In the last installment of this column, I began my first day attending the Museum of Television & Radio’s summer retrospective, “Look! Up at the Screen! It’s Superheroes on Television.” I had had high hopes for this exhibition, but found myself dismayed by the Museum’s display of art from bad 1960s superhero animation and Underoo designs.
Finally, it was three o’clock, and the retrospective’s Main Event of the day commenced in the MT & R Theater on the Museum’s Concourse level (below the street floor). This is the New York branch of the Museum’s largest screening room, a genuine auditorium where television shows are projected onto a movie-sized screen.
The size of the projected images and the setting, a theater within a midtown Manhattan museum, alter the experience of watching television shows. Watching television at home is a more intimate experience, since one watches alone or with one or a few other people. The smaller size of the screen (for those of us without those huge home theaters) makes television seem less important than a wide-screen movie. And watching television is an everyday experience, one that you can get for free (on broadcast channels as opposed to cable, anyway), and so it’s easy to take TV for granted.
But here, at the Museum, watching old television programs can be like watching film, an artform with higher cultural standing. Marshall McLuhan would contend that film is a “hotter” medium than television: one relaxes more with the “cooler” television medium, but concentrates more on film. So one watches film with a different kind of attentiveness, and presumably watches television programs shown as if they were films that same way. A while back I saw the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Hush” on the Museum’s big screen during its horror retrospective, and it came across as if it were a feature film. It’s also interesting to watch television shows as part of an audience in a theater: for example, to hear the laughs at Joss Whedon’s witty dialogue.
So, this first program in the Museum’s main theater was titled “Comic-Book Classics,” and comprised three early television adaptations of iconic superheroes from the comics.
The first show in this triple bill was from the 1950s television series The Adventures of Superman, starring the late George Reeves as the Man of Steel. The Museum made a good choice in selecting the very first episode of the series, Superman on Earth, from 1953, a recounting of Superman’s origin that provides interesting points of comparison with other versions of the Superman mythos in the comics, movies, and later television series.
Superman is meant for storytelling media that can transform fantasy into reality. On the comics page Superman can perform any feat his writers and artists can conceive. Superman worked well on radio, back in the classic era of radio drama, when writers and actors created a theater of the imagination, conjuring fantastic visions within the listeners’ minds. The Max Fleischer cartoons were perfect for Superman: animation could depict superhuman spectacles long before the rise of CGI.
So how, then, could Superman work on low budget 1950s TV?
Considering the obvious limitations, this first episode succeeded quite well. It began with the familiar opening to the series, which simply and effectively evokes the epic, cosmic scale of the Superman concept. There is the opening shot of Superman standing against a background of large planets in the black void of space, as if he is a god. As the narrator describes how this “strange visitor from another planet” masquerades as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, the image of actor George Reeves as Superman fades into that of Reeves in his Clark Kent guise, complete with glasses. That simple dissolve evokes the idea of Superman as a god who descends to Earth to become human, this reiteration of a mythic motif that can be found in Greek mythology and the Bible.
This first episode recounts Superman’s origin, and the narrator informs us that the planet Krypton is populated by “a race of supermen.”
This notion goes back to Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s original version of his origin. In the more familiar versions since the 1930s, Kryptonians had no superhuman powers on their native world. This first episode actually treats the question rather ambiguously. We are told that the Kryptonians are “supermen,” and yet they display no super-powers in the Krypton sequence. Certainly they do not fly off the planet to escape its doom! Still, the narration plants the idea in the viewers’ minds that Krypton is, in a sense, a world of gods, an Olympus heading towards doom, Asgard on the verge of Ragnarok.
That doom does not come about through the now-familiar scenario of Krypton’s explosion. There is no talk of Krypton’s uranium core, as in Silver age Superman comics, or of the doomsday weapon that John Byrne established as the cause of Krypton’s destruction in his rebooted continuity. These were surely inspired by the atomic age, the bombing of Hiroshima, and fears of nuclear war, all of which came about years after Superman’s first appearance in 1938.
Instead, in this television version, Krypton is going to fall into its sun. That’s perhaps even a grander and more horrifying apocalypse than the planet’s explosion: surely the Kryptonians would have been incinerated before the planet was actually consumed. This scenario, however, does not account for the creation of Kryptonite, the radioactive fragments of the destroyed planet, which had already been introduced on the radio show. Had no one thought of introducing Kryptonite into the television series as yet? Moreover, just what caused Krypton to start falling out of its orbit towards the sun? Perhaps there’s another reason why the explosion scenario prevailed in the Superman legend.
Now there is the traditional scene of Superman’s father, the brilliant scientist Jor-El, standing before Krypton’s ruling council (which will be called the Science Council in later comics stories, indicating that Krypton is a technocracy). Since this show was made in the 1950s, everyone on the Council is a male Caucasian, most well along in years.
Jor-El plays the same role that Cassandra did in the Trojan War, warning about a future disaster but believed by no one. (Unlike the unfortunate princess of Troy, Jor-El does have one person who believes him, his wife Lara.) This scene, in its many versions, is a dramatic part of the Superman legend. Anyone can relate to Jor-El’s situation who has been unable to persuade people in power to recognize what seems to him or her to be an obvious truth. The ruling council represents any established body of power run by people with closed minds, whether in politics, religion, business, or any other field. They are the managers and bureaucrats, not the visionaries. They are the establishment, who will not and can not look beyond the status quo, or beyond maintaining their own power within it.
John Byrne once stated that the sterile, repressed Krypton he depicted in The Man of Steel “deserved to die.” Other versions of Superman’s origin portray Krypton as a lost paradise. But the ruling council seem to bring their own doom upon themselves through their blindness. Jor-El is a Campbellian herald, issuing the call to adventure, to leave their world and save themselves. And as Joseph Campbell warned, when people refuse the call to adventure, they risk grave consequences.
Krypton has often been depicted as a technocracy, ruled by scientists, presumably an appealing notion for various science fiction aficionados of the mid-twentieth century. But notice how in this episode, and so often in other versions of this scene, the Council members refuse to examine Jor-El’s evidence. This is strange behavior for scientists. The Council members’ complacent insistence that Krypton is safe, and that those tremors in the ground are just minor nuisances, seems nearly ideological. They refuse to consider the ideas that Krypton is vulnerable, that their knowledge is inadequate, that their security is an illusion. They so want to be right so they will not consider any evidence to the contrary.
Those of you who have been reading the 9/11 Commission’s report about the United States’ preparedness against terrorism before the September 11 attacks should see the parallels here.
The ruling council scene (and Jor-El) were not part of the “original” version of Superman’s origin. Yet I wonder, since Superman is a creation of the late 1930s if Siegel and Shuster consciously or unconsciously had been thinking of isolationist Americans and Europeans who did not foresee that the menace of Hitler would lead to World War II. Indeed, Superman has repeatedly been regarded as a symbol of the immigrant. Krypton’s destruction and Superman’s escape to Earth, specifically to America, could easily be a metaphor for the Nazis’ destruction of the “world” of European Jews, save for those relative few who had gone to the “New World” of America.
This pilot episode presumably had a bigger budget than the standard installments of the series, but not that much more. But considering my expectations were low, the Kryptonian scenes were okay. The ruling council set and costumes were decent enough. Jor-El and Lara’s home hardly looked alien or even well furnished, but their costumes were serviceable and their rocket wasn’t embarrassing for its time.
The actor who played Jor-El looked quite young, as if he were a Superman who could’ve been had he gone to Earth. Perhaps that was the intention.
In this episode the ruling council has vetoed Jor-El’s plan to construct great spaceships to evacuate the population of Krypton before the disaster strikes. Jor-El has only constructed a “model” spaceship, that can hold only one adult. If it’s supposed to be a scale model, why was it built to hold a full-size adult, why does it have life support equipment that can sustain that passenger, and how come the rocket actually works? Perhaps “model” was the wrong word for the writers to use.
In America’s Space Age Superman readers might have wondered why more Kryptonians did not escape in spaceships. Krypton was supposed to have a more scientifically advanced civilization than our own. Earth was taking its first strides towards space travel; wouldn’t Krypton have mastered it? Back in the early 1960s, the explanation was that Krypton had halted its space program after the destruction of one of its moons, which the Kryptonians had colonized. (This atrocity had been the work of Jax-Ur, the leading criminal in the Phantom Zone.) I suppose the moon’s destruction could be regarded as a harbinger of Krypton’s own end; it also seems like an anticipation of the space shuttle disasters of later decades.
For decades not just science fiction writers and readers but Americans in general assumed that the nation would continue its space program indefinitely: first men would land on the moon, then there would be lunar bases (as in 2001: A Space Odyssey), and then it was on to other planets in the solar system. Pop culture visions of the future (even The Jetsons) took space travel for granted.
This year marks the 35th anniversary of the first landing of men on the moon. Of course, neither the United States nor any other country has sent astronauts to the moon for decades. The attitude appears to be Been There, Done That, and that we’re better off spending money on projects here on Earth.
So nowadays I find Krypton’s lack of a space program more credible. They presumably came to the same conclusion about space travel that America has.
To my surprise, the current television series Smallville has established that Krypton did have an interstellar space program, and even that Jor-El visited the town of Smallville as a teenager. So in the Smallville continuity, the question remains: why didn’t more Kryptonians than baby Kal-El escape?
Oddly, in the first episode of the 1950s Superman, Jor-El initially wants to send Lara to Earth, not their baby Kal-El, the future Superman! Now there’s an Oedipal nightmare situation. Lara insists that they send the baby. Jor-El then wants to send her and the baby in the rocket, but she insists on staying with Jor-El.
Now, this has traditionally been considered an expression of the deep love between Jor-El and Lara: she would prefer to die with him than live without him. But how many people have considered this: shouldn’t she go to Earth to take care of the baby? We know that Kal-El will be found and adopted by the kindly Kents, but Jor-El and Lara don’t know what will happen. Yes, in various versions of the origin, Jor-El and Lara know that Kal-El will gain super-powers on Earth. So then he won’t be harmed, but a baby doesn’t yet have the intelligence to take care of himself. And in other versions, including the Byrne reboot, Kal-El has no super-powers on Earth as a baby, and only develops them as he grows up.
So, here’s another Freudian dilemma: Mom prefers dying with Dad to staying with her son. Does it ever occur to Superman that perhaps he should resent this? The problem does not arise in those versions of the origin in which the spaceship is only big enough to hold the baby are preferable.
Now, though the Superboy series was established in the 1940s, and the episode does use the name Smallville for the town where Clark Kent grows up, the show reverts to the original version of the Superman legend, in which Clark had no teenage superhero career as Superboy. Despite the long, popular run of the Superboy comics, more recent versions of the Superman legend, beginning with the 1978 movie, and including the Byrne reboot, the Lois and Clark TV series, the 1990s Warners Animation series, and now the Smallville TV series, all return to the original concept that Clark did not begin his costumed career until after he reached adulthood.
In the Adventures of Superman episode Jor-El and Lara launch the rocket towards Earth as earthquakes, or, rather, Kryptonquakes, begin shaking their planet. Landing on Earth, the rocket is sighted by Jonathan and Martha Kent, who show up under their original names from the comics, Eben and Sarah Kent. They are, perhaps condescendingly, portrayed as hicks, given to such expressions as “Land sakes alive!” How different this is from the more recent portrayals of the Kents. Even in the early 1960s, the Kents had given up their farm to run a store in town. Maybe the editor and writers did not want the Kents, then portrayed as elderly, to be shown engaging in hard physical labor, or perhaps they wanted to make the Kents and Smallville seem less rural. In Mark Waid’s Superman: Birthright Martha is sufficiently au courant with contemporary technology to communicate with the adult Clark via the Internet. In the current Smallville TV series Ma and Pa Kent may be farmers, but they look youthful and sexy, and certainly aren’t given to archaic colloquialisms. The billionaire Luthors have a mansion in town; there are computers everywhere; there’s a hip hangout for teens, the Talon; and townspeople regularly visit Metropolis. Even in the 1978 Superman film Smallville seemed to be far from the beaten path, surrounded by vast wheatfields. The 21st century TV Smallville seems more like the suburbs.
Since this episode was made in 1953, baby Kal-El arrived in Depression-era America of the late 1920s. This is another point to keep in mind when considering this version of Smallville, which hardly seems the prosperous, sophisticated town of the current TV series.
In the 1950s TV origin, the Kryptonian rocketship blows up, rather than surviving as proof to the grown Clark of his alien descent, as in other versions. In this origin episode Clark presumably never finds out about Krypton. This version of Clark thus assimilates so totally into American – and human – society that his past “ethnicity” might as well not exist for him.
But lest we assume that this version of Superman is an unquestioning example of 1950s conformism, there is a striking scene in which Clark, grown to age 12, asks his foster parents why he is “different” from everyone else, possessing powers that they don’t. Young Clark does not seem happy about this, either.
This is an intriguing anticipation of the Smallville series, in which Clark initially thought of himself as a “freak”; antagonists who learn of his powers label him that way, and he keeps his superhuman abilities secret so he and his foster parents won’t be hauled off by government investigators.
In Smallville this treatment might appear to demonstrate the influence Marvel’s reconceptualizing of the superhero genre has had even on Superman. It’s as if Clark were a mutant like the X-Men, afraid of exposure; indeed, various other super-powered characters on the series, genetically altered by exposure to Kryptonite, are in effect mutants.
On a featurette on the X2 DVD, Chris Claremont points out that X-Men‘s theme of the majority’s prejudice against mutants, dating back to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original stories in the 1960s, may be a response to the McCarthy period of the 1950s, with its political “witchhunts” against people suspected of being Communists. I’ve read speculation by cultural historians that various, seemingly superficial TV situation comedies of the 1960s dealing with magic and science fiction gimmicks, might have worked subconsciously as rebellions against conformity in postwar American society. So it is that Samantha Stephens keeps secret the fact that she’s a witch in Bewitched, Uncle Martin hides his true identity as a Martian in My Favorite Martian, and so forth.
So here, in a popular television show of the 1950s, is another character with paranormal abilities who has to keep them secret. Clark’s fears of being treated as a “freak” in Smallville don’t just reflect the Marvel influence but, whether consciously or not on the part of the current show’s creators, descend from this surprising scene in the first Superman episode of the witchhunting 1950s. It’s striking to think that 1950s fears of persecution for being “different” have resurfaced in the treatment of the Superman legend a half century later.
In this same episode, Clark lives at home with his foster parents until he has reached the age of twenty-five (!), at which point George Reeves takes over the part. Doesn’t this seem a little long to keep living with the folks? Or does this reflect different attitudes from those of the present? Did sons stay on family farms and then take over running them after the fathers retired? (Some other TV series of past decades depict a similar unwillingness of adult children to leave the nest. J. R. Ewing may have been a feared oil tycoon in Dallas, but he (and his wife) still lived with his mom and dad. Carolyn Stoddard on Dark Shadows felt stifled living in the family mansion in a small town in Maine, but it never seems to have occurred to her to go to college or get a real job or move to the city.) How odd it is, too, to see Clark dressed in overalls, as if he were going to become not Superman but Li’l Abner.
Finally, the 25-year-old Clark leaves home after Eben dies. It is as if Clark cannot assume an adult role until his father is dead. There’s another strange Freudian aspect to the Superman saga. That too is true to the earliest comics version of his origin, in which Clark does not begin his career as a costumed hero until after his foster father’s deathbed speech, instructing Clark to use his great powers to aid humanity. (This prefigures Uncle Ben’s “power and responsibility” lecture to Peter Parker, although Clark dies not bear partial responsibility for his foster father’s death. Or does he? In Silver Age Superman continuity, in which Clark had a teenage career as Superboy, he tries desperately to save his foster parents’ lives from a rare disease but fails. Psychologists would surely say Clark/Superboy would therefore partially blame himself for their deaths.) In the 1978 Superman movie, too, Clark remains with his foster parents until his adoptive father dies. (Apparently Clark thinks he had to keep both parents company, but now that his foster dad is gone, his adoptive mom can fend for herself.)
In the 1950s TV origin, there is no deathbed speech by Eben, who dies off-camera. The deathbed speech could have been presented as a key element in motivating Clark to pursue his career as Superman. As the episode stands, we learn that Ma created the Superman costume, but we don’t see how and why she and Clark decided he should be a costumed superhero. This may well be in keeping with the standard assumption in superhero comics of the 1940s and 1950s that people would just automatically decide to fight crime once they gained super-powers. (Part of Marvel’s revolution was to supply credible motivations for such unusual career choices.)
So Clark bids farewell to Ma Kent and heads to Metropolis by train. (Why doesn’t he simply fly there under his own power?) So, on arriving, Clark is very much the Country Boy in the Big City. Consider how different this makes him from so many other superheroes. It’s not just that the Kents taught him the traditional values of the American heartland.
It’s that he comes from an idyllic rural America, a very different milieu than the crime-ridden modern city. In contrast, Bruce Wayne grew up as part of the city, which claimed his parents’ lives, as did Peter Parker and classic Marvel heroes including Captain America, Daredevil, Nick Fury, and the Thing.
Not until Clark arrives in Metropolis does he first don his disguising glasses. So I wondered the same question that should plague viewers of Smallville; won’t the people who knew Clark in Smallville recognize him as Superman?
Now, yes, I know, in real life the glasses wouldn’t fool anybody. They work in the comics medium because most superhero artists don’t draw individually distinctive faces. Just drawing glasses on someone is enough to make him look like somebody else. Having said that, I note that Christopher Reeve was so good at playing a shy, nervous Clark Kent that he enabled the audience to suspend its disbelief over the thinness of his disguise. In the 1950s TV show George Reeves doesn’t give that kind of comedic performance as Kent, but somehow he manages to look and seem just different enough from Superman to allow a similar suspension of disbelief. Maybe in part it’s because, in a decade long before contemporary fashion’s body consciousness, Reeves’ wardrobe as Clark Kent, complete with hat and large glasses, so thoroughly obscured his physique. The idea of glasses and shape-concealing clothing as a disguise also may relate to the stereotypical idea of the dowdy woman who turns out to be beautiful once she takes off her glasses, lets her hair down, and gets what today would be called a makeover.
Watching this 1950s episode, with its version of Smallville as the proverbial sticks, I finally realized what the Superman writers’ original assumption about that small town was. Since Superman debuted in 1938, Clark would have grown up in the 1920s and 1930s, long before the rise of television; even in 1953 television was not yet the mass medium it would soon become. It was unlikely that the citizens of a small town would read big city newspapers like Metropolis’s Daily Planet. And the popularization of the Internet was many decades in the future. So the idea must have been that it was highly unlikely that people in Smallville would see pictures of Superman, who, initially, was a “mystery man” who avoided public appearances. For that matter, the people of Metropolis would have little contact with a rural town like Smallville. Smallville was thus presumably intended to be in the middle of nowhere, a secluded spot where Clark Kent could grow up unobserved by the outside world.
(Exactly where Smallville is is a good question. The 1978 Superman movie visually implied that Smallville was in the American Midwest; John Byrne specified its location as in Kansas. The Smallville TV series follows Byrne’s lead, and indicates that Metropolis is in the Midwest as well. That seems odd, since Metropolis, like Gotham City, has usually been portrayed as a fictionalized New York City. Of course, the 1978 Superman movie even filmed location shots in Manhattan. That means that the DC Universe has three versions of New York City; someone, perhaps E. Nelson Bridwell, established that Metropolis was actually in Delaware, and that Gotham City was in New Jersey, as a kind of “twin city” to New York much like Minneapolis and St. Paul. If Metropolis was on the Northeast Coast, would that imply that Smallville was originally meant to be in someplace like upstate New York or Bucks County, Pennsylvania?)
As the decades have passed, it has become harder to believe in Smallville’s isolation. By the late 1940s, with DC’s launch of Superboy comics stories, Smallville would have become known throughout the world as the home of this amazing new superhero. Superboy comics established that Clark began wearing his glasses and posing as “mild-mannered” from the age of eight. Still, even growing up, I wondered why the news media (never mind that snoopy Lana Lang) didn’t descend on this small town and easily figure out from amidst this highly limited population who Superboy must be. (Maybe this is one reason that DC and Byrne dropped Superman’s Superboy career in the 1980s reboot.) Even if there had been no Superboy career, once Superman stopped being the mysterious urban legend of the 1930s and began appearing in public, surely the citizenry of Smallville would have begun seeing his picture and thinking, why, that’s Clark! Land sakes alive!
In this episode as in various other versions of the saga, Clark applies for a reporter job at The Daily Planet, Metropolis’s leading newspaper (and hence comparable to The New York Times or The Chicago Tribune), without having a journalism degree or much or any newspaper experience. Was it possible once upon a time to get hired for such a job with so little background?
The episode quickly introduces the viewers to the familiar Daily Planet supporting cast, which looks from the start like a surrogate family for Clark: the grumpy “dad” Perry White (a more benign curmudgeon than his later counterpart, J. Jonah Jameson), the “kid brother,” Jimmy Olsen (Spider-Man is, in a sense, a recasting of a Jimmy type of character as the lead superhero), and Clark’s potential wife, Lois Lane. Played at this point by Phyllis Coates (later to be replaced on the series by Noel Neill), Lois makes a strong initial impression by unscrewing the lid on a jar that Perry couldn’t open. That, and her businesslike demeanor, make clear that this 1953 Lois still fits the model of the career woman in a “man’s” field in the popular culture of the time that Superman was created. There are quite a few examples of tough young woman reporters in the movies of the 1930s and 1940s, like the roles played by Jean Arthur in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Barbara Stanwyck in Meet John Doe, and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Clark/Superman is to become the central figure of this “family” unit.
In Superman’s first case on the TV show, he rescues a man dangling from a dirigible. This is something that the limited special effects available can actually pull off. It is probably just coincidental that this seems like an earlier, low tech version of the first public feat that John Byrne gave Superman in The Man of Steel: rescuing the passengers of a “space plane” in danger of crashing, a sequence subsequently adapted into the first episode of television’s Lois and Clark. All three are aerial rescues by Superman.
The 1953 TV Clark gets his job at the Daily Planet by reporting on Superman’s first appearance. This reminds me of Peter Parker’s long career photographing his own appearances as Spider-Man. Stan Lee says that he did not intend to base Spider-Man on Superman in any way, but there are parallels between the two characters, and this is another of them.
There are some nice bits of business in this first episode. Not allowed to get in to see Perry White, job applicant Clark ducks into another room, nonchalantly walks along the building ledge, and then enters White’s office through a window. Can it be that another reason that Clark Kent wears glasses is that his creators were thinking of Harold Lloyd, the great silent movie comedian, whose screen persona was that of an ordinary young man in glasses who could perform amazing feats (including, famously, scaling the exterior of tall buildings)?
When White and Lois want to know how Clark got in, he tells them he came in through the window. They don’t believe him.
At the end Lois asks Clark how he got to the scene of the dirigible rescue before she did. Clark smiles and says maybe he’s a superman. Now Clark does not expect Lois to believe this, and she doesn’t.
So Clark has twice basically told people he’s Superman and they don’t believe it! (Like the Science Council, they refuse to believe facts right in front of them!)
John Byrne once did a Superman story in which Lex Luthor had computers programmed to uncover Superman’s secrets. When the computers deduced that Superman was Clark Kent, Luthor refused to believe it, contending that no one so powerful would masquerade as such an ordinary person.
Similarly, there is an early Spider-Man story by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in which Spider-Man, weakened by illness, is easily overpowered by Doctor Octopus and unmasked in front of witnesses, including J. Jonah Jameson. And none of them believe the evidence before their eyes. They persuade themselves that young Parker was merely pretending to be Spider-Man.
Just this year, there was an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer became a costumed hero called the Pie Man, who threw pies in the faces of the unjust. Ultimately Homer unmasks in front of the entire population of the town, and they react just as JJJ and Doc Ock did to the unmasked Peter Parker. The people of Springfield decide as one that n ordinary guy like Homer can’t be the mighty Pie Man; Homer is just trying to fool them.
The transparency of Superman’s disguise as Clark Kent is really what makes it work dramatically. Clark Kent is Everyman, and Superman represents our true inner self, our potential for greatness, that goes unrecognized. Then the glasses and the flimsiness of the disguise are a joke on everybody who refuses to see one’s true self. The truth is right there in front of people, but they are too locked into their preconceptions about a person, or too narrow-minded and unimaginative, to see it. I note that in the last issue of Mark Waid’s recent Superman: Birthright series, Clark, smiling knowingly, points out to Lois that no one has ever seen him together with Superman, and she misses the real point.
Though the episode’s narrator refers to Clark as timid, he’s not. Watching this episode, I realized what it is I like about George Reeves’ performance as Clark: his Clark Kent is not timid or weak, but is quiet and polite, and appears genuinely humble. This is important. We like Superman because he’s one of us. George Reeves’ Superman doesn’t swagger about his power. The Clark Kent presented in this episode does not seem to be a put-on; he’s not a comedy character like Christopher Reeve’s often is, and certainly not a caricature. The Clark Kent portrayed by George Reeves seems to be what Superman is “really” like: the truly decent person produced by his small-town upbringing, who doesn’t let his physical superiority to “normal” people swell his ego.
So the Superman of the Nineteen Fifties turns out to be Ward Cleaver as Clark Kent. Clark is no caricature, but contentedly conforms to the conventions of his time, as the center of a (surrogate) nuclear family, a cog in the wheel of American business (journalism division), and member of the prospering postwar middle class. Yes, he does every so often depart from conventional behavior to fly about in tights, but he does so to uphold the law, working in alliance with Inspector Henderson, who has not turned up in this first episode, but will become another member of the regular cast. (Notice that Henderson does not play so visible a role in post-1950s versions of Superman; the conventional forces of law and order are de-emphasized in the Superman sagas of later decades.) As long as Superman/Clark can keep anybody from realizing that Clark Kent, proper member of society, and Superman are one and the same, stability will continue at the Daily Planet: this planet won’t explode.
So, just this one episode of The Adventures of Superman provided plenty of food for thought about the Superman mythos as a whole. If only the Museum had chosen to do a complete program of Superman shows, demonstrating how the concept changed over the years. What if they had shown Superman on Earth alongside an episode of Lois and Clark, in which the rather subdued and square Clark and Lois become a youthful, sexy couple in a series that is as much romantic comedy as adventure? Then there’s Warner Brothers Animation’s 1990s Superman, which so masterfully combines the spirit of the Fleischer cartoons with the greater sophistication in story and characterization that evolved in the comics since the 1060s. And then, of course, there’s Smallville. But no, this is an opportunity the Museum overlooked.
Instead, the Museum packaged Superman on Earth with an episode of the 1970s Incredible Hulk television series and a two-parter from the 1960s Batman, two series which represent radical departures from the idealized world of the 1950s Superman, as we shall see in the next installment.
-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson
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