And still, George Reeves, best Superman actor ever.
Didja ever notice that, much like Springfield, Metropolis had a seaport, desert, mountains, small towns, international airport, world-class academic and medical researchers and four-season climate within walking distance, and yet had a newspaper with only three reporters?
Well, if nobody noticed that Lois herself changed her appearance completely overnight (Noelle Neill didn’t look ANYTHING like Phyllis Coates), why would anyone notice that Clark Kent looked a lot like Superman?
This. Despite pushing (and then passing) 40, with plenty of padding in the chest and apparent salt & pepper hair. You could believe the guy had been fighting crime since 1938. He’d been around.
On the thrown gun thing, my understanding as a kid was that Superman himself wasn’t actually invulnerable; it was just the S emblem on his chest that was bulletproof. So when the baddies were shooting at his center of mass, he was fine, but when they threw the gun at his head, he had to duck. At least, that’s what I remember, though I’m not sure if I got that from any canon source.
I’m pretty sure you’re wrong. The Punisher has the great big skull to make people shoot him in his bullet-proof vest, but Superman doesn’t. You’re just forgetting the incredibly obvious: Superman is immune to thrown pistols, but the actor isn’t.
Couldn’t they have cut to Supes stopping the “bullets”, and then cut back to the guy holding a foam gun, and then throw it at Supes? It was good enough for the metal bars.
Hey, those foam guns have corners, y’know. You could put someone’s eye out, or it’ll kinda sting, anyway.
That was the explanation I’ve read for Batman’s yellow emblem, but not Superman.
Re: the disguise thing: one of the comics mentions that a minor superpower Superman has is mass hypnosis. Everybody sees Clark Kent as some blonde dude.
Superman #330 (December 1978). Everyone sees Clark as frail and smaller than Superman, because that’s the image he’s trying to convey.
Which doesn’t actually require a superpower, just good acting skills. As evidenced wonderfully by Christopher Reeves.
The first two seasons were in black in white, starting with the third they sprang for color. Which is something I’ve wondered about too. What were the extra costs involved and how much extra money did they make as more people bought color TVs.
I used to wonder what would happen if there was a janitor in the storeroom whenever Clark Kent changed into Superman. And did he wear his suit and tie underneath his Superman costume?
Now that you bring this up, a good question.
Color tvs were only rolled out in 1954. They cost $1000 at that point. They didn’t sell very well.
by 1957, they were down to $500.
There were 44 million tv sets in the US in 1957. 300,000 of them were color. No good reason to make your tv show in color.
I
“Look! Up in the sky!”
“It’s a bird!”
“It’s a plane!”
“Actually, it looks kinda like an elderly guy holding some sort of mop…”
I don’t remember all the Fleischer cartoons but I do remember Superman leaping in one of them. IIRC, Supes leapt from the ground and then pushed off a skyscraper to get some good distance. The episode I am remembering is The Mechanical Monsters, I think. That was one of the early cartoons, full fledged flying may have come in a later one. I’ll have to re-watch them.
Not if you were a network show, but syndicators were using a different business model. By 1955, when Superman was first shot in color, first-run syndicated programs were losing their appeal. The networks were filling more time during the day, and older, more popular network shows themselves were starting to be syndicated.
So smarter syndicators started looking at ways to lengthen the shelf life of their products. Ziv had filmed Cisco Kid in color from the very beginning. Both it and Superman were still being run by stations like WGN into the 1980s.
I watched the Superman reruns as a kid and yet somehow never noticed that there were different Loises. It wasn’t until Joel and the Bots pointed out that one of their MST3K experiments had both of them in it, that I did finally recognize them as two distinct women.
I didn’t notice either when I was a kid. I think because both Noelle Neill and Phyllis Coates look exactly like Lois Lane.
Almost as much as changing actresses, Noel Neill dyed her hair red for the color episodes so it would pop on screen. You couldn’t tell during the black and white era, but her natural hair color was brown.
I remember in the episode “The Big Freeze” a mad scientist immobilizes Supes by lowering his temperature to “a thousand degrees below zero.”
I always wondered if that was Fahrenheit or Celsius.