I have always loved both characters, Batman and Superman. When I was first able to walk and talk, the Batman TV show inspired me in myriad ways, starting in January 1966. Later in the same year, in the fall, the New Adventures of Superman cartoon was on CBS on Saturday mornings, and I loved that, too, especially the eight-minute Superboy sequences parked between two eight-minute Superman shorts. There have been times in my life where I have swung like a pendulum from one side to the other. As a small child, I couldn’t help but be swayed by Batmania. It was in full effect, like it was made for me. I had Batman slippers, Batman pajamas, Batman dinnerware. If Batman action figures (besides the Captain Action outift) had existed then, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere without one. As it was, I had a plastic cake decoration that served the same purpose.
But as I got older and Batmania started to fade from the national consciousness, I started to learn that Superman had an older and deeper public presence. He’d had a radio show from 1940-1949, a series of animated movie shorts from 1941-1943, and a television show from 1952-1958. When the 1966 cartoon show came on, I didn’t have the first clue that it used three of the voice actors from the radio show (as did the animated shorts in the 40s) because I didn’t know there had been one!
As far as I knew, the New Adventures of Superman were the first adventures of Superman. When I found out that Superman had had a radio program, I was eating breakfast in 1976, reading the back of a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes:
By that time, I had been introduced to War of the Worlds and the Lone Ranger, but I had no inkling that there had been a radio show featuring Superman. I thought for about a second about asking for it, but I might as well have asked for the moon because I was still living with my stepfather, who had burned all of my comic books and forbade any such stuff in his house. Oh yes, I have them now, all four volumes. Of course I do. But I don’t really need them, because we live in a time of wonders. Back in the early 1990s, a company called Radio Spirits really got into cleaning up and preserving old radio broadcasts, including Superman. At first they released them on cassette, then compact disc, and among their popular releases was Superman. I was an early adopter, buying both cassettes for the car and my vintage-appearing radio/cassette player, and later, CDs, and then finally switching to USB drives, I can listen to Superman for pennies per episode. And I do. I listen to it every day on my way to and from work. I guess you could say that I’m swinging back toward the Superman side of my fandom right now.
I’ve even gone to the point where I have a reproduction box of Kellogg’s Pep, which was the sponsor for the show, as well as one of the comic buttons that they advertised twice an episode.
Superman had his own sort of Batmania in the late 1970s with the December 1978 release of Superman The Movie. Double-album movie scores, trading cards, t-shirts everywhere, oversized comics celebrating the character’s past and present, movie tie-in novels, quiz books, there was no shortage of Superman.
One of my favorite products of that line of Supermania was (and is) the novel, Superman: Last Son of Krypton, by Elliot S. Maggin. Elliot was one of the prominent Superman writers of the period, and I thought he wrote a wonderful novel. Despite the fact that there were photos from Superman The Movie included in the book, the novel did not share its ice-planet vision of Krypton. It pulled strictly from the mythos of the comics, and their wonderful and sometimes absurd situations, even sometimes adding to them by suggesting that Jor-El sent a telepathic probe to seek out Earth’s greatest mind in order to have someone fitting receive baby Kal-El’s rocket as it arrived. Instead, the anonymous scientific genius, whose not-so-subtle nom-de-voyage was Calvin Eisner, arranged for the elderly Kents to be the first to find the rocket under the illusion that they were at a certain location to buy a used tractor at a good price. “Eisner” had wisely chosen not to raise the child himself, but instead chose the salt-of-the-earth Kents after meeting with Smallville’s Chief Parker and getting the lay of the land, if you will.
Maggin additionally added layers to Lex Luthor, who actually merits some sympathy due to his upbringing in this story, as well as its 1981 sequel, Miracle Monday. Both books really dig into what it was like for Clark Kent to grow up, perhaps implausibly, in the same hometown as the boy genius who would grow up to be his archenemy. A lot of time is spent in both books, especially the second, exploring what it would be like to grow up with superpowers, and even just to have superpowers. That kind of expanded storytelling appealed to me in a more adult way than comics ever could, and did what so few kinds of entertainment of the day did: It made me think. As a kid living in the country without the virtues of streaming entertainment or even cable television, I had pleny of time to think during the day, letting my mind wander into the clouds where Superman could dwell. The memory of the day I met Elliot and shook his hand, telling him what his stories meant to me, will remain with me forever.
The Superman movie that Elliot’s book supposedly tied into was quite different. It was a very interesting period piece, honestly. The Metropolis of 1978 was supposed to reflect the Manhattan of the time. Now, I visited Manhattan in 2004, and I thought Times Square was incredible. Shops everywhere, a three-story Toys R Us, so much fun! It was a far cry from the downtown of 1978. “Funky” would be the nice word to use. It’s been the setting of many movies that feature the filth and the grit of the area, like Midnight Cowboy, for example. And Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane seems to fit right in with her harsh and cynical no-nonsense attitude.
Right about that time, a book called Superman: Serial to Cereal was published, and went into some detail about the screen history of Superman, including the Fleischer cartoons, the movie serials starring Kirk Alyn, and the Adventures of Superman TV show, starring George Reeves. The Adventures of Superman came back to TV in my area thanks to syndication, and I rushed home to watch it every day after school. I even checked off the episodes that I saw in the checklist in the back of the book.
This was a connection that my dad had with me. This show had started when he was nine years old, and he had watched it faithfully. This, more than even comic books, is where his impression of Superman came from. I find it funny now that he thought Christopher Reeve was too scrawny to be Superman, compared to the obviously padded suit that George Reeves wore.
It was in this same book that I learned of the existence of the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons, but it would be a few years before I ever saw one. I saw the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons at my very first comic book convention in 1984. Someone was playing a VHS tape on a tiny portable TV. Since then, I’ve bought them on VHS, DVD, and now on Blu-Ray. As I said above, the connections to the radio show were strong, as they used the voice actors for the radio program when making the cartoons. The Fleischer design of Superman is generally the visual image I use when participating in “the theater of the mind” of the radio show. The Superman of the animated shorts and the radio show is sometimes quite different from that of the comics.
There have been various homages to those incredible pieces of animation history. Some of them are direct, and some of them are more subtle. Such is the modern world where everything is available at our fingertips. I was once one of the very few who appreciated the cartoons. Now, they’re ubiquitous. It’s a great time to be a fan!
