife-beater. 

In his 1930s adventures, Superman rescued miners in a cave-in, battled stock market manipulators and munitions manufacturers fomenting wars to sell their wares. He fought crime, but also poverty and unsafe labor conditions. He battled crooked politicians and lobbyists, slumlords, corrupt industrialists and crooked labor leaders alike. He came to the aid of individuals in trouble, and was devoted to the common good. He was a compassionate, high-spirited and humorous hero of the people, a wise-cracking crusader, like Spiderman with an edge.

 When others took over the comic books (Siegel and Shuster had signed away their rights to the character), the themes of righteous rescue and battling injustice were weakened, but never completely faded.

 They emerged again from time to time in the 1940s radio show. On the very first radio broadcast Superman was described as "champion of the oppressed...who has sworn to devote his existence on Earth to helping those in need." Later on radio he would be described as “ champion of equal rights, valiant, courageous fighter against the forces of hate and prejudice.”  

 In 1946, a 16-episode series had Superman battling an organization based on the KKK ("The Clan of the Fiery Cross.")  Reputedly based on descriptions by a  reporter who infiltrated the Klan, for the first time it exposed its secret rituals as well as its crimes.  The series was credited with reducing KKK recruiting.  Notably it related this domestic racism to Nazi racism.

 The 1950s television series hit some of the same notes. The first episode of the second season echoes that first comic book story when Superman saves an unjustly convicted man from execution, just in the nick of time. In the pilot film, “Superman and the Mole Men,” Superman defends harmless and helpless aliens against a mob. He reasons with these men but then explodes:  “Stop acting like Nazi storm troopers!” 

(This Superman in the pilot movie had the harder edge of the early comic’s character.  He saves the life of one of the mob, but when the man tries to thank him, all Superman says is, “You don’t deserve it.”)

 If Superman’s rescues became less pointed and more generically humanitarian, they still maintained that initial image to some degree. 

 According to author Thomas Andrae, Superman was “neither alienated from society nor a misanthropic power-obsessed nemesis but a truly messianic figure...the embodiment of society’s noblest ideals, a ‘man of tomorrow’ who foreshadows mankind’s highest potentialities and profoundest aspirations but whose tremendous power, remarkably, poses no danger to its freedom and safety.” 

The Adventures of Superman series we saw in the 1950s was in large part a legacy of earlier versions. Besides the comic books, the early 40s animated cartoons made the key change of giving Superman the ability to fly, instead of just leaping tall buildings in a single bound.  (They animated this in one sequence and thought it looked dumb, so they got permission from the comic book company to show Superman flying.)  

The animated series in particular began the evolution of the similar theme music that continued until John Williams made it definitive in the first big budget feature film in 1978.  But the 1950s TV version was also exciting.  We would dat da da, da da da da the melody out loud while we played.

The radio show also added Kryptonite, the Daily Planet as the newspaper’s name, and the characters Jimmy Olsen and Perry White. The comics then absorbed all of it. Though he was invented for radio, it was the TV version of Inspector Henderson that persuaded the comic books to include him, too. 

Jimmy Olsen (Jack Larson) and Lois Lane
(Noel Neill)

The actual stories in the TV version’s opening seasons came primarily from the radio show, though many of those tales had in turn been adapted from the comics.  The origin story in that first episode was a direct copy from the Kirk Alyn movie serial, including some identical dialogue. 

 But by the second season the TV series settled into itself.  Noelle Neil as Lois Lane was a key to the difference.  She was a good-natured skeptic in relation to Clark Kent, but without the withering contempt, and treated Jimmy Olsen as more of an equal.  That worked better with the new interpretation of Clark Kent, and helped elevate the increasingly popular Jimmy Olsen. 

There was a relationship, a camaraderie among the principals that transcended some of the hokey stories, without ever seeming insincere.  This happy family was more reassuring to kids. The suspense in the stories was sometimes furnished by threats to Superman (especially Kryptonite), but more often the suspense was whether he would find out where the trouble was and get there in time.  Of course, all this was the surrounding sideshow for what we sat down to see: Superman flying, bursting through walls, facing bad guys with their bullets bouncing off his chest.

 As children we may not have noticed, but there’s no hiding what a low-budget series this was.  It was shot very quickly, with scenes in the same location but for various episodes shot on the same day—one reason that the characters wore pretty much the same clothes all the time. When the series was shot in color, those clothes got even more similar: they were all mostly in shades of blue, presumably because they would also register well in black and white until the color sets came along.

 And those outfits in the origin episode that look like the ones in Flash Gordon?  One reportedly was worn in a Flash Gordon serial, while others had appeared in other serials such as Captain Marvel and Captain America.

 The absurdities became in part a kind of television convention, such as the opening shot of the huge Daily Planet Building, in which it seemed that about five people worked.  They got out a metropolitan daily newspaper with an editor and two and a half reporters.

 The same special effects shots—especially of Superman flying—were shown over and over.  Other shots—Clark Kent running down the alley to become Superman, or Superman landing in front of a wall of boulders—were also repeated often, even when not entirely appropriate.  But to us I suppose it was all ritualized.  Perhaps that early childhood insistence on repetition (the same story over and over) never completely goes away (playing the same song over and over.)

 The low-budget nature of the TV show unfortunately extended to the shockingly little the cast was paid.  Eventually George Reeves was paid decently, but the others all had to live modestly and insecurely.  John Hamilton (Perry White) lived in a bungalow and took a city bus to work on the Superman set.  They were all cut out of the residuals paid over the many years that these episodes were repeated.  (But then it took Siegel and Shuster several lawsuits to begin to get a tiny piece of the huge action from their creation.)     

 It took more than 20 years after the TV show but the character of Superman went on the big screen in a very big way in 1978, with the first of the four Christopher Reeve Superman films.  To me Reeve is the definitive Superman, as well as the definitive Clark Kent.

 More television shows followed, and more and even bigger movies.  Superman was the first superhero, and now superheroes are a genre in themselves.  They dominate feature filmmaking and exhibition, and with films that cost more than the annual budgets of some countries, not to mention the combined annual incomes of millions of people.  Superhero films get bigger and bigger, as teams of superheroes battle teams of super-villains on a cosmic scale, with the survival of worlds, the universe and everything at stake.

 Now the human scale of the TV Adventures of Superman is almost completely lost.  The idea that superheroes might waste their time rescuing miners after a cave-in, fighting a slumlord or a protection racket targeting small storekeepers, saving a child from harm, or even dealing with the unfortunate consequences of goodhearted but misguided inventors, would seem beneath them, not to mention failing to generate big enough visual effects battles, explosions and loud mayhem. 

 For all its flaws, the 1950s TV show better represents the rationale and the uniqueness of the Superman character, including human wish fulfillment to address human scale tragedies, in which the worst of it includes feeling powerless.  Something a six year old understands very well.  Yet the message was part of the character: if you have power, you use it for others, and for the common good.

Happy 40th, Superman (the Movie)

I was one of the first few hundred (or maybe few thousand) to see the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie, at a New York pre-premiere press screening in 1978.

 It was a very hot ticket. Mike Shain (mild-mannered reporter for a New York metropolitan newspaper) and I were on our way to the second screening when we ran into a then-famous movie director and his famous actress girlfriend coming back from the first. Our screening was so crowded that the only seat I could find was in the front row. You could say I was in that movie as well as into it.

Everybody there that day knew that a lot of money was spent on it.  Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, both released just the year before, had raised the bar for visual effects epics.  John Williams had made his reputation as epic big screen movie score composer on those films--he did the score for this one.  Everyone wanted to see Marlon Brando, the Godfather himself, slumming as a highly paid space alien.  Nobody knew much of anything about this Christopher Reeve kid. And most of all, nobody knew how anyone could make a Superman movie in 1978 that wasn't ridiculous.

Still, what if he was back?...Not the paunchy George Reeves from the reruns, but the Superman of childhood wonder?  The tests of that would certainly involve the actor and the story, but most of all...could he fly?  For this was a time, boys and girls, before CGI, when most visual effects were still mechanical and not computerized, and when there were many true "special effects"--that is, physical effects done on set, on the day of shooting.

Nobody had yet seen a credible flying sequence on the big screen.  The movie, everyone knew, would rise or fall on whether Superman could fly.

So perhaps knowing this, the moviemakers made everybody wait almost an hour to find out.

Or maybe they didn't plan it that way. Though the three parts of the movie were reputedly in the original Mario Puzo story, there were so many writers eventually involved, so much turmoil between the producers and the director, so much that had to be accomplished in so short a time (and they were filming a lot of scenes for the second movie as well) that it could be one of those classic messes, like Casablanca, that almost unaccountably turns out to be more than the sum of its crazy parts.

director Donner at left

Or maybe it was director Richard Donner who made it all work.  That's certainly the tenor of the featurettes that accompany the boxed set of Reeve Superman movies.  Donner and the actual script writer (billed as Creative Consultant due to Writers Guild rules presumably) Tom Mankiewicz managed to imbue contemporary Metropolis with comedy but preserve Superman himself from ridicule, sarcasm or even irony.  (Though the mythos was good for a few laughs, as when Clark Kent can't find a phone booth where he can change into Superman.)

Violating all kinds of expectations, each of the three distinct sections of the film has its own style.  But the tone for each was just right, while the rhythm from one to the other built the film's energy.  Together they made it an epic.

First there was that dazzling title sequence, with the neon blue names zooming out (quite an effect in the front row.)  It became a much imitated style, making its way to TV commercials (as did the circling tracking shots of 2001 a decade before.)

The Krypton section that began the film was a bit shaky, but then this part of the origin story always is, despite the otherworldly appeal.  In each of the prior dramatizations, the outfits and haircuts of the advanced alien Kryptonians always looks ridiculous a few years later.

In this one, Marlon Brando spouts ornate nonsense in his best Claude Rains accent to the remarkably crypto-fascist Kryptonians in their glowing white outfits, and condemns villains who wouldn't show up again until the second movie.  Maybe the denial of a scientific prediction of the planet's peril by the supposedly advanced Krypton leadership makes a bit more sense now than it ever did before.  Still, the function of Krypton in the story is to die quickly: Krypton as crypt.

While the design is conceptually bold, the Krypton scenes didn't even look that good in 1978, when the movie was rushed into theaters to meet its holiday play dates.  Both the sequence itself and the look of it vastly improved in the year 2000 re-edit and re-mastering.

As the destruction of Krypton he predicted begins, Jor-El sends his infant son on a course to Earth, for mixed motives apparently: because he has a better chance of surviving there since he's from a society thousands of years ahead of Earth's, he'll have super powers and be indestructible.  But also because (as his recorded voice later tells his grown son in the Fortress of Solitude) the Earthlings "can be a great people, Kal-El.  They only lack the light to show them the way.  For this reason above all, I have sent them you, my only son."

So starts the tracking of the Christ story, which some of us saw in it and which Mankiewicz has since confirmed was deliberate.  In some ways it's intrinsic to Superman's function as a kind of savior with godlike powers.  It's there in Jerry Seigel's description, and it certainly suggested itself to me and my friends when the Superman television show was first popular, just as we were starting Catholic school.  I recall hushed discussions among us about whether Superman and God were the same.

After a few scenes of the only begotten son's journey through space (during which he's treated to Jor-El's educational recordings, part one) his capsule skids into a Kansas wheat field, where Ma and Pa Kent in their pickup see the crash, and the toddler (sans swaddling clothes), holding his arms out to them.

So a virgin birth of a being from the sky. And once the child lifts their truck above his head, they realize they must keep him, just to protect him and his innocence from those who would exploit his powers or treat him cruelly because of his difference.  So they accept their divine mission.

The Kansas section can be criticized for the abundance of perfect Andrew Wyeth/Winslow Homer imagery--the fields, sky and clouds in every shot. (It was actually shot outside Calgary, Canada. But the fields and the sky were real.)

Unfortunately for the critics who want to call it hokey, it's beautiful. Esteemed cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth (who died shortly after this film, which is dedicated to him) shot painterly uncluttered foregrounds against vast vistas to create a mood, that together with the simple dialogue and characterizations, create a meaning.  Scenes like this have been attempted many times since, never as successfully.

Together they tell the story of Clark Kent's roots, which become Superman's. They are the rural equivalent of the original roots of Superman in the Jerry Siegel's 1930s vision.

The time sequence as given by the film is somewhat complicated.  The brief introduction notes 1938 as the birth of the Daily Planet, but within the film 1948 is named as the year Krypton blows up.  This makes Superman a Baby Boomer, in more ways than one.

 Later, Jor-El says it happened thousands of years before, sort of confusing matters.  But if it was 1948 and the super baby's journey takes three years, then he's a teenager in the 60s (though the Kansas vehicles suggest the 40s and 50s, and the diesel train that teenage Clark outruns would be no earlier than the 50s or 60s.  On that train, by the way, is Noel Neil, the original Lois Lane from the movie serials and the 50s TV show.  She's playing Lois Lane's mother, a joke that mostly got cut in the 1978 version but is restored in the 2000 edit. Also in the restored scene is Lois' father, played by Kirk Alyn, the very first live action Superman.)

Clark is 18 when he leaves the farm to do his Krypton father's bidding.  There's a transitional scene in the Arctic where Clark throws a crystal shaft that builds his Fortress of Solitude, and he stays to complete his Kryptonian education.  The Brando voiceovers suggest this takes several years.  So if he emerges in 1978, he's 30 when he begins his public ministry--the same age as Christ was.

At the end of the Fortress of Solitude sequence, we see simultaneously for the first time Christopher Reeve and the adult Superman in his classic blue and red costume.  And for the first time, very briefly, we see him fly.  Bingo.

 Then the movie moves to Metropolis. The tempo and mood change immediately.  It's the cluttered, fast, jangling, cynical city of 1978--the one just outside the movie theater where I was watching this film.  (In a few years, I would actually be working in the very building that portrayed the Daily Planet: the New York Daily News building, as a freelancer on assignment.)

Here's where the previous two sections pay off, especially the mood and content of the Kansas scenes.  We see Clark as an awkward, even bumbling adult.  We know from previous scenes, that he's really not--this is an act.  But his deadpan physical comedy (Reeve said he'd looked to Cary Grant's performances in similar roles) works seamlessly with the mildly satirical comic mood that embraces the Daily Planet characters.

Yet Clark's essential character--sincere, principled and naturally good without irony or apology--is also revealed.  Though the fields around the Kent farm are timeless, they echo an America identified with the Depression era.  He is the idealistic rural heartland 1930s America, here to redeem the overmechanized metropolitan 1970s.

 Superman begins his ministry with a series of miracles.  The crucial one is the first, when Lois Lane is dangling from a helicopter which is itself dangling from the top of the Daily Planet building.  A crowd quickly gathers--noisy, excited, fearful but full of the adrenalin of disaster.  Recall that in the late 1970s and well into the 80s, Manhattan seemed like a more dangerous place than before or since.  There was more street crime, and it was also choked with fumes and dirt. There seemed to be a disaster a minute, of one kind or another.

Clark Kent does his first classic transformation, this time merely spinning in the kind of revolving door that he previously had gotten himself jammed up in, playing the hapless Clark. As Superman he says "Excuse me" to a young black hipster complimenting him on his outfit.  And then zooms straight up.

In a scene that is always exhilarating, he catches the falling Lois, who responds with her famous line: "You've got me?  Who's got you?"  Then he catches the falling helicopter.




The crowd cheers but it is more than amazement.  On their faces is evidence of a very un-70s Manhattan emotion: joy.

The series of other miracles that follows are the small ones, reminiscent of the early comic books and TV show: thwarting a lone criminal and then a gang, saving Air Force One, before rescuing a cat from a tree for a little girl.  This was Superman's original mission--helping others in time of urgent need.

Meanwhile at the Daily Planet and in Lex Luthor's lair, the movie never forgets that it comes from a comic strip. It never gets as silly as the Batman TV show of the 60s, with its earnest heroes and outlandish action. But it is playful in these areas.

Gene Hackman's theatrical Luthor is a comic arch villain, adding to the high spirits and anticipation of more Super exploits.  But behind Luthor's genial psychotic demeanor is an arrogance and tricky cynicism that will test the efficacy of Superman's virtue.

And the love story necessary to the film's climax begins. There's romantic banter when Lois interviews Superman on the impossible rooftop terrace of her apartment, but when she flies with him, the audience experiences that wonder and freedom of flight.  It's a little cheesy but it works.  As well as being a pretty good first date.

The main action of the movie is an ingenious sequence that doesn't bear close analysis.  Donner's directorial motto was "verisimilitude," which avoids disbelief in the rush of events, but can't completely escape the logical lapses.  It also takes the movie into the bigger is better ethos of superhero movies ever since.

There is one small vindication for the Superman ethic.  Luthor traps him with a necklace of Kryptonite (which looks disconcertingly like the crystal sliver that makes the Fortress of Solitude.)  He escapes it with the help of the voluptuous Miss Tessmacher (played by Valerie Perrine) whose function to Luther is obscure.  She extracts a promise in return, which she knows Superman will honor because he--unlike the perfidious Luthor--always tells the truth.

Superman (now known as Superman I or more often Superman: The Movie) was followed by three more films with Christopher Reeve. After a successfully charming TV series (Lois and Clark) in the 90s, a Smallville prequel TV series, and an attempt to pick up the feature film story with new actors (Superman Returns), a more recent movie went back to reimagine the origins and take it from there in a series of superhero extravaganzas.  But most still see Christopher Reeve as the definitive Superman, and his first Superman film as the acknowledged classic.

Postscript: I posted this before I learned that Margot Kidder had just died.  There were a few major parts in this film for which the actor was the filmmakers' second or third choice, but there was active competition for the role of Lois Lane, and Margot Kidder won it.  

Kidder's Lois didn't disdain or demean Clark; she barely saw him, but when she did she prodded him like a sister.  She won the role doing the balcony scene with Superman ( interviewing him on the terrace outside her apartment.)  Her lovestruck performance and interaction with Chris Reeve was the essential piece. That scene as a screen test, incidentally, is also what finally won Christopher Reeve the role of Superman.

Kidder played the part of Lois in the subsequent Reeve Superman movies, and remained close to Reeve the rest of his life.  Kidder died at her home in Montana at the age of 69.

Happy 80th, Superman

Dated June 1938, the first issue of Action Comics became available to the public in May. It featured a brand new character.  In its pages Superman was born, eighty years ago this month.

Jerry Siegel was 20, the son of poor immigrants in Depression Cleveland, searching for ideas for a comic strip character that he and his friend Joe Shuster could sell to newspaper syndicates. Grabbing elements of characters and how they looked from other comics, B-movies and science fiction pulp magazines and novels, he added some unique features to his choices.

In the 1890s H.G. Wells reversed the usual plots in scores of forgotten Mars stories: instead of sending humans to Mars, he brought Martian invaders to Earth. Siegel made a similar move. Instead of a hero like Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter whose exploits took place in the strange societies of Mars, Seigel brought the strange visitor from another planet to the familiar streets of everyday life on Earth.

As the ultimate illegal immigrant from outer space, he could have powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary humans. But to mix with humanity he would need a secret identity: somebody that didn’t look like a superhero, somebody—like Siegel and Shuster—who wore glasses.

They talked about how Superman should look and Shuster drew him with the signature S on his chest. The costume was futuristic, like Flash Gordon, but it also made his powers coherent to his 1930s audience. For where did people see beings of immense strength, who could leap through the air, and had other powers bordering on the mystical and magical? Only one place: the circus. So Superman had the aerialist’s tights, the underwear on the outside of the circus strongman, and the magician’s cape.

But Superman was a Depression product in a more profound sense. In 1934, when Siegel first started dreaming up the character,  he was influenced (as he later recalled), by “President Roosevelt’s ‘fireside chats...being unemployed and worried during the Depression and knowing hopelessness and fear. Hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless, oppressed Jews in Nazi Germany...seeing movies depicting the horrors of privation suffered by the downtrodden...”

Siegel was also reading about crusading heroes and seeing them in the movies. He wondered how he could help these victims of the 30s. “How could I help them, when I could barely help myself? Superman was the answer.”

This became the key to Superman’s character that has endured many reductions and perversions over the years but has somehow survived. His first adventure in Action Comics involved saving an unjustly condemned woman from the electric chair. His next was stopping a wife-beater.

In his 1930s adventures, he rescued miners in a cave-in, battled stock market manipulators and munitions manufacturers fomenting wars to sell their wares. He fought crime, but also poverty and unsafe labor conditions. He battled crooked politicians and lobbyists, slum lords and corrupt industrialists and labor leaders alike. He came to the aid of individuals in trouble, and was devoted to the common good. He was a compassionate, high-spirited and humorous hero of the people.

According to author Thomas Andrae, Superman was “neither alienated from society nor a misanthropic power-obsessed nemesis but a truly messianic figure...the embodiment of society’s noblest ideals, a ‘man of tomorrow’ who foreshadows mankind’s highest potentialities and profoundest aspirations but whose tremendous power, remarkably, poses no danger to its freedom and safety.”

Superman became so immediately popular that barely more than a year later, he appeared at the New York World’s Fair and his huge balloon image flew over the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

 Just two years after that first comic book story, Superman was the star of his own radio show, and a year after that, he was the star of the first animated adventures shown in movie theatres in the ground-breaking Fleischer Studio cartoons.

from the 1940s Fleischer animations

Clark Kent and Lois Lane at the Daily Planet in Metropolis were in the original comic book stories. (Lois Lane was derived from a B-movie heroine called Torchy Blane, and the Cleveland girl Shuster hired to model for her depictions in the comics became the woman he later married.) 

But radio and the animated cartoons added new characters (Jimmy Olsen, Perry White) and elements (kryptonite), including Superman's ability to not just leap tall buildings in a single bound, but fly.

Still, the original impetus for the character of Superman remained. Versions of the opening made famous on television began in radio, but with significant additions.   On the very first radio broadcast Superman was described as "champion of the oppressed...who has sworn to devote his existence on Earth to helping those in need."

Later on radio he would be described as “ champion of equal rights, valiant, courageous fighter against the forces of hate and prejudice.”  In 1946, a 16-episode series had Superman battling an organization based on the KKK ("The Clan of the Fiery Cross.")  Reputedly based on descriptions by an actual reporter who infiltrated the Klan, it exposed its secret rituals as well as its crimes.  The series was credited with reducing KKK recruiting.  Notably, immediately after the war, it related this domestic racism to Nazi racism.

Of course, Superman also foiled bank robbers, defeated and deflated mad scientists, and rescued people, Lois Lane in particular.

Two mostly live action serials (the flying was animated) for movie theatres came next, with Kirk Alyn and a young and especially fetching Noel Neil as Lois Lane, a role she reprised in all but the first season of the 1950s Superman TV show.

Television was the next natural step, so just as Action Comics pioneered the fledgling field of comic books (only four years old in 1938), The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves was one of television's first major hits. But producers first tested the waters with a 1951 theatrical release, Superman and the Mole Men.  The mole men were probably unintentionally comical looking little beings who lived deep under the Earth, with a few of them emerging from the deepest oil well shaft ever sunk.

from Superman and the Mole Men, seen also as
episodes in the first season of the TV show

But instead of Superman battling the alien Mole Men, he defended them against mobs of crazed humans.  They were essentially helpless and only wanted to go home.  In a startling but very Superman-like move, he accused the townspeople of acting like a bunch of "Nazi stormtroopers."

The syndicated TV show itself premiered with its version of the Superman origin story in 1953.  I was six years old and happened to see it when it aired one Saturday afternoon on a Pittsburgh channel.

a Kryptonian in the origin episode

 It was one of the most memorable afternoons of my young life.  I watched it alone--an aunt and girl cousin were visiting, so there were alternating giggles and screams coming from my sisters' room, and my mother and aunt's chatter from the kitchen.  But I watched, amazed and completely absorbed and mesmerized.

Afterwards I hastened to my room to think about it.  I wasn't sure what I'd just seen, and nobody else was interested.  The girls were engaged in their frenzy of shrieks and running, while my mother was inaccessible in the kitchen with her guest-- If I ventured in, they would either ignore me or, even worse, talk about me as if I wasn't there.

So alone in my room I made the classic kid move: I tied a blanket around my neck and trailed in down my back as a cape.

George Reeves and Phyllis Coates, who played
Lois Lane in the first season

By the time I started first grade I knew the basics.  I was especially taken with the secret identity.  For I was no longer the hero of epics my playmates and I invented as we performed them all day, but had to be meek Clark Kent, and fold my hands and put them in the center of my desk.

But I did not want to keep my true identity secret from a blond girl named Judy, and once stood outside the classroom where I knew she was, significantly glancing to the sky and running off, George Reeves style, to transform into the Boy of Steel.  I somehow believed she would interpret my actions correctly.

I fell deeply into every second of those stories every week, especially the first two seasons.  I have the series on DVD and the opening sequence still had an indescribable effect. The first season had the same producer as the radio show, and both the stories and the style seem derived from radio but also the noir aspects of the Fleischer animations and the movie serials, themselves influenced by crime and suspense movies.

The Adventures of Superman was also an immediate hit, but since it was a favorite with children, a new producer was hired for the second and subsequent seasons who eliminated its moodiness and crime movie violence, and skewed the stories more towards kids (and the approval of meddling congressional committees.)  Still, the second season began with the first comic book plots--Clark Kent proves a man convicted of murder is innocent, and Superman saves him from the electric chair.

Beginning with the third season, the TV show was filmed in color.  There were no color televisions yet so these shows were first seen in black and white.  That accounts for the fact that the characters were all dressed mostly in blue, which transferred to black and white best (and because the shows were shot quickly, often scenes mixed and matched from several episodes at once, the characters tended to have the same basic wardrobe.)  But when color TV sets became possible and popular in the 1960s and 1970s, reruns of the last four seasons of Superman got new life for several more generations.

Most of the memorable episodes are in the first two seasons, but even within the rote plots of the last seasons there are delightful performances and surreal comic moments, as when one thug fantasizes about what he will do with his cut from his gang's robberies: he'll build a big house shaped like a penitentiary so his friends will feel at home.

Under the spell of the TV show, I sent in for my membership to the Supermen of America Club.  I got my letter, membership card, button and the secret code, which I remember as a colorful grid rather than a cardboard wheel.  There were actually nine different codes, one for each planet. They were for secret messages in the comic books. I kept the codes between my mattress and springs.



The button image, by the way, shows Superman breaking chains--another throwback to the circus strongman.  But the motto--strength, courage, justice--was all Superman.

Superman fell on hard times for decades after that.  The comic books got more fantastic--thrilling in their way for awhile, but then downright silly.  Superman's powers grew to an absurd extent, and so he required villains with their own extraordinary powers, usually matched by motives of revenge or wanting to rule the world (or the universe.)  This is the same superhero syndrome we've got today.  So I look back to the otherwise awful episodes of the 1950s TV show to see at least a human scale Superman, who helps those in need.

Superman was also treated as a joke (on Broadway and a short-lived TV show as well as the comics) and then with cynicism and derision.  He wasn't hip or relevant, he was square and establishment and obsolete.  His story was twisted, he and his Earth parents were given cynical motives, his myth seemed outworn and false.

Then in 1978--exactly 40 years ago--Superman came back.

To be continued...