Super Suited

This Is No Fantasy: “Superman” (1978) - Act 2, Isolation in Smallville

It was June 1938 when we departed from Earth, and not much time seems to have passed when Kal-El’s ship brings us back home. Our hero’s formative years are therefore set in the era during which, in real life, the first Superman comic was published.

Superman was developed in response to the social and political themes of that decade: poverty, inequality, international tension. Instilled with classic American (ie. Midwestern) values, the first superhero was equipped to face all of the issues and more. Act 2 of Superman defines those values.

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This Is No Fantasy: “Superman” (1978)

It’s rare that I write such a long essay. But this movie is the reason I began this blog project in the first place. 

2013 is the 75th anniversary of Superman’s first appearance. By now, his story has become legendary — everyone knows the basic outline of a Superman story…

An alien scientist on a doomed planet sends his infant son to Earth. There, the baby is found by small town Americans and, despite his unusual powers, raised as their own son Clark Kent. Upon reaching manhood, Clark leaves home to become a reporter at a major city newspaper. But unbeknownst to his colleagues — Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Perry White — Clark occasionally retreats to his arctic Fortress of Solitude, contemplating how a superhuman alien can be part of our world. His questions are answered when villains like Lex Luthor emerge, and his role as Earth’s protector is secured.

By constructing a series of unexpected variations on what, by the time of its release, were already legendary tropes, Superman (1978, Donner) argues that the superhero movie genre can be more artful than its reputation suggests. My critique of Superman is divided into five acts, modelled after the structure of the film itself.

Act 1) Alienation on Krypton

Act 2) Isolation in Smallville

Act 3) Concealment in Metropolis

Act 4) The Unstoppable Force

Act 5) The Immoveable Object

This Is No Fantasy: “Superman” (1978) - Act 1, Alienation on Krypton

As this project has already covered, Superman first appeared to the public in June 1938. That’s the date that looms over the screen as Superman begins. Richard Donner’s cinematic masterpiece — that’s right, I said it — was released in theaters forty years after the publication of Action Comics #1.

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Apologia: Update

Sorry for the delay.

I’ve watched the pilot of Wonder Woman — don’t worry, I liked it better than Batman: The Movie — but I’m not going to have time to write a full post anytime soon. When I do get around to it, and I will, I plan to argue that Lynda Carter’s portrayal of Diana Prince/Wonder Woman is covert feminism.

Disguised in her “satin tights,” this superheroine earnestly advocates gender equality. Her point is enhanced by the 1941 period setting of the first season. (The series updates to the contemporary 1970s in Season 2, which is also why it’ll take me a while to develop a solid argument about the series as a whole.)

Additionally, WW’s creator, William Moulton Marston, is a pretty fascinating character in his own right. If I can find some space to talk about him for a bit, I just might.

Finally, I’ve conscripted a college friend of mine who majored in Women Studies to write a guest post about Wonder Woman. So, fans of the Amazonian Princess, fear not! More material will be posted soonishly.

I’m hoping that by jumping to my next subject, Superman: The Movie, which will require significantly less time to watch, I can get another essay posted sometime in the next week or so. Until then, feel free to check out Dash of Time, my blog for everything else I watch. It’s more casual and subsequently more frequent. These days, it’s pretty much limited to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager.

This Looks Like A Job For…: “Super Friends” (animation, 1973-1986)

I’m not too far into this project yet, but I think it’s time to reorient myself. After watching multiple versions of Superman, Batman, and the Green Hornet, it got easy to forget how and why I wanted to pay attention to these stories in the first place.

Back in the prologue, I defined a superhero as “a character who, after undergoing a transformative experience, uses extraordinary means to fight injustice.” So, much of my distaste for Batman and The Green Hornet boils down to how those shows don’t bother with the transformative experience. It’s difficult to identify with those characters, because they don’t have recognizable motivations.

Spider-Man, at least, demonstrates that the sillier aspects, which audiences of this period seem to enjoy, can work — when it’s actually in a cartoon. (And, to be fair, Spider-Man makes a cursory effort to reference Peter Parker’s transformative experience in the opening theme song. “Is he strong? Listen, bud / He’s got radioactive blood!”)

Super Friends perpetuates this era’s frivolous treatment of superhero stories, but also introduces some new concepts: crossovers and narrative facility.

It’s surprising that it took this long for an onscreen superhero story to construct a crossover, considering that the narratives we’ve seen so far are designed for children. Russell T Davies, the head writer of Doctor Who from 2005 to 2010, once said that crossovers are an innate impulse of a child’s imagination. Children are “experts at crossovers,” Davies says, because they “think nothing of having their Dalek toys battling Star Wars droids.” (The crossover in Super Friends isn’t even that difficult to conceive, since the characters are all DC Comics’ superheroes. They already exist in one universe.)

By mashing characters from disparate stories together, we can discover new ways to define those characters and stories. Super Friends demonstrates this by introducing emergency situations that certain superheroes are uniquely suited to handle.

The first season of Super Friends features Superman, Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman. In the first episode, “The Power Pirate,” we see how the heroes each tackle disasters in their designated spaces. Superman stops a runaway train and a crashing plane; Batman and Robin maintain order within the city; and Aquaman obviously handles any crises in the ocean.

I call this “narrative facility,” by which I mean that the stories here are tailored around the heroes’ skill sets. They’re written specifically to facilitate a character’s ability to meet a challenge.

Super Friends isn’t entirely successful at executing crossovers or narrative facility. (Granted, it’s the first example of either concept onscreen, but the ways in which they fail can illuminate how they might work in the future.)

The crossovers don’t quite work because, at this point, writers are still hesitant to give superheroes any emotional complexity. There’s no meaningful interaction between the characters, because the characters themselves have no meaning. (Again, there’s never any attempt to address the heroes’ transformative experiences, their lives outside of their superhero duties, the forces that drive them to fight injustice, etc.)

Furthermore, Super Friends dilutes its focus by introducing original characters. The first season features Wendy, Marvin, and their pet Wonder Dog. They do not have superpowers, and are wildly over-privileged. Like Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, they’re allowed to spend time with the major characters simply because they’re children. Marvin has the additionally unfortunate burden of being the dimwitted comic relief character. (Later seasons replace Wendy, Marvin, and Wonder Dog for the superpowered Wonder Twins and their monkey, Gleek.)

Meanwhile, the narrative facility proposed by Super Friends falters because the show chooses, for some reason, to belittle the heroes rather than glorify them. Superman is introduced wrestling — and intentionally losing — to dimwitted Marvin. Aquaman’s first mission becomes absurdly more difficult when he is immediately trapped in the clutches of a renegade sea anemone.

And these early episodes never quite figure out what kind of situations Wonder Woman should handle. It’s an issue that might be resolved during later seasons — Super Friends continued for 13 years, under different titles and featuring slightly different characters. But, regrettably, there’s just not enough time to watch all 109 episodes and keep this project moving. So, next up, let’s leave the boys behind and give Wonder Woman the attention she really deserves…