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Learn how to think about movies and have fun along the way. Get a biblical movie education with the best people on the internet. In-depth, entertaining, biblical analysis of classic films (and a few new ones now and then).
āYou're now listening to Sanity at the movies Superman edition. He stands for Truth Justice in the American Way because that means he stands for like pornography and corrupt late stage capitalism. I mean, what's the American way guys? Jake and Ben are falling out of their seats laughing. You can't hear it.
That's why we can't answer. Yeah, I had to edit it all out. Like Jake is gasping for error right now. That's why he's not talking. Jake is a big Superman fan. He's probably insulted on Superman's behalf. I don't know. We'll find out. Hopefully Jake doesn't cast me into the Phantom Zone. Listen, we're talking about Superman.
Where do you belong? What's that? Where do you belong? The Phantom Zone. Death seems preferable. That's what I've decided. Having researched the mythology behind the Phantom Zone randomly, it's like you become a ghost basically, and you're just stuck in stasis and you can see everything that's happening in the real world, but you can't affect it and you're just like that forever.
Although sometimes on Krypton they will sentence you to it for a while and then you know, take you out like jail or something like that. But I think Z and Nersa and what's his face, were just gonna basically be stuck like that forever, which doesn't really seem like that nice of a punishment, I think in the Lord.
Like Jor, he's such a kind, compassionate dude that he comes up with the phantom zone, he discovers it and then says, better than capital punishment, we should do this instead of capital punishment. But if I had a choice between being trapped in stasis forever or death, I think I might choose death.
I think probably most people would Yeah, choose death. I know. In any case, maybe they weren't thinking that hard about it when they came up with it. Well, you're obviously not trapped in stasis forever if there's a way out. That's true. Yeah. So there's hope. There's always hope. Yeah. But that's almost like a greater torment.
Yeah, that's torture. Perpetual hope. Yep. That's, yeah, that's pretty nasty. It's like that pit that Batman gets thrown into in whatever that, I was just gonna say that, were you really? No. Well, listen, folks we're talking about Superman, the movie that showed you that a man could fly. That was its tagline.
You'll believe a Man Can Fly, and this is part of our superheroes journey that we are going on. You are lovely. Patrons got us to the place where we could talk about Superman. Superman two Batman, the 19 89 1 of course, and then Batman Returns, all kind of seminal defining superhero movies. Arguably, Batman is a little bit more influential on what superhero movies ultimately became for a long time.
But Superman was the one where it was like, Hey, we can do superhero movies now a as we'll talk about, nobody thought this was a good idea. Nobody thought that you could even take a superhero movie and make it into a movie. It was just ridiculous. Which is why they're really overcompensating by hiring Brando and Hackman and Mario Puzo to write the script and they're like, ah, guys, this is, we're adults.
We swear we're doing something good. Brando wanted to be here. Brando wanted 4 million is what actually, Brando wanted a lot more than $4 million and he got it, but he didn't get enough to come back for part two. Anyway, folks, this should be an exciting episode, so much to talk about. It's a great story, the making of this movie.
It's an interesting movie. We'll talk about whether it's a good movie or not. We were actually just talking about this off mic. It's certainly an iconic movie with many good things. And I don't know, maybe it's a great movie. I could see that argument. Maybe it's a bad movie. I could see that argument. But we're gonna talk about it.
We're gonna talk about it all. Who's talking? You might ask. Well, look who's talking? It's me. I'm the Bruce Willis. Who else was in? Look, who's talking? You guys remember that franchise? I never saw the, the babies. Bruce Kirsty Ali, part of that franchise and Kirsty Alley was part of that franchise.
You've never seen it. I still know that. May she rest in peace if they do a Cheers reunion, they will not be able to get Kirsty Ali. She and Coach are both dead. Anyway, on that note, I'm Nathan, you're humble. ENT host. We've got Ben right there. He's a preacher who's a teacher of Superman. Very good. He's super, super heroic being himself.
Yep. And Ben, why don't you introduce the most heroic of all of us, a man currently wearing a red cape and blue tights, I assume. Yeah, he, he's got clothes over them, so it's hard to tell. It is hard to tell, I bet. Yeah, just guess that is a good guess. He's Jake Menzel, the pastor who's a master of Superman.
Yeah, that's you. Hey, welcome guys. Ooh, should we do super baggage first? What baggage do you guys bring to, this is gonna be a lot of context and setting this in its historical time and all that sort of thing. So, but let's just get our own personal stuff out of the way first. Ben Nathan, I grew up watching Superman two, a recorded copy from the, it's like a TV VHS recording of Superman two.
Was it one of those ones where they added a bunch of extra footage like they used to do in those days? I have no idea cuz I, don't think I've, ever seen it, not from that recording. I've only seen clips of it. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, but I remember watching it over and over again along with a TV edit of Terminator with bad stuff taken out.
I mean, still violent like Terminator, but. So those were the two movies that I had on VHS and would watch over and over again. That's what I remember. So I know that I must have seen Superman the original at some point, but I, as I re-watched this movie, I was like, I hardly remember this. I remember that as a kid, this was really boring and there were no bad guys to punch or anything cool like that.
And that's what I wanted as a kid. And so I didn't really care about the original Superman. You liked Za and stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You had the city superhero battle long before cinema really tried to do that again. If memory serves like that, it was awesome. These guys flying and punching each other through board cards.
Cards, yeah. Card. Just all this crazy stuff. It was like, it was the stuff, you've got a Saran wrapped s Yeah, that was really cool too. You've got Superman, violently murdering Zd. That was also really cool. No one cared Neil before Z Yeah, that was a great, very Tramp at moment. You've got other weird and unpleasant stuff.
It's, anyway, we'll get to that movie some other time, but that's my main Superman baggage. Do you have a relationship with the character? I wouldn't say much of one. No More of a Marvel guy. If memories, I'm a, Marvel guy. I didn't really read Superman comics. when Superman Returns came out, I was a decently big fan.
Saw it several times, liked it quite a bit. Superman returns, I would say is another kind of, sort of like this movie we're gonna talk about. It's boring and stately, except it's a little more stately actually than the Superman movie in some ways. Maybe that's getting ahead of ourselves, but I don't know if Superman returns is a good movie or not.
I haven't seen it in years, but I just remember liking it even and liking Superman in it. Mm. And then you get to Man of Steel. Yes. I never I ignored. Then I watched it on the internet. I streamed it at some point. I was like finally curious enough to actually see it. I don't know why I didn't wanna see it in theaters, it's like, yeah, that was fun.
It was quite dumb. And then, the rest of the Snyder history listeners of this podcast will know. Well I'll just do mine real fast cuz I think Jake probably has the most extensive history. Yeah. With Superman. I had a similar relationship with the movies in that I remember really liking Superman too as a kid.
Cuz like you said, it's just got a cityscape and being leveled and super heroics and violent conflict. Whereas the first one, the action is more like Superman saves things, some of which I thought was pretty . Cool. And I appreciate much more now. . But back then it was like, I wanna see him punch somebody.
Yep. So the thing that I principally remember about this first Superman movie is the train gag when he makes himself a rail so that the train can go over him. I always . Thought that that was really fun. And I was vaguely aware of this lowest and superman stuff is obviously something that my parents appreciate.
Like it's, there's something sophisticated and adult and worldly going on here that ultimately, as I watch it now, isn't that sophisticated or adult or worldly. It's quite charming. But at, for a kid it was like, this felt like, Tracy and Hepburn or something like that. . It's just, just like I, there's wit here, there's things that my parents are chuckling at that I don't really get.
So, so there was that level of Superman. Like I understood, there were things that I didn't understand, which was not really my experience with Batman or with any of the other heroes. If he felt a little bit more adult. I think from a fairly young age, I would've said the same thing that a lot of lame emo kids say, which is that Batman is my guy and Superman is just boring.
Too much of a boring straight arrow to really like or appreciate. So, yeah, I read lots of Batman comics. I don't think I ever have read. No, I have read Super. I, finally read Grant Morrison's run the All-Star Superman. . Many. But that was like when I was an adult. . Like within the span of being friends with you guys, maybe even with the, in the span of doing podcasts together.
I've read that. So it wasn't like a big influence on me when I was a kid. It was more something I wanted to go back and enjoy. . Now, but, so yeah, I, I don't know that I've had that big of a relationship with Superman. I remember very much not liking Superman returns. It felt sour and mean spirited.
And I just remember a Superman being stabbed with a green glowy thing and being sad and having a child out of wedlock. Yeah. And just all this stuff that didn't really feel very Superman to me. But then I loved Man of Steel, not because I thought it was a good Superman movie. I knew it was crap as a Superman movie, and I knew it was crap as a movie, but I just thought in terms of pure spectacle, just leave it to someone as tasteless as Zach Snyder to ask and answer the question of what would happen if two super beings actually battled their way through New York or whatever meant .
Metropolis a big city. And so the nine 11 times a thousand mass destruction stuff I thought was pretty impressive. Even if it's just morally like Superman. What are you doing? So yeah, I enjoyed that movie, but not really as a Superman movie, just as a thing. And I think I like Superman better now. I think I have some appreciation for the character.
I think coming to this movie, I appreciated many things about Superman and about certainly about what's his faces Christopher Reeve's performance as Superman that I didn't really get. Before, and I understand how this character works. I think if you'd asked me when I was a teenager, I would've said Superman just basically doesn't work.
He has no vulnerabilities either as a person or as a super being, as a conceit. And so there, there's nothing fun there. There's no drama there, actually. And now I understand how a Superman story can be told, and I'm excited to see James Gunn tell a Superman story. But I think I would've just Snootily said there's no such thing as a good Superman story.
Like it's just these comics have moved past that. It was the first and they forgot to include anything to humanize him. And it was dumb. But I don't feel that way now. That's just my history with the character. Obviously. I did weirdly grow up watching Superman four many, many times. I don't know if we owned a VS or something.
I've seen Superman four a lot and Superman four really is obviously a famous weirdly derided movie, really bad. But I thought it was cool when I was five. He fights Atomic Man. They fight on the moon. I mean it's none it's just the corniest stuff. You can find YouTube clips if you haven't seen it.
It's really bad. But I thought it was cool when I was five. I also thought lots of things were cool. I was five. I think I saw that one when I was like 11 for the first time. . I was like, this is so boring. It's really bad. But at five I could see, yeah, I saw Superman three and like that when I was a kid.
Unfortunately I've never seen on Superman three all the way through. Yeah. I've seen some clip that the internet likes to bring up as this horrified me when I was a kid where a woman gets turned into a computer. I've seen that clip a billion times cuz it goes, it makes the round rounds on Twitter every once in a while along with other sort of what was the scariest thing that scared you when you were a kid.
So whatever, Superman, this, it's really sad what happened to this franchise, but I will, we'll have plenty of time to talk about that. Jake, your super history. I grew up with Superman. My strongest memories of Superman are before my parents divorced. So, Superman was just. A big part of this particular Superman was a big part of my childhood, I guess.
Like Superman, the movie specifically? Yeah, the movies. Yeah. I was never a comic book geek. I never did any of that stuff. I thought that was for losers and so never ever, ever have read a comic book in my life. Not a graphic novel, none of that stuff. Just kind of always made fun of the kinds of kids who did but Superman these movies.
I identified very much with my dad as a kid growing up. I'd wear red cowboy boots around the house and had Superman pajamas and stuff like that would get up on the back of the sofa and pretend I was flying. Dad was a, at that time was a police officer, so I identified and who, shared some just physical, just like he doesn't, if you look at pictures of my dad from that time and Christopher Reeve, there's a lot of just physical similarities just in, dark hair in the classes and a, a good physique.
And so just sort of like identified him with my dad. So I loved those movies. For that reason. It was just a father-son sort of thing for us. And I hate the Snyder version of Superman. I think Nathan goes off and craps all over that Guy Richie king Arthur, because it's not Arthur.
Right. care if it's a good movie or a fun movie. It's not Arthur, and I hold Arthur special, and so it kit it's not allowed to be good. . I feel about that way, or have felt about that way about what Snyder did with Superman. I don't care that it's a good spectacle. It's not Superman.
So Totally fair. It kind of suck. I mean, also even on its own terms, it's a bad movie. Yeah. There's nothing. . I don't think there's anything redeeming about it, and there's plenty of other places to get spectacle, so I just don't care. I would only quibble with one thing. I think the opening sequence on Krypton with Russell Crow is awesome.
That may be true. I was, I might have been there for that, that, that much. But you get to the play, like, I don't know when I checked out of that movie, but, or somewhere around time when the Kevin Costner goes running for the dog. Well, there was that, but then there's also just, and I, some of these seeds are in the Lester movies at the very least, but there's like the trucker is being boorish and slapping the waitress on her mind and stuff, and that Superman has destroyed his truck.
Like, the guy walks outside and his, there's just a, lot of sort of, as we like to say, othering and Yeah. very Superman's. Mean. Andrey. It's mean and passive aggressive and just not sort of like, I just love I maybe rediscovered is that I just, I love, Chris Reeve? Yeah, just Christopher Reeve is awesome. Like his portrayal of Clark Kent is super fun and sweet. And his portrayal. Superman is sweet for the most part. It does have edge in places that you don't remember that you like gloss over. It's not consistent. Like they're not No, they're not trying to say anything one way or another.
They're just doing a thing. And so yeah, there's places where it contradicts itself but overall, yes. He's the guy that's gonna rescue Lois from a helicopter and then say, air travels, statistically speaking, air travel's still the safest way to fly. Right. He's gonna do things like that.
He's gonna say, excuse me, sir when the guy with the gun, uh, you don't wanna do that, you know, and he's gonna frame it to where he saves the day, catches the bullet, and also gets frisky out of the tree. Yeah. All of it. So, that's the Superman. I love the Superman.
Who's gonna get the cat out of the tree and who's gonna be a bumbling, wholesome farm boy from Kansas. But who's got some real charm and charisma to him too when he turns it on. watching him flip those switches and watching him do that because he has a code or a higher principle, I think that's what's lovable, or one of the things that's lovable about him as a character and I mean, we can talk about all kinds of things about him and Lois.
It's the same as Indiana Jones and Marion. . It's like there's nothing likable about this person and there's no reason this person would like, but the simply decided. . Cuz that's what's how it's supposed to be. And I guess that's what's true to the comics or whatever, and we need a romance.
And so, but well, there's so much that doesn't, even in the lore that doesn't make sense. can they be together? I guess so, but also, can they be together? Can they be together And, and Is he gonna just stay the same and she's gonna get old and die? there's just questions that probably the comics have answered, but, yeah.
Well, there's two ways to approach like world building and lore. And this definitely falls into the at least the way this movie was approached falls into. I think of it as sort of like the George Lucas camp and the Tolkin camp. . Right? . Tolkin is going to actually when he creates a world, every the world's gonna have its own internal logic.
There's gonna be a reason the Elf culture developed the way that it did, and Elf Architecture developed the way it did, and the way that Hobbit culture is gonna develop the way it does, and Hobbit architecture's gonna develop the way it does, and there're gonna be habits and things. And so all of this stuff, when you get to Hobbiton or when you get to LA Laurian or wherever you go, it's gonna feel like this lived in world.
And if you were to ask Tolkin why any one thing is the way it is, he's got a reason. And then it's the George Lucas School, which is like, I intuitively know what I think is just really cool and fun. And I'm really tapped into my inner kid. And so I just follow my gut intuition and I create things that are maybe arbitrary, but feel fun.
. And then we can backfill it later. And there's a whole world of world building that follows that school that doesn't have anywhere near the intuition that George Lucas does. So when you get to a movie like this and you get to Krypton, or you get to the Fortress of Solitude, it's like, well, the, we know this needs to feel foreign, this needs to feel alien, so it needs to feel otherly.
And so it's just gonna feel really cold and austere. And it's a, it has no internal logic. It just feels . Cold and austere Right. And clean and sterile because human is. New York, we needed something to contrast with the grime of 1970s Metropolis, New York City and the Norman Rockwell, some Smallville stuff, and the Norman Rockwell Smallville stuff.
And so the obvious, simple, cheap answer is cold and sterile. . And lifeless. Yep. And there's no internal logic to it at all. So even when the fortress of solitude is built, like you see Superman, like having to like jump or take these awkward steps to get, there's nothing intuitive about it. There's nothing within any kind of internal logic about it.
And so it just feels lame. . But there's a whole world of people that's set, like the level of depth they go to in their world building. It just so happens that Lucas had a sort of magic touch for, building things that actually worked on an intuitive level that could be backfilled with its own kind of internal logic down the line.
And a lot of comic books developed that way. I think. I also think Lucas was just enough of an academic that he read. Right. Joseph Campbell. And he's like, how can I tap this into the most primal sort of fairytale thing? Well, and he ripped off people. Yeah. He ripped off Dune, he ripped off Kwa, he ripped off all kinds of other people who actually did the legwork.
Yeah. And so there was that, and then there was his inner kid and there was all that sort of thing. and I forget why I'm, going here, but I think that there's a thinness to levels of this movie both in terms of characterization and world building, but some of it really works well and it has to do with just contrast.
Yeah. So yeah, it's Christopher Reeve. That is, I think maybe that's was my only point. Christopher Reeves. Portrayal of Superman. That's the thing. He holds it all together for sure. And he holds it together. And part of why that works is the background. . Well, Donner is not, I mean, I'm sure you'll get into this, but Donner's not an Tura like Lucas, like Donner's not creating Superman, obviously.
He's just using him. And then he's a studio guy who's a decent craftsman who can put things together. But he's, this is a movie with a big committee and a big production committee and all kinds of pressures going into it. Like you already know. I, I think that's true. And we'll get to this.
I think Donner is actually the hero, and I think Donner actually left to himself would've made a more consistent film. . I think the villains as we'll talk about in detail are Alexander and Ilia Salkin, the producers of this film who cool, don't care about the lore, just want it, they're responsible for everything that we hate in the sequels after they canned Donner and brought in Lester, who's just a comedy guy have a really campy sense of who Superman is and they don't care.
And I think Donner actually has a decent respect for the mythology as we'll talk about. And he, you might actually accuse Donner of some of the boring stuff on the front end. Like Donner wants to spend time in Krypton because he wants it to have the weight. And so it's like you combine Donner's sense of, well, this actually does have to have gravitas and it has to make sense with the sulkin not caring and saying, get the movie done.
And you have a movie that spends a lot of time setting up stuff that ultimately don't go anywhere, doesn't go anywhere and feels thin. You have 45 minutes of set dressing and backdrop. And then, oh, now we're into a totally different story. And I guess it does work to tell, it is an origin story movie, and you're gonna have that sort of thing.
. And breaking a superhero origin story, being the first to do it, was always gonna present its challenges. Yeah. There's a, there's a lot that we can forgive this movie for. But that doesn't really translate across the years very well. But, but yeah, I do agree with you. Ben Donner also he's a craftsman.
he doesn't have some big innate vision of this thing. Yeah, yeah. In any case, is that all the baggage Superman, super baggage that we have? Sure. I think so. Okay. So, Ben, you're gonna take us on a super journey across the, through the creation of Superman. Oh, boy. Which, let's remember it. Dun dun, one of the great 20th century American, I mean, Coca-Cola, Charlie Chaplin, Superman, shell Oil I know I'm saying the most obvious thing, but this is an icon.
This is, part of our collective American myth. And it's important. It's important to how we understand ourselves and how we think of ourselves, how we think of heroes, how we think of the 20th century, how we think of the 40, the thirties, the forties, all the way through, and the way our view of him changes is important to track.
So . It says a lot about us. I think that'll be, that's an obvious thing to say, and it'll be obvious in what Ben's talking about, but I just, I always wanna say that from the very front in case anyone's like, why are they going into su? Because it's real, it's actually pretty important that, I'd say, knowing who Superman is, you could argue is more important than knowing who Odysseus is, who was created 400 or 4,000 years ago is Superman.
He's about how we think of ourselves anyway. . Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm gonna give a history of DC as I go as well, because it DC and Superman, DC comics that go together. Yes. So start right out DC It's not called DC at first, it's National Allied Publications in 1934.
It's founded by a guy named Major Malcolm Wheeler, Nicholson. And this guy's an entrepreneur. He wants to get into the comics business. First up publication is called New Fun, the Big Comics Magazine. New Fun, new Fun. Marvel is going to, when you'll hear this, when we talk about Marvel comics in our Spider Verse episode, but Marvel it what It starts out as something called Timely Comics and superheroes are not what either company is gonna do, right at first Westerns, adventure Comics, funnies but you know, national Allied hires a couple guys named Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster to create their famous DC character.
We've all heard of Dr. A Cult 1930. I'm gonna keep doing this folks, I hope that you think it's really funny. I just gonna keep, I'm just warning you. So, 1935, also known as the Ghost Detective, also known as Dr. Mystic. Can I just say Dr. Occult the Ghost Detective? Sounds awesome, right? It's is actually cool.
I want read about him. Well, he's, this character is still around investigates occult mysteries where it's a fedora and so on. Apparently the earliest DC superheroes to the modern day, you didn't have to say that he wore a fedora. I knew Dr. Colt wore, a fedora. Did you? You can picture him. I mean, I Well, it sounds like you already did.
If you look him up, he will look just like you imagined. So, he wasn't, I call him the first, or they call him, someone calls him the first, the earliest DC superhero. He's not fully super heroish. Right? Not like archetypally, a superhero like Superman is gonna be. Right. Anyway, so Wheeler Nicholson, he is still going.
He creates Detectives Comics magazine soon after with its famous character, slam Bradley. I told you I'm gonna keep doing this. Slam Bradley was also created by Siegel and Schuster. Jerry Siegel, by the way, writer, Joe Schuster Illustrator. So Major Wheeler Nicholson Forms Detective Comics Inc. He's like creating all these different brands and subsidiaries and companies, and this is how the comics and publishing business is at the time.
It's just. All these splintery things and this whole knot of relationships. But all these stories start with an entrepreneur, by the way. They always start with an entrepreneur. They'd never start with. Some guy grew up and he just had a vision to create the Walt Disney. Precisely. Well this entrepreneur is not very good at what he does.
He's just not very good at it. Major Wheeler, Nicholson. He has debt problems. He has cash flow problems, so he's forced to take on some partners. One is his printer and distributor. Harry Donenfeld, who's Jewish, and also Harry Donen Field's accountant. Jack Liebowitz, who's also Jewish, by the way.
Jerry Siegel is Jewish. Joe Schuster is Jewish major. Malcolm Wheeler, Nicholson, not Jewish. well, we'll come back to this, but he's eventually forced out of detective comics cuz he's just not, he's not good at this. He's in debt. Meanwhile, his other, his national allied company goes bankrupt and Detective Comics, which is now owned by Leitz and Donenfeld, it's, they buy up National Allied and Detective Comics is where we get the name DC Right.
Basically. So Detective Comics now is this bigger thing and it starts a new magazine. Action comics. . Action comics number one. Get the OG of superheroes, I think you could say. That's right. It's Zara. All right. I'm done. I'm done. It's Superman, of course. Zara I think is in there. Zara is like a stage magician superhero also still around, like in front of a crystal ball.
Like a turban or He's, no, not a turban, but he looks like, a top hat stage magician guy. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. no, it's Superman, Siegel and Schuster Cred, his first appearance action comics number 1, 19 38. He's on the cover, makes history. Lois Lane appears in the same issue and so does some unnamed planet of Superman's origin later to be named Krypton.
It's a big seller. Superman's just a big seller right away from here on out, detective Comics Incorporated is going to be successful financially. So who were these guys, right? Jerry Siegel. Joe Schuster. How did they come up with Superman? Well, they were friends. They're children of Jewish immigrants. They met in high school, 1932.
They just start creating stuff together. Siegel's like, I wanna write Schusters, like, I wanna draw, I wanna illustrate they love pulp stories like Tarzan and John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burrows. Both of them love comic strips. They love the famous little Nemo comic. If you guys have ever looked at that, never understood it.
Never understood why people liked it. It's very strange and hard to get into for me at least. But it's strange and surreal. But one thing it is is gorgeous. It is gorgeous. Yeah, it's crazy. Listener, if you've never seen it, look up a panel online or something, it's, quite striking. And like Nathan said, what in the world they love adventure, sci-fi movies.
Joe Schuster is into fitness, the artist, he's into fitness. He collects fitness magazines to use as a reference points for his art, right? So you can see all these influences coming into Superman in 1933, which I think, I guess is just out of high school. Siegel has his self-published magazine called Science Fiction, the Advanced Guard of Future Civilization.
So that, that's the name of his self-published magazine in Schuster, illustrates it. He writes a story called The Reign of the Superman, which is about a homeless bum who gets pulled into this experiment by an evil, mad scientist to take an experimental drug. And this bum gets all these telepathic powers and he uses them for evil.
He like kills the mad scientist and he's gonna take over the world. But then the powers wear off and he realizes I'm gonna be going back to the breadline and da da, I guess crime doesn't pay his Superman, so that's the story. There's not many copies of this magazine left, as you might imagine.
These guys turn to comics next and they wanna make it work. They want, they wanna make money. They're poor and single things. Hey, what if we had like a Superman thing who was good instead of bad? I bet he could make a cool hero. And they go several through several iterations of a Superman. Concept. He's a science experiment like the bum, but instead of telepathy, he gets bulletproof skin and he, fights crime.
He's a scientist and adventurer from a distant planet. Ah, he's the child of a dying earth sent back to our time by the last surviving man. It's, they just, they're trying to sell the Superman concept to newspaper publishers. That's where they think the money is. Newspapers are not having it. And they're like, this isn't really sensational enough.
Then they come up with a comics magazine version. They shop that around. That doesn't work either. Siegel starts thinking, maybe I need an artist with some name recognition instead of my friend who's good, but no one knows who he is. So he starts quietly looking around for artists. Schuster finally finds out, they're like, he's like, dude forget it.
you do your own thing. They still work together, but he's like, I'm not helping you with Superman anymore. Just whatever. That doesn't work out. He has some Siegel find some interest at artists and they shop it to their publishers, but it just doesn't work. Finally, on all this time, at some point in here, they're hired by our dude who flops out of the comics business, major Wheeler, Nicholson, and they're creating strips for him, and he's interested in Superman.
He's like, Hey, I'll pu I'll publish it. And they're like, this guy sucks as a businessman. He doesn't even pay us on time for our work. Like Superman is our baby. We're not giving him our baby. But when he finally falls out of the business and the new owners have it, and it's clear like these guys know what they're doing, they're finally like, well, at least someone will publish him.
We're exhausted trying to find someone to publish Superman. So, okay, you can publish him. And then a star is born and everything I mentioned earlier goes into Superman, Tarzan, John Carter movie Heroes played with lots of cool, like Douglas Fairbanks who plays Zaro in ma in Mark Azaro. They create the dual identity of Superman, partly based on Zaro, partly based on like the Scarlet Pimpernel.
Apparently based on Harold Lloyd, the silent film star who wears glasses, looks, looks a lot like Clark. Ken looks a lot like Clark. Kent is very meek, very mild. But then you trigger him, you get him in the right situation, and he starts climbing buildings and like being incredibly aggressive to do whatever needs to be done.
then of course you got the strong man physique of Superman. Well, Schuster's got all this fitness iconography in his brain. Superman's face is based on the face of Johnny Weiss. Muller the most famous actor to portray Tarzan. The city of Metropolis gets its name from the famous German expressionistic sci-fi film metropolis.
These guys are just immersed in pop culture, just pulling everything in to create something that would become itself like a wellspring of pop culture. And by the way, the name Superman, you know it comes from Nietzche, right? But, but it was apparently common at the time to call people the Superman.
There's no evidence that these guys read Nietzche. People would say things like, or write things like that. Politician is a Superman. That athlete is a Superman. So it's a measure of Siegel and Schuster's success that when we hear the word Superman, we only think about Friedrich Nasia and his books. Uh, just kidding.
We only think about Superman, right? 1938 Superman debuts. It's only a year later. The Detective comics number 27 introduces Batman, one of the other most famous, most financially successful superheroes of all time, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. And this is gonna shock you listener, but Kane and Finger are, they're Jewish.
All these guys, all of these guys who successfully pilot DC create Batman, create Superman, are Jewish. When we talk about the new Spider Verse movie and Marvel Comics, you'll see a heavy Jewish influence there. Marveled as successful because of Jews. Comics is a Jewish dominated industry. There's another Jew in our supercharged history of DC who's waiting in the wings.
I wanna introduce him now. His name is Max Gaines. He created this four color pamphlet for publishing comics. That's the direct ancestor of the modern Comic book magazine format. He also created a comics line you've never heard of called All American Publications. And he did it in partnership with the owners of Detective Comics.
And so his comics line acts basically like a subsidiary of dc So he's gonna originate superheroes like the Adam and the Flash, Greenland Hawkman and Wonder Woman, which he'll co-create. And eventually those guys get subsumed by DC like that his company gets bought out and those guys get subsumed. Fun little tangent here.
All American comics had a comic book called Picture Stories from the Bible. And Max Gaines, after he sells the rights to all his other stuff to detective comics, he retains the rights to that. He's like, I'm gonna start a new company. I'm gonna call it Educational comics, EC Comics for short. And I'm gonna wi so quote, I'm gonna quote Market Comics about science history and the Bible to schools and churches according to Wikipedia.
But actually, EC Comics is known for other stuff because Max Gaines dies in a boating accident. His son William, takes it over in 1947 and starts publishing edgy horror stories and starts saying, EC actually stands for entertaining Comic Skies publishing sci-fi stories with a political or social angle.
Stories known for twist endings. Really good artwork, often gruesome. It gave us tales from the crypt. For example, if you've ever heard of two Fisted Tales that was a war comic that was anti-war, or at least not pro-war, these were, quote unquote mature comics. For better or worse, they also give us Mad Magazine.
And Nathan, you've read some of these things. Yeah, I used to have several omnibuses of tales from the Crypta Vault and fear and stuff like that. The artwork is absolutely gorgeous. The stories are pretty juvenile. It's always just like some guy is a jerk for two thirds of the story so that he can get a really poetic, gory.
Come up, and it's probably the most famous one is called Foul Play. And it's about a baseball pitcher that wants to go far. And so he poisons his rival, and then , the team gets wind of the fact that he's murdered somebody. And they're like, we're gonna deal with this our way. And then the final panels are this incredibly gruesome thing where they're all playing baseball, but it's like his organs are the the, my goodness, , the bases.
And they're, they've got an arm for a bat, and they're using the skull as the ball. And and the story again called foul play. And so you spend like this boring two-thirds of the story with the guy like, ha ha ha being a jerk, murdering somebody. And then you get to this incredibly over the top.
I don't know if you were gonna talk about this or not, but EC comics is, and Tales from the Krypton and all that is directly responsible for the moral panic of comics in the 1950s. And the eventual comics code where this No, I wasn't gonna talk about this. Just as like the ratings board, Hollywood was afraid, oh, the government's gonna censor us, so we better start censoring ourselves.
So they developed the ratings board, which we've talked about on this podcast before, or, or the censorship, the green office, which later became the MPA a, all that. But comics did the same thing. So you, you see any comic from the golden age, and it'll have this little stamp on it that says, approved by I forget what it's called.
The comics approved by the comic code or something like that. The comics code. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I remember those stance. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. And that just means we're self-censoring. So tales from the K crypt actually died, or like,
Marker
an incredibly lame run of horror comics through the sixties and seventies when they couldn't do anything cool because parents had been outraged by things like foul play, which is, again, incredibly gruesome.
Very silly. Stephen King read all these comics when he was a kid. He is the direct air of this kind of stuff. . Just the idea. They are influential in the horror field. I didn't realize it's a total tangent but just. We can have, we're gonna take vampires out of Transylvania and it'll be like a guy in small town America walks into a diner and there's a bunch of vampires, and they're all they've got straws in people's necks and stuff like that.
it combines kind of . Everyday Americana with gruesome horror tropes in a way that was really influential for a generation. So, anyway. Yeah. That's cool. Well, it's terrible. Awesome. Gross. It's gross. It's awesome. Yeah. So, yeah, I'll go back to the main storyline now, our main storyline.
So when Siegel and Schuster agreed to let DC have Superman, they sign over the rights, and that's just what was done at the time. They're gonna regret it later, but in the meantime, they have this 10 year contract with DC to write and draw it, and they're well paid. And you should remember this, as I tell you more of their story.
By the end of their contracted time at DC together, they had earned $400,000, which adjusted for inflation is about six and a half million dollars. So they were doing pretty well. Superman quickly gets hisself, a newspaper strip, 1939, that's where we meet Joel and Laura, and Action Comics keeps going with Superman stories.
They introduce Superman's first big recurring villain, the ultra human, a terrifying villain that you no doubt no is a crippled old man whose guy who's a super genius. And, and then, Superman gets his own comic book very shortly after, which was not a thing that superheroes got at the time.
That is just not what you did. You published them in these omnibus things like action comics where they're alongside other stories, but he gets his own. And because DC is making bank and DC starts branching out into other media, so they've got a radio show that runs from 1940 to 1951. I've never heard this show, but I'm curious now because it's got 2088 episodes that range from 15 minutes to a half hour long I 2088 episodes.
It's super popular. It's aimed at kids. This show gives us a bunch of stuff that we think of as basic Superman, like his ability to fly in episode two gives us Perry White and Jimmy Olson and Kryptonite Superman meets Batman and Robin for the first time on the show, it famously did an episode sometime later in its run where Superman battles the Coup Klux Klan, which apparently really worked.
I mean, this is This is the lure. Anyway, it really worked his negative marketing for the kkk. Like nobody liked the KKK cause, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A Superman. That's what I mean, because it included info information from this Klan Infiltrator, a guy named Stetson Kennedy, who's a famous civil rights activist who became, he went into the KKK as one of them, like a narc.
And he gave the Superman radio show all like information about their rituals and code words stripped away some of the mystique that made them feel cool. So the lore is that, that it was a blow. The Superman struck against the KK k and yeah, and by the way, 1940 is the time when DC starts calling itself Superman, DC Superman, DC and then eventually just dc But that wasn't their official name until 1977.
So for what that's worth now, DC also makes an animated series. It runs from 41 to 43, 19 41 to 1943 produced by Fletcher Studios, which is this awesome art deco thing that I don't know why I never saw any of them. I just watched a couple clips. You guys, did you guys grow up with that? I. There was some Art Deco style cartoons that I did watch.
They're in color. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Movie. Beautiful sees. Yeah, really nice looking, really fun. Superman does dorky things like, if he's gotta fight some scientist who's got a laser beam, he's gonna have to punch the laser all the way back. You know, like Yeah. That's the cliff that I just watched.
Yeah. They're amazing. I mean, they're, they are works of cinematic art. They're worth, you can find 4K versions on YouTube now. Yeah. Of at least some of them. they might arguably be the best visual superman. That's probably just me being a dork, but yeah, they're short and they're not biting off more They can than they can chew.
You can definitely argue that there's no perfect Superman movie, which I'm sure we're gonna be talking about here shortly. But these things are perfect. Little encapsulations of Superman and, and they're just art deco, you know, like that dumb movie, sky Captain and the world of Tomorrow. Tomorrow.
. That guy was really trying to do what's, . What's it called again? Fletcher, Fletcher Studio. Like if, yeah. Fletcher. F l e i s c h e r. I didn't grow up watching these. I don't know why I, I did watch a clip. I was like, what in the world? It had a massive budget Oh yeah. For the time.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Right. Yep. It's, these are the ones that we want. Well, it's budget. These are 10 minute shorts. Right. It's budget was $50,000. Yeah. So you could like pick up a VHS of these super cheap. That's right. I think I had That's right. So I had, we had a, just a couple of VHS's of these. I think they may have fallen into the public domain for a while, so I think they still are.
It's kind of like Betty Boo or something, where you'll just find these weird compilations of them. Yeah. And Betty Boo also is Flesher. It's Fletcher. Yeah. And they had, the little score they had is something that Williams plays on. Well, one of the things that people said about when Will Williams was hired do the score is he'll never beat the music that we all associate with Superman, which is this, that score.
Yeah. Which is quite good. That's cool. Well, he won. Yeah, he did. He did win that one. Yeah, he won. So I was saying this is $50,000, which it's the modern equivalent of paying more than $700,000 for a 10 minute short per short. . There are, well, let's see, 17 of these, if I got the number right.
Sounds right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the first nine are like fantasy sci-fi, like what you want from Superman. The last date are World War II propaganda. Superman foils the Nazis and the Japanese Hey, hit Hitler makes a brief appearance in one of them, apparently. And Fletcher, like you said, they do this. The brothers, Dave Max, Dave Fletcher, guess their ethnicity.
Um, they're doing German. They're German. Yeah, they're Jewish. They did, yeah. Betty Boo Popeye. They did the animated Gus Travels feature film, which I think I've seen, I've seen at least. It's kinda dule. Yeah. it's beautiful. Insanely like Betty Boop, people think of her as a little sex pot, whatever, but those cartoons are crazy creative.
Kind of scary from the Id Yeah, they are. We, I think we've had some opportunity to talk about them on this show before. I forget why, but we did. These guys were geniuses in their way. Yeah. Yeah. speaking of World War ii, Jerry Siegel gets conscripted in 1943, becomes a reporter for a military newspaper in Honolulu during his time away.
DC of course, continues to make Bank the Superman. He comes back in 1946 feeling cheated out of royalties from Superman, stuff like the radio show, crazy successful radio show. And also he finds in his app that in his absence super, the dcs created a super boy comic based on his concept, which he pitched, but they never bought.
So they don't have the rights to it. So Siegel's like, okay, Joe, let's sue these guys. So Siegel sues them for Super Boy, and then Siegel and Schuster together Sue for the Rights to Superman, which they can't get because they signed a contract that clearly explicitly signed away the rights.
But DC settles with them for some cash and for the rights to Super Boy. And then DC is like, we're removing your byline, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Juice. Oh, that's gone now. Siegel and the Schuster try to white write one more comic together. Apart from BC called Funny Man in 1947, a satirical spoofy sort of a take, and it fails.
Siegel takes jobs here and there. He slips into relative poverty. Schuster. Meanwhile, he draws this and that and slips into relative poverty. He writes, draws some horror and some degraded stuff. As I Stite starts to get bad in 1948, DC produces their first live action adaptation of Superman, which is a movie serial starring Kirk Allen.
It's really successful. And George Reeves appears first is who we all think of as the Proto Superman. You know, the right before Christopher Reeve Superman he appears in the next live action production, which is this 1951 B movie called Superman and the Mo Man, which is a lead up into the famous TV series that runs from 52 to 58.
So in 59, Jerry Siegel goes back to write for DC he needs a job. He's riding with no creative control, and he's let go. In 1966 when DC finds out that, what do you know, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster are planning a second big lawsuit to get the rights to Superman. DC is like, we don't have any more work for you, Jerry.
And then Siegel and Schuster lose that lawsuit too, and goes into financial hard times again. So DC keeps pumping out the Superman animated shows. You know, the, you've got the New Adventures of Superman, the awesome Super Friends show made by Hannah Bara, 1974. Disclaimer, not awesome. Yeah, that's right.
Completely not awesome. In 1975, Siegel hears about the upcoming Superman movie, oh, they're gonna make a big one with Christopher Reeve, and he and Schuster make it public. Hey, we're not doing well, DC hasn't treated us well. DC's, like, Ugh, we do not want this negative press. We're trying to make this Superman movie.
They're like, look, if you guys will just shut up from now on and stop contesting the copyright that you signed away, we'll give you a $20,000 a year lifetime stipend. So they take the deal later, that becomes 30,000. And then DC take, again, thinking of the negative press, they restore the byline, like created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.
And that's really just about the end as far as our, creator heroes are concerned. I mean, they die in relative poverty. Schuster dies $20,000 in debt in 1992. DC pays that off with an agreement that Schuster's Airs will get nothing from future royalties of Superman. you just can't make this up.
Lex Luther himself couldn't see Siegel's hair, Siegel's heirs on the other hand, they have some kind of arrangement that gives them money from DC on a regular basis. I don't know how much, but Siegel, he kept writing comics here and there. He wrote a little bit for Marvel comics too. He created the villain Plant man.
He died. He died. He died in 1996, da da da da da da da. Copyright. It's important. so that's an, the unpleasant tale of those guys and their lives, which I don't know, it's, they successfully create this amazing icon, pop culture wellspring, and then they just become like, they act, it's hard not to feel like they're just acting like parasites for the rest of their lives.
. I, I, I know it's sadder than that and whatever, but I don't know. Well, imagine if you created the pop culture icon. I know. And then you didn't profit from it. I know, I know. I, but you sold it. Yeah. But you, but you sold it fair and square , you didn't know it was what it was gonna be. It's just the risk that everybody takes with anything.
They, create at a certain point. It's like, well, know how it's gonna end. You don't know how it's gonna go. Do I take the cash now? While I feel like it's hot. Or do I hold? Yep. And part of why it was probably able to take off the way it did is because DC you know, if they had it, they could pump it, they could do what they wanted with it.
And, they weren't gonna do that with somebody else's property if they didn't have the rights to it. So, yeah. Yeah. It's just like, it makes sense. It's just the way that it No, I, I see both sides. I always like the stories of George Lucas losing money initially on Star Wars, keeping the rights, getting the merch right.
Like, like when somebody's farsighted like that. That's always fun. I like that too. And then it's also fun. It's also sweet sometimes when you see, this is kind of a weird example, but new Line Cinema had the rights to Freddie Krueger, who Russ Craven created, and West Craven did the first movie, and then they did a bunch of sequels.
They made a bunch of money. He was the horror star of the eighties, as I'm sure we remember. And then eventually the Bob Shay, who owned New Line is responsible for the Lord of the Rings and all that stuff. He went to west Craven and was like, Hey, I'm gonna write you a check because even though I don't owe you anything legally, you've built my kingdom.
You've built my kingdom and can you come back and do a movie for us? And West Craven did West Craven's New Nightmare and, , from Freddie Krueger. And it was a nice story. And they were all friends. And I like those kinds of stories a lot that didn't happen here. Right. Better than terrible stories of people making the wrong choice and suffering.
Yeah. And apparently they just sunk all their money into who knows what. Funny man. I don't know. They made a lot of money at first and then, eh, it's just too bad. I'm sure some of our listeners will be familiar with Michael Saban's fictionalized novel version of a lot of this uhhuh that the Adventures of Cavalier and Clay, which is a good novel minus some gay stuff that comes out of nowhere.
It's about two thirds of the way through. But it's an interesting version of this. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. It's, it is a cool novel except for that stuff. Yeah, anything. You read it on the booking, except for Yeah, that stuff killed it. Yep. Oh, I didn't really remember you guys were gonna do that. We were, it was on a list and then we killed it.
I read it ahead and I was like, ah. And I don't know if I'd actually make the same decision now, but I, at the time, I felt like, well, we can revisit it. Yeah. Maybe we will. In any case, yeah. Anything else? that's it. Can we take a moment to talk about the Jewish of it all? Because I was just, yeah, I was just scrolling across tweets today.
You know, I'm on Twitter, I'm on conservative Twitter, and so I was just, scrolling across tweets today saying how the Jews are controlling our nation and degrading us on purpose, and they hate Anglo Protestant America and they control all of our news corporations and our baba blah. So why do I bring that up?
That is not what I'm saying here. But what is interesting is that, and, and I'm sure we've talked about this before on the podcast, is, that Jewish identity is the American identity. The American. The American. I the American dream. And it is because so I first got clued into this in my early twenties.
I was just sort of like had the veil pulled back. I was recovering from surgery and I, for whatever reason, was watching pbs. And it was this documentary about Broadway. And instead of it being a, Jews have shaped the American na narrative, the 20th century American narrative. And it's a horrible conspiracy.
It was a celebration of how. Jews have shaped the American narrative. And it's a wonderful, beautiful thing, right? And it was just a, documentary on p b s about the kinds of things that people act like is a conspiracy theory, but it's just the facts. All of early Broadway, all of early cinema, and modern cinema, cinema and the comic book industry, which all of early Broadway means, not just Broadway, but the American Song Book.
Yeah. I mean, Irving, Berlin, the Gershwins, like all of it. And so all of these stories, and so then you have these stories of the outsider are all coded Jewish experience type stories. And the only one that you can, that I can think of that's even explicitly Jewish is Fiddler on the Roof, which comes down the line.
But it's all coded outsider stories. So you have the immigrant experience, you have the Jewish outsider experience then that gets translated to the reason why the leap is made to Dey is because it gets translated to gay coding and things like that, right?
. But all of the early shapers of what we know as Americana, we're in fact, Jews. Bob Kane, who invented Batman, his name is a Robert Kahn, he just went by Bob Kane. . Gershwin, George Gershwin is gertz. It's, always that. Segel Spiegel and Schuster just happened to sound a little.
So everything that we think of as just like traditional America, whether it's Superman, whether it's Broadway, whether it's like, just the American songbook behind the scenes of all of that, you have Jewish artists and creators, right? Well, and so without saying that every Jew is trying to corrupt what I think you can say is.
The people that make our myths are self-consciously finding themselves or defining themselves in opposition to Anglo Protestant America or Ang while trying to appeal and profit off of Anglo Protestant America Right. At the same time. So it like that whole idea of we are outside of this and opposed to it and it's opposed to us, but if we position ourselves in such a way as to be sub as to subvert it .
And to Trojan Horse ourselves and our own stories we went that's embedded in the d n a of the entire entertainment industry top to bottom since the, the very earliest days of the 20th century. Yeah. And I don't know, there's a sense in which I feel the same way. Like I, I am not, I do not define myself as a member of the Anglo Protestant mainstream right.
think it's one of the reasons why their stories are powerful is because nobody actually thinks they're part of the club. Nobody actually feels, everybody feels like an outsider. Right. To some degree or another. Even if you're a wasp, princess you don't feel like you're part of things.
Everybody identifies with the outsider, but people like Zack Snyder is so hammy and Superman returns was so hammy with the Christ imagery, the Superman, like, he'll be doing kind of the stigma to pose or whatever, but actually it's Moses. It's Moses. It's the baby in the basket.
That is Superman. Now, of course, the reason that translates to Jesus is because Moses is in fact the type of Christ. . Yeah. Which is so hilariously ironic. That they can't help but tell Christ stories. They can't help but tell Christ stories when they tell Moses stories, and yet they refuse to connect the dots to Jesus.
Right. But the filmmakers don't. I mean, the filmmakers have JLL say, I have sent my only son. Right. Because everybody understands the connection. The Moses story is a prefigurement and a type of the Jesus story. Everybody understands that it's just there. And that's why, that's why Jesus says some of the things that he does.
Right. And why Paul does too. As typology as semiotics, Superman is a very benevolent ver he is, he does stand outside of let's say Protestant Anglo culture, but he also is the savior of it. So it's a very nice as, as far as Jewish myths go, Superman, I guess you could argue is a nice one. It is like, we need a Moses or we need a, they wouldn't wanna say Jesus, but, we need a savior that's out that transcends us, A savior, a transcendent Christ figure who is outside of us.
A Messiah. A Messiah, yeah. . And he cannot be one of us, but he has to fit in with us too. If he's going, if he's gonna make his thing work. Like it is never actually been clear to me why on a plot level, Superman needs to hide his identity. But just in terms of, it feels right. the myth works.
It makes sense. Like they don't even bother explaining it in this movie. You could maybe put it together with his dad saying something or other, but there's no real reason. Nothing can hurt this guy. There's no real reason why. Well, I would say it's because of the mediator role that he plays.
He needs to be able to understand our sufferings, like our great high priest. I mean Right. But it's also the thing that gets him into trouble. That's right. Jorell doesn't actually want him to fall in love with one human being. . He's supposed to be able to serve all of humanity. Yeah, that's right.
Yeah. And if he gets wrapped up, he's going to end up altering human history. Right. Which was not just a metaphor for intervention, but apparently a literal alteration of history. Right. So I think we could talk about the Jewish influence on culture without being accused of c being conspiracy theorists because Yeah.
The Jews would be the first to celebrate it and to agree with us. A hundred percent. We would just wanna say, yes, we agree with you, but also let's question what was good about this? What was bad about this? And why? And, well, I'll come back to this when we do Marvel context, but you can draw, you have to remember that comic books are the cutting edge of what's lurid.
. And what draws guys into porn. I say that as a kid who read comic books. I understand the links for me. Yeah. No, I Into later temptations. There's, so they're so, yeah. Yeah. But ahead of movies. That's right. they're ahead of movies. So you just draw the line from like pulp fiction stuff, which is larid, it's a comic books to stuff like Men's Adventure magazines, which the Jews, a lot of, at least to a significant extent, had a corner on back in the day.
Those men's adventure magazines become today's porn magazines. So all of this stuff is linked, this whole entertainment complex from the most evil to the stuff that we like the most is all linked. Well, okay. This is as provocative as I'll get. There is something a little bit condescending or smarmy about it.
There is a little bit of like, Hey, Anglo Protestant America, hey, Anglo Protestant men. I know what you really want and I know how I can get you sexy lady on the cover. You idiots you'll buy my magazine. there is that cynicism and there is that kind of like, you wouldn't let me come through the front door of your culture, so I'm gonna take the back door and I'm gonna make you come crawling to me because you made me come crawling to you and there's a, an envy and jealousy.
Yeah. And the sense of, with that cynicism, that sense of Yeah, we tried faithfulness to God. . Well, let's, let's, we tried that. Let's not forget that all comedy comes from the Jewish experience to all American comedy, right. Comes directly from the Jewish Porsche belt comedians and all your sort of famous, you know, the Marx Brothers, whatever.
Well, and pop music too. And pop music, right. So who, who's been a greater contributor to and let's just take out the producers and everybody else behind the scenes and just say Bob Dylan. . a lot of the Jewish comedians, they have riffs on this sort of thing, right?
. So it's like, even if they're not great comedians, they're gonna talk about, Adam Sandler has a song . About this sort of thing, right? that's one of his comedy bits is he has a song about all the Jews who have shaped everything. Well, it's Spielberg. I mean, we talk about Spielberg all the time, but Spielberg, like, he's the shaper of you.
You don't have to go back a hundred years to see this, like the shaper of our pop culture right now that we're about to see the fifth Indiana Jones movie. Like yeah. We're just like, he gave us, he's the shaper of our childhoods, right? . And everything downstream of it and everything that everybody's trying to imitate today and that everything that's still paying off today.
Yeah. I mean, where I don't want to go with the conspiracy theories is theorists is there's some kind of cabal. Well, and also if I have a neighbor and his name is Goldstein, I'm not gonna assume he is out to get me. And I think it's what they to do. So like, it what you can make a generalization about a people and about their position in society without therefore assuming that every last person that you run into is the maximum re representation.
Yeah. I grew up in a very Jewish part of my city at the time. I could walk to the synagogue. And so that, you know, a lot of Jewish families lived in my neighborhood, had a lot of Jewish friends growing up, and so them were just really great people and really great friends. Right. And it's not, some kind of one-to-one.
And we wouldn't be doing this podcast if we didn't love their stories and love their sense of humor. I think we have to admit that the angle that they have on things Yeah. Is smart and you like it and you hate what's evil about it. But Yeah. But also brilliant. But yeah and in that sense of just sort of, and fun, we are God's people and we're the ones who have suffered.
that can get very blasphemous very fast. And I don't even like en fiddle on the roof when Tevye is having his little conversations with God. . But that basic sort of rye approach to life, like, you know, here I am, I'm trying to do good. I'm trying to make my way and things fall apart is something that is so central to our experience, the American experience, the way we look at ourselves, the way we laugh at ourselves.
And I just, you know, I can't, and everything we love and identify with about some of our greatest heroes, like it is Indiana Jones. The American hero as shaped by Jewish identity is not actually Superman. Right. For the most part it is Indiana Jones getting the crap kicked out of him and keep getting back up and doing the right thing.
It's Spider-Man, the same thing. . Even our superpowered heroes, like what we love about our heroes is not that they are invulnerable, it's that they've overcome something and that they just keep getting back up. It's rocky, you know, he's gonna go down and he's gonna get back up. That's what we love about them.
Yep. . What we love about Superman is if we line up the movies that we've talked about in this and we fit Rocky into it Superman's just the daddy figure and Rocky is, but Rocky and Indiana Jones, they're the every man, they're the us of it all.
Yeah. Who can pull through and Luke Skywalker's, the kid, the son, who's got that sort of g shucks innocence that Superman has but stuck in between Luke Skywalker and Superman is everybody else. . And it's just the guy who gets beat down and gets back up and just keeps getting back up.
And that's his chief virtue. As he doesn't quit. He never stops. Yes. Yeah. I think, I'm trying to decide whether to talk about this now. Yeah, why not? So just in tracing the, I don't know, did you have anything else you wanna say about this before I, I'm gonna move this a little bit real, real quick, just to, to the extent that they're like we'll sell you stuff by putting a naked lady on the cover of our comic or whatever, to the extent that anyone does that.
You don't think of like a, just a puppeteer like, ha ha ha, I have you now, white guy, number of p Right. What you think of is, well, this is also what you want, and you are also a slave to sexual perversion as you do this. Even however cynically in a marketing move is also what you want.
Right. You're also given over to porn. Yeah. It's not like you were perfectly virtuous and then Gollum came crawling out of the mud to Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So l let me go ahead and give what I think where I think that particularly Christopher Reeve's Superman sort of lands on this trajectory of these kinds of heroes.
. More specifically because I think there is a sort of more waspy male identity that comes out of the sort of John Wayne's school. my wife was just watching McClin took know not too long ago, and there's a line where he says, never apologize, son. It's a sign of weakness. Now, whatever that is, was every man like that?
No. But my grandpa who fought in World War II was Sure. Like that. You couldn't get go anywhere emotionally with that guy. . And I think out of World War ii, we have this idea of the man of action who's not interested in feelings and can't really relate to kids or talk to you like you're a human being and are a little scary.
And John Wayne. he might punch you and you might learn something, but he's not gonna like take you a aside and empathize with your feelings or anything like that. He's gonna throw you in the water so you can learn, learn to swim. Swim. Yeah. That's, that's, that brand of masculinity.
Yeah. And there's a, weird distinction. So sorry, I'm stuck on, I never apologized, son. . What was the rest of the line? I never apologized, son. It's a sign of weakness. Okay. There's a sense in which there's a lot of truth to that. . And it's a lesson that a lot of men need to learn, but take in too far what it means is The good version is don't live your life. Like you're always apologizing. Yeah. You don't apologize for existing, for being a real, for existing, for being a man, for Hey, I'm sorry I don't surrender your dignity and your power and your authority to people because you feel a need to appease them or make them like you.
Right. There's that side of things that is the virtue that John Wayne represents, but you know, is not weakness to admit real fault. Right. And there is something, I think that there was something hollow about the 1950s man that we would not like and we would not want to go back to. There's a reason why he fell apart.
Right? Yeah. There's a reason why he was subsumed by the sexual revolution for crying out. Like Yeah. People did not like their dad's actually never apologizing. To wildly generalize people did not like, oh man, A man who could, not ever, who thought that any show of feeling was a show of weakness, a show of weakness.
Unless it was anger. Yeah. Unless it was anger. Like the only kind of thing that you can feel is aggression and to do anything else is to be a effeminate. And that's not real masculinity. It's not biblical masculinity. It's not David, it's not Jesus, Jesus wept, but that being said, that is the sort of, that is the masculine image in that is dominant in mid-century art.
And then you have the sexual revolution. You have the Beatles, you have a feminization, the embrace of androgyny, long hair, all that stuff on the one hand, And then on the other hand, you have James Bond and Playboy magazine, and they both feel like reactions to that. So you have the Beatles like, oh, we're just rebellious man, and we've got our long hair and we're just, sexually androgynous man.
And, but we also, but, and then you have James Bond who just feels like, what? It just a cynical Well, it's, yeah. It's just like, why have any pretense of being a family man and a father? If I have no interest in being a father or a family man, I'll just be a womanizer and a, badass. Yeah. Why don't I take what, fun about man?
Aggression? Yeah. Well, and then it's plain Eastwood. Yeah. Well, that's where I'm going with this. Dirty Harry comes out in 1971 and Dirty Harry is such a distillation of the reaction to that where it's just like John Wayne is a righteous killer. Dirty Harry likes to kill Dirty Harry gets a kick out of shooting people.
And actually, so does James Bond. James Bond gets this kick out of sleeping around James Bond. Yeah. Let's just not pretend to have any virtue whatsoever because Yeah. Let's just drop drop the pretense guys. Yeah. Drop the, we don't need a hypocrite. Like, why did you bother marrying my mom and having me if you were just gonna sleep around and screw whoever you wanted and you just like dominate and destroy and, and show off the, just the power out.
Yeah. Just go out and dominate, destroy, and, conquer the woman. . And don't, don't drop the hypocrisy in the pretense. Yeah. And so Clint Eastwood's whole career is just, I mean, he's spent the last 30 years apologizing for it, but the first part of his career is just that, just, guys, let's drop the pretense and let's have fun with this.
Dirty Harry's a funny character because he admits that's what he is. He gives these great speeches, you know, the did I fire five shots or six, like I would re make my day. He's got a gun to a guy's head. The guy's got a hostage. He's like, please shoot the hostage so that I can blow your head off.
Because that's my view of human life. Like the thing that I really, that would just make my day is a coffee and blowing your head off black man. And so there was something very cathartic about that for people. It was also even then, like you can find all the think pieces from 1971 with the first Dirty Harry on where people are just like, this is fascist, this is terrible.
This is playing to the, worst instincts in us. What happened? And what they don't realize is that, well actually our masculinity idea in F 1950 with John Wayne was a little hollow and the response with the sexual revolution was hollow. And so Clint Eastwood's brand of cynicism is just really appealing to people.
But then a few years later, I think you have an equal and opposite hero. And I would actually, I was thinking about this a lot because Rocky comes out in 76, star Wars comes out in 77 and the movie we're talking about today comes out in 78. And these characters are obviously that you couldn't find three more different characters in their approach to life than Rocky, Luke Skywalker and Superman.
But I think there is something that makes them all of a type and I think the thing that I would say about all of them, I came up with a clever term for this. Like, I'll call it Boys to Zen. You get it guys. they're appealing cuz they start out boyish with their wear are their hearts on their sleeve.
They're very affable and they have emotional access in a way that John Wayne and Dirty Harry didn't. Superman for all his kind of pretentiousness. He's got an easy way with himself and with his emotions and with his romance that, John Wayne, he's got dude's got some charisma, he's got some charisma.
. This is something that John Wayne and Gary Cooper and Kerry Grant and Gregory Peck. Never had. But then you have to ask the question of, okay, we know the world's crap. We know what we really need is for Dirty Harry and James Bond to just be unleashed, to just unleash their IDs. Cuz that's how you survive in this world.
So it's like, how can you actually make your way when you're embracing, the more as they would see it, a effeminate side of yourself with Rocky, with Luke, with Superman. And I think in all three cases, the answer is you have to become zen. You have to access a larger part of the universe and become one with it one way or another.
And with Rocky, it's just asking the universe to give him what he wants because he believes in it so hard. And with James or with Skywalker, it's literally like he has to learn to use the force. Like it's just the metaphor is just made into not a metaphor. And with Superman, at least in the architecture of what you can see that they were trying to do with these two movies and the Donner Cut and everything like that, it's like, yeah, you can have your romance with Lois and you always will, but you gotta stand for something bigger and you've gotta wash yourself of like specific attachment.
It's what gets you into trouble. It's also what, like, there's a sense of which Adrian is ultimately like a little bit incidental as much as we love her. And Leia ends up being incidental to Luke's journey and super, like all these guys have to forego personal happiness one way or another. I realize I'm broadly generalizing and you can find sort of self contradictions in these movies, but I think broadly speaking, that was, it's coming out of, so you, you have John Wayne and then you have the reaction to that, which is Dirty Harry and James Bond.
And then the reaction to that. Is well we're gonna have a more, a hero that embraces his feminine side a little bit more. That's, that has more access to his emotions that wears his heart on his sleeve. That's kind of a more boyish. Well it's interesting in contrast to what you're saying, we just talked about Guardians of the Galaxy three, and that is very different because that is not zen, right?
That is all found family, that is all specific. If we have a moral code, eh, maybe we do, but it arises because we have a found family and that's why Well, it's kind of like if you don't actually believe in good, then what is your good, like what is it that keeps you, that actually enables you to defeat the monsters and keep them at Bay?
James Bond, dirty Harry. They say you just unleash your own monster. I mean that's the only way to do in service of what's less monstrous Western Civiliz relationship. Yeah. In both cases those guys are appealing because they work for institutions. They've actually got, they're standing up for institutional authority and the institution is in some sense curbing what's most terrible about them.
They're not just pure vigilants, but they kind of are also like they, they use the best of their id, but they bring just enough of the other two parts of themselves that they don't just become pure psychopaths, but we realize you need a lot of it to get anything done. And so then you get past that and you're like, okay, I, it is, you can't actually be an, a well-integrated, appealing masculine figure if you're just dirty.
Like, dirty Harriet has no life. James Bond ultimately has no life. Like nobody would actually want to be with these guys or be around these guys. They're a little, they're appealing for a one night stand, but what's the relationship that you could actually have with this guy? What's the ongoing relationship that we as an audience can have with this guy?
And you have to find different answers. And I think so much of the answer now is found family is what anchors me and gives me purpose and gives me a reason to keep going. Star Wars I don't think has had an answer in these new. In the new trilogy, which is one of the problems. Like, it just doesn't have anything to say and just I guess, found family as much as anything.
But where Ray's story goes is really generic. I don't know the reason, was it on this version of the podcast or one of the discarded ones where I said that All American cinema goes back to all action cinema. All cinema of the male goes back to Ethan Edwards, John Wayne standing outside the door in the searchers.
So the question is always, can the American hero who saves society also be a part of that society? Or do you need to stand above or below or to some side of that society in order to fit in? And mostly the answer is you can't. Iron Man tries, but he dies. Captain America ultimately gives up on it.
The guardians just create their own little family. Superman. We never got a coherent actual Superman narrative. Zack Snyder gave us a coherent narrative, but it's just pure fascism. It's just pure, like he's actually a nichi superman. And that's what I actually think is cool as Zack Snyder. again, I've said this a million times, it's one of the things I don't like about Harry Potter is that JK Rowling's answer to that question is way too easy.
She's just like, yeah, Harry can reintegrate, it's fine. He can save the world and then be a part of the world. And I'm like, yeah, I'd like to think that. But I'm not, that's not usually how the hero's journey goes. And it feels a little weird to me. I know Harry loses a lot of friends and it's very sad, especially for younger children.
But always well just the final scene on the platform just always feels a little bit false to me because fro Bains can't go back to the Shire again. And I'm not sure Harry can go back to Har Hogwarts. Anyway, those are, that's where I, think Superman lands, he's, he's wanting to be a better man than John Wayne.
He's wanting to be something more. He's wanting to, these filmmakers don't actually, as much as we all, a lot of people will look back on Christopher Reeves Superman and say, he's just a cheese ball kind of dad figure with nothing to him. I don't actually think that that's what Donner is intending or what, certainly not what Reeves, you can find quotes where Reeve is saying, specifically positioning himself against John Wayne, like he says, like, our ideas of what a man is have changed in the seventies.
And so I wanna be that kind of Superman. Which is really funny because when we look back, when people look, watch this movie now, they're just like, what an old-fashioned idea of manliness. But Christopher Reeve is actually trying to be as cutting edge as he possibly can. Now, Jake, you've been quiet.
what are you thinking? I think the first thing that sort of raises my eyebrows is the idea that Luke is some kind of emotionally integrated, character who's tapped into his let me re-explain. In all three cases, I, that's why I said Boys to Zen, they all start as boys. They all start as not emotionally integrated. Luke has to get rid of all of his emotions and attachments, right? And that's ultimately, if you remember in the Donner cut, it's like Lois and Superman can't be together.
Like that was dumb. He, he can't do that. He needs to go back to just being Superman. JLL was right. So it's the same thing. And Rocky is its own thing. It might be a stretch to include Rocky, but I think Rocky is always playing with that. Adrian would ultimately rather him just be home, but then she needs to support Rocky always kinds of, has to empty himself to win.
Yeah. But he can only do it if Adrian's behind him. Yes, true. So it's part of a, an actual emotionally, like he, like his heart can't be in his training if Adrian's not behind him. Right. So it's gotta be a part of his family. He has to have his family as the wind in his sails. It's not detached. And that's, yeah.
I mean, I guess I was thinking more of the first Rocky movie where it's like he solves the Adrian problem and then Adrian is there as a bystander while he solves the rocky problem and taps into the force. But it's all just the rocky problem and like the Adrian problem's, the Rocky problem.
The Mickey problem is the rocky problem. Yes. And, can Rocky get anybody to believe in him and can he believe in himself? And can he keep getting back up with Adrian and can he keep getting back up in that dopey little gym and can you keep getting back up in the ring with Apollo and it's all gonna keep getting back up And if I do, will I eventually win and can I apply that to every part of my life?
Right. Which, and in that sense, he actually ends up being integrated with the city. It's a Philadelphia story and he's a Philadelphia man. And so that's, even though he starts out alone, what actually ends up happening is he ends up being embraced by everybody. Yeah. And he becomes the people's champion.
Instead of moving away from that. And that's like his trajectory, not just in the first movie, but in like, everybody's wants Rocky to win that fight. Everybody wants Rocky to win every fight because he's the people's champion. And yeah, I guess one of the things I'm thinking is that when he gets a, we tries to get above or outside of, or separated from that is when he screws up, he's gotta go back to his roots.
Yeah. But he becomes more of a superhero, like in three and four, especially like he is Luke Skywalker in Return of The Jedi by the later films in the series. And the love story kind of doesn't matter. The movies don't actually care anymore. And you wish that they would, you wish that you could.
I mean, the third one carries very, carries too much actually. You have this great big long fight at the heart of that movie between Adrian and Rocky. But yeah, the fourth one doesn't, it doesn't matter. If you just trace, because we're gonna go to Russia and we're gonna train in the snow and it's Rocky versus Drago and he's become a superhero.
Yeah. I'm not trying to argue that there's not things in the movies that contradict it. I just think the broad sweep always like, give them enough sequels. This is where they have to go. They can't live in the tension of we have a, a family and we're this, we have big principles.
Yeah. Nobody actually believes that those two things can go together the way that we as Christian men take for granted. Okay. Everybody always thinks there's tension there. Yeah. Yeah. There have to be oriented to your code and your mission and screw the family and screw the people. Or you have to be oriented to your woman or your family and screw the mission and screw the code.
And the mission is always suspect like at the end of the day, because the real mission should be the family. The real mission should be the family, or Yeah, sure. Of course Emperor Palpatine needs to be defeated, but you lose something in the process. To be a warrior is to give up. Part of this being a lover is to give up being a lover.
So all such saying as the warrior poet or the warrior lover, right. All Sam Ryan movies ever. Yeah, it is, it's very Eastern. And all these movies, I think are, I realize I am broadly generalizing and there are contradictions all over the place and things we could say, but I think broadly we are embracing a more Eastern way of thinking about these things.
And when you say we are embracing, you mean starting in these movies in the seventies? Yeah. Like this is, George Lucas, he hasn't fully gone there in the first Star Wars but Lucas such a less appealing character to me, at least by Return of The Jedi. He just has become this zen figure.
. And we're gonna shuffle his love interest off with Con Han Solo, who's feels pretty emasculated . In that movie. Yeah. It's like, being a lover and being saved by his love makes Han Solo a guy that just steps on twigs and is comedy relief now. In order to, I mean, kids always love Han Solo, but he doesn't even get to be part of the bike chase for crying out loud.
Like he's, just funny. Harrison Ford obviously doesn't care. Like it's not doing it for her anyway. I don't have to talk about Han Solo, it's like they've actually all accepted the Clint Eastwood frame like that. To be a man of action is to be, is to engage in something intrinsically bad and intrinsically channeling parts of yourself that are destructive.
And so you can zen your, so it'll be fun to revisit this conversation when we hit Ramey. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe what I should do is, because there's very much his conception of Peter Parker. Right. Or the tensions that he, at least the question that the central question he wants to ask and falls apart asking it over and over again.
Yeah. Maybe the more useful way for me would've been to frame this would've, and I framed it this way, but maybe I should've from the very start, said, these movies don't actually answer the question. This, these are just the questions that they're playing with. And I see a sort of, in the seventies, in the late seventies, in the early seventies, I see a shutoff Let your inner monster takeover.
That's Dirty Harry, that's James Bond. 60 seventies in for a few dollars more of that stuff is all that. Early twenties would, and then late seventies. I see. Well, that's actually not appealing. That's actually not what we want from a man. We want a guy who has some self knowledge, some self-awareness, some for life, some enthusiasm for love, someone with some emotional integration.
But then that, that begs another question. How can you be that guy and be a successful warrior? And the answer is, it's either really hard or you can't, or I mean, maybe Rocky is actually appealing because he pulls it off. Rocky. Rocky. Maybe we could argue Rocky is the one hero from all the stuff that manages to integrate that stuff.
I think if you take Rocky or Rocky one and two. Yeah, I was gonna say at least for a couple of movies, then it, he very much feels that way to me. But the series as a, the totally separate . There's this more heart and more to him as a character than any of these other guys who are playing much more of a blank slate Yes.
Typological role. But it, but then I do wanna push back a little bit and say, it is interesting that the series moves past that into typology and kind of Rocky becomes less of. The character that we love from one and two and more of just this typological superhero, this typological superhero. And even the first movie is playing with the, like, I don't remember whether they actually stop having sex, but they certainly talk about it.
He's like, I'm, I need to keep myself. there's always some feeling of a woman, just like, how do you integrate these things? You can't. You have to, you don't want to give your potency over here when you need to give it over. Now you're reminding me of Dr. Strange love. Well, but that's something, as much deeply embedded in sports culture as anything else.
Like you're going to have, like even if you watch a movie like Bull Durham, they're gonna talk about, well, you can't pitch. If you've had, if you've made love that you can't do that the same day, it robs you of your strength. It takes your legs out. It robs you of your verve and your potency.
You have to be all like, I, it's gotta be your sexual energy channeled. So you can't have that. Like, they're gonna talk about that explicitly in a movie like Bull Durham, but that's locker room talk. . Like locker room talk for sports is going to be talking about keeping your girlfriend away for the weekend, keeping her away on game day.
No porn or anything like that on game day until after the game. that's locker room talk because there's such a connection with your physical performance, or at least your conception of your physical performance and your just your verb as a man, your sexual energy, your potency, your strength.
But don't you think that comes out of the same cultural stew that these movies do? Like for example, spider-Man? Oh yeah. I'm sure it's all interconnected, but I also think you can go back to probably Warrior War Warrior manuals from. Sparta? Well, you I'm thinking of Uriah not being willing to go to his wife when David summons him home from battle, right?
it's always something that people have dealt with. It is an interesting Freudian way to frame Spider-Man as just the story of a man who really wants to have sex and doesn't know whether he can fulfill his mission and have sex at the same time. And he's in agony for his entire life about that problem, and he never solves it.
And when he does, he gets impotent in other places. At least that's how Ramey thinks of it. Well, and now we have a series where we're gonna say . The black kid can do it, which is hilarious. Although maybe he doesn't end up with a girl. Maybe the black kid actually is Zen. Like I've been saying, at the end of the day, we'll find out.
But we all kind of think of black kids might be able to do it a little bit better. Maybe that's just our, the self-hatred that we've been taught. But it's like, I don't know, miles. Well, that's, that's a, have a better shot than Peter. Well, that's a race frame, but Peter's an orphan and Miles has a family.
Yeah. Which is another frame. Yeah. No, I think that's true. I think that's true. I, I'm intentionally choosing the most base of the frames. Okay. Well, we didn't reach any definitive conclusions, but there we've thrown out a bunch of stuff for you to think about, and we'll keep thinking about it as we go.
Let me talk about the making of Superman, which as I've said before, is a interesting story with heroes and villains. As it came out in 1978, directed by Richard Donner, the tagline was, you will believe a man can fly. It made 300 million, which is the equivalent of a billion or something. This movie made a lot of money.
It was also the most expensive movie. To its time, which is a joke to talk about now. Cause I think it costs 55 million, which is like the catering budget on a Marvel movie. But 55 million also would've been way more back then. So the story of this movie is the story of why we have comic book movies at all, as I've said, because it was not intuitive to people to make a comic book movie and to make it for adults and to make it on this scale and to spend this much money on it.
We needed people with a real vision to do this. Or we wouldn't have the entire comic book industry. We wouldn't have action movies, we wouldn't have fantasy movies the way that we have them. We have Star Wars to thank for that, which came a year before this movie. But even with the success of Star Wars people were still just like, Superman is not going to work.
So I'm gonna very self-consciously cast this as a story of good versus evil. We have our All-American good guy versus our slime ball, European villains and the good guy's named Richard Donner Slime Ball. European villains are Alexander and Ilia Salkin. The Sulkin tried to possess and destroy Superman and it was up to Donner to save him, but it would not be easy.
So lemme take you back to the early seventies. Nobody is. Star Wars hasn't even come out yet. Nobody is thinking about doing a comic book movie. Comic books are for kids. There's no graphic novels like it's for kids. It's a dumb thing that your kid buys with a nickel and he was his time. He could be outside playing, he could be working a job.
Instead, he reads comic books. as Ben talked about, there had been some good cartoons of Superman. There had been those, the cheesy Superman, George Reeve TV show, which is really a silly, and there had been some serial films of Batman and Superman in the 1940s. But they're all B movies. They're all silly.
Nobody is looking at this. I just, I don't think it's possible for us to enter it now into how much people were not looking at this as a thing that was gonna work as a thing that was gonna, that even made sense. Like there's just, like, you have a guy in a red cape with blue tights, like nobody is, we cannot do a serious version.
There is no serious version. The one kind of thing that had been done successfully with this stuff that everybody agreed worked was the campy, I think we were just talking about this on an episode, the Batman 1960s Batman, which embraced pure camp, pure irony. And that show is very clever and very subversive in what it does.
But you can also feel the producers of that show just being like, this is what we have to do. Like, we can't, there, there is no serious version of this stupid story of a Batman with his butler and his car and his super villains. Like, the only way for us to do this is to find some angle on it that makes it a joke.
And we can little kids can be excited about it, but I, if we don't find an ironic way to approach this from the side, it's not going to work. And so that's Batman. That's like everything that had come before. The person who just, sometimes Lex Luther, he could start a, good thing, I guess. He comes to the city and says, I'm gonna give energy to Metropolis.
It's like one of those plots. But then he's got an evil plan. Well, our slime ball, European villains, Alexander Salcon and his son Ilia, were the ones who came up with the idea to do Superman. So we have to give them a little credit for that. Alexander was, what else for our story today? A Russian Jewish born man who moved to France and became a French.
Independent film producer, by which I mean someone who does not work for Warner Brothers or one of the big studios, but just raises money, makes his own movies, produces them, acts as the studio, and then generally will make a, if he has a movie, we'll make a deal with the studio to distribute it cuz it's hard to be your own distributor.
But he and his son Ilia were both in the business and they were known to be shady. There's actually a, law, rule in the screen Actors Guild now called the Salkin Rule, which basically says it's illegal to do what the Salkin did to us that one time because the Salkin, they produced a movie called The Three Musketeers, based on Dumas's novel in 1973.
Great movie with, Michael York and Christopher Lee Charleston Heston plays Risha Lu and it's really fun all star studded cast. But they, it was gonna be one of those four hour kind of Ben, her kind of epics. But somewhere in there they decided, eh, we're just gonna split it. We'll make two, we'll make the Three Musketeers and the Four Musketeers.
And so all the actors found out as the first movie was premiering, Hey, so Charleston Heston, by the way, you actually started in two movies, but we paid you for one and you're getting royalties for one. And the actors weren't happy. I think they all went after, after the money from the kins. And this, rule to this day, there's this all kind rule, which is that if you're gonna make a series can't hire Robert Downey Jr.
To do one movie, one Ironman movie, and then say, oh, we got too much material, we're gonna make it two. Unless you go back and renegotiate with him and then he makes a lot more money, you can see how it would be very easy to misuse a star that way, which is exactly what this all kinds were famous for doing.
Especially if you're doing something like the M C U or something like that. Right, exactly. It's like, oh yeah, well, Yeah. That's why we always hear about this guy has such and such a number of movies left on his Marvel contract or his star. It's like, and what constitutes an appearance? How many minutes constitutes an appearance, right?
. That stuff is all, it is like reading the sports page and like the, there's so much of it is just so much of the interest. If you follow, this is just like the salary negotiations and stuff like that. It's kind of ve endlessly fascinating if you're into this stuff or if you just like to watch the Rich and Famous devour each other, which personally I love.
So Ilia Salkin, the younger Salkin the younger has the idea to do Superman, the old, the cheesy old comic, and they negotiate in the early seventies with DC for about a year to get the rights. And DC's like, ah, we'll let you do it, but we need to know who you're gonna cast as Superman. And so they're like, how does Muhammad Ali strike you?
And they're like, yeah, cool. Or Al Pacino, or James Kahn, or Clint Eastwood or Dustin Hoffman. And DC's like, okay, that sounds pretty good. So that just goes to show neither this all kinds nor DC is actually taking this stuff with the reverence that your most basic comic book nerd takes it. Now they're just thinking of it in terms of if we get a headliner, yeah, we'll get a headliner.
Pacino a Superman, so it's almost as rich as, Nicholas Cage. Nicholas Cage, yeah. Nicholas Cage. Yeah. It's, so they get the rights to Superman and then they make what's called a negative pickup deal with Warners, which is a, which is, I'm sorry. I really find the contract kind of stuff pretty interesting.
So a negative pickup deal means that the studio agrees to purchase the, a completed film at a given date and some, so I have to go as the producer, raise the money myself, make the movie myself. But if I complete it by such and such a time with such and such stipulations, then Warner Brothers agrees to buy it from me.
Negative doesn't mean the opposite of positive, it means like film negative. We're gonna pick up the film negative. From you. So essentially what this means is is good for the studio because they don't have to assume liability for production that may or may not work. Like if everything falls apart, they're not gonna spend a dime on it.
It's good for the producer because I've basically got, as long as I can bring the movie in time under the agreed two stipulations, I've got a postdated check. Like it'll be paid for. It would be like, if somebody came to Jake and said, I'd like to build a building for Church of the King, but Jake, actually you need to raise all the money you need to get the building built.
If you get it built by such and such a date, then I'll write you a check for the entire thing. But I'm just not gonna front the money up front. I need to see that you can, I don't know why somebody would do that, although I've critic things like this in the church world even, the fundraising world the nonprofit world.
And so the good thing about that is you can borrow money against the promise that War Warner brother, you can go to private investors and say, Hey, they're gonna pay for everything, but I just need to get the money up front. The bad thing is you better deliver your film or you're gonna be stuck with a product that's not finished, no distributor.
And so anyway, the all kinds get that kind of deal. Warner Brothers will be, will buy the film and be a distributor if they can just get it done. The next problem that they have is that, like I said, nobody takes this stuff seriously. So they're like, how can we make this sound like a prestige, a picture? So they decide they're just gonna spend money up front to, to get headlines and make this look good.
And so immediately they hire that, that great guy known for his, light touch and pop culture Savvy Mario Puzo, our old friend, the author of The Godfather, to write the script. And, and they're not paying because it's nowhere has anyone like, oh, Mario Puzo, he's got an angle on Superman. No, it's just like he's got a name that is intriguing, like, Hey, Mario Puzo's Superman.
That's interesting. So we're gonna pay for that name and then we're gonna pay for two more names and are gonna be the, the greatest. Actors of their respective generations. We're gonna pay, we're gonna get Hackman, gene Hackman up front, we're gonna pay him a couple million dollars and we're gonna get Brando, Marlon Brando to some.
We don't have a script, we don't have an angle. We have got Puzo, we've got an, we've got the rights to Superman, we've got Mario Puzo as our writer, we've got nothing else but, or Hey, Brando for $4 million or whatever. Will you lend us your credibility? And Brando's like, yeah, sure, I can buy a lot of donuts with that.
so I think that's what he said. Brando signs on for the biggest payday of an actor. Up to that point, obviously again, you now people make a lot more, but 3.7 million plus a hefty nice percentage of the gross. Puzo writes this giant script, which is 500 pages long.
It's supposed to be two Superman movies. So they decide to do the Musketeer thing, but they're being upfront about it. They know they can't get away with it twice. So they're hiring everybody to do two movies and to shoot them all at once, like Lord of the Rings or something like that. Then they hire a director named Guy Hamilton, who is famous for doing Goldfinger.
He was one of the great James Bond directors to shoot the movie in Italy. The problem is Italy doesn't have nearly the tax breaks that Britain does, and if you haven't caught on the sks, like their money and like to do things successful, they're slime ball European villains. So they I'm gonna just, uh, make this as cut and dried as they can.
So they're like, you know what? We actually needed to sit shoot in Britain. Unfortunately, guy Hamilton is a tax exile Britain had. Everybody was a textile exile from Britain. Christopher Lead didn't live in Britain for a long time. Bri Britain's tax taxes were very tyrannical then probably still are, but he's not gonna go back.
So suddenly they are going to need another director for this movie. And so who do they think of? This is one of my, Ben, like trick, outs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just wondering who could be, hold on. Remember this is the mid 1970s Kala Kolo Kalo. No, go. Think even more mainstream. Just say the obvious one.
Spielberg. Spielberg. Okay. They're like, Hey, we should get this Spielberg guy. His duals thing. And Sugarland Express was really good. Ilia Salkin says, well, let's get him for Superman. We can get him for the right price. And the dad is like, yeah, let's see. He's got this Phish movie coming out. Let's see how the Phish movie does.
If the Phish movie does good, then maybe he can direct our Superman. Well, the Phish movie does pretty well. And then Spielberg after that is not interested in he's priced out. He didn't need any more stepping stones. Yes, he's exactly. So they actually had their shot. These guys suck. Had their shot.
I, I'm gonna, when we do Superman too, I'll try and tell, tell more of the story from their point of view. Cuz maybe they have, but they are the bad guys of this, so Spielberg is not available. So they're like, who else is like a young, hungry guy? Who's got ] some credibility that we can get and they think of Richard Donner, our hero of the story.
An all American good guy, Richard Donner, one of the great middle of the road populists in film. One of the great generic showman. Yep, yep, yep. You might know him from the Goonies, the Lethal Weapon Quadri personal favorite of mine when I was a kid Maverick. I don't know why I like that movie. So I think that one too.
But it was a lot of fun. Yeah, it was fun. It was fun. I mean, Mel Gibson, what a charming guy. mean that non ironically, he's I Mel Gibson. People forget what a great star conspiracy theory A Scrooged Lady Hawk. Did he direct conspiracy theory? Yes, he did. What a terrible piece of garbage. Well, that's like a, one of those scrooged is even worse.
Yeah, I believe it. So Richard Donner's only ever as good as the material, but he's a very good craftsman. I mean, leave The Weapon is quietly a better movie than John. Do you guys know there was a, that he directed a Goonies sequel? Can't Be True. It's right here. It's right here. The Goonies two. Hey again, you guys with a totally different cast or something like that.
Maybe it's not a, maybe it's not pulling up for me. Oh, no, no, no. It's some kind of yeah, I'm seeing articles here that say why The Goonies Too never happened. Yeah. Despite many scripts. Okay. Maybe it had to do with Corey Feldman. Well, in any case, yeah. Well, Corey Feldman's his own Hollywood tragedy, but in any case, Donner, he's really good.
action direction on the Lethal Weapon films, lethal Weapon Two was another personal favorite of mine at a certain age. It's got that wonderful diplomatic community. It's just, I've got scenes of that in my head. It was like I was never, my dad really loved Lethal Weapon movies, but it's, Shane Black was involved in those two.
Yeah. Yeah. He wrote the script for the first two. Okay. But we were never allowed to watch 'em. But, it'd be like, about bedtime or whatever and a lethal weapon. So you'd creep down and, or you get little bits and pieces of it. Oh, yeah, yeah. I've only seen TV edits, I think, but I know that they have sex in them and stuff, so they weren't even, they were more unfriendly even than diehard.
Yeah. So I would say just as in terms of that style, they are better, objectively better. Like he's a better action director than any of the diehard directors. Were like, what's better than diehard one? You really think so? I think the movie has, think about diehard one every day I get up and I find it another reason.
Yeah. It's, got a great emotional hook. Mel Gibson. I don't know, diehard one. The thing about it is there's so much in between stuff. There's so many dumb characters that show up to just be dumb and, keep John McClain like when the action happens in diehard, it's amazing the hanging off the building, all that.
But there's actually not as much action as you want when you watch diehard. Sure. Maybe I'm just a, a crank, but I'm always just a little disappointed when I go back to diehard. It's such a wonderful Christmas movie, though. You got the same opinion that the internet has. I'm different.
Richard Donner born 1930. He's an All-American good guy. Like I said, he served in the Navy as an aerial photographer and then became an actor. Wanted to become an actor. Guy was doing off Broadway stuff. And then, then there's this story where he goes and he's acting in some TV show, like maybe has two lines or something, and the director calls him over.
Nice guy says, Hey Dick. you're not actually good at this acting thing. You don't wanna be an actor, you wanna be a director. And Richard Donner's like, oh, oh yeah, I could be a director. And he's like, why don't you be my assistant director? So through, through the random kindness of some guy, he becomes a director, and then he, moves into directing TV and he directs a lot of iconic tv, probably stuff that we've all seen something of.
He directed man from Uncle Gilligan's Island episodes Kojack like stuff for all the kind of iconic stuff for he, he directed a Twilight Zone. He directed probably the most famous Twilight Zone nightmare at 20,000 feet. If you, I don't know if you guys remember bill Shatner, William Shatner is in the airplane.
There's a little gremlin on the wing. It's one of those you can't take a, it's as iconic as it gets plane ride without people of a certain age saying there's a gremlin on the wing. It's, it's, yeah that's Richard Donner and that's a great episode. And yeah, so he becomes a really reliable TV craftsman.
And then he gets his big shot with a little movie called The Omen, which is the best of the post exorcist satanic panic Boom. Gregory Peck of all people, plays the senator who may or may not have the anti-Christ as his adopted child. He's trying to figure it out. The whole movie, strange accidents are happening to people who interfere with this child's life and the kids acting in a little strange, and maybe he's the anti-Christ, I don't know.
And as far as those kinds of movies go, it's the best. it's fun. It plays with that seventies paranoia really well. And actually does a pretty credible job of Gregory. Is Gregory Peck Just crazy. what if you just found yourself having with a kid later in life and it was unpleasant and some things happened, and then you started weaving this wild theory.
So Donner does a really good job, has a big hit with that. He's hot and he's, he's like this guy. He's had one hit. So you can still get him cheap, but he, he's got some credibility. So our All-American good guy, Richard Donner, gets a fateful phone call one day from slime ball, European Alexander Sal Kind.
And Alexander Salkin says, this is Alexander Salkin. I don't know what kind of accent he has. Do you know who I am? And Donna's like, yeah, I do. Thanks for calling. Cuz Donna, remember, he knows the Salkin are famous for the Salkin thing, this Three Musketeers thing. So, and the next thing on the phone is we want you to do Superman and Donner's.
Like, yeah, right? Nobody can do Superman.
a bad idea. Thanks for calling. And then the next thing on the phone, we'll pay you a million dollars. And Donner says, yes, how are you? What can I do for you? Let's talk. So, and that's exactly, that's exactly how Donner tells the story. By the way, Donner's a really fun guy to watch interviews with.
he's very ular, very likable.
Marker
I've listened to whole commentaries of, of things he's done. I like him a lot. He's just a, he's a good teller of his own myth. But much like Luther Luring Otis into his pay are our slime ball. European villain gets our hero with the offer of a million dollars. and with the offer of working with Pacman and Brando, who we've already hired for a huge sum of money.
And so that's the all kinds, they want something, they just throw money at it. But they are also shifty people as we'll find. So they're like, Hey, so Salk's, like we have a 500 page script. It's by Mario Puzo. You're gonna shoot two movies at once. We already have a release date set. Donna's like, I don't know, can, I don't know if anyone can really do Superman, Salk's, like, we'll send you the script.
So later that day, a messenger arrives with this giant tome 500 pages and Donner looks at the script and he's just like, this is terrible. Puzo has no affinity for this material. He does not care about Superman. It's just junk. It's campy. It's actually the later Superman movies is what it is.
It's really silly. There's a scene where Superman encounters Tully SAS's character of Kojack from tv and Tulley Savas, his catchphrase, like, who Loves You Baby? Or whatever. Like, it is just like all this junk. It's like these people don't care about Superman. They care to, I guess they see something in this intellectual property, but there's no nothing in this script to indicate they have any reverence for this character.
And Donner, our hero, does have reverence for this character. He grew up reading Superman. Superman triggered his imagination. He's like, if they make this movie, they're gonna destroy Superman, and I don't wanna see that happen. And I actually think I know how to do this. So he calls his buddy Tom Manko.
So Tom Manz is interesting. He's the son of Joseph Manko who directed all about Eve and the Ne that would make him the nephew of Herman Manko. Who wrote? Anybody? Anybody. They just made a movie. David Fincher made a movie about him called Mank Citizen King. Citizen Kane. Yeah, sir. And so he's got, writer blood in him, but he'd become a James Bond writer and a script doctor.
He would later do Doctor the script for Goonies. He's got his fingers on a lot of things that you like and have heard of Gremlins. But he has the same reaction that Donner initially did when Donner calls him. He's just like, I can't do Superman. I, I don't know what to do like Superman, really? So Donner's like, just come over to my house and look at the script that they've sent.
See if you can just help me with this. And so Manko drives over as he's driving Richard Donner rolls the joint gets high. They've actually sent with the script a Superman outfit. Richard Donner puts on, gets high, puts on the Superman outfit. And when Mantz drives up, Richard Donner comes running out in the Superman outfit, dancing around.
Saying, please, Tom, help me. We've gotta make this script. We've gotta save Superman. And Richard Donna's very affable, likable, persuasive guy. So Menz is just like, okay. And Donna already knows, he's like, there's two things we need. People have to believe that this guy can actually fly, which means we can't cast Pacino or anything like that.
Cuz nobody's gonna believe Al Pacino can fly. And we need a love story. And that's what you can help me with. Let's get a love story and let's get ve real verisimilitude. This has to feel grounded. It can't be it. It needs to have some reverence for the material. So now Donner has to go and pitch to Sal Kind our evil villain that he wants to not go with their approach at all.
And of course, this is gonna light the fuse that's gonna lead all the way to the end of our story, which is a sad ending. Although everybody made lots of money, so, and it's a pretty good movie. So maybe it's a happy ending. But Sal Kind is living in a hotel in Paris because of course he is. So, Donner flies out to Paris.
He goes into the bedroom where Salkin is in bed. He said, Salkin never got out of bed. He's just, he really is doing the Eurotrash producer thing. And the first thing Donner says is, Mr. Salkin, this needs a major rewrite. And Salkin says, no, no, no, this is a perfect script. And Salkin says it's not a perfect script.
And Donner starts to tell him his story and Salkin just says, you're wrong. And Donner says, okay, thank you for the trip to Paris. I can't do this. And he starts to walk out the door and Salk's like, okay, okay. Cuz they have got this release date with Warner Brothers and this negative pickup deal, like they need to get this movie done or they'll lose, out on the $4 million they gave to Brando and everything else.
So Salkin says, okay, okay, tell me what you would rewrite. You sit there, they argue, Donna thinks he's lost, he doesn't think he's gonna get Superman. He drives back to his own hotel in Paris. And then he gets a call from South Kind and he says, okay, okay, we agree. So our hero, Richard Donner, has to immediately jump into, making this movie, which they've already, they already have this giant puzo script.
The machine is already worrying. They've got sets that are being built, like Donner just has to jump into the middle of this with a script that he does not believe in. So you'll see in the title's sequence of this movie that it does credit Puzo and a few other people as the script writers. It credits.
Minowitz, I think, is a creative consultant. Minowitz is the one that I think they kept Puzo's structure. Puzo
had a good idea of \ we're gonna do a big krypton thing. We're gonna do a, a Smallville, a Norman Rockwell thing, and then we're gonna do a Metropolis thing. But they really just tried to take, strip out everything that was campy, everything that was silly, find a real love story, find a real emotional through lined, and Donner's doing all this while he's doing flying tests, while he's trying to figure out how to make the movie work and the all kinds, ugh, all they care about is what it costs.
So Donna's like, \ these flying tests that you've done, they're total crap. And the all kinds are like, well, they cost the right thing. But you can see hilarious flying tests where they actually took a dummy and just catapulted it into the air. Like, that was one of their first ideas, since you just see this really silly dum go flailing across.
Like, what if they had done that with Superman? But they don't know nobody's ever done flying on this scale. Everything from the George Reeves thing was, didn't really work. So Donner has just, he's got all these units already running, people, building models, and Brando is on tap, all this stuff, but he's gotta, he's gotta pull this all together while it's already left the gate.
And he's got a cast superman, which is obviously really important in our villains. All kinds, like what they, what they said to dc they want Pacino, they want James Kahn. They basically want the whole cast of The Godfather. Anybody from . You know, all those kind of seventies guys, Dustin Hoffman.
I mean, can you imagine Justin talk about little Jewish Superman, man. So he actually saw Stallone who just had a big hit with Rocky. They hit it off, they said it was a very nice conversation, but they saw Pacino, saw Robert Redford. The producers were so desperate by the end that I think they did a screen test with Mrs.
Salk's dentist, just cuz he looked good. Like they really no star wanted to touch it. And eventually they started just looking for people, but they couldn't find anybody. Like, it's really hard, you might think all you need is a jaw and, but as Christopher Reeve shows and as I'm sure we'll talk about, like it's hard to do this kind of thing.
Well, and so they had to find Christopher Reeve and he was just a humble all-American. I'm gonna do a Ben thing here. Christopher Reeve, humble All-American, Kansas boy who spent all day just eating apple pie off mom's windows sill. Except he didn't. Christopher Reeve is a good actor and he is playing Superman and Christopher Leve or Christopher Leve.
Christopher Reeve Christopher, some kind of Dracula Super \ Christopher Le Reeve. The thing that you need to understand about him then I wanna emphasize is he is an Ivy League east coaster. That is Christopher Reeve. He is money. This guy comes from that makes sense. Class. He is not, he's a polo player.
Yeah. E exactly. Christopher Reeve born September 25th, 1952 in New York City. He's the guy who has his. The white sweater wrapped around his shoulders. Yeah, exactly. he's the bully in the piece in Smallville, his father was a novelist. A poet, a Russian translator. He wrote a book of poetry that the dad did called The Moon And Another Failures, which I think is an awesome name, a book of poetry.
Uh, wrote The White Monk, an essay on Dusty Kin Malvo. His father wrote Alexander Busk Between Image and an Idea, so his father's like an academic. When his father found out he was playing Superman, he said, oh, you're you've been cast in a production of Bernard Shaw's man, and Superman and Christopher, you've had to explain to him like, no, which of course is based on each.
his parents divorced in 56. He moved with his mother and younger brother to Princeton, New Jersey, where he attended Nassau Street School and Princeton County Day School, where Reeve excelled academically, athletically and on stage during his school years, he developed a passion for acting, participated in amateur plays, and worked as an apprentice at the Williamtown Theater Festival.
So this guy's he's a blue bud that likes to act. He decided to attend Cornell, choosing it over other opportunities to avoid the temptation of immediately becoming an actor. So he's good looking. He, he might be able to just like go get a play or something off Broadway, but he's like, I wanna actually hone my craft by going to an Ivy League universe University.
So Reeve joins the theater department at Cornell, and during this time he pops, he receives an offer from a New York City agent, but again, instead of dropping out of college Reeve stays in college, but he visits begins visiting New York once or twice a month to explore acting opportunities. And at a certain point, he takes a leave of absence from college and travels to Europe to immerse himself in theatrical productions and study.
The French Theater I might odds to emphasize all this. Cause I want you to understand how much Christopher Reeve is not Superman and how good of a performance he's really giving. He finally transfers to the Juilliard School in New York City. He was accepted into Juilliard's Advanced program, very Ivy League stuff where he developed a close friendship with, does anyone know he played a Big Blue Genie and will Smith.
Yeah. Will Smith in an embryonic form? No, no, no. He is a big, he's a great friend of Robin Williams. John Houseman, the great serious classical actor says, you need to join the acting company. It's terribly important, Mr. Reeve, that you become a serious classical actor. He, Reeve is told by another, by Houseman, who's like a famous actor presence of the time.
but then a houseman says, unless of course they offer you a i'll change, I'll censor the word here. Unless of course they offer you a crapload of money to do something else, in which case you should do that. . So that was advice that was given to Christopher for early in life. After completing his first year at Juilliard.
Reeve graduated from Cornell in 1974 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and he got a Broadway play with the Blue Blood herself, Katherine Hepburn. And the story is that he had to come on and say his first line, he managed to come on and say his first line, and then he promptly fainted in front of the whole audience.
And Hepburn turned to the audience and said, this boy's a fool. He doesn't need enough red meat. But apparently Reeve got better after that and developed a lifelong friendship with Katherine Hepburn Burn. She told him, you're gonna be a big, I can't do a Hepburn, but you're gonna be a big star Christopher and support me in my old age.
And he said, I can't wait that long. So, Our hero, all American good guy, Donner, he's looking for his Superman. And this kid comes in Chris Reeve, and he's got a great big sweater and blonde hair and Donner's, first question is, Hey, what's under that sweater? And Reve takes off the sweater and he is just this skinny set, skinny kid.
And donner's like kid, like the guy that we hire has to be a Muscle Zoo. And Reeve's like, listen, Mr. I was a jock in school. And then I went into acting and I lost 50 pounds. And Donner's like, nah, you're an actor. I can tell like, you're not Superman, you're an actor, you're a Julliard guy. And Reeve's like, no, I swear I could do it.
So Donner isn't that impressed by the interview, but then he goes and sees Reeve in a Broadway play that night, and Reeve, I guess is playing both the father and the son and he's doing transformative work and Donner's impressed. And so they hire, they go ahead and they hire Reeve. They do already have Brando and Hackman to be the above the line kind of guys.
So that works out well. Reeve needs to work out to bulk up to become Superman. And so he works out with David PRUs, who is famous as a muscle man and as, does anyone know? Nope, Darth Vader. He's the Body. Oh yeah, that's right. He's the body of Darth Vader British dude that kinda has a weird relationship or had before he died, a weird relationship with Star Wars.
Cause he always resented that they didn't use his voice. So he doesn't make it into a lot of Star Wars retrospectives and documentaries and things. But he's the body double. He's the body double. Yeah. And he would argue the presence and the acting and he would say he brought a lot to it.
And maybe that's not wrong. I don't know. Anyway, Donna, our hero, he has his Superman, but he's gonna need more than that to make his movie not horrible, like the Sal kinds would have it be. So he's gotta get his lowest lane and he gets Margo Kitter. Obviously, we all know that the story that Donna likes to tell is that she came in for her audition and she like tripped over a prop and stumbled and just the way that she did that, he wanted to cast her on the spot.
He's just like, this is this girl is bumbling and charming and self effacing. And that's what we want. We need the, obviously Lois is a very forward kind of a woman, but she's also a very vulnerable kind of a woman at the same time. And we need a character that can be lovable doing both of those things and not just shrill easy to go long, wrong with Lois Lane.
And so Donna wants to cast somebody that's innately bumbling and vulnerable and that you could believe Misspells rapist and all that sort of thing. And Margaret Kidder's perfect for that kind of thing. The other story that Donna likes to tell, which I'll just jump ahead and tell right now, is that Kidder had an eye entered injury on her first day of shooting, shooting.
She scratched her eye and she couldn't use her contacts and her performance really came to life that day because she was just wide-eyed and looking around and stumbling over everything. And it had that kind of goofy quality that Donna was looking for, the more vulnerable quality. So he got together with his stage hands and basically contrived, we've gotta keep her contacts the way she can never put on her contacts for the rest of this movie.
And so they were always coming up with reasons to make it so she never could see. But we'll talk about the rest of the cast. Real quick before we get into the making the movie. You do have Gene Hackman at the height of his star power. He was not excited about doing this. He's a serious actor. But Gene Hackman's also always not been averse to taking the money.
I mean, he did pose beside an adventure in 72, which is not a great actor's movie. But he's on quite a run right now. 71 French Connection, 72 pose beside an adventure. 73, the conversation 74. He is got that great cameo in Young Frankenstein where he plays the blind guy that's like ladling soup into Frankenstein's lap and all that sort of thing.
Gene Hackman, of course, refused, did not wanna wear a bald cap or shave his head was not interested in doing the most iconic thing that everybody knows about Luke's l Luthor. So they ag got him to agree to do one shot, and then they created this conceit where the character is vain and wearing a series of different bad wigs.
Brando got 3.7 million plus a percentage, which ended up netting him 14 million for 10 minutes of work. You can do the math on how much money he was getting paid per minute there did all right for himself. Wow. Which, like Nicholson and Batman, the thing that they're bringing just as a marquee title, just as a name, they bring gravity to that and the gravity.
Yeah. The sort of, I think that they, it's more than just even the name of in credibility, it's actual gravity. When you open with your Superman movie with Marlon Brando as this like sad scientist father figure, it really brings a lot anchors it Yeah. It anchors it emotionally. If what you're going for is verisimilitude, and you're going to have a world as sterile as Krypton.
You better have the best actor you can get. Yeah. Like he, put anybody else in his place and nobody makes it through the first 25 minutes of that movie. Yeah. Brando is a world unto himself, which is what you need. Like, you, I can't, I think you're literally right. I cannot think of another actor that could occupy that cheese ball set and make it work.
Now Brando would agree with us that he was important to the movie. He deserved every penny that he was paying. Well, he actually thought he deserved more. He sued the production for 50 million of what he thought he would was additionally owed. And that is why he does not appear in the original cut of Superman two, which is super lame.
They should have just paid him, I think his Superman two, even in the le, the Lester cut would be a lot better if it had Brando. But Donner is scared. He needs to, like Brando famously difficult. He needs to figure out how to do it. So he calls Francis Ford Coppola, who's just on The Godfather. He calls people, um, Coppola's advices.
He's brilliant. Just keep him talking. Just get him to keep talking and he'll talk himself out of any problems. And then Donner calls this guy named Jay Cantor a really powerful agent who's worked with Brando and Cantor's advice is he's gonna wanna play it like a green suitcase.
And Donner says, what does that mean? And Cantor says, well, it means he hates to work and he loves money. So if he can talk you into the fact that people on Crip Krypton look like green suitcases, and then you only photograph green suitcases, and he gets paid just to do the voice over, that's the kind of trick that Brando's gonna pay on you, play on you.
donor's like, okay it's interesting. So he goes to meet Brando at his home to discuss the role, and Brando comes out immediately with, why don't I play this like a bagel? I mean, how do we know that people on Krypton didn't look like Bagel Bagels? And Donner had thought that the agent was exaggerating.
But in fact, the only thing the agent was wrong about is he got a bagel instead of a suitcase. Donner's just like, gee, Marlon, uh, let me tell you something. Donner appeals to Brando basically just says, there isn't a kid in the world that doesn't know Jor and what he looks like and this story.
And you know what? He looks like Marlon Brando actually. And so let's just do this for the kids. And Brando takes a beat. He looks at Donner, he smiles, he says, I talk too much, don't I? And they figure out the wardrobe. And Brando, apparently it was very pleasant. he did come for more money.
Lee, you can't have a happy ending to a Brando story. Famously didn't come back for The Godfather too, stuff like that. But he was very pleasant during the movie. He was pleasant with Reeve. Brando at this point, has given up on memorizing his lines. He likes to, as he would say, just be spontaneous.
So when he is holding the baby, when he is holding little Callel, the lines are written on the baby's chest. there's a lot of stuff like that. But Robert Downey Jr. Wears a earpiece. Robert Downey Jr. Has people feed him his lines, and he thinks it makes him more spontaneous. Maybe in both cases they don't like to memorize and they've gotten lazy.
But also when you're that brilliant, maybe you're allowed that, I don't know. In any case there's also a story that a crazed woman came at Tom Mantz with a knife, and Brando jumped up and used his sort of Brando powers of personality talker out of stabbing to once to death. So, Those kinds of stories.
Weird. Just followed Brando. Oh, and there's, there's one other thing to say about Brando before we move on, which is Brando suggested the s on the Chest be the Family Crest, which is now standard Superman comic book lore. But that's just something that Brando threw out as a joke almost.
But, uh, so Mar she got that scene where everybody has their own family. . Crest. . Right. And that's a cool piece of I mean, I think that's way cooler than Superman having a dorky s that stands for Superman. So all the pieces are in place, the actors in place now the battle is joined between our hero, Richard Donner, uh, the SA kinds and Donner's whole thing.
He actually writes the word v verisimilitude on a little plaque in his office with a picture of Superman. And he's like, we have to make this something that people can actually believe in. But the salkin don't want that. They are constantly pressing for more comedy, more goofiness, more camp. They will not tell him the budget only that he's going over it, which is incredibly frustrating and not how you're supposed to do it.
Not how any director would wanna be treated. Like he doesn't know what his parameters are. He just knows that he's over them, which is just, if anyone's ever worked for someone like that, it's just an awful thing. Uh, Donner's running around between like different units. The model unit, the special effects guys over here trying to desperately to pull something off.
Manque is constantly rewrite, rewriting the script. You have the producers saying, make it silly. And Donner wanting to revere what he sees as the great American myth. And they have to get the special effects to work if this movie's gonna work. And\ they're working on that. the, the main thing is the flying.
they try catapulting a model. They try actually a model that's built to fly like a rocket powered kind of plastic Superman. The way they eventually did it is pretty obvious to see now they have cables. anytime. Reeve is flying out of a scene and he's actually there. You're just watching a guy, like a Peter Pan stage production or something.
You're just watching a crane pull him and kid her out of shot. But the other stuff is front pro projection, which is more complicated than rear projection. It involved mirrors and stuff. Basically, they shoot all the heco, the footage from a helicopter, and then Reeve in a studio is just performing in front of a background.
And Christopher Reeve gets all the credit for making this look good. Like they had stunt people and actors and models try it, but they didn't. But none of these people understood what Christopher Reeve understood because Christopher Reeve was a glider pilot. He understood aerodynamics, he understood how to just move his body so that it looked like he was flying.
And, and that's something that no one else. it is so intuitive to us, you know, post fact, like we watch it and we're like, of course. But nobody knew how to do that in a convincing way. And Topher Reeve apparently saved it. Now, like I said, they were trying to make two movies and they weren't gonna, they had this release date that was built in.
They're not, at a certain point, they realize we're not gonna finish this. We need to just scramble to get the first movie done. So they steal what's meant to be the ending to the duology the time travel stuff. And they put it at the end of the first movie, and they're just like, after this movie comes out, we'll have time to figure out what the ending for the second movie is.
But they just get it done against all odds. Our hero, Richard Donner pulls something together that actually does take Superman pretty seriously. And the movie comes out. And it's a giant hit and it's a critical hit. And critics are snobs. They comic movie What? Yeah, there's, there's some No blockbuster popular appeal, no New York Times says for Vincent Canby famous crank Vincent Canby quote.
For me, it's as if someone had constructed a building as tall as the World Trade Center in the color and shape of a carrot. Rabbits might admire it, they might even write learned critiques about it and find it both an inspiration and a reward while the rest of us would see nothing but an alarmingly large imitation.
Carrots. So that was the New York Times. Oh my that, that's hilarious. But Roger Ebert, our boy Ebert said Superman is pure delight. A wondrous combination of the old-fashioned things. We never really get tired of. Adventure and romance, heroes and villains, earth shaking special effects. And you know what else Whit that surprised me more than anything, this has big budget.
This big budget epic, which was half a decade, making its way to the screen, has an intelligent sense of humor about itself. And that's obviously what the better critics, the more Farian critics say. And that is what the audience says. And the movie is a huge hit and does really well. And Donner didn't know whether anyone was gonna work.
He finally saw the movie with an audience and was like, ah, we pulled it off and he's excited and he's gonna go work on the second movie. And he's like making his travel arrangements. And then he gets a telegram from the All kinds telegram, which simply says, you are no longer needed. And that is the end of Richard Donner's Association with Superman.
We will pick up this story with Superman too, but basically, as everyone knows, they hired a comedy director to make the movie they'd always wanted which was a camp be comedic sort of thing. Richard Donner had actually shot about 70% of Superman to Richard Lester. The other guy reshot a lot of it so that he could get Director Oratorial credit.
But there is what works about Superman too, and it's a, in its theatrical form is the structure that Donner and Mantz and these people had already put on it. A lot of what we don't like is just these guys being like, we need guys to pay to blow off when there's wind from the superhero fight.
And it's just like really dumb stuff. Although it is important to remember that Richard Donner, while heaven casting him as reverential, and while he was, he did allow a lot of camp and silliness into this movie, and some of it's fairly successful, I'd say in both movies. We can get into that, but that is the story.
This all kinds suck. this guy pulled something together against all odds. They didn't make it easy for him. And then they, as soon as it was successful and they could catch their breath, they sent him a telegram saying, you are no longer needed. And then they proceeded to basically get one more good movie out of the leftovers of what he'd done and then just drive the franchise into the ground for the next decades.
And you could argue Superman is a Sy somatic property has never really recovered. Like, and what's worse, you can imagine Richard Donner just doing five or six of these with Christopher Reeve and them all being really nice. Really nice. . like you said, Ben, I think you're right to say Richard Donner's, not like he's not a visionary or an artist or anything like that, but he did basically understand this is an American myth and we have to take it with some level of gravity and for heaven's sake we've got Brando.
He didn't do much to salvage hackman's dis disinterest, I would argue, but I guess we could talk about that. . Anyway, that is the story of the making of Superman. All right, fellas, we've been. I'm dancing around it for a while now. we'll talk through the film, talk about some individual pieces, talk about that awesome credit sequence, stuff like that.
But what are your big picture thoughts on Superman? The movie I was disappointed by how poorly it held up for me, this go round. . You've seen it many times in your life, I guess, though. Yeah, a lot as a kid. . And only a couple of times as an adult. So I, I have a lot of nostalgia for the movie.
It holds a special place in my heart. I feel like I like Superman two better. Or maybe the Donner cut up Superman too, or maybe that's just the little kid in me who likes Rocky Four Best and Right. Who likes last Crusade Best and doesn't know what he's talking about. But I, it's got a lot that works and a lot that's really smart, but at least on, on the whole I don't know.
It's hard to put your, it's like you are gonna get 45 minutes before you see Christopher Reeve on film. . On camera. Right. And it's in, I don't know. There's a lots of, I don't know. The way I would put it is almost every scene has something that doesn't work almost. There's like so many things about this movie that are bad or dopey or of aged poorly.
That you would think that in summation it would be a disappointment for me at least to something is greater than the parts. Like it adds up to pretty great experience even though almost not a minute goes by that I'm not like that was lame. That was, and my wife, she'd never seen it before and had no interest.
And she watched it and she was like, that was a really good movie. Which is. Saying something, but she was also like, what? Huh? Like the whole movie she was, it's got a bunch of head scratchers in it. If you pick it up, it's really easy to pick apart. Like Krypton is stupid. . Everything about Krypton is retarded.
. It's just ridiculous. . We spent a lot of time with in Smallville with Clark Kent feeling like a dope, although I think Smallville itself is actually pretty great. Yeah. I, I like the way that the Kents are played and everything, but Yeah. Then we moved to Metropolis and everything is nasty and grimy and dirty and, uh, you forgot about a Long trek into the Antarctic.
Oh, yeah. A lot of big exposition dump of the same information we've already gotten from earlier. Right. Well, you just tend to want to forget all of that. And then the fortune. Yeah. The forts of solitude, which just so, such a stupid set design. It's the only idea that we had was it needs to be other.
. And feel other, and, to feel alien. And so let's make it cold and cereal. I've already, I don't need to retread that. I've already . Rift on that. But then he, it's like, okay, now we're in this like, petty crime thing with this Otis guy and this cop's gonna get killed in the subway, and, oh, now here's a, woman that's all over the place, and, oh, here's, she does have the Gene Hackman part.
I know. It's like, oh, and now Superman's gonna go flying with Lois Lane, and she's going to be doing some weird kind of, can you read my mind Beat poetry? It's like, wow. Yeah. There's, there is a lot. I don't know. Ben, before we get to Farfield what's your big picture thoughts? Yeah, there's plenty That doesn't work.
I've, I really didn't remember seeing the movie the whole way through. I never liked. As a kid, I hated everything to do with like, the ending from California on like you did? Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Well, well let's save that. Let's, let's, let's get there. In the getting. Well, I, I enjoyed it.
I don't think I'd wanna go back to it because I do, there is something that doesn't work in every scene. I wouldn't wanna go back to it for a while at least. It's, it's long and it's, long. There's a lot to be charmed by. I like Brando. I like Smallville. I like Reeve. But then there's a lot of random clunk.
Yes. Including, I would say the entire villain stuff. I, I just basically think that Hackman doesn't work. He's doing what's required of him. I don't think. Yeah, it's, very uninteresting, but just the whole conceit of Flex Luther as a bumbling villain is just no fun. And you can have a good bumbling villain.
I'm not necessarily against it, but Otis and Miss, it's just like, it's like, it's really odd. It's like with this all kinds, just wanted cheesy camp. That's where they made their compromise. And it's a bad compromise cuz it means you have no credible threat in this movie. You just have a goofball. And then we're asked to believe that he's gonna goof around with his minions and they're gonna reprogram a missile with the while wearing bad disguise.
There's, yeah. This it's really just, um, some of that stuff is pretty disheartening. You're like, oh no, another scene of this, well, we at least we didn't have to watch the three hour television version. Right. Which has even more of that apparently, because there are three different versions out there of this.
There's the television version, which you can still find, which is three hours. There's the, oh my, there's the version that's normal, the theatrical cut, and then there's a. Slightly extended by eight minutes. By eight minutes cut. Which I think you saw, right? Or did you, confirm that I just saw whatever was on hbo, whatever.
That's what I watched. Yeah, I watched on it on Amazon. But you had a scene that I don't think was in mine. Frisky. Well, did you have frisky? Yeah, he Of course you did. Yeah, of course he rescues the cat. But it's after that the joke quote unquote the girl getting the slap, it gets cut short.
Yeah, there's, so there's a longer friskies, there's a long frisky scene where Superman actually gives her a speech about fear and stuff. That's pretty sweet. Which is only in one of the extended cuts. And then, okay, well, in any case, yeah, maybe I just missed, it's just you get the implic No you probably just missed it cuz it cuts right at the moment where, you know, as someone in the audience that she's about to get slapped or spanked, like the cut is timed with the spank or the slap, or, but you do hear the, you do hear it.
You do hear it, yeah. Yeah. But it is, it is, the blow and the cut though are at the same moment. So you hear it as you're cutting to the next scene. Right. Interesting. must have just missed it. All right. It's so funny. yeah, that it's part of the, I think the genius of how this movie actually works. And what's exciting about James Gunn, the James Gunn can actually tell the story of a, dark, I, I read some of the discourse on this scene.
It's, there's a lot of it that's out there on, on the frisky scene. I'm sure there is. Um, so yeah, let's just frisky sidebar. So Frisky sideboard, then we'll talk through the movie, then we'll be done. So, yeah. Yeah. I, I guess what you're saying, well, why don't I let you say what you're saying?
Well, okay. So just if you've not watched the movie, if you're a listener, this is the, the thing that we love about Superman is he's, we're getting our introduction to his powers and him going around and saving people and being introduced to Metropolis. And so of course we have to have the scene where he takes time to pull a cat out of a tree.
He takes time, he pulls the cat out of the tree, gives the cat back to the little girl. The little girl goes inside as Superman's flying away. She's like, mommy, mommy. A man flew up in the tree and got, frisky and, mom's like, how many times have I told you not to tell lies? And this is gonna, you know?
Yeah. And then you hear a whack of some sort, a whack of some kind, right? Yeah. So, so Superman saves the cat, and all it does is , get the girl a nice big spanking. . So what's exciting about seeing sort of the machinery of how, so we talk a lot about how it's really easy, it's really easy to tell a good villain story .
And to paint and to draw evil. And it's really, really challenging to draw good. Right? And so when Peter Jackson does it, he just turns everybody into glowy angels. They're shining and they talk like this, and they're sort of gay and Yeah. Very, very Fay, right? and so it's just a real challenge.
And, and Zach Snyder's not even gonna bother. It's just like, we can't, I don't know how to make a superman that feels virtuous or feels like he's otherly, right? But what this movie does, what I think it cracks is, well, let's focus a little bit less on Superman and a little bit more on just dialing up.
The background behind him. Mm. . So at every turn, like new you, this metropolis is pretty gross. It's pretty evil. It's pretty vile. Like the reporting room is a vile place to be. Like, there's just like, everything is dirty and gross and nothing is wholesome. . Right? So at any turn even when they're walking down the street, you'll just linger.
The camera will linger for a second while somebody's like, you stole from me. Or I don't, I don't remember what it was. Right. But there's a specific moment where it's like, huh, why'd they leave that on it? And it doesn't really go anywhere. It's just to add a little flavor of . Un wholesome vibe.
Yeah. Right. To stand as contrast to just wholesome Kansas Boy Clark Kent slash Superman. And that's where I think the genius of what Donner does or what Donner's able to get out of this movie or how it just sort the alchemy of it works. Christopher Reeve is giving a, a performance, I had no comprehension of understanding how great a performance it was as a kid, right?
. And I think maybe a lot of people don't because he is, they think of Superman as, or Reeve as just playing a zero. But man, the turn between the distinction between Clark Kitt and Superman and just that sort of ability to hold a sort of moral wholesome center with all of the background noise of chaos and violence and just general like ickiness and then wholesomeness is part of the magic of what makes him feel so strongly virtuous.
And he's never go, he's not gonna tell a lie. Like everybody is lying. Like this movie is just, everybody's lying and out for themselves. Everybody is lying and everybody's at got an angle and it's sex and it's violence, and it's all these other things. And here he is in the middle of it all.
. And so what's exciting then about Gunn is like, I think Gun UN can understand and see yeah, I think he's the kind of guy who has the vision to be able to look at this movie and look at everything else and be like, okay, yeah, I, I totally get why and how this works and I'm gonna have a lot of fun.
. Building a nice black backdrop. . For my wholesome Superman. I don't have to, like, I have a lot of fun telling these kinds of gross stories and I can just tell as many of them as I want in the background and it's just gonna make my Superman look that much more whole Awesome. And wholesome and cool to people.
I can pull, I, I think I can pull it. I think he can pull it off, yes. . For the exactly that reason. And I may have stolen that insight from you at some point, but it's very clearly on display. Uh, if you're just trying to watch like, and figure out how it works. Yeah. I mean, in the best Superman stories, the mistake with the Superman story, the mistake that Man F Steel kind of makes is Superman's not actually a character.
he is a du SX Machina. That's what he was built to be. He, he is not built with dimensionality. He's not built with interiority. And those are not, those can be flaws if you're trying to bring those things to a place where they're not required. But you can actually build a really intriguing, interesting story around what if do a sex mock existed?
What if a God was among us? What if this person that Now in addition to that, Christopher Reeve actually does bring some interesting interiority, I think, to this character. So I'm not trying to say that there's nothing there, but Superman as a force of nature is actually a legitimate. Way to tell the story.
And we don't need to, we don't need the psychology of fulfilling cast off by his parents or like, we don't need to find that, hook, that boring Hollywood hook. No, he, he doesn't, we don't need any psychology at all. Part of the beauty of what I think is fun about even how Smallville sets up Superman for us is he's embraced the role from the beginning.
And we know that there was some struggle with it as a kid of like, okay, like I have to just be better than everybody and because I am better than everybody and that's okay. But he's embraced that role and learned it. But he's actually, he's so competent and so strong. He has enough confidence in security to just be bumbling Clark Kent.
Like he really can live there. And then when you see him on the balcony with Lois as Superman, the charm and the charisma that he's able to turn on from that strength and confidence, it's just, I don't know. I, I think, that's another example of what we're talking about because it's like, it's not from Clark's.
It's not from the boy's perspective. Will the boy get the girl? It's from Lois's perspective and Lois is a seventies whatever wave of feminism woman that is, and she's tough and she's out for herself and she doesn't want any kids. And her dilemma is, well, there's one guy that I would cook for and have to have his babies.
That's right. There's one guy that's strong enough to . Make me accept that feminine role. Right. that's classic Superman. I mean like a great Superman story is actually. From the little girl who catches the spankings perspective I'm making this up, but this is like the kind of thing you see in the best Superman comics well, my mom's always on my case and she thinks I'm always lying. And then Superman flies into my life one day and he saves my cat. And then, that gives me the strength to take it and transcend it somehow. And it's just stories of, I live in a sad, broken little world. I have my regular people problems, but there's hope.
But there's hope and there's a savior. I mean, there's a savior out there, there's a messiah. And so Superman can't be everywhere. He can't save everyone. But just the fact that he can come and get my cat out of the tree, one of the think pieces I said, I, it is always the possibility that the next time I'm in some kind of jam, he just might show up.
He just might be there. this is a little overblown, but I saw one think piece on the frisky scene because there's a lot of internet. What is that scene doing in the movie? And it's pretty funny because you watch Zach Snyder's movie , you just realize if you had a kid get spanked in a modern Superman movie, people would revolt and throw their chairs but we'll have cities get leveled and uh, yeah.
passerbys get blown up and Superman break Z's neck and nobody cared. That's just, it's just like he had to, they were gonna kill, he was gonna kill innocent people. Yeah, I know. And to be fair, Superman too. He punches them into that. Whatever. Yeah. But it's just funny how morality has shifted.
Like something like the little girl getting slapped , we would never do that in a million years now. well, we might do it, but then Superman would take their truck and tie it up into a pretzel and Yeah. Snyder's Superman comes back and lasers off mom's arm and says, like, how, you know, pick Yeah.
Pick on somebody your own size. Why don't you pick on someone your own size? Kind of like Superman goes back to that guy in the bar and beats the tar out of him and both the Donner and the Lester cast. Well again, terrible. Keep working out. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Terrible, terrible moment. there's lots of things that don't work in both, in all these movies and it's just too bad.
The one where he gets absolutely trashed that, that moment totally works though. That does, yeah. Yeah. But he should've gone back and given the guy a pamphlet on not drinking or something. I dunno, I don't know how you handle that, but it was cheap the way that that was done. No, that all, that's all, that all gets really, really cheap.
Yeah. But that's just, and really petty too, like there's the one gym scene, there's a gym scene too where he throws the weights at the guy when the girl's not looking or whatever. I dunno, I don't remember this. You just see creators that don't actually have a coherent vision of who this guy is or why this resonates.
Anyway, the thing piece that I saw was like, cuz in the slightly extended cut, I think Superman actually does get, she's like, frisky, you bad Kitty. And Superman's like, actually sometimes we get scared and we're not able to do our things. And so the think piece was like, this little girl is stuck in this cycle of not being believed by her parents and being tyrannized by this mother.
And then she's enacting it on this cat, and then Superman comes and says, don't do it to the cat. Like the cat is just scared. The Superman actually gives her an entire perspective. On her life and on whatever trauma she has from her relationship with her mother. And then she goes back in and she's still gonna have to deal with, now that is overblown, that is more than the filmmakers.
I think mostly they were just, they just thought it was funny that in a cynical kind of way that Superman could, doesn't solve every problem. Yeah. They love that joke so much by the way. They do it twice. It happens in the dam scene in Superman two, I forget which Cutter, whether it's both cuts, but Superman rescues a little boy and then Oh, Niagara Falls.
And Niagara Falls. Yeah. And then, and the dams in. And then the mother is like, how dare you embarrass me? And she starts slapping him. Oh yeah. As Superman. I remember this. So, they thought that was so funny. They love the idea that, but I think, I think there is a there is a, there is actually moral content.
It's not just a joke. It is the idea that Superman's not fixing everything and that it, you know, it is the diamond against the black velvet. It is the this world kind of sucks and parents suck and you take beatings for things that aren't your fault. And that's what Superman's here to fix. But also he can't fix everything, but just having him there means at least you don't drown Niagara Falls.
So anyway, I think we, can we close the Frisky tab? Yeah. All right, so let's go through this flick. So we start with the credits scene. Actually we start with this really dorky, black and white here's an old comic book comics Shara Lame. Huh? And then the John Williams theme. .
It's a statement of intention. I think it's like a, Hey, remember that lame thing? And remember how you thought this movie was gonna be lame. Here's like a little black and white thing. Get some nostalgia going. But then state of the Art, John Williams, amazing theme, which we haven't talked about. John Williams.
The only thing, three-dimensional, three-dimensional, the credits come Whooshing past is just like, this is not your daddy's superman. Right here. it would be like if, the New Mario movie started with eight bit Mario just jumping around and then blew out into, and maybe it does for it, which does, yeah.
Does. Okay. There you go. I wondered. Yeah. But yeah. And then becomes a plotless meaningless. Okay. Nevermind. Yeah. Like, like the Superman movies. Yeah. But man, I miss credit sequences. I love like just the amount of anticipation you can build just with music and a suit. Few simple special effects here.
It's like this movie would not play the same without this . Sequence. It's, and John Williams doing most of the work, but if you're hiring John Williams, let him do the work. I've heard John Williams talk about this. He's like, the thing that I love about Stephen and George is that they write into their movies silent parts where I can do the work, whereas a lot of directors just don't actually give me space.
there's dialogue or sound effect. Like, but these guys want me to lead the way some of the time. And then we go to Planet Crypto. Do we all agree that Krypton actually basically sucks. Yeah. In this part of the movie? Yeah. I like the sentencing of ZA and Non Anda. That's pretty but it's like Marlon Brando walking around in Foy Tinfoil and he's got this little, I don't know, I guess it's the best part of that whole extended sequence.
But yeah, this whole thing feels like Dr. Who, or also I just don't buy the fact, I've never really bought this fact, the fact that about the lore in any of its versions that he doesn't just leave the planet. Yeah. Yeah. I found that hard to leave it. This one's dumb. Pretty stupid. Right. And pretty bad parenting.
Come on. Yeah. This is lame. you have to have a better. Way to keep him on the planet if you're gonna do that. I love the sort of decides to have the noble, I won't contribute to panic as everybody dies around me, I will die with them all. It's like, come on. But I will send my son away to be raised, I guess hopefully by I was just like, I mean, you're combining two sort of Jew Jewish myths, so to speak.
You, you're, you've got the Old Testament prophet of it all the, babylon's coming, but no one will believe me. Everybody wants to be complacent. All these false prophets are talking. You've got that and then you combine that with the story of Moses and they're both really resonant, but it doesn't quite, it's like, okay, if you really are know that Babylon's about to raise the city and kill everybody, then it's just bad world building.
Yeah. It's just bad world building. I could buy a version of you're gonna cause mass pit. No, I couldn't, there's no way to make this work. I mean, obviously the reason they don't want 'em to leave is cuz everybody will panic and leave. But from J Doll's perspective, that's a good thing. Of course it is.
Even if people rampage and overturn fruit carts and some people die in the process. Uh, crystal, crystal clerks Nathan. Yeah, yeah, sorry. Crystal carts. That's all that they have on Crypto Pistols. Uh, it's still, better than anything else that could happen. It's better than everybody getting blown up.
But, Marlon Brando, like one of you guys said he earns his paycheck and he brings some gravitas to it. He's quite good. He's, . He's there to play. He's got a British accent for some reason that I don't quite understand. But it is interesting to me how much this movie feels the need to set the table.
Like it doesn't trust its audience to know the Superman lore. Like now you'd be like, oh, everybody knows and is on board with this. We live in a nerd saturated culture, but this movie's like, we also live in a culture that has had this many around for. 45 years or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it makes sense that it would be that way.
It is just different. Like you don't need that much of, like, if James Gun wants to spend no time setting up who Superman is and he wants to just jump into telling a Superman story, we'll all be here for it. We'll all be here for it and no one will be confused. And even if you brought your grandma, she wouldn't be confused.
anything else you guys wanna say about Krypton or any of that? I hate it. It's really claustrophobic. I hate bad, Dr. Who's sci-fi sets in World Worlds where like old old Star Trek stuff where it just, where you just feel trapped on a small set in a world that's supposed to be expansive.
it's pretty lame. It's lame. Then we get to, then we have like a long sequence of Brando giving exposition. Like this movie over explains. It really is like a pains to Brando gives the same, some of the same lines of dialogue multiple times just to make sure we understand the rule rules that will later even in the third act of this movie, be blithe about.
We wanna make sure to do as much table setting as we possibly can. We get to Superman landing on Earth meeting the Kents and Jonathan and Martha Kent, our Norman Rockwell adventures and Donner said, we did 10 Commandments, Norman Rockwell and then newspaper picture were like our three parts newspaper comedy, his girl Friday or something.
. So, and Reeve by the way is playing, Grant and is very consciously modeled on how Carrie Grant would do something like that kind of bumbling, bringing up baby kinda stuff. Anyway, what do you guys think about this? The Smallville stuff I enjoyed a lot. I, mom and Pa Kent are really great.
Yeah, they bring a lot for almost no screen time. It's amazing how little screen time Jonathan Kenton gets. He's one of the most emotionally affecting parts of the movie. Yeah. Little touches a few. Just him saying, oh no, when he realizes he is about to have a heart attack. Yeah. Just that, that really just that he's going to, we set that up really, obviously, careful your heart and, and then, oh, come on, let's run to the bar and I'll race ya.
. Yeah. But that Oh, no moment is yeah. Really sweet. It's great. . And it's just the right level of, it's always interesting to me when a filmmaker can do something this sentimental, this Norman Rockwell, and not make you want to just vomit. And, I don't know exactly what the trick to that is.
But underplay it. Yeah. Underplay it. I think it's, yeah. You can't sentimentalize a subject that's already sentimental. You just have to aim your camera well and shoot, for goodness sake. It's just everybody's grandpa. Yeah. And everyone's grandma I and everyone's and everyone's dad someday too. Yeah.
And there's no, like any they don't try to make it any more or any less than that. And Yeah. I love that they don't spend a lot of time on, well, I'm leaving you mom, I gotta, she's just like, who this day would come and, as a cynical person watching it so many years later, I'm like, oh, okay.
I hope he visits her. So, you know, like this is a hard, thing. Yeah. But that's not, you're not supposed to think about that. It's just the myth. Zach s cider solved that problem by having Zd grab her by the neck and then Superman leave my mother.
Oh, dare you threaten my mother. Well, he, things blow up around them. It was not a good way to solve that problem. No. But the callback later in Superman, Batman v Superman, Don of Justice, where it was Martha. Yeah, that was, totally, that was good. That was good. Because you know, when you're dying.
You say not mom, you say your mom's name, whatever that is. Like when you're in pain and you're calling out for your mother, you always use her Christian name. Yeah. That's what everybody does. That's the one logical fly I just exposed in that movie, other than it's perfect. Oh no.
. Uh, I do really like outrunning the train. I think that's one of the most fun Oh yeah. Practical effects. Yeah. And that is just a guy on a crane being pulled along next to a train. Yeah. Obviously sped up, but yeah, that's great. Okay. Superman says bye to mom. And then I have no patience for this part of the movie.
Maybe you guys wanna make an apology for it, but I didn't mind. I was like, he's gonna go find himself or whatever. Uh, yeah. I was like, that's when I started checking the clock to be like, how many, how deep into the movie are we? . This is a, at least an interesting, bit of homework to be doing right now.
Like, how far in are we gonna get Checking my watch, pulling it up and being like, huh, 40 minutes. That's where I think like 45 minutes, obviously for this big story. They're telling, we need the for of solitude. We need K Elle back. But if they, if we just went, if we just, if you just cut that scene out of this movie, the movie plays exactly the same.
Nobody would question or care that Superman is suddenly Superman and revealing hims. Like, he'd be like, oh yeah, he went away for a few years. He showed up. He's getting a job. He's Superman. Like, yeah. If we had just cut some Metropolis and Clark Kent, that would've been just fine. Yeah. If you just, if you literally just lifted this out, did nothing else I don't think anyone would mind, but.
It's, I like the idea of him having his sort of, I'm, well, he's had a crisis, right? His dad, as he knew it died, then it was revealed to him that he is, he wasn't really his dad. And now he is asked to go find himself and figure out, but he already knew that. Right. That's the idea. Like I, I always got the impression he always knew.
Well, he gets, he definitely gets, he, he goes and finds the thing, right? He goes and finds the crystal, but the crystal's like calling to him because it's the time or something. like the impression Jonathan can't give you in that scene before he dies is that he's, always to us or something like that.
Yeah. He's always raised Clark to know like you're from out of this world. And typologically, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether Moses thinks he's a prince of Egypt or knows he's actually Jewish. It doesn't matter whether, how much Jesus knows he's divine and the, this is the template we're following.
Moses and Jesus both discover something about themselves and then they go out into the desert Uhhuh and they get the call, right. The burning bush, Jesus faces temptation. . And then they come back empowered to, to do their missions. That's, yep. Sorry, I don't wanna be bli about actual story of Jesus, but , that is just typologically what we're drawing on here.
And maybe it's why you do need him to go into the, an arc to kind of go into exile and face himself. . Yep. But I think some kind of an actual test or, I guess it is just the Moses story. He just he meets his father in the de in the in exile and then comes back as the hero.
. So yeah, typologically, it, fits with Moses perfectly, fits with Jesus pretty well, which makes sense. But you sure do have to put up with a lot of we're going through a star field and Marlon Brando's narrating stuff. That part drags. Yeah. But then Christopher Reeve comes out in his Superman suit and he flies.
And then we go to Metropolis. And like Jake said, the city kind of sucks and Los doesn't know how many peas there are and rapist. And suddenly we're in like a new, newspaper comedy and it's every newspaper office must be his girl Friday, or the boss must be like a lovable curmudgeon and everybody must be talking over each other.
I'm being a little unfair because of course Superman was developed in the forties and all these cliches that they're drawing on Superman drew on the original versions of . And helped create. So you can't say Moon Perry White's just doing his girlfriend. Of course he is. and I like all this stuff.
I like all the, I don't know what, what do you guys think about Margo Kidder as a Lois Lane? Oh, she's fun. She's fun. She is a good comic actress. She's got just enough. They have a good I'm losing words here cuz I just had lunch. What chemistry. That's the word. They have good chemistry. They have good chemistry.
They do. I mean, I think she's from the same school as Marion Ravenwood a couple years later where Yeah, she's the obvious comparison point. It's pretty much, yeah, trying to play the same character, the woman who's tough to the whole world. But we get the knees for exactly one man our hero. And although Marion, takes a little while to reveal that, but Marion kind of has the Clark relationship with Indiana Jones mostly and .
Only kind of saddles up to him as Superman a couple times. And then she smashes a mirror in his face and it's hilarious. Then we cut to a comedy shot of a ship with him screaming. But yeah, the. Man, if James Mangold would just understand this way of writing a strong woman, like what we are what I'm dreading we're gonna get with Phoebe Waller Bridge in this new Indiana Jones movie as just a omnicompetent girl boss who can do everything.
Yeah. And who's woke and who's, but that's not interesting. Like you want a character that has what man or woman you want a character that has vulnerability. The thing about Marian is she's not strong enough to just beat up the Nazis, but she's smart and she can take care of herself and she'll run into a thing and find a frying pan to hit the guy.
Like she's tenacious, but she's not resourceful. Yeah. She's got qualities that we would all look for in a woman or in a wife, but she's not, she doesn't transcend her sex. She's just a strong, vibrant example of it. But she's all woman when it comes to our hero. And that's Lois Lane. the fun of Lois Lane is that she's actually a woman, even if she doesn't want to be.
And I think that Margaret Kitter has a nice line in that kind of thing. Yeah. Then we're gonna get to Superman, starting to reveal his power. He's gonna catch that bullet and that, and then literally smiled at the camera. Like just, Christopher Reeve is really good at that, doing that kind of thing without making you despise him or the movie.
He'll just like, wink it, wink at you. Like he, he almost breaks the fourth wall. And John Williams for all his virtues, he's kind of corny about the way that he'll give a little musical trill. Yep. There. . I mean, I like it. But John Williams does do something that I hate in this movie, which is maybe the movie asked for it and he just gave them what they wanted.
But he, he writes like bumbling comedy music. Yeah. The villain. It's Ken. He is stupid. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Christopher Reeve obviously great as Clark Kent, but yeah, we get Superman, Saban, a bunch of stuff. Do you guys feel like that held up or like It's pretty great. Yeah, I think it's the template and the only thing that comes close.
Well, I would say the one thing that maybe supersedes that passes it up is amazing. Spider-Man's similar, well, amazing Spider-Man and especially part two is he's one of the only heroes that's actually allowed to do a lot of hero stuff, like rescue people, like movies even. But yeah, I think it's the opening.
Is it the opening scene of Amazing Spider-Man two that I'm picking up? It's the kid in the car or whatever. Yeah, the kid, the science project. Maybe that is Spider-Man. That's Well, no, that's amazing. Spider-Man two, but that's like a midpoint scene that's later. That's not opening scene. It's, it's probably 20, 30 minutes in or something.
He's, look, he's, yeah, he just gets a couple of sequences that have nothing to do with the plot of him just spider manning out. Right. Yeah. It's great. And he's gonna stop and, the, some kids getting beat up in the back alley and he is gonna help him fix his science project . And tell him it's cool and stuff like that, you know?
Yeah. Little things like that. Super sweet. I really it just makes you realize how many superhero movie Evens ones that we love are fixated on violent action. And there's a whole other kind of fantasy that is really powerful, which is the fantasy of someone saving you, someone fixing problems.
Or Spider-Man was my Spider-Man, right. If he was my hero what if he could fix my actual real life problems? And that's the thing that both of those movies or both those sequences . Do and I think of another superhero movie where you really see that sort of thing. There'll be a large scale plot, like, we've gotta get the people off of The Guardians just did this.
We gotta get the kids off the thing. And that, that couldn't be sweet. We gotta get all of Sokovia off of, right? The rock that they're now on, which is obviously we leave nobody left behind because we are just like big time, commenting on Snider, what Snyder did, right? And if Snyder had just added a scene of Superman grabbing a little girl and getting her outta the way, that would've gone a long way just to symbolize the fact that this guy even cares what's happening.
. But Sny does not care what's happening, which is what's makes him terrible. But yeah, I actually started tearing up weirdly just a little bit during the helicopter scene of all things. And I think it was just because I'm so used to scrolling on Twitter and seeing news stories about car accident.
Like it's just like everything's terrible all the time. And just the fantasy of a guy who shows up and fixes things just like that helicopter accident didn't go bad. Nobody died. That jewel robber, he went to jail like that cat is out of that, yeah. I had a cat stuck in a tree. It was stuck for 10 days.
It almost died. And finally we had to knock it off the, it was getting so cold that we got a painting extension pole and knocked the cat out of the tree. And it almost like I, I would've loved to have Superman just steal my cat, like, or steal my cat. Yeah. I would've loved to have Superman save my cat.
Like, just the idea that there's somebody that can just show up and make things right that are wrong in the world is such a powerful Yeah. Fantasy. And it's weird how much superhero cinema does not tap into that at all. Like, it's exactly what is most potent and most powerful about Superman in particular, like the mythos around Superman in particular, is that there's is nobody too small for him.
Right. And there's no problem too small for him. And if he's got a chance, He can't do everything, but he'll do everything that he can. And it's just, he's just not above, he's just not above the cat in the tree. He, every bit of responsibility he's able to take he takes, that logic doesn't hold up when you just think about Clark Kent sitting at a desk at a typewriter, but still just the same.
That is what people love and play with about Superman. And that's why the movie has the cat scene. That's why everybody's favorite panel from, or one of the, one of the great and most famous and favorite panels in all of Superman is the All-star Superman Yeah. Panel that you, the girl su gonna commit suicide and he just comes and talks to her.
Yeah. And he's in the middle of saving all, fixing all these great big problems because he's gonna die and he and oh, he's gonna stop and take time to just talk to the girl who's about to commit suicide. Right. And it taps into, you just are so hungry, for somebody to care. I didn't have a great relationship with my dad, but I've still got that feeling of, man, when I was five there was someone who could just kiss my booboo and everything was better.
There was Right. The world made sense because there was someone who just had it covered and super, you felt safe. The fantasy of Superman, the fact that he can give that to a cynical adult, that he can give that to Lois Lane or to Jimmy Olson or to us, you to me as an audience member, it's such a powerful, powerful thing.
And it is why I'm excited about James Gunn, cuz I think James Gunn can, he said he wants to make a movie about kindness. . Whatever that means. . And I hope it means exactly what we're talking about, that he just wants to be like, here's the world's dad and he's gonna fix all the problems.
Yeah. We're gonna have a horrible, nasty world. And he's gonna basically, Try to do a not sappy version of the thing that people do in Starbucks lines. Right. Where you pay for everybody behind you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's what we want. Yeah. And it'll be really sweet and sentimental without being sappy and it'll make you cry.
Yep. And I think guns, whatever gun's doing is going to end up building towards that all-star Superman story arc. I think that's just inevitable, because I think that's who he, I think that's who he is and I think that's how he wants to reclaim Superman. I, yeah, I agree. I have no reason to believe that, except that's, I just, you really want to I want to, and some of that would be wish fulfillment.
But also I feel like some of it's in Guardians three. Yeah. I feel like that's what I'm watching in terms of his, the stories that he's telling in his own evolution, the story that he's telling about himself and his own personal growth. I think that's what he's communicated to me. Reading between the lines as to where he is at now.
Okay. Maybe he's just a slick, cynical salesman, but he sold me, so I'm here for it. Yeah. I mean, I'm a little scared cuz if Harley Quinn or Rocket Raccoon, caught a mom disciplining a daughter after they'd got the cat outta the tree, they'd vaporize her arm and say they can't give a hand to your parent discipline or they're like, right.
Like that he, yeah. But he, he taking revenge on what's wrong lines? I, I think so. Yeah. I think, and I think he knows to draw those lines with Superman and I think that he can get away with putting any number of other characters in his movie that would, and maybe do. Do that exact sort of thing.
You just have to keep Superman clean. Superman can't let it happen. If he's there, that's the That's right. Things I'm afraid of. He can't approve of it and turn a blind. He can't wink like he has to just always think there's a better way. That's right. and enact it. And he has to win in the end.
Like his better way has to win. Yes. He has to leave the world a better place. And so when he dies at the end of the All-star Superman arc, the world is actually a better, more hopeful place for having had Superman there. And there's hope. I'm all for it. I hope that, that's exactly, and I think, the other thing is that you can say about gun is he loves the comics.
He loves, he knows what makes a good Superman story as, as long as he's able to get his own demons out of the way enough which is what he told us that he's done. Right. And even the fact that, which we didn't know and so didn't comment on the fact that Drex Drex is actually carrying out the high evolution, the high evolutionary in saving him.
So he, we actually know for a fact that it wasn't just another cheap Marvel cop out. We're not gonna kill this guy. We're just, we're just gonna passively him, passively leave him to a certain doom. No, they actually carried him out and saved him. Right. And it's, there's a shot of it and the VFX guy, and everybody's like, yeah, that's who it is.
That's who it's supposed to be. Got whittled down. But yeah, no, yeah, no, they carried him out of there. The James gun there, everybody carried out actually has a little empathy, maybe even misplaced empathy for high evolutionary, I'm all there for that guy. Everybody deserves a second chance.
Isn't that what . Uh, what someone says to Adam Warlock. Great. That's, that's what great says, I think to Adam Warlock. . Oh yeah. Well, okay. After Superman saves all this, people saves Air Force One. You get a lot of fun. I mean, the other thing that Superman movies and particular Thrive on and that Marvel weirdly has forgotten to give us, and most of its movies, is you really want audience surrogates reacting.
You just want the people on the street. You want the, I mean, I know everybody makes fun of, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's Superman, but it adds the fun of these movies to have the guys in Air Force One looking out the window and . Not believing it and rubbing their eyes and don't look, just Spiderman movies have that Spiderman.
Does that it? Yeah. I think, many of the Spider-Man people have had a good line in that, a sense of identity for New York, and they have a sense of identity for Metropolis. Okay. Now we have our romantic evening Superman shows up and we go flying. And I don't know, it's a little weird.
It does go on and on. I think when it's just John Williams doing the work with his music, it's pretty magical. . I mean, it is a bit of a Aladdin and Jasmine moment, it's fairly transcendent, but then Los Lane Sure. Sheez go into a poem and it sure is stupid. Stupid. And the, I understand, my understanding is that Margo Kidder was actually supposed to sing it, and they were like, that doesn't work to have a song.
And so they just had her recite it. She wasn't gonna open, like the character of Lois wasn't gonna sing it, but you were gonna hear like a song on the soundtrack sung by Margo Kidder. So instead they had her recite it and yeah. Boy does that not work? Boy, does that not work? You also get, as these movies do, even the best of them, of these old Superman movies, you get the kind of weird, color of her panties.
Stuff like just I a little out character. Something for Dad. Yeah, something for dad. Well, this is Te Mocker speaking of something for Dad. Yeah. Let's talk about Miss Tesh Mocker. Let's talk about Lex Luther and let's talk about Otis. I don't like any of this stuff.
I just think Hackman's super lame. The comedy's not funny. The lair isn't that cool? The plan is stupid. it's all very lame. Does anybody wanna make any defense for any, and I don't like the way that Miss Temer dresses. I'm against it. Nope. We just wanted a Bond girl in there.
Yeah. Is she actually, or we just, no, I don't think so. I just mean that's kind of, yeah, just that's the role. The coding is like the something for Daddy. She's the villain Hinchman who's gonna end up having the hus for our protagonist. Yeah. I don't like the fact that she's sa it feels like kind of a weird, Joseph Campbell wouldn't approve of this, that she saves Superman.
I don't mind someone saving Superman, but it just doesn't feel like Superman has to, and then she kisses him overcome anything. It's, yeah, it feels it's a little creepy. I mean, I don't like it. Yeah, it's So we got mis te Mocker. We got, I like Gene Hackman. I think he's great, but he's just miscast here.
He doesn't have anything interesting to say. He's a pretty good Lex Luther, Kevin Spacey. Yeah. Kevin Spacey. I known Jason Jesse Eisenberg. So it must be Kevin Spacey. Yeah. Kevin Spacey was born to play Lex Luther. It's. Too bad he didn't appear in a better movie. Nah. We're we are gonna have to do Superman returns after this.
Yeah. At some point. I've wondering about that too. Yep. but yeah, so, uh, you just treat it like a trilogy and Yeah. Right. That's that's what I think. Well, let's do it. Yeah, but Hackman Sachs, he feels like a middle manager. He doesn't feel like a super villain. He feels like a, the guy that owns the Arby's that you work for, that you don't like that much.
But he comes up with a goofball plan and we spend a lot of time with him enacting this plan, wearing different disguises while John Mil Williams music tells us how, whimsical and funny this all is. But, I like how some of the lines are even like, you know, what the num what the number 200 has in common between me and you?
Oh yeah. Oh man. There's a lot of, it's your weight in my iq. Like what? There's so many dumb jokes like that. It feels like that doesn't even work. That feels like old comic book writing. Like you always have these guys who they have to write the script and maybe writing isn't actually like, that feels like the kind of joke that would be in Superman comics of a certain vintage, but I still don't wanna see it in this movie.
It's, I don't know, it's just like something walked in from the 1960s Batman. It's like all the campy stuff that Donna was fighting to keep out. It just, it's bad. But, yeah, they caused big earth quake and Superman. It's gotta fix the fault line. Fix the fault line. I thought that was cool. Yeah. Where he goes underneath the Earth's crest and lifts it up.
I like all the, it's really fun. The model of the model work is cool. It's, fun to see some of these, some of the more successful old special effects with the day I'm breaking and . Stuff like that. It's pretty cool. Like I said, I always love the train thing. Yeah. But then the Lois dies a brutal death.
Yep. the dumbest thing in all of cinema happens. Yep. I'm sure there's many internet videos where nerds complain about this, so I don't know. I'm sorry to be that guy, but I hate time travel so much. I hate the time Tuners and Harry Potter so much. Turners, Turners, whatever. Yeah. They should have been called Time Tune tuners.
That would've been cooler. I, once you can do this, why does anything I know you're not supposed to ask. I know you're supposed to just go with it. I know I'm being with the fun police here, but why would anything that Superman doesn't like ever happen again? Why would Sirius Black Die?
Why would vol ah, just come up with a plot reason why we can't, they destroyed all the time Turners. I know they did right before it happened. Did they really? Yeah. I don't remember. No. All the time Turners have been confiscated in our, like in the Ministry of Magic. Fact, check me on this.
I'm pretty sure this is how it works. No, I think you're right. I think you're right. But they're all there. And the only reason that, so the only real pothole is why on Earth did Dumbledore think it was a good idea? Or McGonagal think it was a good idea to give her Maye Granger a band time turner from the Ministry of Magic when they're so volatile and so dangerous so that she can get an extra class in.
Yeah. But Dumbledore's just an idiot that always does crap like that, so I guess it works. Or he's a genius who knew that it would be then there on hand at the end for the saving of Sirius Black and Buck Beak. But yeah, they all end up getting destroyed in that fight, like all of them. And so now there are no more time Turners in the wizarding world because they were all there and they all got destroyed in that fight.
All right, great. It all makes sense. Yeah. That is a very compelling fix. If I'm Dumbledore, I'm just gonna hang on to one of those babies, like keep one in under Roar. Like Yeah. If you can manage to get one from the Ministry of Magic and give it to a student, you might as well just keep one lying around.
Yeah. And you're, you can't tell me Dumble Door couldn't be like, sorry, ministry. I lost it. What are you gonna do? Arrest me? I mean, you guys suck, just like all bureaucracy does. Wait, hang on a second. Let me go back in time to the part where you figured this out and Right. Uh, fix that. Yeah, do it. Kenneth Brano curse on you or something.
Exactly. I think Superman is the real time turn. It's cause he turns that globe. Now he is not fast enough to catch two missiles, but he is fast enough to turn the Earth's rotation back and circum. This is all, see, this is all about Relativity, right? So if he just goes fast enough in one direction, he's the one who's actually traveling in time.
This movie sucks relative to flash, right. But he's not fast enough to catch the missile. Okay. Yep. I got it. Well, he had to go sense Jersey first. Well, he did it take him a long time to catch that missile. You think? If he could circum navigate the earth in, 10 times and under a second, he could get the missile in one missile going hundreds of miles in less than 20 seconds.
But he can't Did you actually do this math? Are you just making it up, Ben? Uh, I'm pretty sure that, I'm just good at this kind of math, Jake. Well, your math makes sense emotionally. Okay. That's good. That's all that matters to me. These are two minutes that are gonna go down as the best and all of podcasting history.
Yeah, that's right. No, I mean, your math makes more emotional sense. Ma makes more me sitting there watching a movie since than their math does. And so your math wins like it's dumb. At least don't insult me by spending 40 minutes at the top, setting up all this lore and making it so ponderous. If you're gonna then act like none of it matters and we're just in a stupid comic book at the end.
So I don't know. And that is the dumb thing about the Donner Cut is that it uses that again. I was gonna say that, but then I didn't. But in any case, Superman saves the day. It does. That's okay. Spoilers, I, I know this cause I read it, but the way that the Donner cut film ends is that instead of giving Lois a magic kiss so that she forgets he was Superman, he is Superman, he turns back time to all the way to the time before he accidentally freed the villains from the fandom zone.
Everything is undone. No Superman two plot actually happened. Yay. Superman is the winner and that's how Superman two ends as I understand it. Did you think, if you think about it as really Yes, maybe I haven't actually seen the Doner cut. Yeah. I wonder at least the lesser cut wasn't that dumb. I mean my, I dunno, suspicion based on reading things like that is that yes it's nice that the Donner cut takes out a bunch of cornball humor, but I don't think it actually works.
I don't think, unfortunately, I think Donner just didn't get to shoot slash conceive of. . What would've, what would've actually been the good version? I mean the Lester Cut has so many really dumb things like that when he throws the styrofoam s at non or the magic kiss, it's like, it's ridiculous. I know the le I mean the Doner cut has Brando, which is sure something, but .
I don't know. Jake was saying beforehand that he remembered before we started recording that the Doner cut's superior and I think it probably is, but I was like, I don't know how far you wanna go out on that limb cuz I think we might find that there just isn't actually version of my memory is that after, so, several years back, I watched Superman, the movie in a friend's home theater, and it was an awesome experience.
Watched it with my kids, my whole family. It was super cool. Shout out to Josh again. Thanks for that. That was a really cool experience. . Amazing home theater set up in his house. And then I turned around and showed my kids Superman too. And I think I checked out the Donner cut at the time because I hadn't seen it and it was, so that's my memory.
And I remember thinking, huh, I like this and this isn't as silly as, . I remembered it and that's nice. But it still gives me all most of the same memories of, most of the same story and most of the same stuff, but just with less of a silly campy Right. Vibe to it. So that's my memory, but that was a long time ago.
Yeah. We'll find out. Like I said, I don't know what to do. Maybe we should just decide on Mike right now. . We have to represent both cuts on this podcast. I don't know how excited I am about watching both cuts though. I think Yeah, if we could each watch a cut. Yeah. I think we probably just need to split them up.
We could each watch two thirds and then one of us could watch a third of each. And that way, I know I wanna watch the Lester cut just cuz I have a nostalgia for it and I remember it like, I don't know, maybe we shouldn't have this discussion on Mike. We'll figure it out. We have to talk about both cuts.
It might be a little deadly for us all had to have to watch both cuts, so. . Yeah. Yeah. I think I feel that way. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. We'll watch too. We'll figure it out off Mike folks. But yeah, Superman saves the day, but it does actually make sense. Putting the time travel at the end of part two does at least make sense of one of the things that purists always complain about, which is Superman killing Zod and Ersa na and so casually.
] Like they don't die. And as Donner and Mantz conceived it, they just go back in the phantom zone. I've also heard people say that them falling into that Misty Krevas doesn't represent death. Like if you know the lore, they're actually falling it back into the phantom zone or something like that. But the way it plays, yeah, right.
The way it plays to the someone who doesn't know the lore is, well, I've successfully stripped you of your superpowers, so I'm going to now execute you. And Lois Lane is gonna say you are a real pain in the neck. And and then execute uh, the girl. Cuz girls can fight girls and boys can fight. Boy, boys.
That's how these things work. Or how they used to work before society crumbled ruined everything. ruined everything. Society. Yeah. Society did ruin a lot. We, we needed Superman here to say we live in a society. Yeah, no, we needed Superman to say that's not how biology works. Men and women are different.
Remake that Star Wars movie, Kathleen Kennedy Superman could have done a good job of running Lucas film. That's my contention. So Superman saves the day he delivers Luther a Otis straight to prison, just takes up a tour prison yard, which is very Batman 66 again, and gives a nice speech to the warden or whatever until they get a fair trial.
Until they get a fair trial. Yes, that's right. And uh, he flies away into the sunrise as John Williams theme, beguiles us with its awesomeness. And that is Superman. The first one. Apparently when Lester took over, I really should save this for next podcast, but when Lester took over, he had one meeting with John Williams to talk about how they were gonna continue the music and John Williams.
Was so frustrated by the meeting that he walked out and said, I will never work with that man. And John Williams did no more music for this. Of course, they repurposed his themes, but John, this is the suckage of everything. Poston or is, and if you see John Williams, he doesn't seem like he's a very chill guy.
Like you feel like it would be fairly easy to not make John Williams angry in a meeting. Yeah. He seems pretty easy to work with. Yeah. Maybe not, but I mean, I'm sure he's exacting and all, but you know, if you just went in there and treated him like the maestro he is and had a little respect for his ideas, but also, tried to have a productive push and pull artistic collaboration.
I'm sure. I feel like the three of us could get John Williams to do a score just fine. But not Richard Lester, not the Sal kinds because they're the worst. They're the worst folks. That is your podcast on Superman. Ben, how many crystals? Oh, in the way though. Lu Luther figures out. But how does he figure it out?
Again, I'm crypto. I don't know. It's, it doesn't make any, it just doesn't make any sense. He's just like, I've done the math mis chest marker. That was dumb. That was dumb. Yeah. How many crystals? Yeah, how many crystals out of, how many crystals do you figure are in the fortress of solitude? A lot. it's a whole lot.
We'll say 12,000. How many crystals out of 12,000 do you give to Superman The movie out of 12,000? . Oh, man. Out about 8,000. 8,000. I was wondering if you might not say 8,000. Huh? Jason, you know me. Well say question. Same question. I'm gonna, I was gonna give it 9,000. I'm gonna give it 10,000. And the reason I just bumped it is because I think one of the things we have to give it points for, or I feel compelled to give it points for as being the first Yeah.
Its special effects, its score, the opening credits, the flying of it, all the guts to take superhero movie and try to make it feel grounded and make it play to the masses in a way that's compelling. And the fact that it did it successfully. And every movie, it created space for every superhero movie to come downstream of it.
And every superhero movie downstream of it is in some form of conversation with it and benefited from its pioneering work, I think gets it extra points to cover for some of the mess that it made. But you put that together with it actually honoring the character of Superman in the process. And you said it earlier the movie as a whole is greater than, or the sum of its parts.
Something is greater than the parts. Is that the phrase the hole is greater than the Well, it depend, it depends on which thing you wanna say. The inal parts don't all work, but they add up to something more. More than the sum is greater than the parts, or the hole is greater than the sum of the parts. Oh, dear.
Yeah. Now you some confused. Now we've lost it. What in the world this happens, the sum is greater than the whole of the parts. There's a hole in the sum of the, there's a hole. There's a whole, there's a whole hole. Bucket. Hole in the sum. Dear Eliza, dear Eliza, the hole is greater than the sum of its parts.
There we go. That's correct. Anyway, Jake, you were saying I think the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, the pioneering work of just the guts of We're doing it. . We're doing a superhero movie, and it's not just any superhero movie. We're swinging for the fences, we're going for a superman.
And we're gonna try to make it feel grounded. We're gonna try to make it feel like a movie that fits in the 1970s and that people can buy into in the 1970s. And then they sold it and people loved it, and it worked. And it created space for the entire superhero movie genre and the whole American hero story to shift from, from these sort of cowboy stories to these more fantastical comic book stories.
Yep. It's a fulcrum and it's a pretty key piece. And so I think it gets bonus points for that, even though it doesn't quite hold up as a truly great movie in and of itself. Yep. I would agree with that. I would like to say I wrote down 10,000 it's right year. I knew you were gonna say two thou 10,000 after D Bed said eight.
There was nowhere you could go, but 10. I don't know what you would've said if Ben had, if you'd had to start, but well, you'll never know my super genius of predicting how many crystals you guys want to predict what all here, I'll write down what I'm gonna give it. And then now you guys can't predict 9,000.
That's correct. That wasn't hard at all. It wasn't hard at all.
I thought I might take you a second. Ah, no. False. Oh, after Jake's speech, I'm tempted to give it 9,000, but whatever. I'll be, you're locked baby. Whatever. Jake's speech is correct and Jake's speech, you could almost bump it up to 11 or even 12. . Like, it is that important. Well, there's a difference.
It depends on how you wanna evaluate it, right? As, as an actual experience to wa sit there and watch it's more of a six or seven or eight or something. But then you get done and you're really happy and you really do feel like it adds up to something a little bit more Yep. Than you just forget about Gene Hackman goofing around with the missile and you're, you remember the cool stuff and .
You love it. I mean, I, I do think in addition to what Jake said, this movie does get a number of things right, that a lot of movies that came after it would get wrong. I mean, you really have to go all the way to maybe Ramey or Nolan to see people pick up the thread. Like as soon as we get to Burton's Batman, which we'll talk about this when we get there, but they're gonna so heavily stylize everything.
Like their solution to making a superhero fit into our world will be to change our world fund so that our world fits a fantastical superhero. Make it a weird, gothic kind of comic book world. And the fact that this movie does so much to actually just put Superman in the regular seventies world is something pretty special.
And something that wouldn't be intuitive and wouldn't be cracked and, they're, the alkins are immediately gonna ruin that. It's gonna immediately gonna become camp. Starting with Superman two and then getting worse as we go. And so I think Donner Donner had something special. He had a good idea.
I wish he'd been able to keep doing it. But then we wouldn't have the Goonies Yay, yay Goonies never say die. I could care less about the Goonies. I guess I like the Goonies, whatever. They're the Goonies. What are you gonna do? I'd be sad if we didn't have the lethal weapon. I guess I'd be sad if we didn't have lethal Lethal weapon too.
In diplomatic immunity. Oh, so 9,000. Yes. with some scenes being like 4,000 and some scenes being 12,000. . Well, folks, that's Superman. This may be the longest podcast we've. Ever done period. And it may be the, certainly the longest podcast on sanity at the movies. I'd have to check that. I think that is correct though.
So I hope you feel like you got your money's worth. maybe our next podcast will just descend into Pure Camp and we'll edit out everything that's good and put a bunch of corny jokes in after the fact. In any case, until next time, I'm here to fight for truth justice in the American way.
I thought about, uh, I never drink when I fly. I never drink when I fly. Oh, my Goodness's. All right. Goodbye folks.