tanstaafl, that’s exactly right. And the reason they did not record in advance in those days is because tape recording had not yet been invented. Only 78 rpm recording was available and with all the scratches and pops in the sound, it was used only for certain sound effects, and, most of the time, even SFX were done live, as well as the music.
The radio actor who played Superman was Bud Collyer. He also voiced Superman in the Fleischer Brothers cartoons of the 40’s and the Saturday-morning cartoons produced by Filmation in the 60’s. He died in 1969 at 61.
I’m no comic book expert, but I thought it was that anything very close to Superman’s body would share the same properties as he does; bullets bounce off him, bullets bounce off his clothes. This explanation touches:
-why his cape will get torn but his suit stays in tact (and, in the Return of Superman storyline, why the new Superboy’s leather jacket would get torn to shreds and his costume wouldn’t)
I like Stan Lee’s “unstable molecules” literary device for explaining indestructable costumes. I’m waiting for some supervillain to develop “unstable moths”.
Elmer J. Fudd,
Millionaire.
I own a mansion and a yacht.
Flying, instead of leaping, was invented when the first animated cartoons came out (the ones by Fleisher, still regarded as some of the best animation ever made). Leaping looked OK in a comicbook, but in action, it looked stupid.
Since Byrne, the cape has not been indestructible, since it is not protected by his body. He keeps a bunch of spares.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Does he need the cape or does he just like the way it looks? I think I remember him using like a shield in something, but I’m almost positive it was a movie or TV since I don’t read comic books.
He likes the way it looks, though in the comics, pre-Byrne, he did use it as a shield to protect Lois from bullets and debris, to protect her from air friction when flying her around at supersonic speed and so on. He also had a pocket sewn into the cape where he kept his Clark Kent clothes. He was able to compress them down to the size of a soda cracker and tuck them away. Yes, they were chemically treated to withstand such treatment, sort of a super-permanent-press!
The discovery of Uranium predates the discovery of Krypton (the element, not the “planet”). It was known by 1789 (!) that there was an element in pitchblende which didn’t match the characteristics of any other known element, though the metal wasn’t actually isolated for another fifty years or so.
Neptunium and Plutonium were both discovered in 1940, but I think it’s more likely that they were just continuing the “obvious” series started a hundred years previously than that they were getting ideas from Superman comics.
Actually, Mjollnir, it’s been going on for millenia. Ancient mythologies constantly rewrote the previous mythology; you can find storie in the bible that are thinly disguised Babylonian myths. The Romans co-opted the Greek mythology and rewrote it to suit their needs. All comic books are doing is what others have done before them.
