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

Today, April 18, 2018, is the 80th anniversary of Superman's first appearance in Action Comics # 1 which premiered at newsstands on that date way back then in 1938. So it was with that in mind that I finally got to watch the entirety of this TV adaptation of the Broadway musical from the mid-'60s based on The Son of Krypton. It was meant to be campy, like the Batman TV show from that period, and, boy, there's a lot of camp here. David Wilson plays the Man of Steel who gets weepy near the end but I don't want to mention why just watch the thing if you're willing. Lesley Ann Warren plays Lois Lane with such cheery dreaminess that it's almost infectious. Kenneth Mars and Loretta Swit are fellow Daily Planet scribes created especially for the musical. And David Wayne is the main villain and he's the funniest one in the cast especially whenever he breaks the Fourth Wall! I also recognized Al Molinaro as one of the gangsters who help in the villainy. Two more characters are a couple of young men who address each other as Jerry and Joe, one ID's himself as wanting to draw and the other wanting to write about Superman. It's clear they're meant to be Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Kal-El's creators. In fact, the last thing Superman says to them is "Hey, Jerry, Joe, what can I say without you there wouldn't be a Superman!" Truer words were never spoken and it's pertinent here since at the time, they still weren't credited as Supes' creators (in fact, they hadn't been since the last of the Famous Studios cartoons that featured him back in '43) and wouldn't be until the release of Superman: The Movie in '78. In summary, It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman! was a partly enjoyable take on the comic book legend.

Being a big SUPERMAN fan, I can remember when this musical was on TV. I think it was broadcast as an episode of the late night ABC WIDE WORLD OF ENTERTAINMENT. At the time, the old SUPERMAN TV show was popular in reruns again. What made me think to look this up, is that I am currently watching a vintage (c.1966) episode of I'VE GOT A SECRET on THE GAME SHOW NETWORK. The celebrity guest is an actor named Bob Holiday, who was currently starring on broadway in the original play. With songs by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, who also wrote "Bye Bye Birdie." Holiday came dressed in his Superman costume, and his "secret" was to teach Steve Allen how to fly on a wire. I seem to recall seeing a TV GUIDE article about the play from around this time. I can remember the cast album of this play being available in budget "cut-out" record album bins for many years. The stars in the stage play (or at least on the show album) were Jack Cassidy and Linda Lavin. I sure wish I would have bought one then, but checking on the net, the cast LP was re-released on CD in 1992! Those are my memories of IT'S A BIRD, IT'S A PLANE. Mark R. Hill

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.

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.

This movie could have been awesome, but it misses the mark. It's a Superman Musical, based on a Broadway flop, and aired at 11:30 at night; you know it's not going to be Oscar material. But the fun comes in that the movie knows it's bad, and revels in it. It bears its cheese like a badge of honour, and as such actually comes close to being pretty good. It's cheesy, low-budget, and self-referential: three of my favourite things. Plus, it's narrated by Gary Owens, which makes it hard to go wrong.

But there's two problems: 1. It goes on way too long. There's only maybe 20 minutes of plot, tops, stretched into an hour and a half. This is due largely to 2. The songs. There's a whole lot of them, and they're not very well written. In fact, when you get down to it, some of them are really badly written. The rhyme schemes are haphazard and lackluster, the tunes are decent but nothing special, and in general, they all end up being pretty forgettable.

The songs also tend to repeat themselves a lot, stretching a single point into five or six verses... Then repeating several of those five or six verses over for emphasis. It gets boring very quickly. And since a large portion of the movie is devoted to the songs, the movie also gets old pretty quickly.

Still... For all of its flaws, it ends up being a fairly enjoyable movie. And as bad as it is... It's still not nearly as bad as The Adventures of Superpup.