I’m in a semi-darkened theater in Battle Creek, Michigan on Christmas Eve, 1978. I’m with my brother, my sister, my mother, my stepfather, and his three kids. We’ve ridden in the bed of a pickup truck with a cap on it, huddled together in blankets to get us all to the movies. We have popcorn and drinks, and in my hands I have a movie program, the first I’ve ever seen. I’ve been reading about the new actor Warner Brothers has found to play Superman, and I’ve seen him in previews for the past two weeks. He looks like the real deal in the program. As I peruse the actors’ biographies, I’m up to Glen Ford, when the lights go down. I get goosebumps. After the bit with the kid reading a copy of Action Comics I hear the low rolling bass. Dum de da dum dum. Da da da da dum de da dum dum…then a burst of blue light fires the credits right at my eyes!
Two hours later, I walk out of the theater in a daze, past the ten-foot wide crystalline Superman The Movie logo sign. I have just seen the greatest movie in all of my fourteen years. Over the next several months, I see the movie four times. I see it with my dad, and with one of my best friends, Ken. We travel to Traverse City on a night when he has keyboard lessons, and after we see the movie, we spend the whole trip home in his mom’s Lincoln Continental, with our hands outstretched in front of us, imagining the flight along the road in pursuit of an XK 101 nuclear missile.
I had been on the road to weeding out my comic book collection by trading them in two for one at the local flea market, but all of that’s over with. I am buying everything I see with Superman in it. I find a new Superman series called DC Comics Presents, with art by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, featuring Superman and the Flash in its first two issues. I’m reading Starlog Magazine at a basketball game with Superman on the cover. This obsession lasts through spring and into summer. I have Superman The Movie bubblegum cards. I have the Superman soundtrack by John Williams on vinyl. While I listen to it, I sort out the cards in story-sequential order and match the music to the scene. I painstakingly record the soundtrack on my cassette recorder so that I can play it while I’m riding my bike on my paper route. I carry the cassette recorder in my paper bag, hands outstretched in front of me as I ride. It’s an endless summer before high school begins and I have to put away childish things…
There have been many live-action iterations of the Man of Steel since 1978, and whenever the newest one emerges, someone asks me what I think of the new Superman. My answer is always the same:
“It’s not for me.”
Now, I don’t mean to come down on anyone else’s opinion, or disparage anyone’s favorite Superman, but I mean what I say literally. It’s not made for me. Superman The Movie ignited my imagination and came to me at a time when I needed it. Was it perfect? Oh, no. I didn’t like the icy version of Krypton or Marlon Brando as Jor-El. But I was well-read enough to have seen multiple versions of Superman’s origin, even then, and I knew that changes came over time. The character had been around for 40 years at that point, and if in this version, Ma Kent survives to see him become Superman without him ever becoming Superboy first, so be it. My dad was less forgiving. He ranted and raved about the effects not being good enough and that Christopher Reeve was too scrawny. But I knew where his complaints were coming from. It wasn’t for him. His Superman came in the form of George Reeves in “Adventures of Superman,” the TV series that began in 1951, when my father was eight years old. I realized then that nothing is ever going to be more perfect than the cultural icons of your youth, and by the time Christopher Reeve was playing Superman for the last time in 1987’s Superman IV The Quest for Peace, I was graduating from college, and I knew my adult years would alter my perception of what was clearly a character intended for a more youthful audience.
There have been dozens of versions of Superman in animation, television and movies since then, and none of them will ever match up for me. But that’s okay. I’m 60 years old now, and though Superman The Movie is 46 years old, I still enjoy my annual viewing. Every variation, every version seems to find its fans, and boy, they don’t hesitate to let you know that your choice is the wrong one if it differs with theirs. The good news is that I have my version, and no one can take it from me.
