369. And I honestly couldn’t say. Believe it or not, I didn’t become a hard-core Legion fan until the Giffen/Bierbaum era. Pretty fast learner, ain’t I?
Fiver:
Possibly, or more likely you just downloaded it from the forum library.
Fenris again:
Well, if you’re still interested, I’m involved in a nice little on-line DC Comics fanzine that welcomes new members. E-mail me privately if interested, since this board is probably not the right place for that stuff.
The worst part of Byrne’s Superman is that there’s no sadness in his history: Krypton was a horrible place that he was lucky to escape from, his childhood was perfect and he was a perfect person with a perfect life and perfect parents AND he’s Superman. The Earth-1 Superman had depth.
Fenris
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You have hit the nail squarely on the head. Forget all the stuff about whether he was ever Superboy or how common Kryptonite is or even his relationship to Luthor. The key is that the new Superman never suffered loss.
The old Superman, in his way, was as tragic a figure as Batman. Hell, he’d lost two sets of parents instead of Bruce Wayne’s one. And the second time around, he was old enough to know what was going on and realize that his immense powers still left him helpless. Superman was someone who had suffered loss, was alone in the world and still wanted to make life better for others.
Well said. The only thing I’d add is that Luthor was yet another loss: Remember, way back when, he and Luthor were friends until Superboy had a horrible lapse in judgement (hint: don’t try to put out a fire in an occupied room filled with volitile chemicals via super-breath!) and lost one of his best friends, one who could actually keep up with him. Maggin really played up Superman’s regret for this.
how close is the Reeve’s movies close to the official definition /description of superman from a superman nut’s view? except for a couple of comic books in the 60s the movies are the only exposure to superman so I am curious whether the adaption is considered accurate or not.
I’d say the original SUPERMAN is the the second most accurate movie feature based on a comic book/comic strip character – the most accurate one, arguably, being the first TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, since it had much less baggage to jettison. (The only obvious inaccuracy being the size of the characters)
The entire crystalline Krypton of the opening sequences was a huge movie deviation, as was the original depiction of Krypton in the comics was as an Art Deco utopia, not the sterile planet shown in the movie. Everything related to the crystals in the first two movies - that they contained recordings for Kal-El, that they could build a replica of Krypton in the Arctic as his ‘Fortress Of Solitude’, they they could remove/restore his powers - were concepts developed for the movie audiences.
The Smallville arc is fairly accurate. However, the concept of a “Superboy” and all the related mythos and characters (The Superboy robots, the Legion of Superheroes, Krypto, etc.) was completely jettisoned, leaving you with a much smaller world, the notion of the Kents raising the supremely moral and empathic Clark as a human. Deviations: there was no mention of the orphanage the baby Superman was originally placed in, the Lana Lang of the movie was far more removed from Clark Kent’s life than in the comics, there was no young redheaded Lex Luthor as a Smallville scion. In the comics prior to the 80s, it was a given that both Ma and Pa Kent died shortly after Clark’s graduation, before Clark left Smallville for Metropolis, and that Superman couldn’t save either of them.
In the sequence (sometimes cropped from TV releases) where young Clark outraces the train, the little girl on the train is meant to be a young Lois Lane. What I never knew until recently was that HER parents on the train were portrayed by Noel Neill and Jack Larson - the Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen of the 50s TV series.
The whole of the Arctic arc, when Superman uses a green crystal to create the fortress and gets instruction from his father, as I mentioned before, is made-for-the-movie stuff.
There were a few minor deviations on the movie in the Metropolis sequences – Lex Luthor’s rug-wearing vanity, and his surrounding himself with a moron like Otis and Miss Chestbaucher were done strictly for comic relief. Jimmy Olsen was without his signal watch and was never shown as being ‘Superman’s pal’. Lois was well-done as an intriguing mix of the supercompetant/klutz, but I’ll repeat the observations others have made about Margot Kidder being the least attractive Lois Lane ever selected for the role.
I particularly liked how Lex Luthor summoned Superman by using a pitch audible only to dogs.
Superman cannot turn back time by flying around the world, however, except in this movie.
By the second movie, the filmmakers felt compelled to tack on a few MORE extra superpowers Kryptonians DON’T have – the whole point-your-finger-and-shoot-out-white-rays-and-lift-people-telekinetically thing always used to irk me. And when in the second big battle scene in Metropolis, when the three super-villains used super-breath to subdue the crowd, people should have been freezing their britches off: superbreath was always depicted as having freezing properties (as when he cooled off the gas tanker).
The disappearing/reappearing as mutiple images thing? Bunkum.
The weird Superman shield he whipped out to engulf Nog? Bunkum.
To my credit, I have tried to assume that the powers displayed in the battle in the Fortress of Solitude were bcause of the super-properties of the building itself and not innate to Kryptonians. Again, these were created for the movie.
I can’t remember enough about the third and fourth SUPERMAN movies to comment much.
But since Byrne swiped the feel (if not the look), the movie influenced the comic for the last…15 years?!
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Don’t you remember Jimmy’s signal watch (“Zee-Zee-Zee” which did the same thing? )
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In (one of) Superman’s first time-travel adventure from the mid 40’s, Superman needs to collect autographs for…I dunno…some kid who’s dying or poor or poor and dying or something…anyway, he goes back in time by flying at super-speed in a complicated loop-de-loop. I’ve always wondered if that was what the director was (incomptently) trying to get at in that scene.
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Super-breath (to blow out forest fires) and Super-Cold breath (to ice things up) were two different powers (we’ve seen him use super-cold breath on things like watch-crystals or delicate machinery) but both were in the comics although sometimes used together. Somewhere he said that the Super-Cold breath had to do with his lungs being strong enough to compress gasses to liquids or even solids. Blowing liquid helium on something would cool it down pretty quick!
And if we’re talking about dumb movie powers, how 'bout Sup’s Amnesia Kiss in Superman 2 or his “Super-Rebuild the Great Wall of China-vision” in Superman 4?
That, plus I believe in the movies Splinter was a sensei mutated into a rat, while in the comics he was a pet rat (of a sensei) mutated into an intelligent humanoid shape.
Close, very close. Noel Neill was Mrs. Lane, but Mr. Lane was not Jack Larson but Kirk Alyn, the first movie Superman (he starred in Superman serials in the late 1940s-early 1950s).
I rather liked Margot Kidder as Lois. I thought she was pretty enough, and she had the character down cold.
I thought Christopher Reeve was an excellent Superman, but didn’t like his Clark Kent. I don’t think “mild-mannered” should equal nerdy or wimpy. George Reeves remains my favorite Clark; he was obviously different from Superman, but he was still a guy you could respect. Excellent work.
Not, of course, to take anything away from John Haymes Newton or Gerard Christopher.
Fenris, Fiver, thanks for the corrections and clarifications. Honestly, I thought that was Jack Larson on the train.
Another deviation - obvious, really - was the use of the three escaped criminals from the Phantom Zone in the second movie. While there were plenty of SUPERMAN stories depicting escapees from the Zone and the Bottled City of Kandor in the comics, instead of using previously depicted characters like Jax-Ur and Professor Vakox, the moviemakers opted to create a new trio of villains with General Zod, Non and Ursa. (The New Superman Adventures cartoon corrects this oversight somewhat with the introduction of ‘General’ Jax-Ur, and his equally villainous partner, Mala.)
For the record, General Zod, Ursa and Non were about the most gleefully destructive trio ever. I loved the dumb and deadly Non, Ursa’s overall neo-Goth girl butchness and especially Zod’s meglomaniacal hammy posturing and smarmy scene-chewing. Their costumes, also, were deviations from clothing worn Kryptonians in the comics.
The Phantom Zone was shown as this disturbing, two dimensional flatland that floated around in space. In the comics, it was always depicted as this etheral, ghostly void just one step removed from our world, where the imprisoned where about as substantial as mist. Also, as http://www.fortress.am/Encyclopaedia/phantom-zone.html points out:
Obviously that bit about Zone criminals knowing Clark Kent being Superman would have changed the movie’s plot completely, had the screenwriters stuck to the letter of continuity. The Phantom Zone of the movie allowed for much less knowledge about the outside world, and acted more like an Earthly prison.
Now I was 7 when the first Superman movie came out, and I cannot overstate how disappointed I was in the opening sequences of Krypton. Kal-El’s spaceship, in particular, was just all wrong. It was a rocket ship, not that gowdawful thing from the movie – it looked like the styrofoam and silver glitter star I made in arts and crafts for the top of our Christmas tree.
Equally disappointing were some of the other mythos ignored, like the Earthliness of the Fortress Of Solitude. This movie was the first to depict it as a shrine to dead Krypton, with none of the delightful goofiness of trophies in the comics of the 50s and 60s that turned it into, in essence, a super-man’s den:
No key and huge steel door.
No weird trophies.
No bottled city of Kandor.
No alien menagerie.
No robot duplicates.
No statues in tribute to Superman’s biological parents, Lara and Jor-El…
Overall, though, the first two movies did a pretty good job of whittling away the excesses of the character and getting down his essence. In movie number three had some genuinely good moments – I particularly liked the Lana Lang/ Clark romance and especially Superman/Clark Kent battle between Superman’s warring selves. And hey – I cannot hate Richard Pryor in anything, no matter how woefully miscast he is.
Ohmigod. Do you realize what this means? “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” notwithstanding, Supes could have SEX!
Granted, he would have to be on the bottom and not have his hands on the woman to avoid involuntarily tearing her apart in the throes of orgasm, but if his invulnerability extends far enough from his body to protect his suit, it would protect a condom too. That means he wouldn’t have to worry about blowing the lucky lady’s head off or having super-sperm impregnating every fertile woman in Metropolis. Drop the condom into a Kryptonite container afterwards, and you’re gold.
Of course it wouldn’t cure his biggest sexual problem, which is that he’s faster than a speeding bullet…
So how is Superman able to change direction in mid-“flight”, and lift things when he has no leverage? It seems to me that Newton’s laws of action and reaction are being violated when he does that stuff, as opposed to just being able to jump real high, as in the early comics.
Also, about the Maggin books: I own one of them and have read both, I agree with the other posters that they are very, very good. I got a vibe from them, though, that Maggin was a fundamentalist christian. Any truth to that?
He’s able to change directions and stuff because of the “super-energy” he gets from the yellow-solar radiation. (In the olden days, that was all the explantion we needed! :)). As an aside, Jimmy Olsen was taken to a planet with a lighter gravity than Earth’s that had a blue-white sun and Jimmy gained the whole suite of Kryptonian powers (and he was allergic to “Earthite” or some such…radioactive dirt, I guess))
Also, about the Maggin books: I own one of them and have read both, I agree with the other posters that they are very, very good. I got a vibe from them, though, that Maggin was a fundamentalist christian. Any truth to that?
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I don’t believe he is. However, as an unrelated funfact, he ran for some office or another and was a Democratic activist for a while.
Also, in the Kingdom Come series (Maggin wrote the novelization!) Superman keeps quoting Maggin’s famous line “There is a right and a wrong in the universe and it’s not too hard to tell them apart”
Sorry to revive this thread, but I just chanced upon this (after spending the better part of the last 6 hours reading all sorts of Superman stuff) and couldn’t resist the urge to mention how unbelievably cool that info is. This is the most awesome bit of trivia ever! (Antares has always been my favorite star).
And since I’m posting on this thread, a quick question for Fenris. Are the novels you mention (“The Last Son of Krypton” and “Miracle Monday”) a novelization of the original comic or, rather, new, previously unpublished material? If the latter, is it considered canon?
I have that issue (well, in reprint) and the yellow K (along with all the other K-spheres generated by Luthor’s machine) were actually fakes. The Superman robot was programmed to react to kryptonite as the real Supes would (why, I’m not entirely sure) and was fooled.
When the deception was revealed, Luthor was so dispirited that he gave back all the gold he’d stolen from Fort Knox.
The “slow” kryptonite was first used, as far as I know, in an issue of Brave and the Bold which teamed up Batman and Lois Lane. Metallo, the kryptonite-hearted cyborg villian that normally tangles with Supes, had found a way to “slow” kryptonite radiation, making it affect humans. Bats gets zapped once or twice. He didn’t like it.
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