Superman

by Larry Tye

  A new show required another origin story. It had to be familiar enough to loyal comic book and strip readers that they wouldn’t see it as tinkering with the legend, and it couldn’t presume any preexisting knowledge of Superman lore, since part of the point of a new medium was to attract new fans. So whereas Action No. 1 described Superman’s home planet as distant and destroyed by old age and Superman No. 1 simply called it doomed, the inaugural radio show brought the action closer to home and gave more telling details. Krypton was in our own solar system—hidden from us by the sun—and it was that sun’s gravitational pull that overpowered the planet and made it “explode like a giant bubble, destroying every living thing on it!” Superman grew up on his way to Earth and by the time he stepped out of his spaceship, in episode two, he was ready to save his adopted planet.

  Superman’s war against the Nazis also looked different on the radio. In the comics, he stayed in his civvies and fought on the home front. On the airwaves he was commissioned as an undercover Secret Service operative. He still lived by clearly delineated rules, just as he had in print, including doing all he could to spare the lives of his enemies. And he came into America’s living rooms with an opening sequence that would become the signature of Superman on the radio and later on TV, even though it has been altered over time and the first paragraph was borrowed from the animated cartoons. So familiar was the refrain that children across the forty-eight states could recite it as readily as the Pledge of Allegiance:

  “Faster than a speeding bullet,” the narrator intoned. “More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!”

  Man: “Look! Up in the Sky!”

  Second man: “It’s a Bird!”

  Woman: “It’s a Plane!”

  First man: “It’s Superman!”

  Narrator: “Yes, it’s Superman! Strange visitor from another world, who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands! And who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way!”

  The last four words, which were added in the summer of 1942 and became part of Superman’s motto, were chosen with the help of a child psychologist to ensure they touched the right chords. Superman, of course, had always fought for patriotic principles, but it was only with the nation at war—and Americans thinking more than ever about why their country was worth fighting and dying for—that the idea of a distinctly American way of believing and acting took hold in the public mind and the Superman mythos. Yet again, Superman was reflecting and refracting his era in a way that helped define it.

  But words alone wouldn’t do. Listeners needed to visualize the action. So as the narrator talked about a speeding bullet, the radio audience heard a burst of machine-gun fire. Locomotive? Let’s hear the roar of a passing train. The biggest challenge for the three sound effects men was Superman taking flight. At first a hand-cranked wind machine had to suffice, but the artifice grew more convincing with the addition of several recorded sounds: a wind tunnel playing in reverse, a plane diving with a deafening roar, and a newsreel of an artillery shell whizzing through air during the Spanish Civil War. For Superman’s landing, the sound guys slowed by hand those recordings, the way disc jockeys do today. When the record stopped, listeners were assured that Superman was back on solid ground.

  A radio writer’s mission was different than Jerry Siegel’s had been in the comics. Jerry aimed strictly at kids. Radio writers started with young people as the target, but their scripts also had to appeal to grown-ups, who made up more than a third of the listeners. The best way to reach both, advised the show’s first director, was to assume the best in each. “Kids can detect the patronizing tone of an adult who tries to reach down to their mental age, and they resent it,” said Jack Johnstone. “You’ve got to be perfectly natural.” Another challenge: How to keep the pot boiling when everyone knows that nothing can hurt your hero. “A railroad train runs across his chest. It doesn’t hurt him, it hurts the train! Where do you get the suspense from?” asked scriptwriter Edward Langley. “I was a young writer in my twenties. So I asked a guy I knew in his fifties.… He said: ‘The one thing Superman can’t do is strike a match on a cake of soap!’ That was the kind of ‘peg’ that you used—to try to use what he can’t do.… They were wide open to anything, as long as you could make it suspenseful and interesting. Topics didn’t make a damn bit of difference.”

  That challenge got a bit easier in the spring of 1943, when Superman finally got a worthy adversary. It happened while Clark Kent was interviewing Dr. John Whistler at the Metropolis Museum. The scientist showed the journalist an unusual green meteorite that made Kent suddenly feel “as if every ounce of strength had been drained out of me.” The narrator explained the game-changing implications: “Superman for the first time in his life faces an enemy against which he is entirely powerless.” That enemy, a radioactive fragment of the planet Krypton, prompted Superman to recall his birthplace, his parents, and how and why he had been sent to Earth. It was the first the world heard of kryptonite, although Jerry Siegel’s twenty-six-page story on K-Metal was sitting on the library shelf at Detective Comics and could have been read by the radio scriptwriter. It would take another six years for the deadly metal to make its way into the comics and another two before a nation that was still at war, and understandably nervous about the mention of anything involving radiation, would hear much more on the radio about the glowing green element.

  When kryptonite returned to the airwaves it became the centerpiece of an epic battle between Superman and the Atom Man. At seventy-seven episodes, this struggle was the longest in all of the Superman radio series. The face-off began in September 1945, less than two months after America dropped its “Little Boy” nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and the world was thrust into the Atomic Age. Perfect timing. The final story aired the following January, two days before the inaugural meeting of the United Nations. In between, the villainous Scarlet Widow stole from the Metropolis Museum the single known sample of kryptonite, only to see a Nazi scientist named Der Teufel (German for “the Devil”) steal a chunk of it. Determined to “succeed where Hitler failed,” Teufel fed his kryptonite to Heinrich Milch (a.k.a. Henry Miller), turning him into Atom Man, whose radioactive powers were too much even for Superman. Miller seemed unstoppable, as the narrator warned: “Superman is pitting all his strength and speed against the one force on earth which is mightier than he is—the force which twice brought him within the very shadow of death. Can he possibly win this time, when he fights for his very life, and for the lives of those he loves? Monday brings the smashing, dramatic climax of our story, fellows and girls—and a startling surprise, so don’t miss it.” When Superman triumphed the next evening, he told a grateful Metropolis police inspector, “You don’t owe me anything. I’m fighting for the same things you are—the end of tyranny and intolerance—all the things that Miller and the Nazis stood for.” Inspector: “Then I’ll only say thank heaven that the worst threat America ever faced is over.”

  Ahh, but it wasn’t over. Two more pieces of kryptonite were somewhere in the city, and to track them down, Superman had to enlist the help of Batman and Robin. That meant confessing to them his secret identity, the first time he had ever done that. Showing his full self would pave the way for Superman to forge with Batman his first true friendship, one based on an honesty he couldn’t afford with anyone but his foster parents and the sharing that was possible only with a fellow superhero, who understood the anxiety and exhilaration that came with the job. So effective was this radio collaboration in defeating the Atom Man that the Dynamic Duo was back again for more than a dozen other guest appearances. Being able to rely on them as stand-ins proved particularly useful when Superman was taken out of the action by kryptonite—and when Bud Collyer wanted to go on vacation.

  It was on the radio,
too, that Superman learned to fly. He was aloft by the second episode in 1940, which was three and a half years earlier than his flying debut in the “Million-Dollar Marathon” story in Action, although in the early years of broadcast his power of flight waxed and waned from adventure to adventure. Radio’s immediacy and Maxwell’s brashness once again let Superman dive into a topic that comics writers would only slowly tease out. Kryptonite seemed like a good idea, so give it a try. Same with turning a high jump into full flight. What didn’t change was Superman’s boyish delight each time he tested his aerodynamic abilities, as he did in May 1943 when he was battling the Ku Klux Klan. “Up in my arms with you, Chuck,” Superman said to the young ballplayer Chuck Riggs. “Are we going to fly?” Riggs asked. Superman: “We are. Hang on now.” Riggs: “Oh boy—flying with Superman, I must be dreaming.” Superman: “Here we go. Up, up, and away! Is that your house down there, Chuck?”

  While some of the radio firsts involved expanding and curtailing his powers, others filled in what was quickly becoming the best supporting cast a superhero ever had. An intrepid copyboy showed up at Clark and Lois’s newspaper as early as Action Comics No. 6 in November 1938. He was given a bow tie but not a name or an ongoing role; he would make three more cameo appearances through the end of 1939. Jimmy Olsen was introduced to the world in April 1940, on a radio episode called “Donelli’s Protection Racket.” He was a red-headed, freckle-faced boy who worked at the paper. His mother had run a candy store since his dad died three years before, and a local mobster named Donelli was trying to extract money from her. Jimmy turned to Clark and Superman for help. Over the next several episodes we learned more about Jimmy: He was a Boy Scout but couldn’t find his way out of the woods; he perpetually annoyed his boss by calling him “chief” even as he asked to be promoted to real reporter; he reacted to everything good and bad by gasping “Holy smokes”; and he had a knack for getting into trouble and counting on Superman to bail him out.

  Perry White, too, came alive on the radio, fencing with Jimmy from the start and eventually making his way into the comics. The editor was first identified as Paris White, but his first name evolved to one more suited to his gruff demeanor even as his newspaper was changing from the Daily Flash to the Daily Planet. Inspector Henderson—first called Charles, then William—was Clark’s best source and Superman’s closest ally at the Metropolis Police Department. He was made for the radio and was intended to reassure parents that Superman was a friend of the police and not the vigilante he started out as. It took seven episodes on the airwaves for Lois to appear, which was a long time compared to her debut in Action No. 1, but she was the only adult female character on any afternoon action-adventure radio show.

  There were actually several Superman radio series, not just one. They ranged from fifteen to thirty minutes, and aired three to five times a week. The shows were meant to be kid-friendly, although for thirteen weeks in 1949 a crime version aimed at adults ran on Saturday evenings. The Mutual Broadcasting System aired the program for most of its run and Kellogg’s was by far the longest-lasting sponsor. The end came in March 1951, which was sooner than most fans wanted but more than a year later than for competing shows like Captain Midnight and Tom Mix. Because tapes of the old shows became available only recently, the radio Adventures of Superman hasn’t gotten the attention from historians and fans that his exploits on TV and film have. But it was radio that lifted the hero from a devoted audience of comic book fans into a broadcast universe that reached nearly every corner of the nation. The radio series came onto the scene two months into 1940 and it wound down fifteen months after the decade did. In between it joined Kilroy and the Slinky, Citizen Kane and Rosie the Riveter, as hallmarks of 1940s America.

  HIS SUCCESS IN OTHER MEDIA made it inevitable that Superman would find his way to the big screen. It was equally certain, as the 1930s came to a close, that America someday would produce an animated cartoon star who was not a funny, furry animal. The two trends collided in the Miami studios of a pair of Austrian-Jewish animation geniuses, the brothers Max and Dave Fleischer.

  It wasn’t the Fleischers’ idea. They thought building a “realistic” cartoon around Superman was a lousy idea given the problems they had encountered the only other time they tried to do that, with Gulliver’s Travels. What they did best was conspicuously unreal characters, like Betty Boop, Popeye, and Koko the Clown. So when they were approached by Paramount Pictures, which owned the screen rights to Superman, Max and Dave had to think about it. They told Paramount that they could produce the ten-minute movies, which theaters craved as lead-ins to feature films—but given the unusual animation requirements and special effects they would have to charge $100,000 per episode, or four times the going rate. “They thought that would be the end of the project—but it wasn’t,” said Richard Fleischer, Max’s son. “Paramount said: ‘Okay, go ahead.’ ”

  The brothers were right: It wasn’t easy. Special lights were needed to extend shadows and depths and create the right dramatic touch. They tried oblique angles, freeze-framing, double exposures, and other camera techniques that heretofore had been the domain of live-action films and the high-priced Walt Disney Studios. Rotoscoping—a technique the Fleischers had pioneered with Koko in which real-life figures were traced in ink, frame by frame, much as comic book artists sometimes did—made the animated figures believable. Max and Dave’s composers knew what Superman, Lois, and the others should look like, thanks to model sheets provided by Joe Shuster. Their voices came from the world of radio, with Bud Collyer playing Superman and Joan Alexander reprising the role of Lois. Composer Sammy Timberg supplied the theme music. The plot lines—thieving robots, rampaging dinosaurs, and jingoistic Japanese saboteurs—were familiar to fans who knew Superman from comic books, comic strips, and the airwaves. So was the sound of an exploding Krypton, which was generated by amplifying the sound of an apple being ripped apart by hand. The films borrowed the expressionism of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and the futurism of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, blended with the Fleischers’ unique feel for scale and vision. To put together a single ten-minute cartoon took a full six months, or twice as long as the normal Fleischer production.

  Did it work? Time magazine didn’t think so, branding the Fleischer productions “the movie cartoon at its worst. Superman looks and acts like a wooden puppet. So do all his playmates.” The New York Times film critic Janet Maslin, writing forty years later, was equally dismissive: “The Fleischers show so little aptitude for—or interest in—realistic animation.” Both were right in their own way. There was precious little dialogue and the characters seemed as stiff as Joe’s drawings. That was their genius. The Fleischers managed to bring into two dimensions and full motion the same simple strength that Joe had captured on paper, and it was that rendering that led animation historians to deliver a judgment decidedly different from that of newsprint reviewers. “These films are among the best fantasy cartoons ever produced,” said Leonard Maltin. “SUPERMAN stands as one of the Fleischer studio’s finest achievements.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences agreed, nominating the first of the Fleischers’ seventeen Superman films for an Academy Award as the Best Short Subject (Cartoon) in 1941. While it lost out to a Disney feature, the nomination sent a message to skeptical critics.

  Whatever the experts said, the verdict from fans was boisterous and unanimous. “Some 20,000,000 Supermaniacs can hardly wait for Superman’s ten-minute, one-reel cartoon to appear once a month in more than 7,000 U.S. movie houses,” Time wrote in July 1942. “Supermania is the only word for their devotion to this irrepressible Citizen Fixit, who smacks death rays back into the cannon, restores toppling skyscrapers to their foundations, knits broken bridges together with his bare hands, and who has brought a new cry into the world: ‘It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s—SUPERMAN!’ ” While the films necessarily lacked suspense, with Superman always winning, “his idolators (of all ages) seem satisfied to see him flex his muscles. This vicarious satisfaction
has made Superman Paramount’s most popular and profitable short.… So popular is the muscular moron that 114 female artists at the Famous studio recently answered a questionnaire asking whether they would prefer Superman for a husband or a boy friend. All said: boy friend. Explained one: ‘Trying to live with so super a husband might be awfully fatiguing.’ ”

  Reactions like those earned the Superman cartoons an uncharacteristically prominent spot on theater marquees. But that was not enough to save the series or the Fleischer Studios. The Fleischers were deep in debt on other projects, and in mid-1942 Paramount took over their business and changed its name to Famous Studios. Budgets for the Superman cartoons were cut, quality suffered, and in 1943 Paramount killed the series.

  That was not the end of the story. The Fleischer cartoons gave Superman some of his most famous catchphrases—from “faster than a speeding bullet” to “more powerful than a locomotive”—which made their way first to the ongoing radio series and later to TV. These short Superman films were so effective that they even turned up in the comic books: In Superman No. 19, Clark feigned a choking attack and kicked Lois’s purse to distract her from a Fleischer cartoon that would have revealed his identity as Superman. Twentieth Century Fox and animators at Terrytoons were paying attention, too, drawing on Superman’s cartoon success to create their own super-strong character who could fly and wore a blue costume and red cape. The costume eventually changed to yellow and the new cartoon hero’s name went from Super Mouse to Mighty Mouse. One bit of Superman mythology that is never attributed to the Fleischer Studios but should be is the use of a telephone booth as a dressing room. The first time Clark Kent ducked into a phone box to change into Superman was in November 1941 in “The Mechanical Monsters,” the second of the animation films. It proved convenient enough that he did it again on the radio, in the newspaper strip and comic books, on Broadway, and, most famously, in the movies. Pulling it off was easy when the booth was the old, heavy wooden box with a small window up front, but privacy would be tougher to come by in the newer, all-glass version.