I’m not the greatest Superman fan in the world. Was it actually “The Phantom Zone” in the first place? My understanding of the zone is that it turns people into a sort of ghost form, invisible and insubstantial. They can observe the real world, but can’t interact with it. The thing in the movie doesn’t look anything like that.
And @Chronos, wouldn’t some effects of a nuclear detonation travel through space? Heat? Light? Radiadion? EMP? Is it plausible that one or several of these it might disrupt or damage alien technology passing a few miles, or a few hundred miles from the blast?
Huh. I’ve never seen that before, but it’s probably a temporary thing that only lasted for one issue, and not something he could generally do “in the 50s.” I’m guessing red kryptonite was involved.
For what it’s worth, not too long after SUPERMAN II a Kryptonian criminal showed up on Earth and squared off against the big guy, who smoothly countered that crook’s attack and noted that, look, we’re evenly matched on power, and experience will make all the difference here, and I have decades of it and you have none.
Said criminal, irritated by what strikes him as a Jor-El level of smugness, unleashes some kind of pale force beam from his hand: our hero, puzzled, briefly wonders whether that’s a power he’s got, but then shrugs and quickly wraps things up by answering questions like (a) Which Of Us Knows What Kryptonite Is, along with (b) Which Of Us Knows Where Kryptonite Is, and, hey, (c ) Which Of Us Knows How To Do Tricks With Super-Breath?
Sure, I can buy a nuke having effects a few miles, or a few hundred miles, away. But we’re talking Space!!!, here. A few hundred miles is nothing. Space is BIG.
And the described condition wasn’t “a nuclear blast within a few hundred miles”. It was “a nuclear blast in space”.
The notable thing about Superman III is that the sister half of the villain team was played by the incomparable Annie Ross (of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross fame), and she looked exactly like Ayn Rand (which made it obvious that she was a bad guy).
So, my fanwank on the Phantom Zone in Superman II:
What we see is the interface between the Phantom Zone and our universe, a physical crystal that traps Zod & crew. To prevent Zod’s followers from freeing them, the Kryptonian court sent it into orbit around Krypton. Being an enlightened civilization, they wanted to leave open the possibility that Zod & crew could be released at a later date, so they didn’t just launch it into deep space.
When Zor-El and Lara launch baby Kal-El to Earth as Krypton explodes, the capsule clearly uses some sort of FTL drive that also drags/carries/allows a lot of fragments of Krypton through to Earth. Some of those fragments descend to Earth with Kal-El’s capsule as meteorites. Others enter into Earth orbit. Among those debris is the PZ interface crystal, which enters into Earth orbit.
When Superman chucks the nuke into space, it detonates near the PZ crystal’s orbital path and…ok, that’s still a lot of space, and the chances against the crystal happening to be near enough to be affected by the blast are still literally astronomical, but…I don’t know, the blast supercharged the Van Allen Belts or…something? That somehow affected everything inside the Moon’s orbit? But without affecting the moon mission ongoing at the time?
Look, Kryptonian crystal technology and the Phantom Zone and their relationship to our ordinary local space time is…well, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, phantomy-zoney stuff.
My question about Superman II: during the time when Superman was nowhere to be found, why didn’t the populace try to obtain some kryptonite to use against the bad guys? (I can’t remember if people realized that the villains were from Krypton or not.)
Sounds like a fantastic plot for the Luthor spin off movie where the government offers Lex Luthor freedom and bank for getting rid of those pesky aliens.
