For Truth, Justice & the American Way

An American legend makes its way back to the big screen in a matter of hours. Superman Returns will be released on June 28th. We’ve been trying not to get caught up in the hype surrounding the film, but since it’s almost opening night, we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk a little about the big summer hit.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster created Superman around 1935, but weren’t able to get the character’s first story published until 1938. Superman was a pastiche, taking pieces of popular sci-fi and fantasy stories of the day and putting them together. But that’s not to say the character wasn’t original. There was a real twist to Superman: The alien was the good guy. Science Fiction, up to that point, had featured aliens as evil invaders, or mysterious and inscrutable; Superman, the strange visitor from planet Krypton, was nothing like that. He fought to defend and help the people of his adopted homeworld, against greedy & corrupt humans who tried to exploit them.

The early comic book stories have a simple theme to them: Superman is the outsider fighting to earn his place in society. His superior abilities sets him above the rest of us, but he’s no bully — he wants to protect the poor and downtrodden. This was just after the massive influx of European immigrants had landed on US shores; their children found that Superman’s struggle was similar to the one they & their parents faced. This was also the time of the Great Depression, when there were a lot of poor & downtrodden kids wishing for someone to stand up for them.

Superman tapped into the spirit of the times in a way nothing else did. As a result he became one of the defining pieces of pop culture. He’s been a part of America ever since. In the 1940s, The Max Fleischer Superman cartoons impressed everyone with the most realistic & fluid animation of its time. The Superman TV show of the 1950s was one of the biggest hits of its time. The Superman movies of the late ’70s and early ’80s were major hits, and the Superboy TV show enjoyed a strong following. In the ’90s, Lois & Clark took a different approach, focusing on the romance between Superman & Lois Lane. Superman: The Animated Series was popular among kids, and Smallville, a show that explores the life of Clark Kent in his pre-Superman days, has been popular with teenagers and young adults.

Now the Man Of Steel comes back to the movie screen, to take advantage of new technologies and recreate an American legend. We’re happy to see it and we look forward to having a great hero to look up to again.

This entry was posted by A.Rehak on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 2:58 pm