It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Superman!

I recommend tracking down the best quality version of this you can find, as there are some pretty horrible versions out there.

I have seen this twice now. It's mostly quite boring, it's silly, many of the jokes are dumb, and the songs aren't that catchy. As a musical, there's not much of a reason to go looking for this. The same goes for those who are after a good Superman-movie. This isn't it. Superman is an overly insecure side-character in this story, that mostly revolves around the goofy villains.

But if you like so-bad-it's-good, things that are campy, or just interesting pieces of popular culture - then you can do worse than this musical. It's interesting to note that the people who wrote it, also took part in writing the 1978 Superman-movie (maybe this explains why both movies featuring Superman using x-ray to look at underwear). For superman-fans, you might notice how the creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, appears as characters in the movie. As a Norwegian, I took great delight in the villain's end goal being to destroy Sweden(!). And there are some gags in the movie that are genuinely funny.

That said, the movies doesn't take itself seriously on any level, and there's not much more than the novelty of it, that makes this worth a watch.

The Broadway show was not the greatest contribution to the Superman myth, but it was enjoyable. Peggy Lee recorded "You've Got Possibilities" but I don't remember if that was the one I heard several times on the radio. The show had many clever lyrics. My favorite was "It's a satisfying feeling when you hang up your cape/to know that you've averted murder, larceny, and rape!" And the rhyme of "quite a dish" with "solid as a knish." And in "Revenge," where Prof. Sedgwick bemoans being passed over for the Nobel Prize, laments: ....They gave the prize to Harold Urey./The shocking thing about the matter is/My heavy hydrogen was heavier than his! And plenty more. I remember many of the songs pretty well, almost 40 years later.

The Broadway production was named in the Broadway ten best list for that year. You've got Possibilities was recorded by Jane Morgan, Edie Gourme and Streisand. The staging was by the legendary director Hal Prince. The writers of the book enentually used some of their often humorous story as part of the screenplay that they eventually wrote for the Christopher Reeve film.

The TV production was unfortunate in being broadcast out of prime time, and it did look cheap. Best line ... when Perry White receives a news article from a reporter and says "Rosebud..a sled!!!! no one will believe that!". Was anyone paying attention? Why do people on this board keep saying there was no Perry White? Even the Broadway production had a Perry White, played byEric Mason. It was Hal Prince the director who replaced the character of Jimmy Olsen with a more mature pragnmatic character named Jim Morgan. This vharcter was cut from the TV production. Benton and Newman's main plot line and tongue in cheek humor are maintained in the Salkind film. The biggest objection to the Broadway show was it looked too much like Bye Bye Birdie, and the villains parts were bigger than Superman's or Lois Lane's.

Campy TV musical about Superman, adapted from a short-lived Broadway show from 1966. It's fun at first, with its cheesy sets and costumes and very corny songs. But a little bit goes a long way and this thing wears out its welcome long before the hour mark and it goes on another half-hour past that. There are some recognizable faces in this, such as Lesley Ann Warren, Loretta Swit, Kenneth Mars, and poor David Wayne, who had certainly done better than this earlier in his career. It's something Superman fans will want to track down and see, for laughs if nothing else. I can't see musical enthusiasts getting much enjoyment out of it though. The numbers are all pretty amateurish. Anyway, give it a look if you're a die-hard Supes fan or if you just like things that are so bad you can laugh at them.

The star of the 1966 stage musical "It's a Bird ...It's a Plane...It's Superman!" wasn't Jack Cassidy, it was Bob Holiday (in the double role of Superman/Clark Kent). Cassidy was the featured comic villain.The situation was that Cassidy was so right for his role, he stole most of the attention from Holiday.

Let me say, too, that it's wrong to approach this material expecting the Superman of the Salkind movies. It's closer, in attitude, to pre-Tim Burton "Batman" or the '60s "Thoroughly Modern Millie." In other words, jokey and silly and not a little racist. Only the problem, in this case, was a central uncertainty whether to parody its source material or to revere it.

Can't speak to this particular TV adaptation. I do, however, love several of the songs in the stage version -- notably "You've Got Possibilities" and "Oo-oo, Do You Love You!"