Superman

by Larry Tye

  The Superman animation series’ most lasting legacy was in showing that the Man of Steel could conquer yet another medium. He was quickly becoming ubiquitous, succeeding not just in the worlds of comic books and free radio entertainment but on the silver screen. That was a lesson Hollywood would remember.

  THE MOVIE SERIALS WERE Hollywood’s stepchild, representative not of what the filmmakers could accomplish in their heyday in the 1940s but of what they could get away with. A serial was a short subject that theaters showed alongside the featured movie, with a new chapter each week and a dozen or more chapters in all. The format was a carryover from serialized pulp fiction and a precursor to early TV, where the movie segments were rebroadcast at the rate of one a day. The storylines—westerns and science fiction, crime and espionage—were aimed squarely at youngsters, who never stopped relishing them, from the silent era in 1912 until TV made them obsolete in the early 1950s. The writing was thin, with little love, no sex, and the beginning of each twenty-minute episode wasted recounting the last one. Few came for the acting, either, which was slapdash, with escapes and chases routinely lifted from old films and producers hoping nobody would notice. The draw was the cliffhanger, in which the hero (often literally) hung over a cliff as the villain gloated and fans were reminded to return the following week to see whether what came next was a death (almost never) or a rescue (count on it). Even when they flopped, which was often, studios could dub and resell the shorts in France, Italy, Turkey, China, and, most obliging of all, Spain and Latin America, where episodes were stitched back together for a single five-hour viewing.

  “Jungle Sam” Katzman was the king of the serials, for better and worse. The producer and director was Jack Liebowitz’s kind of guy, a penny-pincher and autocrat who had never lost money on a film. He started not with a story or idea, but with a wild and colorful title like Flame of Calcutta. From that he built a narrative of intrigue set in eighteenth-century India. His biggest earners were the Jungle Jim pictures, or at least they were until the Superman serials he made for Columbia Pictures in the late 1940s. To make sure the new films would be a hit with the adolescent fans who loved Superman in his other media incarnations, Katzman tested them on his fifteen-year-old son, Jerome, and his friends. “If they guess how the guy gets out of the predicament each week,” Katzman said, “it goes out immediately and we rewrite until they can’t guess.” The other key, the producer knew, was a Superman in whom his son and millions of other kids could believe.

  Kirk Alyn was an odd choice for the job. He was more a song-and-dance man than an actor, having studied ballet and performed in vaudeville and on Broadway in the 1930s and early forties. That’s where he decided to trade in the name he was born with, John Feggo, Jr., for Kirk Alyn, which he felt was better suited to the stage. He appeared in chorus lines and in blackface, modeled for muscle magazines, and performed in TV murder mysteries in the days when only bars had TVs and only dead-end actors performed for the small screen. But he had experience in serials if not in superheroes, so when he got a call from Columbia in 1948 asking if he was interested in trying out for Superman, he jumped into his car and headed to the studio. Told to take off his shirt so the assembled executives could check out his build, the burly performer complied. Then Katzman instructed him to take off his pants. “I said, ‘Wait a minute.’ They said, ‘We want to see if your legs are any good,’ ” he recalled forty years later. They were good enough, and fifteen minutes after he arrived, Alyn was hired as the first actor to play a Superman whom his fans could see as well as hear.

  Alyn and his directors were smart enough not to try to reinvent the character Bud Collyer had introduced so effectively to the airwaves. “I visualized the guy I heard on the radio. That was a guy nothing could stop,” Alyn said. “That’s why I stood like this, with my chest out, and a look on my face saying, ‘Shoot me.’ ” His demeanor said tough guy, but his wide eyes signaled approachability and mischievousness, just the way Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had imagined their Superman a decade before. Alyn understood much as Collyer had that kids like fifteen-year-old Jerome Katzman could spot a phony in an instant. If they didn’t think Alyn was having fun—and that he believed in Superman—they wouldn’t pay to see his movies. His young audience, after all, didn’t just admire the Man of Steel. They loved him. Superman was not merely who they dreamed of becoming but who they were already, if only we could see. The good news for them was that Alyn was having fun, and he did believe in his character in a way that these preteens and teens appreciated even if movie reviewers wouldn’t.

  Columbia Pictures, too, had learned something from the Superman radio broadcasts: It pays to let children hold on to their fantasies. Sam Katzman announced at his first press briefing that he had despaired of finding an actor capable of portraying the mighty Man of Steel but thankfully had persuaded Superman to appear as himself. The credit lines continued the ruse, billing Kirk Alyn as playing just Clark Kent.

  Superman’s comic book colors—blue and red—would show little contrast in a black-and-white film, so Alyn wore gray and brown. Being the first live-action Superman meant making a series of adjustments, some of them painful. When it became clear that no stuntman could convincingly stand in for him Alyn performed his own stunts, or so he claimed, including one where he intercepted an electric current the Spider Lady had intended for Lois Lane. No one counted on the sparks catching on the metal of his Superman belt buckle. “I was saved from incineration only by the insulation on my boot soles,” he said later, “but it scared the blazes out of me.” Producers also promulgated rules about superpowers like X-ray vision. There were two things it shouldn’t penetrate: lead, whose X-ray blocking power proved to be Superman’s sole defense against the deadly radiation emitted by kryptonite, and clothing, which was Lois’s only defense against prying eyes.

  Making Superman fly was a more vexing problem. The technical crew strung cables from the studio ceiling to pull Alyn aloft and molded a steel breastplate to hold him there, and for twelve long hours he was filmed dipping, banking, and, yes, flying the way men had dreamed of since Daedalus built wings for Icarus. The flaw this time was the wiring: It was so painfully visible that the crew was fired and Superman was grounded. Filmgoers saw Alyn poised on the window’s edge, but what flew away from the building or any other setting was an animated Superman. He always landed behind a bush or wall, from which his human counterpart could dash out and resume the role. The effect was cartoonish.

  Parts of the radio Man of Steel were reprised on film, with Alyn self-consciously announcing, “This is a job for Superman!” before each rescue and shouting, “Up, up, and away!” every time his cartoon double took off. That made sense on radio, when listeners needed cues; it seemed like a parody when everyone could see that Superman was on the job and airborne. Equally jarring to observant fans was noticing that Clark went through the identical motions every time he changed into Superman in the Daily Planet storeroom, and that the rough airplane landing in the final episode looked an awful lot like one in the 1947 serial Jack Armstrong. Why were they using scavenged film? Surely it wasn’t for lack of money: Columbia poured $350,000 into the filming, making Superman one of the most expensive serials ever. In the end, the fifteen-part film that aired in 1948 looked like what it was: a B movie sliced into fifteen disjointed parts.

  But kids whose Saturday at the movies was the highlight of their week ate it up. These were the same youngsters who, even before they could read the words, had thumbed through their Superman comic books until the pages grew ragged. In later years the reward for finishing their homework, or the inducement to get started, was the chance to listen to Superman on the radio. Saturdays had meant Superman cartoons at the movie house downtown, while on Sunday he showed up in regal color in the funny pages. Now there was a new treat: their hero, in live action, as part of the weekend matinee. Their parents dropped them at the theater thinking the attraction was Charles Dickens’s penniless orphan Oliver Twist, but the real reason they
wanted to come was Hurled to Destruction, the Superman short that ran first. That explains not just why Superman played in seven thousand movie houses nationwide but why it took in more than a million dollars, which was three times what Katzman had invested and enough to make it the most successful serial of the time.

  In 1950, two years after the first set of shorts, Katzman and Columbia released a fifteen-set sequel called Atom Man vs. Superman. The title was borrowed from the radio series that introduced kryptonite, but almost everything else was different. The enemy this time wasn’t Der Teufel, the Nazi scientist, but the comic books’ Lex Luthor, who slipped in and out of prison and banished Superman to outer space using a secret ray that “breaks down your atoms and reassembles them wherever I desire.” Even as the hairless villain was rewriting the laws of physics and inventing flying saucers, his henchmen inexplicably continued pulling off low-tech capers like holding up shoe stores and laundries. Atom Man used a hybrid approach to flying that made it more convincing than in the first serials, though it still left a lot for the fans to wish for. Animated stand-ins were used again, but the transition from human to cartoon was smoothed by filming Alyn with his arms raised above his head, an electric fan blowing from above to simulate whooshing air, in front of blue staging that was supposed to look like sky. Other shots had him straddling an airplane and later a missile. The changes made Atom Man better than its predecessors, but there was no denying that these short Superman movies did not have the taut drama of the radio broadcasts of the same name.

  The Superman serials launched the careers of several actors, some of whom, like Alyn, came and went with the short films while others, like Noel Neill, would be back later. Neill, a twenty-seven-year-old “sweater girl,” became known to adoring fans as the sweet Lois Lane and to detractors as the saccharine one. Like Superman, Lois had a uniform for the first fifteen shorts: a wide-brimmed white hat, a wool business suit, and wavy black hair bouncing off her shoulders as she walked. In Atom Man her wardrobe expanded to three outfits and her hair was trimmed to well above the shoulder line. Katzman knew Neill from their earlier collaborations and thought she looked enough like the comic book Lois that he didn’t require a tryout. The direction he gave her during filming was clipped and pointed: Play yourself.

  In an era when studios carefully managed the lives of actors, Columbia was obsessed with keeping intact the illusion of Superman. Every aspect of the making of the serials was to be secret. Katzman banned outsiders from the set when scenes with Superman were being shot. He screened any personal appearances scheduled for Alyn, and told the actor that he “wasn’t to appear on the studio lot wearing the ‘uniform,’ ” which is the way his bosses insisted he refer to his costume. But the studio simply couldn’t suppress Alyn’s swaggering pride at the role he had been given to play. He loved it when Katzman would tease the maître d’ at lunch by asking, “Do you know who this is?” then delightedly telling him, “This fellow is Superman!” When he was off the set Alyn refused to brush back his Superman spit curl, which clearly identified him with the character, and when he was on he gleefully told nonstop stories of derring-do. That identification came back to bite him: He was so widely viewed as an alien from outer space that it became difficult for him to get other roles. “Everyplace I’d go,” he explained, “they’d say ‘Hi ya, Superman!’ ” This would become a familiar complaint for future actors playing the role.

  In the end the serials suffered the same fate as Superman on radio and in animation: they faded out as the spotlight moved elsewhere with changing American tastes and technologies. By 1948 America had four television networks, and in another three years their broadcasts would be beaming across the nation. TV didn’t kill the movie business, as Hollywood had feared, but it did change the behavior of the American public, especially young fans like those Superman leaned on. The cabinet radio that had been the focus of family entertainment was replaced by a TV console, and kids who had flocked to Saturday matinees increasingly stayed home and watched for free.

  The Man of Steel, though, was far too potent to fade away himself. Kirk Alyn, Noel Neill, and Sam Katzman had proved that their superhero could be wildly popular as live-action entertainment, and Jack and Harry already were lining up the talent and gadgetry to bring Superman into the era of the television.

  BACK IN THE COMIC BOOKS, something curious had been happening to Superman: He was maturing and evolving. That had never been a consideration before, not when he went from infant to adult in a single page of Action Comics No. 1 and it was uncertain whether he would last beyond a few issues. No one had given any thought to how or even whether he should continue aging. Joe and his assistants had drawn the character as if he would stay thirty-something forever, even as they went from being young artists to middle-aged ones (editors would later explain his slow aging with the contrivance that he was born on February 29, the leap day, so he added a year only once every four years). Just as important, no one had scoped out which parts of his past readers would want to explore and how his present world should be enlarged. Now, as Superman was looking ahead to his third decade of stardom—and Jerry and Joe were reluctantly relinquishing control over him—a new lineup of artists and writers had begun scoping and enlarging.

  Krypton was one of the first elements to take on added dimensions. All we knew to start was that the planet had exploded and Superman had escaped. That seemed like enough, since what mattered was his life with us on Earth. The newspaper strips and the radio show had begun to fill in details about Superman’s parents and their world, but the comic books didn’t catch up until the summer of 1948, and the first full-length origin story was written not by Superman’s creator but by Batman’s. Bill Finger’s tale opened with this teaser: “Who is Superman? Where did he come from? How did he obtain his miraculous powers? Millions keep asking these and many other questions.” The next nine pages took readers back to “the great planet Krypton,” populated by “humans of high intelligence and magnificent physical perfection.” A handsome, tall Kryptonian scientist wearing a green costume and yellow cape was trying to convince the ruling council that their planet was doomed. The uranium in its core had been quietly churning for ages to the point where “Krypton is one gigantic atomic bomb!” There could be no more hair-raising words for readers, even young ones, who just three years before had lived through the staggering news of what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki thanks to the nuclear bombs that ended World War II. Kryptonians’ only salvation, Jor-El insisted, would be to build huge rocket ships and flee to Earth, a world with a similar atmosphere and far less gravity. When no one would listen, Jor-El and Lara sent their only child off in a tiny spaceship.

  That enlightened readers about Krypton, but Superman himself still didn’t know his planet’s history or its fate. It took another fifteen months for Finger to bring the hero back to Krypton for the first time since he was an infant and for comic-book-only fans to get their first look at kryptonite. Superman encountered a meteorite infused with the metal in a jewelry store on Earth and, alarmed at how it wilted him, he followed it back through space and time to its source. Arriving on Krypton just as the planet was about to explode, he had a quiet look around. (He “is invisible to these people because he is not of their time and doesn’t exist for them,” an editor’s note explained. “He can only view them as he would a silent movie, but he can read lips.”) Following Jor-El and Lara’s baby as he rocketed to Earth, Superman did not realize he was following himself until he saw the infant rescued by the Kents, his foster parents.

  Going home humanized the Man of Steel. He knew now why the meteor from Krypton had weakened him and why his parents had abandoned him. But that understanding brought with it a loneliness that would never leave. He realized now what Jerry Siegel had confided in us from the beginning: Superman was an orphan and an alien. His planet’s sole survivor, he was the last of a long-lived and majestic race. It was not an easy burden to shoulder. “Now I understand,” he thought to himself, “why I�
�m different from Earthmen! I’m not really from Earth at all—I’m from another planet—the planet Jor-El called Krypton!!”

  The character named Jimmy Olsen was another instance of comic books catching up with radio as well as with a changing world. While we were introduced to Jimmy and his mother in an April 1940 broadcast, it would take another nineteen months for the comics to give him a personality and a starring role. It took just four panels for the boy, who looked to be ten, to let editor Perry White know his dream: “I—I’d like to become a real reporter—like Clark Kent. And if you’d only give me a chance.” White’s reply hinted at the repartee the two would continue for decades: “Tell you what I’ll do, kid. Come back again in five or ten years.… And I may give you a break.” Too impatient to wait, Jimmy stowed away in Lois’s car as she chased a story about the villainous Archer, then he helped Lois skedaddle into the woods when the Archer took aim at her. The story ended with Jimmy getting his first byline in the newspaper. It would be four more months before he got a last name, twelve years before he earned a promotion to cub reporter, and seventeen years before he settled in with his trademark blazing red hair after experiments with blond, honey blond, and light red.