Word: supermans
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...attitudes of Superman to current social problems reflect the strong- arm totalitarian methods of the immature and barbaric mind...
Then came, out of nowhere, nostalgia -- including nostalgia for things the nostalgia lovers were too young to know. That mood gave rise to the first of the feature films in 1978, and suddenly Superman was soaring again. And this time, when Christopher Reeve waved his arms and pointed his heroic chin upward, he really seemed to take off over Metropolis. "Honest to God, I was disappointed by the flying," Reeve says of the TV version that he had seen as a boy. "I remember thinking, 'He's got to be lying on a glass table.' I wanted him to really...
Reeves, a rather lardy figure, had serious acting aspirations (he had been one of the Tarleton twins in Gone With the Wind), and he felt that Superman was somehow beneath his dignity. He also disliked the need to diet for the role. He once referred to his heroic tights and cape as a "monkey suit." After growing famous as Superman, Reeves encountered great difficulty in finding work as anything else (the same problem ended the careers of Alyn and Noel Neill, who played a perky Lois Lane in both the serial and TV show). When ; he did get a minor...
Despite the success of the TV series, which is still being syndicated to this day, Superman had some bad times during the '50s and '60s. For all his superpowers, he proved quite helpless against the onslaughts of Dr. Fredric Wertham, onetime senior psychiatrist for New York City's department of hospitals and author of a widely read anticomics diatribe, Seduction of the Innocent (1953). Though much of Wertham's crusade was a commendable attack on the sadism in crime and horror comics, he denounced Superman before legislative committees on rather dubious political grounds. He attached weighty significance to the derivation...
...publishers responded to such attacks with a code, guaranteeing in effect that all comics would henceforth be as mild as milk toast. But just as the publishers promised sweetness and light, the '60s began to demand "relevance." What had Superman's crime fighting ever done about civil rights or Viet Nam? Youthful eyes turned to the work of "underground" comic artists like R. Crumb, whose heroes used and acted out words that would have shocked the irremediably respectable man of steel. Even in the swinging '60s, Superman's idea of a really strong expletive was "Great Scott...