There’s been a lot of talk and a lot of print about the latest Superman movie over the last few weeks.
I grew up with Superman comics, Superman black and white movies shown on Wednesday afternoons in serial form at the neighborhood theater, and a western thrown in also, all for a quarter. I mostly watched the black and white television series from 1952 to 1958.
Let’s go over the birth and growth of Superman.
Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel met in a Cleveland high school in 1932 and toyed with the idea of producing a superhero. Shuster did the drawing and Siegel the writing. After trying several ideas and plots they were met with rejection and advice and the Jewish pair finally came up with Superman, who made his debut in the number one issue of Action Comics, dated April 18, 1938.
Born on the fictional planet of Krypton which was in the process of being destroyed, Superman’s father quickly put his three-year-old son in a small rocket ship which landed in the fictional town of Smallville, Kansas, and was found by farmers named Kent. They adopted the little guy and named him Clark. The Kents raised Clark with a strong sense of right and wrong and realized he had powers they had not seen in any other human.
Clark Kent grows up and moves to the big city of Metropolis where he gets a job as a reporter at the newspaper, The Daily Planet. Wearing glasses, the mild-mannered, soft-spoken Kent becomes friends with another reporter Lois Lane and they often work together on big stories. And those stories were turned into radio programs, novels, movies, television shows and games.
The radio series with Bud Collyer playing the man of steel ran from 1940 to 1951 while the television version starring George Reeves played from 1952 to 1958, followed by years of reruns. I remember George Reeves from several bad guy roles in Hopalong Cassidy B-movies and from a role as a good-looking guy in the Civil War era color movie, “Gone With the Wind,” starring Clark Gable.
Sadly, George Reeves committed suicide in 1959 at the age of 45 as he was so typecast with the Superman character Hollywood was worried movie-goers and TV watchers would not accept him in another role. Superman lived on in television reruns and in newspaper comic strips which ran from 1939 to 1966.
Actor Kirk Alyn played Superman in short movies in the 1940s and in 1978 with a lot of hoopla “Superman,” starring Christopher Reeve brought the story to life once again in gorgeous color in two hours and 23 minutes. Reeve repeated the role in 1980, 1983 and 1987. Other actors in other Superman movies from 2006 on didn’t seem to fit the costume as well as Reeve.
This year’s Superman version stars David Corenswet, a 31-year-old actor with a Jewish father, a lawyer, from a well-known family in New Orleans. His mother isn’t Jewish and David married a Catholic young lady two years ago in a ceremony presided over by a Catholic priest and a rabbi from New Orleans.
I don’t know if Superman Corenswet was able to break the glass.
