When Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster channeled youthful male wish fulfillment into the bulging muscles of Superman, clad in the costume of a circus strong man, they first gave him super strength, speed, and invulnerability.

However, he couldn’t fly when he appeared in Action Comics #1 in June 1938, although he could certainly jump. In his debut, he leaps up onto electrical wires while carrying a lobbyist, leaps with him onto the dome of the U.S. Capitol, and the cliffhanger is how he then tries but fails to make a leap across to a skyscraper.

However, he could fly in the Adventures of Superman radio serial in early 1940, which gave him an introduction that also graced the television series from 1952-1958:

Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman!

That always bothered me when I was a kid watching reruns of the show in the 1970s. Why would he bother with leaping over tall buildings when he could just fly over them? Visuals of him in flight began with the 1941 Fleischer Superman theatrical cartoons, since animating him constantly leaping about was too time-consuming, and the custom infiltrated the comics by Action Comics #65 in October 1943.

The first Superman comic book that I owned was Superman #256 in September 1972 when I was six years old. By then, he was tremendously overpowered, able to travel faster than light to other galaxies and withstand atomic explosions. He had X-ray vision, heat vision, telescopic and microscopic vision, freezing and hurricane-force super breath, super ventriloquism and hypnotism, and so forth.

Lex Luthor had to become ever more ingenious, and magical characters like Mister Mxyzptlk and were also introduced to counteract his overpowered abilities. Kryptonite was first introduced in the radio serial in 1943 as a way to weaken him, and that made its way into the comics in 1949, where it multiplied into well over a dozen different types.

The 1950s television series used Kryptonite in a half-dozen of its 104 episodes. Reading the comics in the early 1970s, I was told that Superman possessed genius-level intelligence and an eidetic memory. However, I recently was reminded that his 1950s television persona was only as intelligent as the script writers.

Episode 100

I recently replaced the television antenna atop Meador Manor, hooking it into an HD Homerun to stream broadcasts and digital video recordings of them to devices across our home network. I wanted to test its functionality, and a quick search revealed that the 100th episode of the old Adventures of Superman show, which was the ninth installment of its sixth and final season in 1958, was being broadcast on the local MeTV affiliate that evening. I set it to record and the next day I watched Superman’s Wife.

The first two seasons of the show, filmed in 1951 and 1953, were black-and-white, with plenty of film noir influences in the early shows. The next four seasons were filmed in color, increasing productions costs such that the final four seasons had half as many episodes, with only 13 each year instead of 26.

Superman’s Wife opened with the Man of Steel supposedly getting married to a policewoman portrayed by actress, pin-up, and nightclub singer Joi Lansing.

The plot is quite campy, but the stupidity is what interests me. The climax is when the evil Mr. X lures Superman and the Daily Planet editor Perry White and reporters Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen into a bathysphere, of all things, at “Pier 96”.

It is lowered down so far that if it were opened, Superman says the pressure would crush the humans aboard. The writing is sketchy, but if Superman breached the capsule, I expect the humans would at least drown.

Everyone is stumped for awhile, evidently unable to fathom the flying Man of Steel simply rising up and pushing on the roof of the capsule to lift it to the surface. Jimmy Olsen says, “If you were only on the outside, you could just lift the bathysphere up to the surface!”

Superman replies, “Lift it? That’s it! Jimmy, you’ve just given me an idea!”

Okay, he’s a dingbat, but now he’ll fly up and push up on the roof, right? Nope! Stupidman decides to pull a plate off the roof, which he knows is attached to the lift cable, and then rapidly pulls down on the cable while the compartment begins to flood. Pulling down on the cable might work if his body were pushing up against the roof, but he just stands on the floor and repeatedly yanks more and more cable down into the capsule, which mysteriously rises.

Uh no, that would not work. All he would be doing is playing out line from the dockside winch down into the capsule while it sat on the ocean floor. If we want to be generous, we’ll say that Superman slid his unseen feet into some sturdy metal floor straps and that is how he saved the day.

Yeah, I know it was a cheaply made kiddie show in the 1950s and Superman physics is constantly nonsensical, but did writers Robert Leslie Bellem and Whitney Ellsworth truly fail to realize the obvious solution, given his capabilities, of him just pushing up on the roof?

No doubt they wanted the dramatic footage of water spraying into the capsule while Superman yanks on the rope. I laughed out loud at poor 70-year-old John Hamilton, who played editor Perry White, getting absolutely soaked. The director and editor made the most of shots of his fedora hat redirecting some of the shower.

Hamilton was a veteran of stage and screen who had played hundreds of parts, but no doubt is best remembered for the Perry White role he inhabited from ages 65-70. His gruff iconic catchphrases of “Great Caesar’s ghost!” and “Don’t call me chief!” while chomping on a cigar made it into the comics. Sadly, he died less than a year after filming Superman’s Wife.

Oh yeah, as for her, she ends up as the campy damsel in distress, tied to a car bridge with dynamite about to go off beneath her. Supes unties her, leads her away, and shields her from the explosion. It all ends with the marriage being revealed as a sham to use her as bait to lure out Mr. X, as if Lois Lane or Jimmy Olsen wouldn’t have already been tempting enough.

While I enjoyed the Superman comics, the old Adventures of Superman reruns, and the silly animated Super Friends back when I was in elementary school, by the time Christopher Reeve was playing him in 1978’s Superman I was a 12-year-old 7th grader who found it rather silly. I did pay for cinema tickets to endure the three increasingly awful sequel films, and even the 2006 Superman Returns with Brandon Routh, but I was never tempted to visit a cinema for the later films with Henry Cavill and now David Corenswet.

Superhero movies rose to great prominence after the 2008 Great Recession, much like comic books surged in the Great Depression of the 1930s. They certainly boast better special effects these days than in the movie serials and television series of 70+ years ago, but their scripts continue to ignore basic physics, which limits my engagement.