A bat! That's it! It's an omen.. I'll shall become a bat!
Pre-CBR Reboot Join Date: 10-17-2010
Pre-CBR Reboot Posts: 4,362
THE CBR COMMUNITY STANDARDS & RULES ~ So... what's your excuse now?
In season 5, episode 6, "Disappearing Lois," Clark has a bust in his apartment where he puts his hat and he calls this bust "Sam." This is remarkably similar to a bust he had in his apartment in the 1970s comics, where he also put his hat, but this bust Clark called "Morty" (as a tribute to editor Mort Weisinger). I'm wondering who "Sam" is? If it's like Morty, then Sam could be someone who worked behind the scenes on THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN. Sam Waxman was the film editor, so it could be him, but I'm not convinced. I wonder if anyone else has an idea who the Sam Hill that bust could be.
A bat! That's it! It's an omen.. I'll shall become a bat!
Pre-CBR Reboot Join Date: 10-17-2010
Pre-CBR Reboot Posts: 4,362
THE CBR COMMUNITY STANDARDS & RULES ~ So... what's your excuse now?
It's interesting to me that The Stolen Costume is so fondly remembered in a lot of these posts, because I found it really disturbing. Faced with a situation where he's getting blackmailed for his secret identity,Clark chooses, basically, to just kill the crooks. But what's more disturbing is the way he does it by keeping his hands clean on the faintest technicality, bringing them up to the top of a mountain where he cannot be stupid enough to think they won't try to get down and fall. It would have been more honest if he'd just crushed their skulls, or gently pushed his hand through their ribcage to remove their hearts! He may as well have done, given that he put them into a situation where no outcome was more likely than their death and then left them unsupervised! I didn't see Superman making a good-faith attempt to keep two criminals on top of a mountain for the rest of their life without trial, not that that would have been better! No, I saw Superman engineering a perfect situation for them to die, without him having to actually do it, so he can keep his precious clean conscience. And that is more than a little bit horrific.
It gave me this weird sense of Superman as a type of well intentioned monster, like a version of Hannibal Lecter who may have certain noble goals but always puts his own self-interest first. I'm not... angry about it, I guess. I think there's something interesting to a Take on Superman like that, if it was done very deliberately, thoughtfully, took care to keep Superman interesting and likable despite his moral compromises, rather than just making him a straight-up villain. But then, The Stolen Costume isn't a deliberate Take, it's an ill-thought-out Mistake.
I couldn't see Stolen Costume and just go right back to enjoying The Adventures of Superman as if he was still a straightforward good guy, except by compartmentalizing it away with the reasoning that nobody really meant his actions to come across as the murder they clearly were. Which is easy enough for me to do! It's just like how the end of Superman II isn't meant to be a horrific violation of Lois Lane's mental privacy. So I can watch Superman III and Mystery in Wax without feeling like Superman is a monster, despite his actions in the previous installment of the series. But I don't see how it's regarded as one of the best episodes.
But enough about that! I love Superman & The Mole Men, the movie that launched the show. I've never bothered to see The Unknown People - I like the movie too much to bother. But it doesn't have great action or anything, I just think the plot and the writing are awesome. An angry mob of small town citizens trying to take frontier justice out on two (frankly, not that great looking) subterranean dwellers exploring the surface, just for being scary? And Superman, being something of an outsider himself, takes their side immediately, without hesitation or pondering. It's a great, simple morality story.
"You know the deal, Metropolis. Treat people right or expect a visit from me."